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The Big Brotherness of It All |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396"><span class="small">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Thursday, 29 May 2014 15:08 |
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Engelhardt writes: "What I've been wondering recently is why, in a world that usually boggles my mind, this bleak side of it seems so relatively unsurprising to me."
(illustration: Dailydot)
The Big Brotherness of It All
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
29 May 14
 nternet Class of 2014, I’m in awe of you! To this giant, darkened auditorium filled with sparkling screens of every sort, welcome!
It would, of course, be inaccurate to say, as speakers like me once did, that after four years of effort and experience you are now about to leave the hallowed halls of this campus and graduate into a new and adult world. The odds are that you aren’t. You were graduated into that world long ago. I’m not sure that it qualifies as adult at all, but a new world it surely is, and one I grasp so little that I feel I should be in the audience and you up here doing what graduation speakers normally do: offering an upbeat, even inspirational, explanation of our world and your place in it.
Honestly, I’m like one of those old codgers I used to watch in the military parades of my 1950s childhood. You know, white-haired guys in open vehicles, probably veterans of the Spanish-American War (a conflict you’ve undoubtedly never heard of amid the ongoing wars of your own lifetime). To me, they always looked like they had been disinterred from some museum of ancient history, some unimaginable American Pompeii.
And yet those men and I probably had more in common than you and I do now. After all, I don’t have a smartphone or an iPad. I’m a book editor, but lack a Kindle or a Nook. I don’t tweet or Skype. I can’t photograph anyone or shoot video of anything. I don’t know how to text or read my email while walking in the street or sitting in a restaurant. And when something goes wrong on my computer or with the Internet, I collapse in a heap, believe myself a doomed man on an alien planet, mourn the passing of the typewriter, and call my daughter and throw myself on her mercy.
You were “graduated” long ago into the world that, though I live in it after a fashion as the guy who runs TomDispatch.com, I still find as alien as a Martian landscape. Your very fingers, agile as they are with little buttons of every sort, speak a new and different language, and a lot of the time it seems to me that I have no translator on hand. Your world, the sea you swim in, has been hailed for its many wonders and miracles -- and wonders and miracles they surely are. Dazzling they truly can be. The tying together of the planet in instantaneous communion as if space and geography, distances of every sort, were a thing of the past still stuns me.
Sometimes, as in my first experience with Skype, I feel like a Trobriand Islander suddenly plunged into the wonders of modernity. If you had told me back in the 1950s that someday I would actually see whomever I was talking to onscreen, I doubt I would have believed you. (On the other hand, I was partial to the fantasy that we would all be experiencing traffic jams in the skies over our cities as we zipped around with our own personal jetpacks strapped to our backs -- a promised future no one ever delivered.)
There’s a book to be written on just how disorienting it is to live into the world of the future, as at almost 70 years old I now find myself doing. There is, however, one part of our futuristic world that I feel strangely at home with. Its accomplishments are no less technologically awe-inspiring, no less staggeringly sci-fi-ish than the ones I’ve been talking about and yet, perhaps in part thanks to a youth heavily influenced by George Orwell’s 1984 and other dystopian writings, it seems oddly familiar to me, as if I had parachuted from a circling spacecraft onto an only slightly updated version of my own planet.
The Sea in Which You Swim and They Phish
That bright and shiny world of online wonders has -- as no one could have failed to notice by now -- also managed to drop the most oppressive powers of the state and the corporation directly into your lap, or rather your laptop, iPad, and smartphone. You -- yes, I mean you with that smartphone in your pocket or purse -- are a walking Stasi file. “Your” screen, in fact, all the screens on the walls of this vast room and in your hands really belong to them. It’s no more complicated than that. The details hardly matter.
Yes, you or this college paid for them. You yak endlessly with your friends on them, do your business on them, and pay your bills with them. You organize, complain, and opine on them. You find your way around and connect with acquaintances, friends, lovers, even strangers, via them. You could no longer imagine living without them. And yet the much-ballyhooed techno-liberation they offer you is actually your prison.
