Author: jameswagner

The march.
Barry and I will be here, in front of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library late saturday morning with the fabulous people of the “CARNIVAL BLOC FEEDER MARCH.”
If any of our friends are going to be there [and why not?] and want to meet up with us, bring your cellphone so we can find each other. Call or email me before saturday if you don’t already have one of our mobile numbers.
Oh yes, I’ll have plenty of extra Blue Buttons with me.

This is an excerpt from as essay on ZNet by Michael Albert. It puts the current unprecedented threat to our world into its proper perspective, and it is intended to bring us all into the streets at noon this saturday.

Despite the magnitude of the indignities and deaths, it always seemed certain that the crimes of the men in grey flannel suits were just intensified business as usual. All the grim and grievous circumstances of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s never seemed to me poised to transcend existing social relations. There was no new more ugly regime threatening the world.
But I have to say that today it does seem that plans now being pursued in the suites, in the Congress, and in the White House, are not merely an intensification of business as usual.
The anti-corporate globalization movement, promising a new but much more humane world “regime”, has (with good reason) seriously scared the masters of the universe. But 9/11 has given them confidence and hubris.
Capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and corporate globalization are vile enough, but every so often — and of course the mid century Nazis were a prime example — something even worse tries to emerge out of still deeper layers of hell, and occasionally it does. And such a scourge of evil seems perhaps to be seeking entry into our world now, all the way from the seventh circle, or further.

A piece in TIME on January 20 by Brian Eno [yeah, Brian Eno] represents the argument of a reasonable European who understands and admires America but is very concerned about what’s going on here. I won’t excerpt it, but will copy it whole. It’s not long, and it’s argument is compellingly, beautifully written.

THE U.S. NEEDS TO OPEN UP TO THE WORLD
To this European, America is trapped in a fortress of arrogance and ignorance
BY BRIAN ENO
Europeans have always looked at America with a mixture of fascination and puzzlement, and now, increasingly, disbelief. How is it that a country that prides itself on its economic success could have so many very poor people? How is it that a country so insistent on the rule of law should seek to exempt itself from international agreements? And how is it that the world’s beacon of democracy can have elections dominated by wealthy special interest groups? For me, the question has become: “How can a country that has produced so much cultural and economic wealth act so dumb?”
I could fill this page with the names of Americans who have influenced, entertained and educated me. They represent what I admire about America: a vigorous originality of thought, and a confidence that things can be changed for the better. That was the America I lived in and enjoyed from 1978 until 1983. That America was an act of faith — the faith that “otherness” was not threatening but nourishing, the faith that there could be a country big enough in spirit to welcome and nurture all the diversity the world could throw at it. But since Sept. 11, that vision has been eclipsed by a suspicious, introverted America, a country-sized version of that peculiarly American form of ghetto: the gated community. A gated community is defensive. Designed to keep the “others” out, it dissolves the rich web of society into a random clustering of disconnected individuals. It turns paranoia and isolation into a lifestyle.
Surely this isn’t the America that anyone dreamed of; it’s a last resort, nobody’s choice. It’s especially ironic since so much of the best new thinking about society, economics, politics and philosophy in the last century came from America. Unhampered by the snobbery and exclusivity of much European thought, American thinkers vaulted forward — courageous, innovative and determined to talk in a public language. But, unfortunately, over the same period, the mass media vaulted backward, thriving on increasingly simple stories and trivializing news into something indistinguishable from entertainment. As a result, a wealth of original and subtle thought — America’s real wealth — is squandered.
This narrowing of the American mind is exacerbated by the withdrawal of the left from active politics. Virtually ignored by the media, the left has further marginalized itself by a retreat into introspective cultural criticism. It seems content to do yoga and gender studies, leaving the fundamentalist Christian right and the multinationals to do the politics. The separation of church and state seems to be breaking down too. Political discourse is now dominated by moralizing, like George W. Bush’s promotion of American “family values” abroad, and dissent is unpatriotic. “You’re either with us or against us” is the kind of cant you’d expect from a zealous mullah, not an American President.
When Europeans make such criticisms, Americans assume we’re envious. “They want what we’ve got,” the thinking goes, “and if they can’t get it, they’re going to stop us from having it.” But does everyone want what America has? Well, we like some of it but could do without the rest: among the highest rates of violent crime, economic inequality, functional illiteracy, incarceration and drug use in the developed world. President Bush recently declared that the U.S. was “the single surviving model of human progress.” Maybe some Americans think this self-evident, but the rest of us see it as a clumsy arrogance born of ignorance.
Europeans tend to regard free national health services, unemployment benefits, social housing and so on as pretty good models of human progress. We think it’s important — civilized, in fact — to help people who fall through society’s cracks. This isn’t just altruism, but an understanding that having too many losers in society hurts everyone. It’s better for everybody to have a stake in society than to have a resentful underclass bent on wrecking things. To many Americans, this sounds like socialism, big government, the nanny state. But so what? The result is: Europe has less gun crime and homicide, less poverty and arguably a higher quality of life than the U.S., which makes a lot of us wonder why America doesn’t want some of what we’ve got.
Too often, the U.S. presents the “American way” as the only way, insisting on its kind of free-market Darwinism as the only acceptable “model of human progress.” But isn’t civilization what happens when people stop behaving as if they’re trapped in a ruthless Darwinian struggle and start thinking about communities and shared futures? America as a gated community won’t work, because not even the world’s sole superpower can build walls high enough to shield itself from the intertwined realities of the 21st century. There’s a better form of security: reconnect with the rest of the world, don’t shut it out; stop making enemies and start making friends. Perhaps it’s asking a lot to expect America to act differently from all the other empires in history, but wasn’t that the original idea?

