HOW THE WORLD IS FRAMED: SPOKESPERSONS FROM THE HEGEMONIC POWER AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Harry Targ

(This essay was written in 2022 just after President Gustavo Petro spoke at the United Nations. In 2023 he spoke again. He later was interviewed by Amy Goodman and elaborated on the perspective of the Global South about peace, justice, and the threat to human survival. https://youtu.be/6-6Ni7jbi3U?si=CdPsWUWWOTFFUsDw)

Insights from Social Science

A long time ago the eminent political scientist Murray Edelman wrote a book entitled The Symbolic Uses of Politics. In it he postulated that most people experience the political world not through concrete reality but through emotional symbols. For example, the classic way in which people relate to their political institutions is through the flag of their nation. Americans viewing the flag see images of men in combat fighting for freedom or men and women standing in line waiting to vote for their preferred political candidates. A colorful cloth with stars and stripes gets transformed in our consciousness into a rich, glamorized history even when the emotive images are in direct contradiction to people’s lives.

In addition, Edelman suggests the ways in which the emotional symbols get embedded and reinforced in the consciousness of peoples by borrowing from anthropological writings on myth and ritual. Myths are networks of emotional symbols that collectively tell a story that explains “reality.” Rituals reinforce in behavior the mythology of public life. We need only reflect on the pledge to the flag that opens elementary and secondary school class sessions in rich and poor communities alike or regular meetings of AFL-CIO labor councils.

Edelman pointed out that emotional symbols (he called them “condensational”) provide the primary way people connect with the world beyond immediate experience. The extraordinary complexity of the modern world is reduced to a series of powerful symbols such as the threats of “international communism” or “terrorism.”

Media analyst Todd Gitlin, wrote about “media frames;” that is the ways in which media construct the symbols and myths that shape information about the world. Print media shapes what we read, who are regarded as authoritative spokespersons, and what visual images shape our thinking about countries, issues such as war and peace, trade, investment, and the global climate. Television emphasizes visual images rather than words. Whatever the media form, points of view are embedded in the words and images communicated.

Writers such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Michael Parenti, and Robert McChesney accept implicitly Edelman’s counsel that people experience the world indirectly and usually in emotional form. They also assume, as does Gitlin, that what we read, see, and hear about the world is framed for us. They go further to suggest that what Marx called the “false conceptions about ourselves” in symbols, myths, rituals, and frames are usually the product of ruling class interests.

How the Washington Post Sees the World

Charles Lane, “Migration’s ‘Root Cause’ is Latin American Socialist Dictatorship,” Washington Post, September 21, 2022, wrote about the migration this year of 200,000 Cubans. He also pointed out that such migrations over the years have involved thousands of fleeing Venezuelans: “The exodus is thus a tremendous compliment to the United States and other democratic capitalist countries. We should appreciate it.”

For Lane, the “root cause” of such migrations, of course, is communist dictatorship, a pattern of people fleeing their home countries because of dictatorship and failed economies.  Lane may have been aware of the declassified State Department document, “The Decline and Fall of Castro,” quoted in a speech by Senator Patrick Leahy, February 7, 2022, that US policy’s purpose was “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.”  Cuba became the model for applying economic sanctions against governments which the US tried to bring down.

Today US sanctions have been levied against more than 20 countries. And in most cases, while citizens of these countries suffer, most remained committed to their governments and/or reject United States intervention. And Cuba, despite Lane’s dismissal of it as a dictatorship, has remained a beacon of hope, a model of economic and political development for the Global South. Health care is free, education is free. Cubans in their communities discuss and debate issues and vote on key constitutional changes. Most recently this is illustrated by the national vote on a proposed new Families Code to give legitimacy and rights to all kinds of families and children. And paradoxically virtually every country in the world (except for the US and Israel) condemns the US economic blockade.

And in another editorial statement on the Chinese “challenge” to the United States the author writes: “In just over 40 years, the People’s Republic of China has arisen from the political chaos and poverty of the Mao Zedong era to become a powerhouse on the world stage. Its unmistakable clout is intensifying its rivalry with the United States over which country will dominate the global order and, crucially, which system will stand as the world’s political and economic model: the authoritarianism and state capitalism of China, or the liberal democracy and market-oriented economy of the United States.”  Thus, the media frame is global competition between authoritarianism and “state capitalism” versus markets and democracy (Dexter Roberts, “At Stake in the U.S.-China Rivalry: The Shape of the Global Political Order,” Washington Post, September 22, 2022).