True or not, I remember being told long ago that certain tribal peoples on first contact with the camera refused to be photographed, fearing that those photos could take possession of and steal their souls, their spirits. In the twenty-first century, thanks to the techno-wizardry of both the state and the corporation, what once might have been dismissed as superstition has become a kind of reality. Thanks to those ubiquitous “private” screens that you’re under the impression you own but that are in most ways that matter owned by others, “they” can possess “you.” Without your feeling the pain of it, you are constantly being observed, measured, and carved up into your many discernable traits. Those traits are then reassembled, corporately bundled like so many financial derivatives, and sold off to the highest bidders. Your soul, that is, is being corporately possessed and disassembled into a bevy of tastes, whims, typologies, and god knows what else for the marketplace.
Meanwhile, the national security state has your number, too, and it won’t hesitate to come calling. It doesn’t matter whether you’re phoning, emailing, or playing video games -- the national security state wants YOU. Again, details aside, it isn’t all that complicated. The ever-expanding post-9/11 apparatus of surveillance and power has come to treat Americans as if we were a foreign population. It’s all being done in the name of your safety and of security “threats” that only grow, as that national security apparatus continues to engorge itself on your communications, while becoming ever more technologically skilled and inventive.
You are officially what it must protect, which also means that you are officially its target. To protect you, it must know you. I mean really know you, lest you turn out to be what it’s protecting Americans from. It must know you every which way, whether you want to be known or not, and above all, for your own safety, its access to you must be untrammeled, while -- it’s your safety at stake! -- your access to it must be nonexistent. Hence, the heavy-handed use of classification, the endless attempts to cut down on unsupervised contact between members of the U.S. intelligence community as well as retired brethren and the press, the muzzling of thousands of people a year by the FBI, and the fierce campaigns that have been launched against whistleblowers and to prevent whistleblowing. Above all, you must not know what your government knows about you.
It doesn’t matter whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge in Washington, whether the politicians in question happen to be chanting “big government” or “small government.” No matter what they say, almost all of them bow down before the oppressive powers of the state. They worship (and fund) those powers and, in the process, grant that state-within-a-state ever more powers lest they someday be blamed for another 9/11. Any attempts at “reforms” that might limit those powers turn out, in the end, to be just window dressing. You, the once-upon-a-time citizen, now prospective subject and object of the national security state, are at least theoretically the ultimate grantor of these powers, even if you now seem to have no control over them whatsoever.
This, then, is the sea in which you swim and, in case you hadn’t noticed, the nets of corporate and government phishing are in the water, already being drawn up around you.
The Big Brotherness of It All
What I’ve been wondering recently is why, in a world that usually boggles my mind, this bleak side of it seems so relatively unsurprising to me. Part of the answer may be that the means of tracking, listening in on, and getting to know everything about you, the technological process of creating your dossier (in the case of government) and your profile (in the case of the corporate world), couldn’t be newer, but the urge to do so couldn’t be older. In my own life, decades before the Internet or email arrived on the scene, I encountered it up close and personal.
Here’s a little story about a time when I could still be shocked by such things. Sometime in the late 1960s, at a large demonstration, I turned in my draft card to protest the Vietnam War. Not long after, my draft board called me in. I knew I had a right to look at my draft file, so when I got there, I asked to see it. So many decades later, I have no idea what I thought I would find in it, but I remember just how naïve I was. At 25, despite my antiwar activism, I still retained a deep and abiding faith in my government. When I opened that file and found various documents from the FBI, I was deeply shocked. The Bureau, it turned out, had its eyes on me. Anxious about the confrontation to come -- the members of my draft board would, in fact, soon be shouting at me -- I remember touching one of those FBI documents (what exactly they were I no longer remember) and it was as if an electric current had run directly through body. I couldn’t shake the Big Brotherness of it all, though undoubtedly my draft card had gone more or less directly from that demonstration to the Bureau.
By the time those years were over, I had worked as an editor (and writer) for a small antiwar news service in which there turned out to be an informer who was reporting on us to... yep, you guessed it, the FBI. I had become intensely aware of clicks on my phone that might or might not have been government wiretaps, and it no longer seemed strange that “my” government was intimately interested in guys like me and was out to track and constrain, if not suppress, dissent.