Joan Smith in The Independent asks when we’re going to get over it.

If anyone had told me, in the autumn of 2001, that we were less than 18 months away from what might become the world’s first nuclear war, I would have thought they were insane. In the half century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one has been that reckless or indeed that stupid – even, or so I thought, the Bush White House. Then came the twin towers and everything changed overnight, to the point where we find ourselves apparently on the threshold of a terrifying conflict in the Middle East. So the question I am going to ask, at the risk of causing great offence, is this: when is the US going to get over the events of 11 September?

She also soberly observes,

If the world has become a more dangerous place since 11 September 2001, it is not solely because of the activities of a bunch of Islamic terrorists.

Let us get this straight. The Bushies are going into Iraq to prevent that country from using weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear devices and chemical agents. But they have already said that to do so they may use nuclear devices themselves, and now they are saying they may also use chemical agents.
All this is supposed to make sense and appeal to the conscience of the world?

Rahul Mahajan in a response to Colin Powell:

If one believes everything Colin Powell said to the Security Council yesterday, one’s first response ought to be that there’s no reason to fight a war, since U.S. surveillance capabilities are so awesome that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) can easily be found. And one’s first question should be why has the United States for over two months withheld this apparently so damaging evidence from those weapons inspectors, who could have verified conjectures and destroyed WMD stocks and production facilities.
If indeed the evidence presented is of the character claimed by Powell, then the United States has chosen to sabotage UN Security Council Resolution 1441, clause 10 of which “Requests all Member States to give full support to UNMOVIC and the IAEA in the discharge of their mandates, including by providing any information related to prohibited programmes.”
The actual evidence may not even warrant that conclusion. What Powell served up to the Council was a sorry mess of fuzzy aerial photographs of buildings, a cute “organizational chart” of supposed al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, a couple of tape recordings that are capable of multiple interpretations and, as before, a large number of undated reports by unnamed Iraqi defectors.
. . .
It is becoming increasingly likely that the United States will obtain a Security Council resolution authorizing war. And if it does, its main argument will be that it must go to war with Iraq to uphold international law. It’s important to understand ahead of time just how obscene that argument is. It’s . . . .
. . . because this war is a violation of the ultimate international law. It is a “crime against peace,” a war of aggression. It was decided on long ago in the White House, and the only reason other countries may vote in support of it is the repeated statements that the war will happen whether they want it or not. It is the United States holding not just Iraq but the entire world hostage.

FREEDOM ITSELF IS ON AN ORANGE ALERT
On friday New York City authorities, threatened by the Justice Department in Washington, testified in court about why they are refusing to allow an anti-war march and rally at the UN on Feb. 15.
First they had to argue why it was an inconvenience to traffic. Jimmy Breslin:

He said he hated gaps in parades. They occur in a big parade when you’re supposed to get cross-town traffic through and the marchers are stopped with gaps between them and then it starts again and people don’t move. They keep the gaps. “You can have them at a red light and it changes and they won’t move,” Chief Rocco Esposito was saying in Manhattan Federal Court on Friday as day turned into evening.
. . .
Rocco Esposito was sent to make the stand for the mayor and police commissioner. He turned down the march permit and looked absolutely awful in trying to explain why. In one of the few emotional moments of the day, Esposito got on his favorite, these gaps in the parade, and complained to the court, forcefully, “You just can’t get them to move. You can’t get them.”
At one point, Esposito also said, “I have information that we have an orange condition. I have orders as of 12 noon to upgrade security.”
This was the level of argument in an attempt to stop free speech.
And I believe if he looks, he’ll find that New York has been on an orange alert from about the day they hit the World Trade Center.
Several times, Esposito said, “We don’t know who is coming here for the march. We don’t know who they are.”
Leslie Cagan [the activist basically coordinating this demonstration] said, “Since when in free speech do you have to say who’s coming to an event? Do you have to give the names?”

Breslin and much of the world know the real reason for the City’s intransigence.

During a break, I went up to one severely dressed young man and he identified himself as Andrew O’Toole of the United States Attorney’s office. He was there to make a statement or file something to remind the court that the UN was the responsibility of the city. He was pleasant. The people who sent him over did not tell him to say “Ashcroft.” He didn’t have to. He was at the city’s table and a United State Marshal who had arrived with him and was holding a hand radio stood at the door.

His conclusion:

The city says the march can’t be held because of security reasons since Sept. 11. The reasons they gave Friday made no sense at all, unless you suspect that the march is being opposed because Mayor Bloomberg is trying to help Republicans by stopping a public outcry here against the beautiful war that the administration wants against Iraq. Ray Kelly, the police commissioner, is blocking the march on behalf of Bloomberg.
I know neither one of them is unbalanced, but their work this time has been an act of madness and can do nothing but hurt their reputations with this attempted fascism, which is going to be talked about for a long time.
Free speech comes from Madison and Jefferson and Paine and people went to jail over it and were shot in wars to protect it. You can see how precious, how fragile such a blessing is by the way in which it is embroiled and disputed and can be threatened by the most modest of opponents.

The war is not yet a sure thing. Can we actually succeed in stopping it?