And the Washington Post and other corporate media usually reflect a common agenda. For example, from a Washington Post editorial, May 21, 2016:

“HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order of the past seven decades is being eroded. China and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image…This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial because no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and difficult decisions to save the liberal international order. As a new report from the Center for a New American Security points out, this order is worth saving…”

But How Others See the United States: The Powerful Voice of the New President of Colombia Gustavo Petro

Recently elected president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro made a powerful presentation at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly on the plunder of the Global South by the Global North, a portrait markedly different from the view of the “liberal international order” repeated over and over again by the corporate media and foreign policy spokespersons of the United States.  Petro’s major points concluded the following:

THE WORLD IS DIVERSE IN ITS LANDS, LIVING THINGS, AND PEOPLE

“I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.

There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down, but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.”

BUT THE WORLD ALSO IS A VIOLENT PLACE

“The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.”

AND THE CAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE? THE GREED OF THE GLOBAL NORTH

“For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.”

AND THE VICTIMS? LAND AND PEOPLE

“Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”

AND THE PURSUIT OF POWER IS TO MAKE UP FOR THE EMPTINESS OF CONSUMER SOCIETY

“These are the things of world power, things of injustice, things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.

According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful of the earth will not even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries.”

THE CULPRIT? MONEY AND UNBRIDLED CONSUMPTION

“The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.

The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, the dream of democracy will die in my America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America.”.

THE EXCUSE FOR DESPOILING NATURE AND MAKING PERSONS EXPENDABLE

“They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served them as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.

If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.”

LATIN AMERICA (AND THE WORLD) MUST UNITE AGAINST THIS SYSTEM OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWER

“If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.

It is time for PEACE.

Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality.

What Does All This Mean for Peace and Justice Activists

There are lessons to be learned by analyzing significant narratives of the contemporary world order. First, narratives are inextricably connected to the position from which the narrative comes. Is the narrative one disseminated by spokespersons of the wealthiest country in the world or from a spokesperson from a poor and marginalized country, for example? Second, narratives often reflect the interests of the powerful, economically, politically, and militarily (such as Washington Post writers) or those who speak for the interests of most nations and peoples (such as the President of Colombia). Third, these narratives have consequences. They justify policies that may or may not be in the interests of humanity. They may justify violence, plunder of resources, the exploitation of workers or they may envision a future of greater equality and the satisfaction of human needs. Finally, as Edelman, Gitlin, and others suggest, our understanding of the world is often controlled and manipulated by those in power. Today the dominant symbols, myths, and media frames from the Global North must be challenged. And President Gustavo Petro has contributed eloquently to this task.

END THE WAR: DIPLOMACY NOT BOMBS

On September 15, 2022, Peace Activists Hit the Streets from DC to San Francisco Urging Ceasefire in Ukraine

Harry Targ

 

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a massive invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainians responded and their response was fueled by billions of dollars of US and European military equipment and private armies. Thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have died, and millions of Ukrainians have fled the war. The leaders of Russia, the United States, and even Ukraine talk of the possible use of nuclear weapons. Negotiations between competing parties have broken down.

Sectors of the peace movement in the United States have demanded that all sides participate in negotiations not war. Pacifists in Ukraine, presumably a small minority, have urged an end to the fighting and larger numbers of Russians have protested their country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Protestors on September 15 in the US rallied for all sides to stop sending more arms and fighting and begin serious negotiations to end the violence. For example, in Milwaukee “antiwar activists, including a county supervisor, took their peace flags and "Diplomacy, Not War" signs to the campus of conservative Marquette University, where they passed out hundreds of flyers with QR codes for students to email their Congress members for a ceasefire. Organizer Jim Carpenter, co-chair (with this author) of the foreign policy team of Progressive Democrats of America, told skeptics who want a fight to the last Ukrainian, ‘Are you more concerned about saving lives or saving territory’?" (Marcy Winograd, “Peace Activists Hit the Streets From DC to San Francisco Urging Ceasefire in Ukraine,” Common Dreams, September 20, 2022. 

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/09/20/peace-activists-hit-streets-dc-san-francisco-urging-ceasefire-ukraine

In the face of increased probabilities of nuclear war, the peace movement needs to build a worldwide movement of historic proportions, comparable or greater than mobilizations against the Iraq War in 2003. The task would be to stop the escalation of war in the Ukraine and its spread to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This will take grassroots organizing, building global solidarity, and mobilizing for peoples' power in the United Nations. This may be our last chance to build a peaceful and just world.