The story of the anti-Vietnam War movement was in significant ways -- and we knew it then -- a tale of wiretaps, widespread government informers, and commonplace agents provocateurs. Of course, the urge of the FBI, under its Director J. Edgar Hoover, to listen in on dissidents of every sort (as well as politicians of every sort) then is too well known to repeat. And as it turned out, the CIA and god knows what other agencies were knee-deep in the Big Muddy of “domestic intelligence” as well.
The problem for the national security state at the time was that the means to listen in, observe everyone, collect dossiers on anyone’s communications, contacts, acts, and life were still limited by relatively crude technologies and relatively crude, not necessarily reliable human beings. No longer. Among the many ways the Internet has connected people across the planet, there may be no greater wonder than the intimate ways it has connected governments and corporations to the rest of us. Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations are stunning for the sense they give us that a global surveillance state capable of gathering just about any communication or interaction on the planet is not only plausible, but already a reality.
Similarly, the ability of giant Internet companies to learn about your tastes, buying habits, dreams, medical problems, faults, secrets, fears, and loves, and then sell all of the above and more to the highest corporate bidders continues to grow by leaps and bounds. And yet compared to what’s coming -- compared, for instance, to the smart machines that will inhabit your future house, watch you, and record endless information about you for marketeers (and someday perhaps, for the government as well) -- the remarkable ways the powers that be can now possess you remain crude indeed.
Heading Out of a World of Shadows and Into a Shadowy World
This was hardly the revolution promised us when the Internet arrived, but it’s no less revolutionary for all that. The issue at stake is generally still referred to as “privacy,” but I suspect that, in the new communications world, that term is already on life support in an emergency room somewhere. So what does it mean to live like this? What, if anything, is to be done?
I’m hardly an expert on the subject. It’s your generation, not mine, that will be forced to make something of this particular mess, if anything is to be made of it and we are not to become the possessions of the national security state and our personalities and traits turned into the personal equivalents of financial derivatives. Still, for what it’s worth, I have a feeling that answers won’t be found in the river of shadows that is the online world. I doubt you’ll be able to encrypt your way out of our present dilemma or hack your way out of it either; nor will you be able to simply ignore it to death. There is, I suspect, only one way to change our lives when it comes to the increasingly oppressive powers of the surveillance state and its corporate doppelgangers: you’ll have to step out of that world of shadows and into the increasingly surreal and shadowy world that surrounds and feeds on them.
Screens aren’t going to offer you the necessary answers. You won’t be able to ask Siri for guidance. No Google search will get you where you need to go. If you want a different world, one in which you can’t be taken possession of via your screen, in which you don’t more or less automatically come with a dossier and a profile, I think you’re going to have to slip those screens back into your pockets or, given that you can be tracked via your smartphones wherever you go (even if they’re turned off), maybe into a desk drawer somewhere.
You can’t fight a national security state or a corporate selling state, both operating in the shadows via the shadowy world of the Internet -- not when so much of their power, their essential structures, and their operations are located in the perfectly surreal world beyond the screen, the one that they would like to put beyond your reach. That’s why, on this grey and overcast day outside this auditorium, my urge is to graduate you from the world of shadows where you’ve spent so much of your last years into the increasingly shadowy off-screen world where what matters most still exists.
Unfortunately, there is no obvious gate off this campus. When you've snapped the last graduation selfie on that smartphone of yours, when your gowns and caps are returned and your schoolbooks sold off, you’ll have to find your own way into our confusing world amid all those shadows. All I can do, graduates of the Internet class of 2014, is wish you luck and say that what you do (or don’t do) will matter.
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FOCUS | This Is a Response to the Criticisms |
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Thursday, 29 May 2014 13:40 |
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Piketty writes: "My problem with the FT criticisms is twofold. First, I did not find the FT criticism particularly constructive. The FT suggests that I made mistakes and errors in my computations, which is simply wrong."
Thomas Piketty responds to critics. (photo: CNN)
This Is a Response to the Criticisms
By Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
29 May 14
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FOCUS | Bernie Sanders: The People's President? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9227"><span class="small">Joel Bleifuss, In These Times</span></a>
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Thursday, 29 May 2014 11:46 |
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Bleifuss writes: "Sanders spoke with In These Times about the need for progressives to mobilize and the possibility that he might run for president in 2016."
