REVISITING "AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM"

Harry Targ

Continued study and research into the origins of the folk music of various peoples in many parts of the world revealed that there is a world body-a universal body-of folk music based upon a universal pentatonic (five tone) scale. Interested as I am in the universality of (hu)mankind-in the fundamental relationship of all peoples to one another-this idea of a universal body of music intrigued me, and I pursed it along many fascinating paths. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand, 1959.

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).

President Vladimir Putin wrote in the New York Times, September 12, 2013 that “it is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.” This statement embedded in a generally reasonable statement about the instability of Syria brought an outcry from the liberal media elite and often-quoted academics. For example a Bloomberg editorial refers to Putin’s “bizarre” “out-of date” analysis. Professor Fouad Ajami wrote that “Arab regimes of plunder and tyranny were both physically close to Russia” and the “lawless Kremlin model.”

Liberal commentators dwelled on the silly pictures of muscular Putin riding a horse without a shirt. Or they reminded viewers of Russia’s recent (and vile) homophobia. Or they referred to Putin’s pedigree as a KGB operative or as the ruler behind the throne manipulating the Russian electoral system in order to return to office after being replaced.

Although critics were probably correct to challenge his claim that the recent gassing of Syrian citizens was done only by rebels, he did admit that the Assad regime in fact does have such weapons. But both Democrats and Republicans expressed outrage that anyone could challenge the idea that the United States is the “exceptional” nation.

Let’s be clear. United States foreign policy over the last 150 years has been a reflection of many forces including economics, politics, militarism and the desire to control territory. The most important idea used by each presidential administration to gain support from the citizenry for the pursuit of empire is the claim that America is “exceptional”. 

Think about the view of “the city on the hill” articulated by Puritan ancestors who claimed that they were creating a social experiment that would inspire the world. Over three hundred years later President Reagan again spoke of “the city on the hill.” Or one can recall public addresses of turn of the twentieth century luminaries such as former President Theodore Roosevelt who claimed that the white race from Europe and North America was civilizing the peoples of what we would now call the Global South.  Or Indiana Senator Beveridge’s clear statement: “It is elemental….It is racial.” From the proclamation of the new nation’s special purpose in Puritan America, to Ronald Reagan’s reiteration of the claim, to similar claims by virtually all politicians of all political affiliations, Americans hear over and over that we are different, special, and a shining example of public virtue that all other peoples should use as their guide to building a better society and polity.

However, looking at data on the United States role in the world, the United States was at war for 201 years from 1776 to 2011. Ten million indigenous people were exterminated as the “new” nation moved westward between the 17^th and the 20^th centuries and at least 10 million people were killed, mostly from developing countries between 1945 and 2010 in wars in which the United States had some role. In addition, world affairs was transformed by the singular use of two atomic bombs;  one dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 instantly killing 80,000 people and the other on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killing another 70,000.

Comparing the image of exceptionalism with the domestic reality of American life suggests stark contrasts as well: continuous and growing gaps between rich and poor, inadequate nutrition and health care for significant portions of the population, massive domestic gun violence, and inadequate access to the best education that the society has the capacity to provide to all. Of course, the United States was a slave society for over 200 years formally racially segregated for another 100, and now incarcerates 15 percent of African American men in their twenties.

The United States is not the only country that has a history of imperialism, exploitation, violence, and racism but we must understand that our foreign policy and economic and political system are not exceptional and must be changed.

Finally, a better future and the survival of the human race require us to realize, as Paul Robeson suggested, what is precious about humanity is not our differences but our commonalities. Exceptionalist thinking separates us. Sharing what we have in common as human beings, both our troubles and our talents, is the only basis for creating a peaceful and just world.

THE SPIRIT OF SOCIALISM IN CHILE LIVES ON

Harry Targ

The Chilean Song Movement had become so identified with Popular Unity, it had been such a strong factor, emotional, cohesive, inspiring, that the military authorities found it necessary to declare ‘subversive’ even the indigenous instruments, whose beautiful sound had become so full of meaning and inspiration. Together with prohibiting even the mention of Victor’s name, they banned all his music and the music of all the artists of the New Chilean Song Movement….