Particularly, mass mobilization could be animated by the vision of vibrant international institutions that could represent the "peoples’” interests. The United Nations, usually a reflection of the distribution of power in the world, can be made to represent the people of the world. Particularly, the UN General Assembly, where all nations have only one vote, can be made viable as it was in the 1960s and 1970s when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were competing for the "hearts and minds" of the newly independent nations.

Also, the peace movement should direct its solidarity to the Group of 77, the movement of non-aligned nations that seeks social and economic development in a world at peace. During various periods in its history, the Group of 77 has stood up against the forces of global capitalism. The peace movement should stand with the Group of 77 today.

https://countercurrents.org/2022/09/end-war-in-ukraine-say-66-nations-at-un-general-assembly/?fbclid=IwAR3nq-sObR0mkpmE6M58v_YWw4hLfUmxNNdqtPpYOQquAsmgPPh7c7ebKXc

In the end, a metaphor of two superpowers: the one including economic ruling classes, bureaucratic elites, and generals in powerful countries and the other, opponents of war and economic exploitation, the people, still make sense. The only hope for humankind is the mobilization of peace movements, the second superpower, to demand an end to war. And for the most part, while displaying solidarity with peace movements everywhere, peace movements in individual countries must target the complicity of their own nations in the making of war.

 

 

 

 

 

THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN PUBLIC PURPOSE CONTINUES

 Harry Targ

 

“But we also believe in something called citizenship – citizenship-- a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations...

We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense...

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's what we believe.(Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention, September 6, 2012)

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Most political and cultural historians argue that the United States has not had a strong socialist tradition, at least compared to European countries. While this view has some merit, these commentators ignore the deep communal traditions of Native peoples, the founders of utopian communities in the nineteenth century all across the Northeast and Midwest, radical socialists in the labor movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the large Socialist Party led by Eugene V. Debs, and the Communist movement of the twentieth century. These pundits also ignore violent state repression in virtually every period of American history that has been targeted against Socialist dissenters.

However, despite state police, the FBI, strike breakers, and repressive cultural institutions such as churches, educational systems, and the media, the vision of community, sharing, and public purpose have survived.

Survival has taken many forms—political parties, mass movements, religious and secular campaigns for social and economic justice. President Obama was not talking about Socialism in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention September 6, 2012. Indeed, he would reject any suggestion that his political vision has a commonality with that of Socialists. But he did offer an insightful rendition of values embedded in the American experience. He called it “citizenship.”

What is citizenship about? For starters, it implies the idea of a public purpose. A society consists of persons of all races, genders, classes, sexual orientations, and ethnicities who are, of necessity, bound together to sustain life. The President was arguing that at a fundamental level human survival required some sharing of pain and work as well as the enjoyment of life. It is inevitable that a nation’s people, indeed global citizens, share space, water, the air we breathe, the roads we travel on, and virtually every physical, social, and economic institution and process beyond our most intimate and private lives. Ultimately citizenship is about human community.

In American political history, groups of people have had to struggle to get recognition of citizenship and community. In the nineteenth century, educational reformers had to campaign to establish public educational institutions. Reading, writing, research on agriculture and medical science was vital to human community. The success of the public-school movement and the passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act for higher education are examples of the realization of the needs of human community.

Citizens also came to realize that access to printed material, books, magazines, newspapers, was critical to an informed public and to human community. Public libraries were created to provide reading materials, public space for discussion, and meeting centers.

In urban areas, people came to realize that human community, the practice of citizenship, required space for people to meet, to argue, to play dominoes, to lecture in front of interested audiences on the topics of the day. Human community meant “hanging out,” in parks, on street corners, in empty lots.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, in response to the rapacious, unplanned spread of capitalism, it was recognized that rural space needed to be preserved. National parks were created to encourage the use of what remained of the natural environment, much of which had been destroyed when the colonists conquered the people and occupied the land on which they already had been living in harmony. The original dwellers would be forbidden from regaining what was stolen from them, but efforts were made to return some of the land to its pristine beauty.

In addition to schools, libraries, urban spaces, and national parks, human community, it was realized, required social, economic, and political rights. Citizenship for people living in various geographic areas and working in various manufacturing and service venues required the right of people to associate with whomever they chose, in unions, churches, civic organizations, and interest groups. Citizenship meant coming together with like-minded others, particularly those who had economic interests in common. No human is “an island.”

In a modern society where human community cannot be based solely on direct, interpersonal interaction, voting was necessary to allow the full expression of the sentiments of the human community.  

So, when President Obama spoke of citizenship, whether he realized the full implications of his remarks or not, he was speaking of human community, education, public space, the freedom of association, and the right to vote. All of these core values embedded in American history and culture are under fundamental threat today.