Sen. Sanders speaks out against cuts to Social Security outside the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 9, 2013. (photo: Bernie Sanders)
Bernie Sanders: The People's President?
By Joel Bleifuss, In These Times
29 May 14
n March 1981, 39-year-old, Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont. In These Times reported at the time, “The poor and disenfranchised in Vermont’s largest city have something to cheer about with the surprise election of Bernard Sanders as mayor.” Locals called it a “mini-revolution.” It grew out of Sanders’ ability to lead a political coalition of low-income working people, public housing tenants, environmentalists, the elderly, community organizations, college faculty, women and disgruntled city workers—including the city police, whose union endorsed him.
In November 1990, Sanders forged a similar coalition statewide, and with 56 percent of the vote was elected to Vermont’s single House seat. As In These Times reported, “Sanders fashioned a strong appeal to working-class and older Vermonters, many of whom normally vote for Republicans. It is this singular ability to find support across cultural lines that accounts for the first congressional victory by an independent socialist in over 40 years.” During his first year as a U.S. representative, Sanders made his mark as a co-founder the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is today the largest organized bloc of House members.
In 2006, he was elected to the Senate, defeating millionaire Republican businessman Richard Tarrant in the most expensive campaign in Vermont history.
Sanders spoke with In These Times about the need for progressives to mobilize and the possibility that he might run for president in 2016.
What do you say to folks, particularly young people, who are discouraged about the ability of regular citizens to influence elected officials?
I share the view that neither President Obama nor Congress is addressing the most significant issues facing our country. We can argue whether Obama’s agenda is not as progressive as it should be, but we should recognize that in the House there’s a huge opposition to anything the president says, and in the Senate we’ve needed 60 votes to get anything done. We don’t have the luxury of giving up on the political process. Our political opponents are doing everything they can to stack the deck in favor of the billionaire class, and in fact they want people to give up on the political process. That makes their job easier. We have a war going on led by the Koch brothers and other billionaires against the working and middle classes. Of course it’s very difficult. But the response is not to turn your backs and hide under the carpet. The response is to stand up and keep thinking of ways to effectively mobilize people.
A lot of people have been encouraging you to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. When will you make a decision?
That decision is not going to be made by me alone. It will depend on whether there’s an appetite for a strong grassroots progressive campaign. There are people who would like me to run in the Democratic primary, and there are others who would like me to run as an Independent. But it’s going to be many months before I make that decision. My main concern right now is to make sure Democrats hold onto the Senate.
Hillary Clinton is widely seen as the presumptive nominee. What would you say to people who believe Democrats should all unite behind the frontrunner?
I don’t believe the media has the right to anoint a candidate as the frontrunner. I have known Hillary Clinton for a number of years, and I have a lot of respect and admiration for her. I don’t know if she’s going to run, and I don’t know what her platform would be. But I think a vigorous debate on real issues is a good thing for American democracy.
What would you say to those who say that Democratic Party activism is a waste of time, and what we need is a third, truly progressive party?
Thanks to the Koch brothers and other right-wing extremists, the Republican Party has moved from a moderate conservative party to a right-wing extremist party. It’s also fair to say that the Democratic Party has moved from a center-left party, whose main constituency was the working class of the country, to a centrist party heavily influenced by big money and corporate donations. A lot of people would respond positively to somebody outside of a two-party system, which they hold in a great deal of contempt. The problem is that establishing an independent political structure in 50 separate states is no small thing. You have to start getting on the ballot and developing that infrastructure all over the country. It’s expensive and it takes a lot of time. If you’re in the Democratic primary, there’s an infrastructure already there, it’s easier to get on the ballot, the media would pay more attention and you’d be able to engage in a number of debates with other candidates. So there are plusses and minuses going either way.
As you said, the public debate in this country is between the center and the Right. How does one move the discussion left?
The good news is that on almost every major issue facing this country, there is a strong consensus on where the American people want to go, and it’s certainly not in line with corporate America and the 1%. If you ask people what their main concerns are, virtually every poll says the answer is jobs and economics. They want the federal government to engage in a significant jobs program by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. They understand that a $7.25 minimum wage is a starvation wage and want to substantially raise that. I think most people believe healthcare is a right, and a simple Medicare-for-all, single-payer system would have popular support. The American people want Washington to represent them and the environment. But what you have is a system dominated by big money, which isn’t doing that. If we educate and organize, we can push a progressive agenda that would have the support of a significant majority of the American people.
