The war of words and the new iron curtain

“Wartime governments, and our media, which sounds increasingly like our governments, like to define our popular narrative about war,” said the upright British man behind the microphone, his unblinking eyes locked on his audience. “Territories are taken, battles are won, advances are made… But war isn’t about winning or losing,” he said. “It’s about death.”

Then, an hour and a half before Sarah Palin and Joe Biden were set to start debating, Robert Fisk, the best foreign correspondent of our time, paused before adding, “And it represents the total failure of the human spirit.”

For someone who has spent thirty years covering war, for someone who’s seen dead babies and children and mothers, he seems to have kept his belief in the human spirit marvelously alive.

In The Great War for Civilisation, his 1300 page epic on war in the Middle East, he describes being on the front lines as the Iranian army shells Iraqi lines of defense in the Iraq/Iran war. Bullets fly by him as he walks between unexploded bomb shells towards firing Iraqi artillery. He asks his guide if he and his fellow journalists can leave the battle scene.

“‘Why?’ (The guide) roared. Because we are cowards,” Fisk writes. “Go on, say it, Fisk. Because I am shaking with fear and want to survive and live and write my story and fly back to Tehran and go back to Beirut and invite a young woman to drink fine red wine on my balcony.”

But in New York that night he wasn’t talking about wine. He was talking about the “iron curtain” running down the Atlantic that separates us from the realities of war in the Middle East.

He described watching an Al Jazeera TV crew try to send footage through to a British AP “executive.” The footage was of from inside a Basra hospital as the Americans shelled the city prior to sending ground troops in. Fisk described a child trying to put its severed fingers back on its hand, a woman screaming as she holds her intestines in with her hands. “We can’t air this,” the executive said, “People are eating dinner.”

“Look at it like this,” he’d said earlier that day on a Democracy Now radio broadcast, “first of all, we went to Afghanistan, we won the war. Then we rushed off to Iraq and won the war. Then we lost the war in Iraq, or maybe we won it again. And then we’re going back to Afghanistan, where we seem to have lost the war, to win it all over again. And in due course, perhaps we’ll have to go back to Iraq…. I mean, has nobody actually stood back and said, ‘What on earth are we doing out there…. It looks like we’re on a brainwashing trip, and we’ve all bought the narrative.”

“The only future in the Middle East,” he went on “is to withdraw all our military forces and have serious political, social, religious, cultural relations with these people. It’s not our land.”

And watching the Vice Presidential debates later that night, I couldn’t help but think of Fisk, his righteous anger and his conviction and his humanity on display. I though of Fisk, a short man, but standing strait after thirty years of war, saying “Be equal and unbiased on the side of people who are suffering.”

And I thought of him as Sarah Palin said “we're getting closer and closer to victory. And it would be a travesty if we quit now in Iraq.”

And I thought of him as Joe Biden promised to cross the Pakistan border if they thought they had “actionable intelligence” on Bin Laden.

And as the debate went on, and the candidates spud their gold, he slipped farther and farther from my mind, and I had to fight to keep him there.

Fools Progress

The spires of capital are crumbling. The anabolic boiling in the towers of the global village has been reduced to a simmer, and as the bubbles burst, the high water mark is adjusting down. The boys down on Wall Street with their bright suits, their million dollar smiles aren’t worth so much anymore: the market—sum of their shared belief, totality of their actions—has hysterically convulsed downward over the last month, and the faith of the watching world has been shaken to the core. No longer reassured by the giant American flag that hangs limp from the exchange wall, we need something a little more solid. But Don’t Worry, the great towers of glass and steel are rising again. Just down the street, climbing out of the ashes of the old World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower recently crested ground level. Stories speak louder than words, and it’s going to have 108 of them. But what are they saying?

The brilliant Canadian author and social critic Ronald Wright might know, if anyone asked him. And if they listened long enough, he’d likely mention Easter Island. In his insightful 2004 book A Short History of Progress, the little atoll is but one of several societies, including ours, in which he identifies the tell-tail signs of oncoming collapse.