It was a mystery to me how Victor was remembered. Since the coup his very name had been censored, his records prohibited. But in spite of that I heard his songs being sung in poor community centres, in church halls, football clubs and universities, with whole audiences of young people joining in the singing as though his songs had become part of Chilean folklore (from Joan Jara, Victor, An Unfinished Song, Bloomsbury, London, 1998).

Victor Jara, The Voice of the People

In a powerful biography of the life of Victor Jara, his wife captures the deep political and cultural roots her husband planted in the soil of the working people of Chile. He committed his life to celebrating and popularizing the songs and stories of the Chilean people, recognizing that his cultural project had to be intimately connected to the political project of Salvador Allende’s socialist and democratic Popular Unity coalition. Allende in October, 1970, was the first elected socialist president of a Latin American country. 

The Nixon Administration and the Chilean military found the people’s choice unacceptable and set about undermining Allende’s government. On September 11, 1973 the military launched a coup, killed Allende, rounded up thousands of his supporters, and brought them to a huge soccer stadium, and tortured and shot their cultural icon, Victor Jara.

The United States Crushes Revolution in Chile

The United States had supported the Christian Democrats in Chile with official assistance and CIA financing since the 1950s. The Christian Democratic candidate in 1970 was opposed by Marxist Salvador Allende, who, as the head of a coalition of six left parties, won a plurality of votes.

From the time of the election in October, 1970, until September, 1973, when a bloody military coup toppled Allende, the United States did everything it could to destabilize the elected government. First, the United States pressured Chilean legislators to reject the election result. When that failed, energy and resources were used to damage the Chilean economy and build a network of ties with military personnel ready to carry out a coup.

Allende developed policies to redistribute land, nationalized the vital copper industry, and established diplomatic relations with the former Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Popular culture stimulated by artists such as Victor Jara flowered and grew. All these moves exacerbated tensions with the United States, since its investments in copper, iron, nitrates, iodine, and salt were large.

The Nixon administration formed a secret committee, “the 40 committee,” headed by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to develop a long-term plan to destabilize and overthrow the Allende government. The CEO of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, a major foreign influence in Chile, was enthusiastic about the Nixon plan.

Among the policies utilized by Washington were an informal economic blockade of Chile, termination of aid and loans, International Monetary Fund pressure on the government to carry out anti-worker policies, the engineering of a substantial decline in the price of copper on the world market, fomenting dissent in the military, and funding opposition groups and newspapers, particularly the influential Santiago daily, El Mercurio. Despite growing economic crisis and  protests by the rightwing spurred by U.S. covert operations, the Allende-led left coalition scored electoral victories in municipal elections throughout the country in March, 1973.  

Since Nixon’s directive to make Chile’s “economy scream” had not led to Allende’s rejection at the ballot box, the Kissinger committee and the right-wing generals decided to act. On September 11, 1973 the military carried out a coup that ousted the Allende government, assassinated him in the Presidential Palace, and established brutal rule under the leadership of General Augusto Pinochet. A year after the coup, Amnesty International reported that some 6,000 to 10,000 prisoners had been taken. The new regime banned all political parties, abolished trade unions, and initiated programs to assassinate pro-Allende emigres, including former Foreign Minister, Orlando Letelier, who was blown up in an automobile in Dupont Circle in Washington D.C.

The spirit of the brutal U.S. policy in Chile was expressed by Kissinger in 1970 when he declared: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” One year after the coup President Ford (who replaced the discredited Richard Nixon) defended the it as being in the “best interests of the people of Chile and certainly in the best interests of the United States.” A different assessment was provided by a distinguished diplomatic historian, Alexander De Conde who wrote that the United States “had a hand in the destruction of a moderate left-wing government that allowed democratic freedoms to its people and to its replacement by a friendly right-wing government that crushed such freedoms with torture and other police-state repressions.” 

Chile is one example of the way the United States has sought to control and influence the internal affairs of nations. But the spirit of resistance planted in so many different ways in so many places by cultural performers and revolutionaries such as Victor Jara lives on. 