You have said that you “strongly disagree with this concept that there’s a blue-state and a red-state America.” Last fall you toured the South trying to recruit candidates, who, as you put it, “have the courage to stand up to big money interests and represent working families.” What is behind this initiative?
Democrats have made a profound mistake in ignoring large parts of this country. While the world in Vermont is very different from the world in South Carolina or Mississippi or Alabama, the truth is working families are hurting in every state. Most people think we should protect the environment and reverse climate change. You have many states where working people who are now entitled to Medicaid can’t get it because of right-wing governors and legislatures. Not to mount a challenge in a very forceful way in those states is wrong.
Responding to McCutcheon v. FEC, which allows individuals to contribute up to $3.5 million in each federal campaign cycle, you said, “Freedom of speech in my view does not mean freedom to buy the United States government.” How can we the people best counteract these abominable Supreme Court rulings?
The current Supreme Court has issued some of the worst rulings in the history of the judiciary. They’re paving the way for oligarchy in America. Of all the issues I’m concerned about, campaign finance is at the top of the list. If we don’t reverse the current situation where the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson can spend billions of dollars on elections, we’ll end up with not only an economy but a political process that’s controlled by a small number of people. So what do you do? You rally the American people for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and you move toward public funding of elections.
What role does the independent press, like In These Times, play in helping move the country in a more progressive direction?
I’ve read In These Times for many, many years, as you know, and The Nation and Mother Jones. We have some great media out there, including talk show hosts like Thom Hartmann, who are raising issues that the corporate media does not talk about. That’s important because it educates a lot of people, and some of those ideas will filter on up to media with larger constituencies. But just focusing on the real issues facing working families—and focusing on what climate change will do to our planet—is enormously important. Talking about the truth and standing up to power is an end in itself.
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How Neocons Constrain Obama's Message |
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Thursday, 29 May 2014 09:56 |
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Parry writes: "President Obama said that just because the U.S. military is 'the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail' - a wise observation - but he then confused his foreign policy speech by pandering to neocon narratives on crises in Ukraine and elsewhere."
President Obama arrives at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., to deliver the commencement address to the 2014 graduating class Wednesday. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
How Neocons Constrain Obama's Message
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
29 May 14
 s American neocons continue to shape the narratives that define the permissible boundaries for U.S. foreign policy thinking, the failure to enforce any meaningful accountability on them for their role in the criminal and disastrous invasion of Iraq has become painfully clear.
In any vibrant democratic system, it would be unthinkable that the neocons and other war hawks who yahooed the United States into Iraq a little more than a decade ago would still be exercising control over how Americans perceive today’s events. Yet, many of the exact same pundits and pols who misled the American people then are still misleading them today.
Thus, we’re stuck reading the Washington Post’s deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl reinforce the myth that the Ukraine crisis was caused by “the aggression of Russian President Vladimir Putin,” when the reality is that it was the United States and the European Union that stirred up the unrest and set the stage for neo-Nazi militias to overthrow elected President Viktor Yanukovych and plunge the country into a nasty little civil war.
Yet, you’re not supposed to know that. Anyone who dares explain the actual narrative of what happened in Ukraine is immediately accused of spreading “Russian propaganda.” The preferred U.S. narrative of white-hat “pro-democracy” protesters victimized by black-hat villain Yanukovych with the help of the even more villainous Vladimir Putin is so much more fun. It lets Americans cheer as ethnic Russians in the east are burned alive by neo-Nazi mobs and mowed down by Ukrainian military aircraft.
Diehl and his boss, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, are precisely the same neocon propagandists who told Americans in 2002 and early 2003 that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Hiatt and Diehl didn’t write that as an allegation or a suspicion, but as flat fact. Yet, it turned out to be flatly untrue – and hundreds of thousands of people, including nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers, died as a result of the war.
