Michael Bérubé

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Leftover business IV

Today it’s Ed Herman Day on Leftover Business Week, and, as they say, this time it’s personal. From Herman’s April 2003 essay, “Cruise Missile Left, Part 2: The Anti-ANSWER Crusade,” there’s this little bit of nonsense about ANSWER’s refusal to let Michael Lerner speak at the San Francisco antiwar rally on February 16, 2003:

The Corn-Cooper-Berube phalanx posted a column on The Nation’s web site reiterating Lerner’s charges, and got up an Internet petition doing the same. This petition was quickly featured on David Horowitz’s web site, and Berube participated in a debate on Horowitz’s site on the crimes of ANSWER. As Horowitz is a far-right fanatic, doing business with him doesn’t seem like a means of constructive discussion of the problems of the protest movement, although the same may be said of Corn’s exchanges on the subject with Bill O’Reilly on Fox. Berube has reacted strongly against the charge of being in league with Horowitz, but as Alexander Cockburn points out, “We find it pretty ripe that Berube should whine about guilt by association after he and Cooper and Corn have spent months smearing the peace movement because the Workers World Party and ANSWER have been organizing demonstrations.”

Yep, that’s the kind of nonsense that got dished out three years ago by the “radical” “left” when some of us on the democratic left suggested that having an antiwar movement led by what Dennis Perrin calls “a Stalinoid sect that has, from what I can see, zero contact with the working people it claims to champion” wasn’t a good idea—if, that is, you wanted to broaden the antiwar movement. Likewise, banning Lerner from the rally, on the grounds that he’d criticized ANSWER in the past (even though he’d urged people to attend the protest), wasn’t a smart move if you wanted to appeal to progressive Jews and their friends in the antiwar movement. And so we got a little taste, back then, of what the “we are all Hezbollah now” left would look like today.

Interestingly, almost every word in Herman’s paragraph is false (or, if you prefer, highly misleading). David Corn, Marc Cooper, and I are not a “phalanx”; we are a “troika.” And yet Corn wrote his Nation essay all by himself, which is why it carries his byline. I read Corn’s column the day it appeared, wrote the pro-Lerner/ anti-ANSWER petition and sent it to Cooper, who knows more people than I do. None of us, of course, had any contact with Horowitz, though a Workers World Party member passed the word to Alexander Cockburn that I had actually collaborated with Horowitz (“Berubé then enlisted the aid of arch-right-winger David Horowitz to publicize the petition on his website”), and Cockburn, vigilant as always, published a version of the charge in Counterpunch. But how did Horowitz get wind of Corn’s column and the followup petition, you ask? Why, with his very own computer, which he often uses to access the InterTubes! (Back then, U.No. would steal stuff from other sites all the time, and “republish” it on FrontPage without authors’ knowledge or consent.) In my first debate with U.No., I insisted that ANSWER did not in fact speak for the antiwar movement. Addressing my FrontPage interlocutors directly, I said:

Personally, I believe the neo-Stalinist wingnuts are your best friends (and there’s even a chance that David and Ronald [Radosh] know many of them by name, from their former lives), in the following sense: I don’t think even the FrontPage right could de-legitimate antiwar rallies quite so thoroughly as the WWP can—even though you would surely make a mighty attempt even if Miss Manners and Mister Rogers were leading the rallies.

But when we talk about the WWP we’re talking about perhaps 50-100 far-leftists who have no credibility or influence among serious people, and who have already been repudiated—even by Z Magazine and anarchist groups. . . . So far, the vast majority of anti-war protestors have turned out despite the politics of ANSWER, not because of them—which is why opposition to ANSWER has grown so strong in so many quarters, and why so many leftists are now referring to ANSWER as International AOWCUTGDPF, or “Authoritarian Opportunists Who Cozy Up to Genocidal Dictators—for Peace.”

. . . In the larger scheme of things, there’s simply no need to take up torches and pitchforks against fifty foolish far-leftists; five years from now they will be the stuff of trivia questions, whereas our invasion of Iraq will have had all manner of repercussions throughout the world.

This is what Herman and Cockburn called “doing business with” Horowitz, folks. Back then, if you criticized ANSWER you were charged with “smearing the peace movement.” So I’m not inviting those fellows to my big Chairman Mao Birthday Party this December, either.

And why did I debate Horowitz in FrontPage in the first place? For precisely the same reason I debated Herman in Z, and with pretty much the same results. I just believe in doing these things. I’m not very bright that way.