As long as we sing his songs,
As long as his courage can inspire us
to greater courage
Victor Jara will never die.

Pete Seeger

“Singout Magazine” 1975

A HOOSIER CONGRESSMAN IGNORES THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

Harry Targ

Thinking about the recently celebrated 50^th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, my thoughts returned to the profound intellectual, political, and moral transformation many of us experienced about civil rights, the pursuit of peace, and the fundamental need for economic and social justice that resulted from the first historic March. 

After the August 28, 1963 March many of us, young and old, Black and white, men and women, straight and gay, of all class, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds came to the realization that we had to march, to protest, to sing and shout, and to organize  to continue to work for peace and justice.

As the years unfolded we studied and learned more about the historic struggle for justice that began hundreds of years before August, 1963 and after the March on Washington, we realized, the struggle would not end. 

And over the years the analyses, visions, and political practices of all of us, even the organizers and speakers at the first March, changed. Dr. King himself said in a famous speech at Riverside Church in New York in 1967 that social and economic justice cannot be achieved at home while we were engaged in massive war against the Vietnamese people. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Dr. King’s understanding of the economic dimension of racial injustice deepened as well. Again in 1967 he said: “One day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”

The March on Washington of 2013 had an even broader agenda than the event of fifty years ago. The National Action Network, the organization that launched the event, identified nine key talking points that inspired it: jobs and the economy; voting rights; workers’ rights; stand your ground laws and gun violence; women’s rights; immigration; LGBT equality; environmental justice, and youth. During the event itself these issues were addressed as speakers emphasized over and over that the 50^th Anniversary March on Washington was “not just a commemoration, but a continuation of the efforts of 50 years ago.”

While remembering August, 1963 and watching on television videos of many of the 1963 speakers calling for economic and social justice (Dr. King was one of ten inspirational speakers from labor, the civil rights, religious, and youth communities), I received my weekly electronic newsletter from Congressman Todd Rokita, from the 4^th Congressional District, Indiana. To his credit, Rokita sends weekly newsletters to any constituents who request them.

The Rokita report of August 23, 2013, discussed his travels around the district but did not mention the 50^th Anniversary March that was to occur on August 24. Instead, he highlighted what he claimed were three of the “more frequent topics that I am being asked about at events.”

First, Rokita mentioned what he called “Our Nation’s $17 Trillion Debt.” As a member of the House Budget Committee, he promised to work to reduce it. 

Second, Rokita listed “Immigration” as an issue raised at his meetings. He indicated he opposed immigration reform proposals recommended by President Obama and endorsed by the United States Senate. “Any immigration reform must focus on border security first.”

Third, Rokita wrote about “Obamacare.” He assured his constituents that he would continue to vote against the Affordable Care Act because “Obamacare is a train wreck. Costs are skyrocketing and Americans are finding out they cannot keep their doctors or their health care plans.”

Rokita reported on a statement by one attendee whose comments were in the spirit of The March on Washington. The Congressman said the attendee “wanted Washington to be more civil, and also take care of everyone’s needs.” Rokita suggested that this attendee must realize that “government shouldn’t and can’t be everything to everyone.” He suggested his audience read three books: Friederich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom; Mark Levin, Liberty and Tyranny: a Conservative Manifesto; and Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. The first and second are conservative diatribes that warn of excessive government and claim that unfettered markets can solve all our problems and the third is a commentary by a French political theorist who visited the United States in 1831 and wrote about that experience. 

Six months prior to Rokita’s newsletter, the great civil rights activist and performing artist, Harry Belafonte spoke of an alternative view, articulated by Theodore Roosevelt, the 26^th president of the United States.

Paraphrasing, Belafonte reported that Roosevelt “said that when the state finds itself moving away from its commitment to the rights of the citizen, when those rights are being trampled and misguided, when there are those who would wrest from the Constitution the equality that it attempted to give all of us, then the citizens of the nation have not only the obligation, but the right, to challenge the state and those who run it. And, he said, if we fail to do that, if we fail to meet that moral criteria, then we, the citizens, should be charged with patriotic treason.”