But don’t worry: the careers of Diehl and Hiatt didn’t suffer. They’re still in their same influential jobs a dozen years later, framing how we should understand Syria, Ukraine and the rest of the world.
And, if Hiatt and his editorial board had their way, American troops would still be patrolling Iraq. On Wednesday, the Post’s lead editorial condemned President Barack Obama for not maintaining permanent U.S. military forces in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan – and not getting deeper into the Syrian civil war.
“You can’t fault President Obama for inconsistency,” the Post’s editorial sneered. “After winning election in 2008, he reduced the U.S. military presence in Iraq to zero. After helping to topple Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011, he made sure no U.S. forces would remain. He has steadfastly stayed aloof, except rhetorically, from the conflict in Syria. And on Tuesday he promised to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.
“The Afghan decision would be understandable had Mr. Obama’s previous choices proved out. But what’s remarkable is that the results also have been consistent — consistently bad.”
The neocons, including the Post’s editorialists, voice outrage when Obama paints them with a broad brush as obsessed with putting American boots on the ground. But how can one read that editorial and not recognize that what the neocons want is not just temporary U.S. boots on the ground but to have them cemented into these countries as permanent occupiers?
Mr. Overrated
Then, over at the New York Times, you can read the wisdom of Thomas L. Friedman, another star promoter of the Iraq War who infamously kept telling Americans every six months that the grinding war would look better in six months but it never did.
Friedman, who may be the most overrated columnist in American history, is now asserting what he trusts will become the new conventional wisdom on Ukraine, that Putin lost the Ukraine crisis. On Wednesday, Friedman wrote “In the end, it was Putinism versus Obamaism, and I’d like to be the first on my block to declare that the ‘other fellow’ — Putin — ‘just blinked.’”
According to Friedman, the Ukraine crisis “may be the first case of post-post-Cold War brinkmanship, pitting the 21st century versus the 19th. It pits a Chinese/Russian worldview that says we can take advantage of 21st-century globalization whenever we want to enrich ourselves, and we can behave like 19th-century powers whenever we want to take a bite out of a neighbor — versus a view that says, no, sorry, the world of the 21st century is not just interconnected but interdependent and either you play by those rules or you pay a huge price.”
As with Hiatt and Diehl, one has to wonder how Friedman can be so disconnected from his own record as an eager imperialist when it came to U.S. desires for “regime change” in a variety of disliked countries. While it may be true that the United States hasn’t taken bites out of its immediate neighbors recently – although there were U.S.-backed coups in Honduras, Haiti and Venezuela in the 21st Century – the U.S. government has taken numerous bites out of other countries halfway around the world.
And, as for playing by the “rules,” Friedman’s “exceptional” America sets its own rules. [For more on how this style of propaganda relates to Ukraine, see Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT’s One-Sided Ukraine Narrative.”]
Friedman’s schoolyard taunt about Putin having “blinked” also is at best a superficial rendering of the recent developments in Ukraine and a failure to recognize the long-term harm that Official Washington’s tough-guy-ism over Ukraine has done to genuine U.S. national interests by shoving Russia and China closer together. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Premature US Victory-Dancing on Ukraine.”]
Even newspaper columnists are supposed to connect their writings to reality once in a while. But I guess since the likes of Hiatt, Diehl and Friedman advocated the gross violation of international law that was the Iraq War, got their facts wrong, and paid no career price for doing so, they have little reason to think that they should change their approach now.
During my four-decade-plus career in journalism, I have seen reporters take on tough stories and do so with high professional standards, yet still have their careers ruined because some influential people accused them of some minor misstep, the case of Gary Webb and his Contra-cocaine series being one tragic example. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Warning in Gary Webb’s Death.”]
In contrast, Hiatt, Diehl and Friedman can provide false propaganda to justify an illegal war that gets hundreds of thousands of people killed while squandering about $1 trillion in taxpayers’ money, yet they faced no consequences. So, today, they are still able to frame new trouble spots like Syria, Libya and Ukraine and cramp President Obama’s sense of how far he can go in charting a less violent foreign policy.
Obama’s Timid Speech
Even though Obama did oppose the Iraq invasion last decade, he has been sucked into the same barren rhetoric about American “exceptionalism”; he makes similar hyperbolic denunciations of American “enemies”; and he plays into new false narratives like those that paved the way to hell in Iraq.