“Market fundamentalist” ideologues argue that there is no such thing as citizenship, human community, and a public sphere.

Advocates for the privatization of public schools--from vouchers in Indiana and charter schools in Chicago to the privatization of higher education by business model university presidents--forget that education has been a public good, not a commodity for sale in the market.

Those who call for the selling off of public spaces in cities and the countryside are advocating robbery of land for profit.

And those who challenge the right of workers to form trade unions and associations and those who seek to repress the right of people to vote are advocating the destruction of the most fundamental conceptions of citizenship and human community.

And they extoll the virtues of “free markets” such as reflected in the Wall Street Journal guest editorial below: “It is time to revitalize the system that made America the world’s economic colossus, won the Cold War, and moved billions out of poverty world-wide…  while the American economy is powered by limited government, economic freedom, and free markets” (Phil Gramm and Mike Solon, “Peace Through Strength Requires Economic Freedom: The U.S. must not turn away from its main advantages: free markets and limited government.” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2022.

These are very dangerous times. Whether activists want to call themselves socialists, anarchists, occupiers, liberals, progressives, or whatever, the task is clear. We must unite to save our citizenship, our public space, and human community.

 

NEOLIBERAL ATTACKS ON LIBERAL ARTS CONTINUE: Still Relevant After All These Years

This graphic was created from comments received by faculty and staff relating to liberal arts education. The larger the font, the more often the word appeared in their statements. Seattle University https://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/about/value-of-liberal-arts-education/

Harry Targ

Originally posted September22, 2016

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was founded in 1973 as an organization of corporations, lobby groups, and state-level politicians to propose and implement model legislation, prioritizing such policies as promoting educational vouchers and charter schools, limiting the role of trade unions, restricting environmental regulations, and instituting voter identification rules. ALEC has established think tanks that address key issues of public policy. One such issue is education.

In a 2015 article Lindsey Russell, an ALEC Director of its Education Task Force, wrote an essay entitled “STEM-Will It Replace Liberal Arts?” In it he reports Bureau of Labor Statistics projections that from 2012-2022 there will be a growth of 13 percent in the STEM related workforce. As a result, he poses the question reflected in the title of his article. His answer, although he does not say so directly is a qualified “yes.” He does quote a Forbes magazine article that suggests that STEM graduates need “critical thinking skills” to pursue their careers. These skills, the article asserts, along with those in communication, are what a Liberal Arts education can provide. In an interesting statement he says about STEM and Liberal Arts:

“STEM is the present and the future, and STEM related fields are projected to grow by more than 1 million by the year 2022…. Liberal arts education may seem irrelevant today, but it is necessary if America’s youth are to become successful members of today’s STEM-dominated workforce.”

Although not central to discussions of the vitality of the Liberal Arts, it is useful to briefly refer to empirical studies that challenge the claims about preparing for a “STEM-dominated workforce.” Such analyses, and claims about shortcomings in the American educational system, go back as far as the Soviet Union’s launch of “Sputnik.” In a 2014 volume, Michael Teitelbaum, Falling Behind? Boom, Bust and the Global Race for Scientific Talent, Princeton Press, challenges the periodically claimed view that the United States is somehow “falling behind” in the production of scientists and engineers and in his words, “advocates of these shortage claims have had a nearly open field in politics and the media.”

In addition, in a Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review, May 2015 article entitled, “STEM Crisis or STEM Surplus? Yes and Yes,” the following conclusions are reached based upon extensive research:

*Since the STEM labor market is heterogeneous there are both shortages and surpluses depending on the particular job market segment.”

*In the academic market there are noticeable oversupplies of Ph.D’s.

*In some sectors of government jobs there are shortages of STEM-trained personnel.

*In the private sector, there are some areas where STEM demand is great, in others where oversupply exists.

*Levels of oversupply or demand vary by geographic region.

Perhaps the most damning statement on STEM training and jobs comes from an article by Hal Salzman, “STEM Grads Are at a Loss,” US News, Sept. 15, 2014, declaring that: “All credible research finds the same evidence about the STEM workforce: ample supply, stagnant wages and, by industry accounts, thousands of applicants for any advertised job.”