The island was ecologically devastated by the time it was “discovered” by the Dutch, and with no wood to support such large building projects, the island’s famous statues were long a mystery. “We could not comprehend how it was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber [or] strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images, which were fully 30 feet high,” Captain Cook wrote on first seeing the island, before going on to lament that God had not provided the islanders with any useful natural resources. But he had: at one time the island had been a virtual paradise, with lush soil which supported a rich tropical forest. “The catastrophe on Easter Island,” says Wright, “was man.”

Like many other oceanic peoples, the Islanders practiced ancestor worship. The giant stone moai were their fathers and mothers, from whom flowed the bounty of the island, and by praying to the moai on their beachside alters, the islanders could be sure that the bounty would not run dry. This system was not to last. The islanders became competitive with each other and carved larger and larger statues; cutting down more and more of the trees they needed to transport the silent moai down to the beach. “We might think,” Wright postulates, “that as trees became scarce, the erection of statues would have been curtailed, and timber reserved for essential purposes such as boat building and roofing. But that is not what happened. The people who felled the last tree could see it was the last, could know with complete certainty that there would never be another. And they felled it anyway. All shade vanished from the land except for the hard-edged shadows cast by the petrified ancestors, who the people loved all the more because they made them feel less alone.”

And they didn’t stop there. Unable to question their belief in the ancestors, the islanders kept building. “[The statues] promised the return on plenty, if only the people would keep faith and honour them with increase. ‘But how will we take you to the altars?’ asked the carvers, and the moai answered that when the time came they would walk on their own. So the sound of hammering still rang from the quarries, and the… walls came alive with hundreds of new giants, growing even bigger now that they had no need of human transport.”

“The people had been seduced,” Wright says, “by a kind of progress that becomes a mania, an ‘ideological pathology.’” He’s right: the largest moai that the islander managed to drag to the beach is 30 feet high, and weighs 80 tons. The largest ever carved is 65 feet tall and weighs 200. It never moved from the spot it was built.

The Freedom Tower will be 1,776 feet high, a reference to the Declaration of Independence, and will accommodate 2.6 million square feet of office space. It will weigh 510,000 tons. More than one million people worldwide are inadequately housed, mostly living in slums and tent cities, while one hundred million have no homes at all. Between July 2007 and July 2008, steel prices nearly doubled, and as demand grows, the cost of cement continues to climb.

And what does the freedom tower say to us? It says everything is okay. It says the engines that built it are running smooth, the ideology intact. Limitless expansion can go on. It need not even stop at the edges of this world. In the words of Daniel Childs, head architect for the project, the Freedom Tower will reflect and embody “an important piece of New York City property,” that most potent and unattainable symbol of freedom, “the sky.”

A new recipe for a new American century

The recent economic events leave little doubt: America is being rewritten. They’re also given Obama – always stronger than McCain on economic issues – a lead. But beyond presidential politics, the last few weeks have brought into focus two fundamentally different interpretations of the American dream.

American dreams are different than ours. This is a fierce country. It was born of conflict and the people here hold their ideals much closer to their hearts than Canadians. Take our constitution. It guarantees human rights, “Subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” The famous preamble to the Declaration of Independence is starkly different in tone: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Of course, in the words of Milton Freidman, the preeminent ideologue of free-market capitalism, “Much of the history of the United States revolves about the attempt to translate the principles of the Declaration… into practice.” Freidman argues that “economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom.” He goes on to use the failure of the controlled markets of the USSR to make the case that any encroachment on economic freedom is antithetical to democracy. He is anti tax, anti social program, and anti government intervention in any way. Arguing that both parties invariably benefit from each economic transaction, he would have a world where the market provided for all of people’s needs, be they for healthcare, social security, or education. He sees government encroachment in these sphere’s as a real and pressing danger to freedom. John McCain and the republican party have traditionally appealed to the fierce individualism of Americans – the myth of the frontier is still very much alive – to argue this position.

What is fascinating about the recent economic crash it that it proves them totally wrong, and in doing so calls on us to look again at the meaning of liberty and the policies that best foster it. Policies Barak Obama, unfortunately, does not go far enough in meeting.

For anyone who doesn’t fully understand the crash, I’ll take a few paragraphs to explain it. Following earlier deregulation in the mid nineties, in 1999 the Glass-Steagall act was repealed. A relic from just after the stock market crash in 1929, it had been designed to prevent excessive market speculation, and set up a number of controls on banks and financial markets. After its repeal, commercial banks, which handle normal loans and deposits, and investment banks, which deal largely in trading securities, which in this case were certificates signifying ownership of debt, were allowed to merge.