On Wednesday in addressing the graduating class at West Point, Obama had what might be his last real chance to shatter this phony frame of propaganda, but instead he delivered a pedestrian speech that tried to talk tough about crises in Ukraine and Syria as a defense against neocon critics who will predictably accuse him of weakness.
In Obama’s speech, the United States is still “the one indispensable nation,” so “when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help.” By the way, his reference to the “masked men” occupying a building in Ukraine wasn’t a reference to the masked neo-Nazi militias who seized buildings during the Feb. 22 coup against Yanukovych, but rather a shot at eastern Ukrainians who have resisted the coup.
Again, staying safely within Official Washington’s “group think,” Obama also lamented “Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states” and said that “unnerves capitals in Europe.” But he expressed no concern for the Russian alarm over NATO enveloping Russia’s western borders. Obama also took a slap at China.
Obama said, “Regional aggression that goes unchecked — whether in southern Ukraine or the South China Sea, or anywhere else in the world — will ultimately impact our allies and could draw in our military. We can’t ignore what happens beyond our boundaries.” (Is Obama really suggesting that the United States might go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China over Ukraine and the South China Sea?)
The President also slid into familiar hyperbole about Russia’s agreement to accept Crimea back into the Russian federation after a post-coup referendum there found overwhelming support among Crimean voters to break away from the failed Ukrainian state. Instead of noting that popular will – and the reality that Russian troops were already in Crimea as part of a basing agreement for Sevastopol – Obama conjured up images of an old-style invasion.
“In Ukraine, Russia’s recent actions recall the days when Soviet tanks rolled into Eastern Europe,” Obama said, claiming that this latest “aggression” was countered with U.S. public diplomacy. “This mobilization of world opinion and international institutions served as a counterweight to Russian propaganda and Russian troops on the border and armed militias in ski masks,” he said.
Yet, while using this tough-guy rhetoric, Obama did reject endless warfare and endless occupations, saying:
“Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences — without building international support and legitimacy for our action; without leveling with the American people about the sacrifices required.
“Tough talk often draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans. As General [Dwight] Eisenhower, someone with hard-earned knowledge on this subject, said at this ceremony in 1947: ‘War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.’”
And, in possibly the speech’s best line, Obama added: “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.”
Yet, despite such reasonable observations, Obama kept sliding back into super-patriotic rhetoric, including assertions that sounded at best hypocritical if not ludicrous:
“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions. And that’s why I will continue to push to close Gitmo — because American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders. That’s why we’re putting in place new restrictions on how America collects and uses intelligence — because we will have fewer partners and be less effective if a perception takes hold that we’re conducting surveillance against ordinary citizens.
“America does not simply stand for stability or the absence of conflict, no matter what the cost. We stand for the more lasting peace that can only come through opportunity and freedom for people everywhere.”
The JFK Contrast
Many eyes must have been rolling while listening to Obama attempt to disassociate himself from scandalous behavior that had occurred during his five-plus years as president. And his stab at soaring rhetoric fell far short of the mark set by President John F. Kennedy when he gave possibly his greatest speech at American University on June 10, 1963, declaring:
“What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.”
Kennedy recognized that his appeal for this serious pursuit of peace would be dismissed by the cynics and the warmongers as unrealistic and even dangerous. The Cold War was near its peak when Kennedy spoke. But he was determined to change the frame of the foreign policy debate, away from the endless bravado of militarism:
“I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary, rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war, and frequently the words of the pursuers fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task. …
“Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”
And then, in arguably the most important words that he ever spoke, Kennedy said, “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
In his day, Kennedy also faced powerful war hawks who sought to constrain his vision of an international system that recognized the legitimate interests of other nations and their peoples. But Kennedy still deployed his rhetoric bravely to smash the narrow framework of Cold War reductionism.
By contrast, Obama accepted the tiny frame as shaped by Official Washington’s still powerful neocons; he simply tried to maneuver for a little more elbow room.
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resident Obama raised eyebrows with his West Point commencement address Wednesday by offering a defense of his controversial foreign-policy doctrine of not invading countries for no reason.
