DELUSIONS AND UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY: Fantasies Continue

PRESIDENT BIDEN CONTINUES TO ARTICULATE DELUSIONS OF EMPIRE

Friday, October 20, 2023

American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with. To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it…We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright said, the indispensable nation. (Joe Biden, New York Times, October 19, 2023).

America’s destiny required the U.S. “…to set the world its example of right and honor…We cannot retreat from any soil where providence has unfurled our banner. It is ours to save that soil, for liberty, and civilization….It is elemental...it is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth.” Senator Albert Beveridge, Indiana, Congressional Record, 56 Congress, I Session, pp.704-712, 1898).

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DELUSIONS AND UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY; FANTASIES CONTINUE

April 4, 2022, (reprinted in Portside)

Harry Targ, Stephen David

The brutal war in Ukraine continues. Russia attacks targets in various parts of the country, mostly in the South and East. Ukrainians and Russian soldiers die. Millions flee the violence as the  physical landscape of cities and towns are destroyed. And neither Russia, Ukraine, or NATO/the United States appear to engage in any serious negotiations to end the violence.

Meanwhile military spending in the United States and Europe increase at the expense of desperately needed social programs and transformations from economies based on fossil fuels. Presumably the Russian military/industrial complex (and perhaps the Ukrainian military establishment) experiences boosts in resources and legitimacy as is occurring in the west. And on all sides the mass media and cultural and educational institutions spin narratives about the righteousness, glory, and the efficacy of policy of the country from which the narratives are produced.

Spokespersons from the United States government and the US corporate media particularly have produced and disseminated stories about aspects of the Ukraine war that together constitute a series of interconnected delusions about the context and causes of the war in Ukraine; the US/NATO response; the deleterious impacts of the war on the Russian invaders; and, most importantly, the immediate and long-term impacts of the war on international affairs. A delusion is "an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument."

If one goes beyond the US/Western corporate media and if one gives serious thought to the historical logic of such narratives it would be clear that core premises of US/NATO policies are delusional.

For example, there are at least seven kinds of delusions that are broadly accepted and/or articulated by the US government and the corporate media.

Delusion number one  is that the United States can reproduce the coalition of hegemonic forces that existed after World War 2. It is clear that the US Cold War international system cannot be replicated. After World War 2, the United States, the overwhelmingly hegemonic economic and military power,  institutionalized a world order based upon economics (the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan, the subsequent development of the European Economic Community and the European Union),  military dominance (from the construction of the NATO alliance to a worldwide network of alliances, bilateral treaties, and military bases), and an ideology (the “free world versus communism” or in our own day “democracy” versus “authoritarianism”). While this hegemonic goal - economics, military and ideological - was never fully achieved it has been whittled away by multiple poles of economic power (particularly the rise of the Chinese economy), a declining ability of the United States to control the world militarily (as evidenced historically by military defeats from Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and even in the Western hemisphere), and growing global skepticism about what the United States means by “democracy.”

Delusion number two  suggests that the United States can remain the global hegemon. Here again any number of writers, and more importantly key leaders from countries in Europe, Asia, and throughout the Global South see the United States as a declining power economically, militarily, and politically. As the Ukraine crisis has unfolded many voices from the Global South have evidenced indifference to what appears to be a “white people’s war” that is being  used  to increase demands for fundamental changes in global economics and politics. Many around the world see the conflicts in Eastern Europe as a manifestation of the breakdown of North American and European power and control of what goes on in their countries. The most significant takeaway from the United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning the Russian intervention in Ukraine is the fact that 35 countries abstained in the vote; not only African and Asian countries but several from the Western Hemisphere. The population of those countries constituted about one-third of the population of the world. Not too long ago a loose coalition of big powers, the BRICS, began dialoguing about making modest demands for changes in power dynamics in global institutions and practice. Witnessing greater underdevelopment in developing countries instead of the promise of development, BRICS began charting a course not entirely dependent on the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organizations. While the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) talks have stalled, it is expected (particularly after upcoming elections in Brazil) they will resume. Some modest redistribution of decisioning power in major international institutions is in the air.

