disheartening political process that is forced upon even the best
of our representatives. It's doubly interesting and far more hopeful
in tandem with the second essay, authored by the same person
Hedges identifies as the paragon of war, sexualized. The hope
being -people can change. Why else try, let alone perservere?
.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091026_war_is_a_hate_crime/
War Is a Hate Crime
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig: Oct. 26, 2009
Violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is wrong. So
is violence against people in Afghanistan and Iraq. But in the bizarre
culture of identity politics, there are no alliances among the oppressed.
The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the first
major federal civil rights law protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender people, passed last week, was attached to a $680-billion measure
outlining the Pentagon's budget, which includes $130 billion for ongoing
military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democratic majority in
Congress, under the cover of protecting some innocents, authorized massive
acts of violence against other innocents.
It was a clever piece of marketing. It blunted debate about new funding for
war. And behind the closed doors of the caucus rooms, the Democratic
leadership told Blue Dog Democrats, who are squeamish about defending gays
or lesbians from hate crimes, that they could justify the vote as support
for the war. They told liberal Democrats, who are squeamish about unlimited
funding for war, that they could defend the vote as a step forward in the
battle for civil rights. Gender equality groups, by selfishly narrowing
their concern to themselves, participated in the dirty game.
"Every thinking person wants to take a stand against hate crimes, but isn't
war the most offensive of hate crimes?" asked Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who did
not vote for the bill, when I spoke to him by phone. "To have people have to
make a choice, or contemplate the hierarchy of hate crimes, is cynical. I
don't vote to fund wars. If you are opposed to war, you don't vote to
authorize or appropriate money. Congress, historically and constitutionally,
has the power to fund or defund a war. The more Congress participates in
authorizing spending for war, the more likely it is that we will be there
for a long, long time. This reflects an even larger question. All the
attention is paid to what President Obama is going to do right now with
respect to Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is the Democratic Congress could
have ended the war when it took control just after 2006. We were given
control of the Congress by the American people in November 2006 specifically
to end the war. It did not happen. The funding continues. And while the
attention is on the president, Congress clearly has the authority at any
time to stop the funding. And yet it doesn't. Worse yet, it finds other ways
to garner votes for bills that authorize funding for war. The spending
juggernaut moves forward, a companion to the inconscient force of war
itself."
The brutality of Matthew Shepard's killers, who beat him to death for being
gay, is a product of a culture that glorifies violence and sadism. It is the
product of a militarized culture. We have more police, prisons, inmates,
spies, mercenaries, weapons and troops than any other nation on Earth. Our
military, which swallows half of the federal budget, is enormously
popular-as if it is not part of government. The military values of
hyper-masculinity, blind obedience and violence are an electric current that
run through reality television and trash-talk programs where contestants
endure pain while they betray and manipulate those around them in a ruthless
world of competition. Friendship and compassion are banished.
This hyper-masculinity is at the core of pornography with its fusion of
violence and eroticism, as well as its physical and emotional degradation of
women. It is an expression of the corporate state where human beings are
reduced to commodities and companies have become proto-fascist enclaves
devoted to maximizing profit. Militarism crushes the capacity for moral
autonomy and difference. It isolates us from each other. It has its logical
fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with our
lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, our mentally ill, our
unemployed, our sick, and yes, our gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual
citizens.
Klaus Theweleit in his two volumes entitled "Male Fantasies," which draw on
the bitter alienation of demobilized veterans in Germany following the end
of World War I, argues that a militarized culture attacks all that is
culturally defined as the feminine, including love, gentleness, compassion
and acceptance of difference. It sees any sexual ambiguity as a threat to
male "hardness" and the clearly defined roles required by the militarized
state. The continued support for our permanent war economy, the continued
elevation of military values as the highest good, sustains the perverted
ethic, rigid social roles and emotional numbness that Theweleit explored. It
is a moral cancer that ensures there will be more Matthew Shepards.
Fascism, Theweleit argued, is not so much a form of government or a
particular structuring of the economy or a system, but the creation of
potent slogans and symbols that form a kind of psychic economy which places
sexuality in the service of destruction. The "core of all fascist propaganda
is a battle against everything that constitutes enjoyment and pleasure,"
Theweleit wrote. And our culture, while it disdains the name of fascism,
embraces its dark ethic.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, interviewed in 2003 by Charlie
Rose, spoke in this sexualized language of violence to justify the war in
Iraq, a moment preserved on YouTube (see video below):
"What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house,
from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, 'Which part of this sentence
don't you understand?' " Friedman said. " 'You don't think, you know, we
care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna
let it grow? Well, suck on this.' That, Charlie, was what this war was
about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. Could
have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could."