While debates continue about the need to prioritize STEM in the educational process, a more important discussion should involve the substance and role of what usually is called “the Liberal Arts.” Should Liberal Arts be seen as only a training ground for honing critical thinking and communications skills or does the Liberal Arts project go much deeper? Henry Giroux, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMasters University, Hamilton, Ontario, posted an essay he called “Neoliberal Savagery and the Assault on Higher Education as a Democratic Public Space,” on September 15, 2016. His language is vivid, his critique of the growing connections between higher education and market needs is controversial. His grounding of the political pressures to change and marginalize Liberal Arts has its roots in the theory and practice of neoliberal ideology, an ideology based on a crude vision of markets, privatization of public institutions, and the reduction of all of social life to commodification.

The most important element of Giroux’s essay is the proposition that the university represents a “public trust” and a “social good.”  He correctly claims that in an age of concentrating media and a profusion of unsubstantiated information on the internet, the university remains a scarce and valuable venue for exposing young people to rich, complicated discourse and analysis of society—past, present, and future. Giroux’s words ring true in this regard as he claims the university is “a critical institution infused with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, the civic imagination, inquisitiveness, risk-taking, social responsibility, and the struggle for justice.” Giroux quotes Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis: “how will we form the next generation of intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumental university is like?”

The tasks cultural theorists such as Giroux lay out do not, or should not, suggest that only through Liberal Arts can the civic responsibility of the university be maintained. But and this is critical, Liberal Arts should be seen as a necessary partner in the intellectual development of each and every student and should be a vibrant contributor to the larger society in which we live.

Conceiving of Liberal Arts as just a limited instrumentality of a narrowly defined STEM education, as advocates such as the ALEC spokesperson above suggests, demeans not only the fundamental importance of the Liberal Arts for pursuing an intellectually curious and socially just society but the basic project of higher education.

 

BUILDING A PEACE AND JUSTICE MOVEMENT IN THE NEW AGE OF EMPIRE: 2003 to 2022

 By Harry Targ

Revised from an April 16, 2003 essay

The Peace Movement Said “No” to the Iraq War in 2003

In the aftermath of the February 15, 2003, massive worldwide mobilization against US war in Iraq, activists aptly borrowed the metaphor of the “two superpowers” from New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler. One superpower was United States imperialism and the other, the power of the people.

While the two-superpower thesis remains appropriate today, the peace movement needs to develop its content and ground the contesting powers in their material realities today. First, it needs to clarify the connections between US capitalism, global conquest, militarism, and visions of empire. Second, it needs to discern whether individual imperial superpowers are homogeneous or riddled with factional disagreements that can be used for its purposes. For example, in the US case, analyses should discover where multinational corporations and international financiers stand, whether the oil and/or military industries are driving the doctrine of preemption, and which, if any, sectors of the ruling class regard unilateralism, globalism, and militarism as a threat to global trade, production, investment and speculation. Third, the peace movement must analyze the role and presence of multiple super-powers in collaboration with each other (or unilaterally in the Russia case today) who together or singly seek to dominate other nations and peoples.

As to the anti-imperial superpower, the peace movement should understand it to consist of smaller and poorer nations, masses of workers all across the face of the globe, and representatives of a large range of religious, labor, women's, environmental and other groups from civil society. Most nations are part of the bloc because of the momentous mass mobilizations of their citizens to say no to war. It was extraordinary to see poor and vulnerable countries such as Cameroons or Angola, and traditional subordinates of the United States, Chile and Mexico, reject US pressure to support the war on Iraq in the United Nations Security Council in 2003.

Most importantly, the second superpower was represented by what in 2003 was perhaps the largest global protest in human history. With the launching of the Iraq war in March 2003 the steadfast opposition grew in size and militancy.

In the United States in 2003 protests occurred in hundreds of cities and towns; city councils in over 160 cities passed resolutions against war; and every church denomination but the Southern Baptists said "no" to war. It is true that when war started the "rally round the flag" phenomena kicked in: 70 percent of the people supported President Bush's action. However, just before the war started about half of the US people supported giving the weapons inspectors more time to do their job. Furthermore, support for the war was more likely among those who believed that there was a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks on US targets. Party differences were stark in reference to war: Republicans supported the Bush war on Iraq about 20 to 30 percent more than Democrats.

Finally, people were scared. They were scared of terrorism, of job loss, of economic depression, of devalued pensions. Some worried about being arrested for conduct defined as criminal by the Patriot Act. In fact, then (as now) we lived in a culture that promoted fear.

What was done to nourish and expand the movement for peace and justice during the Iraq War (and what can be done today)? A consensus emerged in the peace movement in 2003 that over several months, perhaps years, grassroots organizing-networking across neighborhoods, churches, union locals, and civic groups-was central. In the US one-third to 40 percent of the population probably supported war in 2003 and the Bush foreign policy agenda. Perhaps one-third were inalterably opposed. This left another third undecided, confused, or marginally supportive of the war on Iraq.