Delusion number three is that the United States can intimidate China. Since the 1980s, China has steered an economic course that involves encouraging foreign investment, utilizing technologies derived from these investments, and adopting an economic development model incorporating advanced capitalism and appropriate state controls. Not only is China about to surpass the United States in its gross domestic product but in its progress it has lifted 700 million Chinese out of poverty. And in terms of China’s global presence, it is establishing more attractive economic relations with nations all across the globe. Through its Belt and Road Initiative for example, China has already become the largest trading partner with the countries of Latin America. In this context, media reports of US threats if China maintains economic ties with Russia are matters of bluster and of little consequence.

Delusion number four is that the countries of the global south support the United States. Given the declining relative power of the United States on the global stage, the rising economic influence of China on the world stage, and the history of United States interference, (from sanctions to soldiers) in the affairs of other countries and peoples, nations of the Global South see the United States as the latest, perhaps last, imperial power. As V J Prashad pointed out, “all war is criminal” - both ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ wars. Therefore, economic exploitation and political interference in the  Global South is increasingly viewed with disdain and discomfort. Again, this disdain is suggested by the number of countries that refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the recent General Assembly vote. Yet despite such clear signs the US media continues to praise US sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, and now Russia, without discussing the horrific impacts these sanctions have on ordinary people in these countries. Nor does the media report that the United States and the European Union currently have some kind of sanctions imposed on 39 nations. Sanctions alone make it very unlikely that victimized people from the Global South regard the United States with respect and admiration.*And alternative forms of payment and paths for international trade will be the logical outcome of weaponizing trade and the banking system.

Protesters demonstrate against police brutality in Nairobi, Kenya, on June 8, 2020. The protest against police brutality in Kenya was in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and in response to the recent killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis. 

Delusion number five is that the United States remains the ‘indispensable nation,” the “last resort,” the model of democracy and market economies for the world. For the reasons suggested above and the demonstrable racism, violence, environmental disasters more frequently associated with the United States itself (while admired for certain achievements such as in education and science) most global citizens regard the US as a failed state, surely one not to emulate. More recently the overbearing, unfair, and restrictive moves against Chinese competitive strength in the form of banning Huawei’s 5G technology and Tiktok compromises the notion of free-market fairness and a just global economic world order. The “American Dream” begins to morph into a hollow specter in the global context. Together they mark an unmistakable decline.

Delusion number six is that the United States cannot learn from others: Cuba, China, peoples on the Africa continent and elsewhere. It has historically been central to the consciousness of the hegemonic actors in the world, the imperial powers, that they are and can be the exemplars and teachers; and, the countries that have been conquered and/or been impoverished have nothing to teach the powerful and only have to follow. Meanwhile examples of alternative healthcare delivery systems, adaptations to the natural environment, or forms of workplace democracy in less powerful nations are ignored.

Cuban doctors travel around the world to help cure pandemics.

And delusion number seven suggests that global hegemony can be maintained or achieved without major (indeed nuclear) war and/or climate disaster. This is the most dangerous delusion because it suggests that the powerful countries can proceed with their drive to dominate without increasing the risk of nuclear war or speeding up the destruction of nature.

Therefore, one project the peace and justice movement in the United States and hopefully with peace and justice activists around the world can do is to challenge the delusions articulated by American and European leaders and to challenge the mythologies that are deeply embedded in the corporate media. And now, this includes developing an historically grounded analysis of the Ukraine war; one that denounces the initiation of the war but understands the history and mythologies that undergird it. With such understandings we can only improve our chances for a sounder basis for peace.

 

*Countries facing economic sanctions include: 1. Afghanistan, 2. Belarus, 3. Bosnia and Herzegovina, 4. Burundi, 5. Central African Republic, 6. China (PR), 7. Comoros 8. Crimea Region of Ukraine> 9. Cuba, 10. Cyprus, 11. Democratic Republic of the Congo, 12. Guinea, 13. Guinea Bissau, 14. Haiti, 15. Iran, 16. Iraq, 17. Kyrgyzstan, 18. Laos, 19. Lebanon, 20. Libya, 21. Mali 22. Mauritania 23. Moldova 24. Montenegro 25. Myanmar, 26. Nicaragua, 27. North Korea - DPRK, 28. Palestinian Territories, 29. Russia, 30. Rwanda, 31. Serbia 32. Somalia, 33. South Sudan, 34. Sudan, 35. Syria, 36. Tunisia 37. Venezuela, 38. Yemen, 39. Zimbabwe. https://sanctionskill.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/39SanctionedCountries3.pdf

Harry Targ is a long-time peace activist, writer, and teacher of courses on United States foreign policy. Stephen David is also a long-time peace activist, cultural critic, and participant in the struggles against apartheid in South Africa.