This is the kind of twisted logic the killers of Matthew Shepard would
understand.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, in words gay activists should have
heeded, that exclusive preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference
to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group made fascism and
the Holocaust possible.
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important
psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could
have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people,"
Adorno wrote. "What is called fellow traveling was primarily business
interest: one pursues one's own advantage before all else, and simply not to
endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the
status quo. The silence under the terror was only its consequence. The
coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor, was the
precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only
very few people reacted. The torturers know this, and they put it to test
ever anew."
Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two
decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe
and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including "Empire of
Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009) and "War
Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003).
***
Don't Build Up
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Op-Ed: October 27, 2009
It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here's my vote: We need to be thinking
about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way,
not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO
allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national
interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in
Afghanistan
I base this conclusion on three principles. First, when I think back on all
the moments of progress in that part of the world - all the times when a key
player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my
face - all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with
it.
America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough didn't
start with us. We can fan the flames, but the parties themselves have to
light the fires of moderation. And whenever we try to do it for them,
whenever we want it more than they do, we fail and they languish.
The Camp David peace treaty was not initiated by Jimmy Carter. Rather, the
Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, went to Jerusalem in 1977 after Israel's
Moshe Dayan held secret talks in Morocco with Sadat aide Hassan Tuhami. Both
countries decided that they wanted a separate peace - outside of the Geneva
comprehensive framework pushed by Mr. Carter.
The Oslo peace accords started in Oslo - in secret 1992-93 talks between the
P.L.O. representative, Ahmed Qurei, and the Israeli professor Yair
Hirschfeld. Israelis and Palestinians alone hammered out a broad deal and
unveiled it to the Americans in the summer of 1993, much to Washington's
surprise.
The U.S. surge in Iraq was militarily successful because it was preceded by
an Iraqi uprising sparked by a Sunni tribal leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu
Risha, who, using his own forces, set out to evict the pro-Al Qaeda thugs
who had taken over Sunni towns and were imposing a fundamentalist lifestyle.
The U.S. surge gave that movement vital assistance to grow. But the spark
was lit by the Iraqis.
The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and
Lebanon, the Green Revolution in Iran and the Pakistani decision to finally
fight their own Taliban in Waziristan - because those Taliban were
threatening the Pakistani middle class - were all examples of moderate,
silent majorities acting on their own.
The message: "People do not change when we tell them they should," said the
Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. "They
change when they tell themselves they must."
And when the moderate silent majorities take ownership of their own futures,
we win. When they won't, when we want them to compromise more than they do,
we lose. The locals sense they have us over a barrel, so they exploit our
naïve goodwill and presence to loot their countries and to defeat their
internal foes.
That's how I see Afghanistan today. I see no moderate spark. I see our
secretary of state pleading with President Hamid Karzai to re-do an election
that he blatantly stole. I also see us begging Israelis to stop building
more crazy settlements or Palestinians to come to negotiations. It is time
to stop subsidizing their nonsense. Let them all start paying retail for
their extremism, not wholesale. Then you'll see movement.
What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won't Al Qaeda return, the
Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This gets to
my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics - everything that
matters - happens the morning after the morning after. Be patient. Yes, the
morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate,
Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video.
And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start
fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban,
or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan's warlords will carve up the country,
and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he'll get zapped by a drone.
My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and
self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent
path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world. China, Russia
and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in
Afghanistan. I don't.
The U.S. military has given its assessment. It said that stabilizing
Afghanistan and removing it as a threat requires rebuilding that whole
country. Unfortunately, that is a 20-year project at best, and we can't
afford it. So our political leadership needs to insist on a strategy that
will get the most security for less money and less presence. We simply don't
have the surplus we had when we started the war on terrorism after 9/11 -
and we desperately need nation-building at home. We have to be smarter.
Let's
finish Iraq, because a decent outcome there really could positively impact
the whole Arab-Muslim world, and limit our exposure elsewhere. Iraq matters.
Yes, shrinking down in Afghanistan will create new threats, but expanding
there will, too. I'd rather deal with the new threats with a stronger
America.
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