(Oh, and just for the record: back then, it was routinely charged that the Cruise Missile Left was trying to “ban” ANSWER from the movement. This, too, is false. As I said repeatedly at the time, every mass movement has its fringe-y wingnuts, and we are certainly entitled to ours. That goes for Nudists Against the War, too. The question, instead, was whether ANSWER should lead the damn thing. Anyway, I’m glad to see that ANSWER has now been consigned to a properly marginal position on the left, the position it actually occupies. Corn, Cooper and I could’ve used a little help three years ago, but that’s OK. But shame on Herman and Cockburn for stumping for the neo-Stalinist sect for so long.)

Now, it’s true that I am not a very good debater. In Monday’s comments, Ben Alpers noted that I was being “too generous about the Euston Manifesto crowd.” Last year, Dennis Perrin said that I was “much too fucking generous to David Horowitz.” (“Even when he castigates the panhandler, a wink and a nod follow. Is this 21st century liberalism—giving domestic fascists the benefit of the doubt?”) And a colleague once complained to me that my reply to Mark Bauerlein’s boundary 2 review of The Employment of English was “way too generous.” So I see that people have finally divined my salient character flaw.

Because, I admit, I was way too generous to Ed Herman in the Z debate. I never dreamed that people would cite that debate, years later, as the definitive moment in which Herman pwned Bérubé, and if I had, well . . . let’s just say that all of this would have been much easier four years ago (and much more fun!) if I’d had a blog. Talking back to people on their own home websites inevitably entails letting ‘em have the last word.

This would all be of merely personal interest, except that Herman opened his initial salvo against the “Cruise Missile Left” by likening me and a bunch of other people to opponents of abolitionism in the 1850s:

One problem with the CMLs is that, not really being on the left, they have lost sight of what the left is all about. The left’s criterion of success is not the extent to which it is listened to or heard, irrespective of message content; it is its success in getting a left message across (and on some issues, like “free trade,” and the merits of overseas military ventures [except in the heat of battle and under a furious elite propaganda barrage], the “radical left” is far closer to mainstream opinion than is the “decent left,” and it is listened to on those issues by ordinary citizens when they can be reached). On issues where it is in a minority position, a real left does not abandon its position in order to be acceptable. Marc Cooper objects to the left’s “scold mold” and its “alienation from its own national institutions,” and Gitlin calls on the left to be “practical—the stakes are too great for the luxury of any fundamentalism.” One can readily imagine the Cooper, Gitlin, Walzer, Berube, and Hitchens equivalents of the 1850s explaining to the abolitionists that they must tone down their message and alter or even drop their anti-racist and anti-slavery message given the “political realities” and public sentiment.

There are two notable things here. The first is the ludicrous idea that the radical left is closer to mainstream opinion than the people who supported a military response in Afghanistan—or that they would be, if not for the ~~Matrix~~ Mass Media, which, as we all know, manufactures consent and keeps people from realizing that they are lying in a pod of pink goo. (Actually, before you get to the standard “media dupe people with elite propaganda” line, try to make sense of Herman’s proposition that “the left’s criterion of success is not the extent to which it is listened to or heard, irrespective of message content; it is its success in getting a left message across, and it is listened to by ordinary citizens when they can be reached.” So the important thing isn’t whether the left is being listened to, it’s whether it’s being listened to, which it is, except when it’s not. OK, back to Leftover Business.)

The other thing is what I’ve been talking about since Monday: the reflexive belief that the leftmost position is the most betterest—and all the potential mischief this belief makes possible. Herman’s use of slavery and abolition here is tendentious, to put it nicely. While it’s true that abolitionism was one of the causes on which the radicals of their day were unquestionably in the right (and I could cite much of labor history since the eighteenth century as well, or the Diggers and Levellers in the mid-seventeenth), it’s not true that all radical-liberal splits map onto the political landscape of the 1850s. To take a more recent and more appropriate historical analogy, I could, for example, suggest that in the runup to war in Iraq, Marc Cooper, Michael Walzer, Todd Gitlin, David Corn, and I represented the McCarthy/RFK left of 1968, and Herman represented the Maoist fringe that would shortly send the New Left down in flames. That too would be a tendentious (though, as I say, more appropriate) analogy, but I hope it serves to make the elementary and entirely necessary point that when liberals and progressives split with radicals, the radicals aren’t always on the side of the angels. On the contrary, as with the “we are all Hezbollah now” left, sometimes the liberals and progressives have the good sense to stop the car before it goes straight over the cliff.