Fortunately, contemporary generations of workers, occupiers, peace activists, anti-racists, women’s liberationists, gay rights activists, and environmentalists are heeding the call to carry on the legacy of the Marches on Washington, advocating what Roosevelt called meeting the “moral criteria” embedded in the U.S. Constitution. Congressman Rokita’s newsletter, unfortunately, reflected an approach to government that would fail to meet this test.

"INNOVATIONS DEFICITS," UNIVERSITY LOBBYISTS, AND COMPETING WITH THE ASIANS

Harry Targ

The President of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, has been embroiled in controversies over the summer because of e-mail messages recently uncovered by Associated Press reporters when he was Governor of Indiana. These messages indicate that as Governor, Daniels sought to exclude Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, from text use in public school curricula. Also, he sought to exclude the use of Zinn’s history in college level teacher training courses. 

In a second controversy critics of Daniels uncovered that he was only one of two Big Ten university presidents who failed to sign a letter to Congress and the President urging them to continue adequate funding for research and development, primarily in the sciences.

President Daniels, defending his decision not to sign the letter, said he was motivated by the letter’s failure to address the “severe fiscal condition in which the nation finds itself.” However, he said, he is an advocate of “major federal investments in research particularly basic research….”

After growing criticism from Purdue University faculty, on Thursday, August 22, President Daniels announced that he would now sign the letter initiated by the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. He said he learned that the AAU and APLU had previously sent another letter to the politicians urging deficit-reduction, tax reform, and warning of “runaway costs of entitlement programs.”

Daniels’ original statement in opposition to the letter and subsequent endorsement of it ignored the significant decline in federal deficits over the last two years. He, as well as the other presidents of major universities, seemingly dismissed the fact that warnings of the dire consequences of debts and deficits have been discounted by many mainstream economists. 

To underscore Daniels’ political agenda, reflected in both his defense of his initial refusal to sign the letter and his recent change of mind, Daniels claimed that “the exploding cost of entitlement programs is choking all kinds of discretionary spending, not just NSF and NIH but many worthy public programs.” Presumably these “entitlement programs” include Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Daniels’ critics claimed that the original reason for refusing to endorse the letter signed by 165 presidents of the most distinguished universities in the country, reflected his political ideology more than his current position as university president. However, the critics fail to recognize that the letter in dispute itself reads like a crass political statement.

The letter highlights an interesting concept, the “innovation deficit.” The statement claims that reductions in federal research support will reduce the creative energies and research outcomes of scientists and other scholars at the nation’s colleges and universities.   No definition of “innovation deficit" is provided. Further, no convincing evidence is presented that clearly demonstrates a connection between innovation and federal research dollars. 

Finally, the letter does not describe the federal agencies to which federal research dollars typically are channeled. For example, President Obama’s FY2013 budget included a proposed 1.4 percent increase in R&D of $1.95 billion dollars to $140 billion. While some agencies would suffer modest declines, 95 percent of federal research dollars would go to seven federal agencies with 50.6 percent to the Department of Defense and 22.3 percent to the Department of Health and Human Services. Throughout the entire period since World War II, almost fifty percent of government research spending has been allotted to the Department of Defense. 

Americans should have clear and transparent explanations for federal expenditures, including research. Today almost 50 percent of the citizenry live below or near the poverty line and major cities, including Detroit and Gary, are going bankrupt. College tuitions are skyrocketing. The letter, a lobbying exhortation by university presidents, does not compellingly explain the connections between research expenditures and the fundamental needs of the vast majority of the American people.

A final problem with the letter signed by165 university presidents is their warning that “having witnessed this nation’s success at turning investments in research and higher education into innovation and economic growth, countries such as China, Singapore, and Korea have dramatically increased their own investments in these areas.” These other countries have invested two to four times more as a percentage of their budgets on research than the United States in recent years, the letter admonishes. The University presidents are raising the specter of a new 21^st century Asian threat that is replacing the old fear of communism; that is scientific innovation. 

The scientific enterprise is conceptualized as one in which socially constructed institutions, nations, compete with each other. Asian competition, the letter suggests, is particularly threatening. The statement is a far cry from the vision of the scientific enterprise as a shared community activity with shared outcomes.