This created a conflict of interest, because the same banks which were lending personal mortgages could package them as complicated securities which they could then sell to investors (mostly other investments banks, trading companies, and insurance firms). What this meant in practice was that the banks offering the mortgages could pass the risk of the lending onto investors.

Unconstrained by the possibility of non-payment, they started handing out loans to virtually anyone, including people with literally no hope of paying off their new mortgage. Many of them started to default. Their homes were foreclosed and boarded up. This drove housing prices down, and suddenly banks were repossessing houses that were worth less than the amount they’d originally invested in them, a net loss of money.

As the extent of the crisis became apparent, banks, who knew their counterparts owned just as much bad debt as them, stopped loaning to each other. The market froze. Money wasn’t moving, so money wasn’t being made, and as their capital bases eroded, banks started to collapse.

The profundity of these opaque events may not immediately be apparent, but the fact this all happened on Wall Street cannot be ignored. The imperium at the center of global capital is breaking apart. The center truly cannot hold—the premises it was based on have proven false and Milton Freidman and the neocons are wrong. Give people too much economic liberty and their greed will destroy the market and with it their livelihood. But how should a democracy which holds liberty so dear deal with this? John Ralston-Saul argues that we must separate economic liberty from other social freedoms. Freedom of speech, the press, religion, and association are decidedly unaffected by economic constraints, and a regulated market provides for a more stable economy in the long run, one less dogged by the bubbles and crashes caused by excessive speculation.

It hardly needs stating at this point that trickle down economics – the idea that if you deregulate and cut tax to the people at the top of the market some of the wealth they generate will “trickle down” – doesn’t work. Everyone knows the wealth gap has continued to grow. But the crash also underlines the fact that deregulation doesn’t even benefit the people at the top. Without this prime counterargument, the necessity of more governmental focus on social programs – paid for by increased taxes on business and the wealthy – is supremely apparent. While a market may be able to provide healthcare and education to the rich, the poor are left out of the equation. In this presidential election, Obama, while falling short in some areas, markedly healthcare, leans much farther towards this way of thinking than McCain, which is why the collapse has aided his campaign so much.

But the kind of paternalistic governmental intervention on the behalf of the less fortunate that these policies mean raises some more fundamental questions about how the Declaration of Independence should be interpreted. It bares direct relevance on how the fist clause – “all men are created equal” – should be interoperated. These five simple words sum up the beauty and the amazing cruelty of the American experiment better than any others can. They are the very basic premise from which democracy must be built. An argument that ends with the postulate “We All Should Rule” must start with the postulate that we are all equal. (If we were not equal, the better ones should surely rule). It is a beautiful idea, and it resonates with us, but underlying it is something much colder and harder. Accepting “equalness” as a basic fact lays the moral groundwork for people like Milton Freidman and the bankers on Wall St. to argue that the market – regulated or not – is the only fair way to distribute wealth among people. If people are “created” equal, then any wealth they gain in their lifetimes is a product of their own ingenuity. And if they fail, it is their own fault. They can argue that government should step back and let people rise and fall on their own merits.

Listen to Freidman write disparagingly about the New Deal of the 1930’s and what he sees as the political climate since then: “Emphasis on the responsibility of the individual for his own fate was replaced by emphasis on the individual as a pawn buffeted by forces beyond his control. The view that government should act as an umpire to prevent individuals from coercing each other was replaced by the view that government’s role is to serve as a parent charged with the duty of coercing some to aid others.” Inimical in this view is the assumption that all people are equal. If they weren’t equal, then some could rightfully argue that they deserved aid, but it leaves us in a tricky position. One could argue that the less able of us deserve our support, but this is a dangerous philosophy. A belief that some people are better than others can just as easily be used to justify suppression as philanthropy. It is as fertile ground for tyranny as it is for a welfare state.