As for Herman’s little fantasy that he would have been fightin’ for black folk in 1852 while I was writing campaign biographies for Franklin Pierce, well, you never know about those things. It’s just as likely that I would have been campaigning for Lincoln in 1860 while Ed Herman lectured us all on how the fight to save the Union was really just a campaign to expand federal power and prepare the way for the U.S.’ entry into the Global Imperialist Sweepstakes. It’s hard to say, because that mean Sean Carroll won’t let us have access to the Time Machine he’s working on.

The funny thing about Herman’s “Cruise Missile Left” is that only one person in the group—Christopher Hitchens, who’d actually praised the cruise missile and would soon decline to the point at which he was calling the Dixie Chicks “fucking fat slags”—supported war in Iraq. That posed a bit of a problem for Herman, who proceeded to insist to me that my opposition to war in Iraq was in fact a form of support for war in Iraq:

Tapping Berube’s article on “Toward An Ideal Antiwar Movement,” let me enumerate the reasons why it is entirely reasonable to describe Berube as a supporter of the imminent war against Iraq. First, he denounces the statement that “We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny free from military coercion by great powers.” Berube says that the “antiwar faction crafted a new ‘sovereignty’ rationale...that turned its back on decades of left internationalism...” This is complete nonsense, as the “sovereignty rationale” goes back many years and is the basis of international law and the UN (Article 2.1 of the UN Charter says “The organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.") By “left internationalism” he means cruise missile left and imperial state rejection of that nonintervention principle. Given this rejection, the imperial powers and cruise missile leftists are not disturbed by blatant disregard for the UN Charter and international law in these interventions.

Second, Berube has great faith in the imperial powers engaging in intervention for benevolent purposes. He says that “I would prefer to see great powers exercising coercion to prevent such nations [that kill their own people] from determining their own destiny...” And so he is prepared to thrust aside the basis of international law and leave it to George Bush and other humanitarians to straighten things out by violence at their own discretion.

This is a strange response to my essay, but it has the benefit of bringing Herman’s position clearly into the open. (And foolishly, I thought that his position was so self-undermining that I didn’t need to reply to the heart of it. Well, live and learn! As I say, I’m really not a very good debater.) Here’s what I actually said in the essay to which Herman refers:

And yet I find that, even as I have deep respect for all the tens of thousands of people who have signed a September “Statement of Conscience,” put out by Not in Our Name to oppose war in Iraq, I cannot quite join them, even though I, too, oppose the war (and endorse most of the statement). Partly that’s because the statement condemns the U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, which (yes, I know) killed civilians and failed to capture Osama bin Laden, but which also destroyed the Al Qaeda terror camps, brought down the Taliban, and (even more important) slowed down the growing radicalization of Pakistan—a radicalization that, ideally, should be opposed by all secular democrats. It’s on the latter grounds that I supported the war in Afghanistan.

But mostly I cannot sign Not in Our Name’s statement because it declares, in its third sentence, “We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers.” It’s a euphonious phrase, to some ears, but what happens, may I ask, when a “nation” decides that its “destiny” lies in the extermination of a “people”? The sentence reads like a leftover shibboleth from Kosovo, when one wing of the antiwar left devised the argument that the United States and NATO had no business intervening in a matter internal to Serbian affairs. That antiwar faction crafted a new “sovereignty” rationale that, in my opinion, turned its back on decades of left internationalism in order to oppose U.S. military action in Kosovo in whatever terms came most readily to hand.

The appeal to “sovereignty” sounds fine to many leftists when it’s a question of defending developing nations from the United States (nations that should be “free from military coercion by great powers”). But should that principle be applied when Saddam Hussein kills Iraqi Kurds? Or when Milosevic kills Kosovar Albanians? Or when Suharto kills the East Timorese, or Rios Montt the indigenous Guatemalan Indians, or Hitler the Jews? Nazi Germany saw the killing of Jews as absolutely central to its “destiny,” but one would not want to have seen a sane and serious left defending the enterprise on those grounds. I would prefer to see great powers exercising military coercion to prevent such nations from determining their own destiny (especially in cases like Suharto and Montt, whose regimes the United States had supported), and I would be all the happier if the great powers did so in my name.