The target of grassroots work was bringing the undecided people into the peace and justice camp. Perhaps, it was thought, what would drive them into the antiwar camp would be fiscal crises at state and local levels, economic stagnation and job loss, the dismantling of the meager health care system, the continued marginalization of public schools, and crumbling infrastructure all around nation. People were reminded of the fact that while economic crisis grows by the days and weeks, the administration increased defense spending to a record $400 billion in 2004 (and over $800 billion today) while state and federal taxes on the rich were cut.

On September 15, 2022, Peace Activists Hit the Streets from DC to San Francisco Urging Ceasefire in Ukraine

 

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a massive invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainians responded and their response was fueled by billions of dollars of US and European military equipment and private armies. Thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have died, and millions of Ukrainians have fled the war. The leaders of Russia, the United States, and even Ukraine talk of the possible use of nuclear weapons. Negotiations between competing parties have broken down.

Sectors of the peace movement in the United States have demanded that all sides participate in negotiations not war. Pacifists in Ukraine, presumably a small minority, have urged an end to the fighting and larger numbers of Russians have protested their country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Protestors on September 15 in the US rallied for all sides to stop sending more arms and fighting and begin serious negotiations to end the violence. For example, in Milwaukee

“antiwar activists, including a county supervisor, took their peace flags and "Diplomacy, Not War" signs to the campus of conservative Marquette University, where they passed out hundreds of flyers with QR codes for students to email their Congress members for a ceasefire. Organizer Jim Carpenter, co-chair (with this author) of the foreign policy team of Progressive Democrats of America, told skeptics who want a fight to the last Ukrainian, ‘Are you more concerned about saving lives or saving territory’?" (Marcy Winograd, “Peace Activists Hit the Streets From DC to San Francisco Urging Ceasefire in Ukraine,” Common Dreams, September 20, 2022. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/09/20/peace-activists-hit-streets-dc-san-francisco-urging-ceasefire-ukraine)

In the face of increased probabilities of nuclear war, the peace movement needs to build a worldwide movement of historic proportions, comparable or greater than in 2003. The task would be to stop the escalation of war in the Ukraine and its spread to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This will take grassroots organizing, building global solidarity, and mobilizing for peoples' power in the United Nations. This may be our last chance to build a peaceful and just world.

Particularly, mass mobilization could be animated by the vision of vibrant international institutions that could represent the "peoples’” interests. The United Nations, usually a reflection of the distribution of power in the world, can be made to represent the people of the world. Particularly, the UN General Assembly, where all nations have only one vote, can be made viable as it was in the 1960s and 1970s when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were competing for the "hearts and minds" of the newly independent nations.

Also the peace movement should direct its solidarity to the Group of 77, the movement of non-aligned nations that seeks social and economic development in a world at peace. During various periods in its history, the Group of 77 has stood up against the forces of global capitalism. The peace movement should stand with the Group of 77 today.

In the end, the metaphor of the two superpowers, economic ruling classes, bureaucratic elites, and generals in powerful countries versus their opponents, the people, still make sense. The only hope for humankind is the mobilization of peace movements, the second superpower, to demand an end to war. And for the most part, while displaying solidarity with peace movements everywhere, peace movements in individual countries must target the complicity of their own nations in the making of war.

 

 

 

 

BRIGADISTAS!: a review

Harry Targ

  (Monthly Review Press, 2022)

From this valley they say we are going

But don’t hasten to bid us adieu

Even though we lost the battle of Jarama

We’ll, set this valley free before we’re through

(words by members of the International Brigade

Sung by Woody Guthrie; posted with a graphic in

Brigadistas!)

 

The 1930s was a time of political ferment. Communists, socialists, pacifists, anarchists rose in opposition to poverty, racism, and an ideology that only capitalist markets could serve humanity.

Michael Denning wrote about a “cultural front.” For him the moving force behind the ferment was working class mobilization, particularly in the newly formed trade union confederation, The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Communists played a leading role in promoting and developing working class militancy in the CIO and on the streets. And Denning suggests, the spirit of militancy, even the idea of class struggle, permeated a broad spectrum of political culture: folk music, jazz, proletarian fiction, photography, paintings, and murals. It was a revolutionary age; at least a potential one.