People then, must be considered equal. What must be understood is that the circumstances into which they are born are very different. In other words, the “forces” which “buffet” them are very real indeed. Governmental policy in America doesn’t take this into nearly enough account. In real terms this means everything that the neocons are against. It means expanded education, social security, and healthcare, among other things. Obama’s platform addresses some of these issues, and if he’s elected we can only hope that he can be pushed to address more. McCain, on the other hand, despite his recent populist posturing, doesn’t even pay lip service to them.

These events clearly illustrate the need in America to implement a more egalitarian tax platform and policies to protect labour and consumers, guiding principles Canadians would do well to think about with their own free market ideologue seeking reelection in Ottawa. But they also show that even those at the very top of the world capital markets must be protected from themselves. It’s no new story that the invisible hand of the marketplace tips the scale to favour the rich, but it is a new story that it doesn’t favour anyone at all.

Thoughts from outside the Party

People milled about outside the presidential candidates’ forum at Columbia University last Thursday, September 11, about half an hour before John McCain and Barack Obama began their respective interviews on the subject of “National Service.” I was outside the campus gates, along with the other 200 of us who weren’t Columbia students and weren’t allowed inside.

There were about 15 people wearing plain white masks, their identities oblique. One was yelling at the police, “NO! We have a right to wear them!”

“They’re trying to make us take off our masks,” one said to me.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the placard around his neck stenciled with an Arab name and the number 19.

“It’s his age when he was killed by our army in Iraq,” he said. They were all wearing them, and there wasn’t a number over 25.

“I’m sorry,” officer number 3256 intoned, “but you’re going to have to remove the masks. It’s not my choice, but either you take them off, or you leave.”

“I can’t believe this,” one protestor said.

Reluctantly they started to take them off. They conversed in hushed tones, apparently deciding to stand in a line holding the masks just a few inches away from their faces.

One of them yelled at officer 5674. “Is what we’re doing not ‘National Service?’”

…

I wandered past a short man in shirt and tie wearing a yarmulke (the small cap orthodox Jewish men wear to remind themselves of their relationship with God). He was holding up a sign printed with the faces of Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran. He was talking to three other men also wearing yarmulkes. “This man,” he said, pointing to Ahmadinejad, “has called for the dissolution of the Jewish state. He’s in support of another holocaust. Six million Jews. Think about it.”
“That has nothing to do with…”

“Six million, and Obama wants to meet with him.”

“That has nothing to do,” the man repeated, “with what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.”
“It has everything to do with it.”

“You’re wrong,” said the man. “You should be ashamed of yourself.” Then he walked away and his shoulders were hunched and he was shaking his head.

I asked the man with the placard what he was about. “Barack Obama,” he simply said. “He wants to open diplomatic relations with Iran… I don’t want our President speaking to the leader of the number one state sponsor of terror in the world… I was there on 9/11. I saw the second plane hit the building. I couldn’t breathe, it was so smoky.” He paused and then said, “You don’t talk to terrorists.” Then he stood staring at me, and he didn’t look away until I turned and left.

…

I walked over to a group of people holding placards with “don’t vote” printed on them. There was a middle-aged, academic-looking man standing and talking to them.

“But I still don’t see why I shouldn’t vote,” he said.

“To vote is to authorize government authority,” said a small man who bobbed up and down when he spoke.

“But I think America would be a better country under Obama,” said the academic.

“But too many people think all they have to do is vote. They vote for some president, and then they go home and they think their job is done. And what is a president? We need more change than voting will bring.”

“Well…”

“Voting never changed anything!”

“But look, you can vote and still protest and write or what-have-you. They’re not mutually exclusive.”
A man who’d been listening jumped in. “Exactly, man. When you have two paths, pick a third.” He held up his fist for a “pound,” but the academic obviously didn’t know what to do. He reached up and took the man’s fist the way you’d take someone’s hand to shake. Then he held the fist for a moment and they both looked awkward.

…

I wandered through the crowd, listening to snippets of conversation.

“Don’t you believe in the power of individual competition? Everything I’ve done, I’ve done on my own merits.”

“The proletariat must be armed.”

“The only solution is the destruction of authority and the dissolution of the state.”

And no one seemed to notice as eight o’clock came and went, and John McCain started to talk about his “National Service” in Vietnam. And an hour later, when Barack Obama talked about his own service in Chicago’s South Side, no one noticed either; but they never stopped talking to each other.