So when Herman says “By ‘left internationalism’ [Bérubé] means cruise missile left and imperial state rejection of that nonintervention principle,” I have to reply, no, by “left internationalism” I meant the left-internationalist rejection of the idea that what happens in Franco’s Spain is entirely Franco’s business. And that’s why Herman’s recent apologetics for Milosevic are so important: he is not, in the end, “on the left” in any recognizable sense when it comes to figures like Milosevic. His position on the Balkans was and is, quite clearly, “let Milosevic be Milosevic,” just as his position on Iraq was “let Saddam be Saddam (except back in the 1980s when he was a U.S. client—we opposed him then, but we oppose those who oppose him now).” Not many people, back in 2002-03, realized what kind of a litmus test the Ed Hermans of the world were setting for the antiwar movement: they weren’t simply against the war in Iraq. They were also against weapons inspections and no-fly zones, on the grounds that these constituted illegitimate imperial violations of Iraqi sovereignty. And, as Herman and Not In My Name made clear, the only correct opposition to war in Iraq consisted of people who would defend Iraqi sovereignty and who opposed war in Afghanistan.

There’s much more to Herman’s reply, but I’ll single out two key items that, at the time, I thought were decisive. The first is a simple falsehood:

It should be noted that Berube’s warm feelings about the enlarged capacity of “great powers exercising coercion” in the New World Order has [sic] not been impaired by the coup d’etat, rule, and plans of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld business administration. Nowhere in his “Ideal Antiwar Movement” does he suggest that they pose a very serious threat of imperial violence and that curbing them is an urgent global task. Only curbing Saddam Hussein seems to strike him as worthy of attention.

In my reply, I wrote:

Actually, this should not be noted, because it is not true. I argued, in response to the Not in Our Name statement, that “great powers” should intervene whenever a nation is systemically exterminating a group of people within its borders, and that I would have supported such international intervention “especially in cases like [those of] Suharto and Montt, whose regimes the United States had supported.” As for the Bush junta, leaving aside everything else I’ve said about Bush since the stolen election, here’s what I wrote in the Chronicle: the antiwar movement I advocate “would distrust US claims to be acting on behalf of oppressed Iraqis, on the grounds that the Cheney/ Rumsfeld/ Perle axis showed no interest in oppressed Iraqis before now and has already demonstrated its remarkable indifference to nation-building on behalf of oppressed Afghans in Afghanistan.”

This, by the way, is why there is such an intense debate between me and Marc Cooper as to whether Herman is a “third-rate” or a “fourth-rate” hack. I go with the former, but then, as you know, I am way too generous in situations like this. (Although if someone shows me that Herman has made contributions to the field of finance on a scale with Chomsky’s contributions to the field of linguistics, I’ll be happy to revise my opinion accordingly.)

And now, finally, for the grand conclusion. Ed Herman counsels defeatism and despair as the centerpiece of the “radical” agenda:

In the November article on the cruise missile leftists I quoted Berube’s statement that “the United States cannot be a beacon of freedom and justice to the world if it conducts itself like an empire.” That is, he believes acting like an empire is a matter of choice; that the U.S. leadership can “say no,” and is not obliged to carry out a foreign policy that serves the interests of its dominant corporate elite. If it did establish a system of National Security States in Latin America, supported Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu (etc.), and has pressed Structural Adjustment Policies on dozens of poor countries, it didn’t have to do that. It could dedicate itself to doing good. This is not only silly, it is plain imperial state ideology, and wonderfully suited for apologetics for imperial interventionism.

I know this is another long post, folks, and if you’ve read this far this week, I do appreciate your patience. But I’m going to have to ask you—I have no other choice—to read this last bit a second time, slowly and carefully. Because to those of you who live in the United States and hope that someday it can be better than it is, Herman’s message is clear (even if he never does explain why the dominant corporate elite would have supported Milosevic before 1999 and then opposed him, supported Saddam before 1990 and then opposed him):

Give up now. Acting like an empire is not a matter of choice. Even President Nader would have invaded Iraq. To believe otherwise is not only silly, it is plain imperial state ideology.

And there you have it, friends and critics, the salient difference between your progressive left and your “radical” “left” (that is neither radical nor left). The progressive left believes that acting like an empire is a matter of choice, and that it does matter who the “decider” is. The Herman Left applauds itself for being the equivalent of the antebellum abolitionists, but right here, right now, it lines up wholeheartedly with Milosevic in the name of “anti-imperialism” and opposition to the “dominant corporate elite” (most of whom, in the U.S., were actually opposed to any intervention in the Balkans). And all of you who supported Lamont on Tuesday, in the hope that the United States can change direction? Imperial state imperial corporate interventionalist apologeticists, every one.