 

 

 

Patrick Chura, Mike Gold: The People’s Writer, SUNY Press, 2020.

Book Review: Socialism and Democracy, March 15, 2022

Harry R. Targ

 

Examining the Life of a Radical Writer: Mike Gold

    Mike Gold, was a literary critic, novelist, playwright, journalist, who learned his politics in the era of the construction of various radical movements-anarchist, socialist, syndicalist-in the context of being born and raised in impoverished tenements in the Jewish sector of the Lower East Side in New York City. In his mature years, he became a member of the Communist Party USA as editor of the New Masses and columnist in the Daily Worker. During this period he developed and articulated a critical stance and a more or less systematic analysis of the relationship between politics and art. He is credited with initiating an artistic genre he called "proletarian literature."

  Gold was born as Itzok Granich in 1893 in New York City. He attended school until the eighth grade, took one year of journalism courses at New York University (1912-1913), and spent one year as a special student at Harvard University in 1914. He published in the political magazine edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, The Masses, and in the newspaper, The New York Call. Also he wrote three one-act plays that were performed by the Provincetown Players in 1916, 1917, and 1920. He spent time in Mexico during World War One to avoid the draft and upon return and in the atmosphere of the Red Scare of the early 1920s changed his name to Mike Gold. In 1920 he became the editor of The Liberator after The Masses was closed down by the government. In 1926 he became editor of the successor of The Liberator, The New Masses, (in the literary orbit of the Communist Party) which he edited for twenty years. In 1933 be began writing a column for the Daily Worker. His contributions to the Daily Worker continued until his death in 1967. Perhaps, most significant in Mike Gold's left literary career was the publication of his partially fictionalized account of growing up in the poverty of the Jewish tenements at the dawn of the twentieth century in his famous "proletarian novel," Jews Without Money. Mchael 

  Michael Folsum, a editor of one of three anthologies of his essays and columns wrote of his life, that Gold was a man who

   "... spent his literary life, as a Communist and a revolutionary, working to build socialism in America. There were lots of people who did that, once upon a time. But Gold stuck it out. He died a little tired after the ravages of the McCarthy period, and a little cynical after many a disappointment, like the truth about Stalin, the ‘Moscow trials,’ the defection of so many old comrades. But he died still holding to the dream of his youth."[1]

 On Proletarian Literature

   Mike Gold spent a career in class struggle and in contestation about what was "good art." In 1921 Mike Gold published an essay in The Liberator called "Towards Proletarian Art." In 1930, Gold published a series of remarks elaborating on the theme of the earlier article in The New Masses. This article in the Folsom anthology was given the title "Proletarian Realism.

   In the first essay, Gold presents a world in turmoil, one in which the demise of capitalism seems eminent. While this prediction in retrospect seems foolish, Gold reminds his readers of how pervasive the resistance to change is. "We have been bred in the old capitalist planet, and its stuff is in our very bones. Its ideals, mutilated and poor, were yet the precious stays of our lives. Its art, its science, its philosophy and metaphysics are deeper in us than logic or will....We cling to the old culture, and fight for it against ourselves." [2] Then, Gold offers a project for the artist to produce works that help people see the possibilities of the new in the bedrock of the old. And the old includes vivid renditions of the reality of human existence not some abstractions about "human nature," "good and evil," "the nature of beauty and love" or other images so common to artistic creation.

   For Gold, himself, it was most significant that "I was born in a tenement....It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the stars...There, in suffering youth, I feverishly sought God and found Man....I saw him ,not as he has been pictured by the elder poets, groveling or sinful or romantic or falsely god-like, but one sunk in a welter of humble, realistic cares; responsible, instinctive, long-suffering and loyal; sad and beaten yet reaching out beautifully and irresistibly like a natural force for the mystic food and freedom that are Man's."