Some of the radicalism was inspired by worldwide revolutionary ferment, perhaps an idealized image of the former Soviet Union, rising anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa, and struggles to defend democracy from the threat of growing fascism. No struggle captured the imagination of radicals everywhere more than the desperate effort of Spanish loyalists who rose to protect their fragile democratic system from the counter-revolutionary forces of General Francisco Franco who fought, ultimately successfully, to overthrow Spanish democracy. Franco’s support came from large landowners, the leaders of the Catholic Church, the military, and most important, fascist regimes in Germany and Italy.

And it is the desperate effort of the defense of democracy in Spain that 40,000 mostly young leftists from 50 countries joined in the military effort to defend democracy. Some 3,000 Americans traveled to Spain to fight fascism. They became known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In a brief forward to this volume Fraser Ottanelli (“The Civil War in Spain and the American Volunteers”) provides a succinct background to the Spanish struggle.

Following the forward this engaging graphic novel, Brigadistas! tells the story of three young communists from Brooklyn who believed the struggle for socialism at home was inextricably connected to the fight against fascism in Spain. And they came to the view that they had an obligation to join the campaign to defeat fascism and racism in Spain.

The graphic novel takes the reader through the life of Abe Rubinoff and his two Communist friends from street protests in Brooklyn and fighting housing evictions by landlords, to debates about pacifism with the iconic Catholic pacifist, Dorothy Day, to the battlefields of Spain. Set against this background the story is largely taken from real characters, real events, and real passion for justice. And the graphic novel, the words and images, brings to life this historic moment that planted the backdrop for political movements in the United States and Europe to follow: defeating fascism in World War Two, supporting communist revolutions in China, Vietnam, and later Cuba, joining the anti-colonial struggles from the 1940s until the 1960s, and defending progressives from anti-communist campaigns in the United States. Survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade became involved in virtually every campaign against imperialism since the 1930s.

The reader/viewer becomes engaged in the organizing efforts of members of the Young Communist League, Catholic pacifists (“Catholic Workers Against Nazi Fascism”) against rising fascism in Europe, and the growing consciousness of young activists about the inextricable connections between war and fascism abroad and the threats to workers at home. The combination of the text, written by Miguel Ferguson, and the artwork, by Anne Timmons, take the reader vicariously back to those days of struggle, triumph and defeat, a consciousness of class and racial solidarity, and internationalism.

As an educational and activist tool, Brigadistas! is first-rate. Virtually every graphic image and piece of dialogue lends itself to thought and debate. For example, on page eleven, Abe and his comrades discuss the international situation, displayed in one panel image, At a political meeting comrades proclaim that “Hitler’s gotta be stopped,” “Mussolini aint just sittin’ around neither,” (as Italy was mobilizing for invasion of Ethiopia) and “Roosevelt ain’t gonna do nothin.” Abe in the panel reports that he read Mein Kampf and says that Hitler “means every word he says.” And finally, he says to his friends that despite Roosevelt’s inaction “that don’t mean we’re gonna sit on our asses while Hitler carries out his plans.” Virtually every panel, as this one, is rich with insight, history, and a topic or topics for discussion.

Paul Buhle, a co-editor of Brigadistas! (with Ottanelli), provides a useful afterword, “The Comic and the Spanish Civil War.” concentrating on the graphic novel genre. It gives a succinct history of the comic format, with its historic artistic roots as far back as Goya’s war paintings, to the war comics of the second World War, to the profusion of graphic novels in our own day. He makes an important point about graphic novels and documentaries of relevance to educators and activists alike: “The emergence of nonfiction comic art as a medium in which to describe historical events and personalities is recent, by most measures, and within the culture of people under thirty, the genre has taken on new and important roles.” (He notes recent publications of a Black Panther Party comic and a three-volume graphic history of the life of John Lewis).

In sum, Brigadistas! is a valuable, accessible textual and visual representation of history. It is recommended for those who are familiar with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Spanish Civil War, and the left of the 1930s and would find refreshing a reminder of its history. And, even more, Brigadistas! can serve as a vibrant tool for political education for those who would be new to the subject. The volume is a useful both for the classroom and the study group.

IMPACTS OF 9/11s: Lessons Learned?

Harry Targ

A revised repost from September 1, 2011

9/11 in Chile

On the bright and sunny morning of September 11, 1973, aircraft bombed targets in Valparaiso, Chile, and moved on to the capital, Santiago. Following a well-orchestrated plan, tanks rolled into the capital city, occupied the central square, and fired on the Presidential palace. Inside that building, President Salvador Allende broadcast a final address to his people and fatally shot himself as soldiers entered his quarters.