________________

Postscript

Believe me, I do feel silly hauling these moldy old things out of the Vault of Regrettables when there are more immediate matters before us this week. But curiously, these ancient documents from 2002-03 actually do have a bearing on the unfolding national debate over the Meaning of Lamont. Here’s how.

After my exchange with Herman in Z, someone sent me a copy of a late-2001 missive in which Herman had written,

the idea that the Taliban is a fascist and expansionist threat, and that Islamic fundamentalism more broadly speaking is the same, doesn’t hold water. . . . The Taliban is a nasty local authoritarian group with very modest power and capabilities—before the U.S. attack, barely able to cope with controlling its own terrain. As I noted, proof of its “transnational designs” by reference to its infiltration of the Pakistan military is laughable—as if every country does not mess around with its neighbors. . . .

OK, now hold that remarkable thought for a second.

As Digby notes, the new Conventional Wisdom—spanning from William Kristol to Jacob Weisberg at Slate—is that a vote for Lamont was a vote for appeasement, free love, and flower power. (Odd how this kind of meme washes over professional “liberal” pundits, isn’t it? It’s almost as if some direct-action Republican operative put something funny in the water. . . .)

Weisberg admits that war in Iraq was not such a good idea:

the invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction to be dismantled, we had no plan for occupying the country, and our troops remain there only to prevent the civil war we unleashed from turning into a bigger and more horrific civil war. Just about everyone now agrees that the sooner we find a way to withdraw, the better for us and for the Iraqis.

Well, “just about everyone” didn’t include Lieberman, actually, and, uh, dude, that’s like kind of the reason he lost and all. So Weisberg comes up with a “reason” to support Lieberman anyway:

The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush’s faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously.

Ah, no. This would be “wrong,” in the sense of “not correct.” Very very very few people in the Democratic electorate are blithe and dismissive about Islamic fanaticism. The overwhelming majority of us—despite Ed Herman’s fantasies about how the “radical” “left” is “far closer to mainstream opinion” than are progressives and liberals—believe that the fight against Islamist radicalism is real, that it cannot be won by military means alone, and that the war in Iraq has in fact been a disastrous setback in that fight. To find people who really don’t take Islamist radicalism very seriously, you have to go all the way to the furthest reaches of Z, way over yonder to Ed Herman Land, which may actually be On Beyond Zebra. There, you’ll find a handful of people who speak of the prospect of al-Qaeda obtaining access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons as just a bit of ordinary border-nation jostling and “messing around,” like, you know, the way Norway messes with Sweden and Suriname messes with Brazil. But to take the views of the “radical” “left” fringe in Ed Herman Land as representative of mainstream liberals and progressives, supporters of Ned Lamont and Howard Dean, is to repeat far-right talking points that properly should be the exclusive preserve of Ann Coulter and David Horowitz.

Although it’s true that hippies did listen to the Grateful Dead, thereby driving the Southern states into the GOP column.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:20 PM

The “give up now” sentiment is what you get when some form of vaguely Marxoid determinism—whether historical, based on relations of production, or whatever—meets the actual failure of the worldwide left. The problem with the left is that it now has nothing except a past. It used to be based on struggle against a structurally determined present towards a universal future, but when that future goes away, what are you left with?

We’re having the test of whether liberalism is going to go down the same way now.

Posted by on 08/10 at 01:35 PM
Michael,

I’ve written a couple of pieces on Pakistan, and I’ve written about its, and other states’, fissile inventories. Rather than point at the Talibans as a latent threat to the Pakistani military, in particular, its weaponized fissile command and control capability, I suggest that the agency of influence and control is in the other direction, that is, Pakistani military and intelligence supply (ied) pre-2004 Talibans units, and continue to the present, across the Tribal Autonomous Areas, and the periodic clashes and cease-fires between the Punjabi state and the bits of Pakistan that might not be.

Somewhere in my disorganized ouvre at wampum are posts on the US forces in Pakistan, and how any military conflict with Iran may operationalize on the Iran/Pakistan border, and what could become of the Pakistani client regime if Iran, the Talibans, and India all wanted it disarmed.

As indifferent as I am to “Islamist radicalism”, I consider the risk that the Pakistani state would transfer fissile weapons C&C to al-Qaeda, or that it could be compelled to surrender FW C&C to any other actor, state or non-state, absent the condition I mention in the para above, at significantly less than repurposing weapons from the Soviet inventory, or acquiring fissiles from states with very large fissile inventories, again, the under-funded former Soviet inventories.