 Gold claims that all he knows comes from the tenements. He saw the compassion of mothers and fathers for their young, the courage of the sick factory worker, the children finding pleasure in the playing of fanciful games in the dark tenement hallways. Gold claims: "The tenement is in my blood. When I think it is the tenement thinking. When I hope it is the tenement hoping. I am not an individual; I am all that the tenement group poured into me during those early years of my spiritual travail."[3]

  Gold argues that artists born in tenements should not have to apologize for it or go beyond the experience and indeed should not forget it. For what is art but "...the tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitive and articulate sons and daughters." Because life for us, he said, "...has been the tenement that bore and molded us through years of meaningful pain."[4]

  Gold contends that the artist has assumed the egoistic, solitary, and even competitive individual stance that comports with capitalism. As individual artist, she or he, combated with God, then Reason, then logic, so that now he wrote, "they have turned to the life of the moods..."Most critically "intellectuals have become contemptuous of the people..." "The people live, love, work, fight, pray, laugh; they accept all, they accept themselves, and the immortal urgings of Life within them. They know bread is necessary to them: they know love and hate. What do the intellectuals know?"[5] For Gold, the artist must root herself/himself in the life of the people.

 A Biography of Mike Gold

    Patrick Chura in Mike Gold: The People’s Writer, SUNY Press, 2020, does a wonderful job developing the life and times of Mike Gold. He highlights the context in which Gold lived and learned his radicalness; powerfully described in Gold’s under-appreciated novel, Jews Without Money. Not only does the novel help us understand the class and ethnic background that shaped Gold but it provides a window into Gold’s idea of proletarian literature, a concept he invented and promoted throughout his life in and around the left.

    Since older radicals were educated during the depths of the Cold War and anti-communism, their exposure to literature was framed by a “canon” which denied the value of  any fiction, poetry, drama or visual arts that which reflected upon the lived experiences of really existing working people and the exploited in general. Literature was judged by the interiority of the text, not the contexts in which fictional characters resided. To challenge this bourgeois conception of art, Gold spent a lifetime of activism.

    In addition to developing the centrality of Gold’s advocacy of proletarian literature, Chura provides us with a rich textured and sympathetic narrative of Gold’s life. Through it the reader is exposed to much of the literary left of the first half of the twentieth century: The New Masses, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Eugene O’Neil, John Reed, and others from The Masses. Later as a literary icon, editor of The New Masses, literary spokesperson for the Communist Party USA, and member of its John Reed Clubs, Gold was close to writers such as Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, and James T.Farrell. And, almost paradoxically, Chura touchingly describes Gold’s longstanding friendship with Dorothy Day even though their politics moved in different directions fro the end of World War One and the 1930s.

    Reading Chura is like reading a history of the literary left of the first half of the twentieth century and particularly giving rich examples of what Michael Denning called “The Cultural Front.”  And as the biographer points out, the lessons young Itzok Granich learns in the seamy tenements of New York city formed the basis of his politics and his lifes’ work as a writer.

    And Chura does not shy away from understanding, and probably embracing Gold’s advocacy of art forms that speak to and speak from the working class. The biography addresses the inextricable connections between the arts and the times in which they are produced: from the high tide of bourgeois art in the “roaring twenties,” to the art borne of economic misery in the 1930s, to the virulent anti-communism and the new criticism characteristic of  post-World War America. And throughout all this time and the varied political struggles of each generation Gold remained committed to artistic creations that spoke to and about the working class, the downtrodden, the victims of racism and sexism. And it is to this stance that the political culture of the 1960s and beyond makes sense. Perhaps the most important takeaway of this fine biography of Gold is that art and culture matter. The arts can give voice to human needs, can inspire political activism, and can speak truth to power.

    The only addition I would have preferred would have been a richer description of Gold’s relationship to the Communist Party, connections between party decisions and the content of The Masses, and Gold’s concrete role with the John Reed Clubs. Was Gold’s practice independent of the Party or a byproduct of Party decisions on matters of culture and the arts?

(For a rich grounding of Mike Gold’s work in the context of working class literature, politics, anti-racism, and immigrant experiences see Benjamin Balthaser, “Mike Gold, the Writer Who Believed Workers Could Speak for Themselves,” Jacobin, July 12, 2021. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/mike-gold-literature-jewish-american-proletariat-red-left)

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    [1]Michael Folsom ed., Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, International Publishers, 1972, 7-8.

 

    [2] Folsom 62.

    [3]Folsom, 64-5.

    [4]Folsom 65.

    [5]Folsom, 66.