Thousands of Allende supporters were rounded up and held in the city’s soccer stadium and many, including renowned folk singer Victor Jara, were tortured and killed. For the next fifteen years, Chilean workers were stripped of their right to form unions, political parties and elections were eliminated, and the junta led by General Augusto Pinochet ruled with an iron fist all but ignored outside the country until Chileans began to mobilize to protest his scheme to become President for life.

9/11 in the United States

Of course, 9/11/01 was different. The United States was attacked by foreign terrorists, approximately 3,000 citizens and residents were killed at the World Trade Center, over a rural area in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. People all over the world expressed their sorrow and sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks as the American people experienced shock and dismay.

But then everything began to change. Within days of the terrorist attacks, members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region. Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. But we cannot attack Iraq, critics said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was said to be in that country. On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and still goes, not militarily (US troops were withdrawn in 2022) but with brutal economic sanctions, although Bin Laden had been killed in 2011 during the Obama administration.

Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neo-cons in the Bush administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal. At last, despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans against war, growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March, 2003. That war ended in 2011.

During the decade following 9/11 U.S. military budgets tripled, thousands of U.S. soldiers  died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, died. Meanwhile the United States maintained, and still does, over 700 military installations around the world, and in the Bush period declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc of instability.”

During the Bush and Obama administrations the United States engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so, from Colombia to Honduras in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, and Afghanistan in East Asia. Presidents Bush and Obama declared that United States military overreach to be in the national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interests of the world. The U.S. adopted programs that included the use of computer operated aircraft, drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command headquarters half way around the globe.

At home, as a result of the 9/11 attack the Patriot Act extended the prerogatives of government to launch programs claiming to be essential to protect the people from domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy. During the Trump Administration, the president’s grassroots supporters and the Republican Party in general shifted to the right, perhaps in the “spirit of 9/11,” what many regard as raising the threat of fascism.

Domestically, since 9/11 basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the population in terms of wealth and income have worsened. Unemployment, before the Covid crisis, rose dramatically. Health care benefits have declined while costs skyrocket. Virtually every public institution in America, except the military, is being threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental quality.

Support for war overseas and at home stoked by a so-called “war on terrorism” and various crises such as the Ukrainian War today, coupled with an anti-government ideology made popular earlier by the Reagan administration,  lionize a “New Cold War” against Russia and China.

Not all had to sacrifice during this ten-year “war on terror” and its attendant domestic programs. The rich have gotten richer while the income and wealth of 90 percent of the population have experienced economic stagnation or decline. Media monopolization has facilitated the rise of a strata of pundits who simplify and distort the meaning of events since 9/11 by claiming that war was necessary; the terrorist threat is a growing global threat; as a nation and individually we need to arm ourselves; and subliminally it is people of color who constitute the threat to security and well-being.

Where Do We Go From Here

So the United States 9/11 event was not the first. The Chilean 9/11 preceded the U.S. one by 28 years. Its people experienced a brutal military coup. And in the United States mass murder was committed by 19 terrorists. But in both cases the 9/11 event was followed by violence, threats to democracy, and economic shifts from most of the population to the wealthy and political/military elites. In both cases, draconian economic policies and constraints of civil and political rights were defined as required by threats to the “homeland.”

As the anniversary of the U.S. 9/11 is remembered, it is critical to reflect upon how the murder of 3,000 citizens and residents was defined as an opening salvo in a perpetual “war on terrorism:” how this war trumped traditional civil liberties afforded by the constitution; how this war, it was said, must be waged at whatever cost to the lives and economic resources of the country. As with the Cold War, military spending takes priority over every other activity for which the government has a role. 9/11/73 caused the Chilean people pain and suffering that they are still working to overcome years later as they struggle to reverse the Pinochet constitution. Unless the American people mobilize to challenge the policies, foreign and domestic, that were justified by such occurrences as the tragedy of 9/11, the United States will continue to move down a similar path the Chilean people traveled after their 9/11.

And Today?

Endless money fuels endless war, often at the expense of human needs at home and abroad. Congress had no problem setting the stage for at least $7.5 trillion of Pentagon spending over the next decade, but it failed to endorse even $1.5 trillion for a transformative 10-year package to invest in children and caregiving, combat climate change, expand affordable health care, and strengthen the middle class.(Friends Committee on National Legislation https://www.fcnl.org/issues/us-wars-militarism/pentagon-spending )

Now is a good time for peace activists to expand education about the history of unchallenged military spending, continued military basing all across the globe, the use of high technology and mobile troop formations to intervene everywhere, the consequences of military spending for making the world a more dangerous place, and the costs, not only in lives overseas but to a basic standard of living at home.