There was even some (in my opinion, goofy) movement that Peter Daou wrote me excitedly about a couple of years ago, that obsessed on the “one nuke” problem. Again, in my disorganized ouvre at wampum is a critique of the “one nuke” belief, and a repeat of the large-inventories-are-the-greatest-risk statement.

Posted by ebw on 08/10 at 01:48 PM
Even though I think you are doing a complete hatchet job on Herman here (unneccessarily - he’s not the brightest one anyway), he had it coming, so I’m not going to defend him. Or any Stalinist organisations like ANSWER. Or Cockburn, whose raison d’etre seems to be “pissing people off”. But I’d like to comment on some substantive points:

1. Taliban infiltration of Pakistani military, and the conclusion that the Taliban pose an international threat: ISI created the Taliban, not the other way around. Do you have any evidence at all that the Islamist infiltration of the Pakistani security establishment (which does exist and is very worrisome) is correlated with Taliban rule over Afghanistan? Do you acutally believe that, had the Taliban’s opponents in Afghanistan been more successful pre-2001, that Islamist infiltration would not have happened? I am really curious as to the evidence supporting the contention that the invasion “slowed down the radicalization of Pakistan”.

2. Global Islamist threat: maybe Herman believes there is no terrorist threat, I don’t know. But all the radicals I read do (well, it is possible I just autofilter those that don’t). However, that is not the same as what mainstream commentators mean when they say “global Islamist threat”. That refers to some supposed ideological commitment to convert the world to some fundamentalist version of Islam ("they hate us because of our freedom"). I don’t believe in that. It is simplistic, and intellectually lazy. If this makes me part of the “fringe”, then so be it. The notion of “global Islamist threat” or “jihadism” or whatever you want to call it today also conveniently serves to obscure the real reasons behind the terrorist threat, which are political in nature.

3. The “despair” and “defeatism” thing. That is just nonsense. Again, maybe Herman actually is a defeatist, who knows - his writing is not very clear, and certainly sounds like it is describing an absurdly deterministic world view. But the rest of us who believe that US (and other countries) foreign policy is shaped by the social and economical structure we live in don’t mean that every foreign policy action is pre-determined and cannot be influenced nor altered by popular pressure (whether of the electoral or “street” variety). However, what is, imo, naive, is to think that military power will be employed by imperialist states for anything but interests of (faction of) the ruling class. Anyway, in extending your accusation of “despair” from Herman (or one piece he wrote) to all of the radical left, you really do engage in a smear.

4. Final question: you blast the radical left for not supporting Lamont, and for giving Weisberg and such a club to beat the moderate, pro-Lamont left with. Well, if Weisbergs standards are low enough that he will try to hang Lamont with the writings of people who explicitely don’t support him, don’t you think it is completely irrelevant what any of us say or think?

Posted by on 08/10 at 02:04 PM
Although it’s true that hippies did listen to the Grateful Dead,
Actually we still do from time to time, but that doesn’t make one shred of difference in any of this whatsoever. Nor does it matter that the original Further as been dug out of the muck of the pond scum. Be that as it may, I must concur with Rich above when he says: “We’re having the test of whether liberalism is going to go down the same way now.”

We can assume, with a certain degree of accuracy, that the authors of the PNAC documents (and all of those attributed to the funded groups that support, spawn, underwrite, etc. these people) are honestly expressing their imperialist intentions (i question their confidence in garnering sufficient military complicity over the long haul, but permanent bases in Iraq are certainly part of the plan). They certainly desire to destabilize Iran, and hope to control the flow of fossil fuel resources of the Middle East; and neither of these goals (opposed by islamic extremists and moderates alike) are beyond possibility. PNAC folk understand that inherent in the success of their long term vision are conflicts with China, India, and Russia over the resources of Asia, Africa, and South America; also part and parcel of this is the loss of human life in large scale numbers from a variety of causes, many associated with institutional neglect.

The “democratic-internationalist-left” is opposed to these PNAC visions on moral and ethical grounds (if i read you correctly) whilst the radical left opposes PNAC’s imperialism disregarding a coherent hermeneutically sound moral/ethical foundation? Yet, from my skewed perspective, both of these groups still require the basic fundamental physical infrastructure and corporate capitalism (that funds and promotes PNAC) to provide for their daily lives (fuel and energy needs, food production and distribution, systemic employment and benefits, etc.) and thus opens the left up to the critique of hypocrisy. The right’s success stems from its allegiance to the goals of controlling and expanding corporate and consumer capitalism, at the point of weapons and violence, throughout the globe. It seems that no matter how carefully nuanced and accurate the rhetoric of the left is crafted and presented, the right will easily dismiss it as bogus, if for no other reason than they are aware that their constituency votes with their dollars as they wait in their SUV’s in fastfood drive through lines where they will use their ATM debit cards.

Posted by on 08/10 at 02:17 PM
So much to agree with here, and yet (not surprisingly for many around here, including our host, I’m sure) I have some nits to pick…

But first, let me highlight some areas of important agreement:

1) ANSWER was (and is) a disaster for the antiwar movement. The problem isn’t their radicalism. It’s their authoritarianism and sectarianism. The nickname International AOWCUTGDPF captures it nicely. Thanks for opposing them from the start, Michael.

2) All the self-important guilt by association practiced by Herman and the CounterPunch crowd above is disgraceful. It’s also all too typical. As a loyal Green, I had to watch CounterPunch spend most of the summer and fall of 2004 slandering the GP and its presidential candidate David Cobb, all because we refused to rollover and rubber stamp Nader’s decidedly not Green independent presidential run. The party has never entirely recovered from this episode.

OK, now the nitpicking…

1) Michael, your descriptions of your opponents in these disputes seems to fluctuate between a) they’re too far left; and b) despite their rhetoric, there’s nothing really left about many of their views. I happen to think that the problem is a lot closer to “b” than “a” (and that you’re on your strongest ground when you repeatedly ask what’s left about supporting Milosevic). Not that I deserve any brownie points (who does?) but as much as I nitpicked your statement about the Eustonites in that earlier post, I also stood up for you against people who wanted to suggest you were merely attacking Herman et al for being radicals. I still think I was right to do so. But it would be easier for me to take that position if you avoided describing these posts (in your last post, e.g.) as your “disagreements with the further left.” The point I’m making is that there are those of us (like myself and Chris Clarke) who are both further left than you _and_ very much opposed to the nonsense you’re blogging against in these posts.

2) I’ve got to disagree with the end of your post. If ANSWER didn’t exist, the right would just invent it. And Ned Lamont would still be a member. Spend ten minutes reading any major wingnut blog, and you’ll see that they can explain to their satisfaction that any remotely liberal (let alone left) position is objectively pro-IslamoMexiFemiFascist in one hundred words or less. Denouncing folks on the far left—even those who deserve denunciation—will not in any way innoculate liberals against unreasonable charges from the right.

3) Unfortunately, although there may only be 50-100 people in the leadership of ANSWER and the the Party for Socialism and Liberation (which is the group the ANSWER folks created when they split from the ~~Judean People’s Front~~ WWP in 2004), there are many more people who buy ANSWER’s lines about the peace movement and ANSWER’s place within it. Often this takes the form of defending ANSWER directly, though sometimes one encounters ANSWER’s talkingpoints without ANSWER itself coming up (e.g. folks who’ll go on and on about how United for Peace and Justice is insufficiently pro-Palestinian). Whatever else one might say about ANSWER, they are frighteningly effective organizers. Indeed, one of the reasons why calling ANSWER out is so important is that they are still far more influential than they deserve to be.

(captcha: “horse” as in “I know I’m beating a dead")

Posted by on 08/10 at 02:47 PM
Berube: And that’s why Herman’s recent apologetics for Milosevic are so important: he is not, in the end, “on the left” in any recognizable sense when it comes to figures like Milosevic.

---

Of course he is on the left. His point of view is shared by Monthly Review, New Left Review, Socialist Register and many other Marxist publications.

I guess you mean the *liberal* or social democratic left. On this you are quite right. He does not belong to the Michael Berube, http://www.opendemocracy.net, Todd Gitlin, Village Voice, Dissent Magazine, DSA, Bogdan Denitch, Michael Walzer wing of the left.

The real dividing line is whether Anglo-American imperialism has the right to “straighten things out” in places like Darfur, the Balkans, etc. The Marxist left says no, the liberal left says yes. When the liberal left opposes an intervention, as is the case with Iraq today, it is not on any kind of principled grounds but because it is expected that it will fail. This kind of rancid pragmatism has characterized the liberal left since the days when Irving Howe was tongue-lashing SDS. It is too bad that Michael Berube wants to carry on his foot-steps.

Posted by Louis N. Proyect on 08/10 at 02:57 PM
Thanks, Michael, for adding the postscript on Weisberg--his piece is absolute drivel. It amazes me that Slate attempts to seem contrarian when so many of their ideas are reactionary replications of the “Conventional Wisdom.” Notice how Weisberg terms peace activists “insurgents,” and you get the idea.

One question I have about this piece and about the entire week, or a number of questions soldered awkwardly into one: what is the goal of the series? I see a number.

1) Horowitz, Medved, et. al. use the badly-phrased and often indefensible statements of the “radical” “left” to claim that anyone left of Lieberman hates America, so you’d like to correct that. However, as others have pointed out, Horowitz et. al. will happily invent or distort, so you aren’t exactly answering them. Plus, they speak to a narrow audience (except in the few cases in which their inanity bleeds into the MSM).

2) You want to firmly establish your own position relative to the rest of the left in the geometric design Chris Clarke’s perfecting on his drafting table as I write this. Establishing that position serves a lot of goals, not the least of which is to respond to false claims about your ideology and position.

3) You want to give commenters, esp. christian h., carpal tunnels.

4) You’re on the cusp of trying to define what it might mean to be “liberal” or “left” or “radical” or “reactionary” at this crucial point.

The last point seems the most problematic (well, right after number three), in part because these figures you’re discussing, with the occasional mentions of this week’s primaries, seem so marginal right now. Chomsky has his admirers (I’m one, even if less so over the last couple of years), but Medved is fringe. Horowitz is fringe (even given the seat they keep warm for him over at Fox News; and yes, I’m aware I’ve devoted several long blog posts myself to Horowitz).

I’m not entirely sure what I’m asking, just thinking aloud.

Posted by Crazy Little Thing on 08/10 at 03:08 PM
I can’t say that I know the positions of all the Marxist left on Milosevic. But I just went to the Socialist Register’s website, which has very extensive searchable archives, and plugged “Milosevic” into the search engine. Only one reference came up—an article by Michael Lowy from 1993 called “Why Nationalism?”.

Here’s the first Milosevic mention. Lowy is trying to explain what he sees as a paradox: that nationalism had recently been most violent in Yugoslavia, a country that had seemingly managed to transcend nationalism through antifascist solidarity:

Of course, one can explain this paradox by several and complex economic, cultural, political, religious and historical causes - without forgetting the heavy responsibility of the Serbian Stalino-nationalist regime of Milosevic, who opened, by his policy of oppression against Kossovo’s Albanians, the Pandora box of nationalisms in the country.

This position seems fundamentally different from those that Michael discusses.

Put another way, it is entirely possible to oppose American intervention in Balkans while admitting that Milosevic was a war criminal. Louis is right that Michael favored intervention. But Michael himself has, in earlier posts, specifically cited folks who opposed intervention but have also denounced Milosevic apologetics.

Posted by on 08/10 at 03:21 PM
Louis N. Proyect: “The real dividing line is whether Anglo-American imperialism has the right to “straighten things out” in places like Darfur, the Balkans, etc.”

That’s the dividing line between the social democratic left, or liberal, left and the hard left? Do tell. It has nothing to do with basic beliefs about how society should be structured?

The hard left loves foreign policy critique because it no longer has any credible prescription for the basics of how society should work. The conservatives have obligingly supplied an imperialist war to oppose. That doesn’t mean that everyone who opposes it gains credibility for their entire project.

People keep asking why the left should be criticized, given its powerlessness. Here’s one reason: in order to convince those liberals who have grown up with “no enemies on the left” that the left’s failures are not ours. Both the left *and* the conservatives agree that liberalism doesn’t exist—the left thinks that all liberals are neoliberals, and therefore actually conservatives, and the right thinks that liberals are leftists. They’re both wrong.

Posted by on 08/10 at 03:28 PM
Louis N. P.: “When the liberal left opposes an intervention, as is the case with Iraq today, it is not on any kind of principled grounds but because it is expected that it will fail. This kind of rancid pragmatism has characterized the liberal left since the days when Irving Howe was tongue-lashing SDS. It is too bad that Michael Berube wants to carry on his foot-steps.”

What about the principle “first do no harm?” Why can’t there be two branches to the test; (1) is the situation in the foreign country intolerable; and (2) can we make it better? How is that rancid?

Posted by on 08/10 at 03:32 PM
Ben Alpers:
I can’t say that I know the positions of all the Marxist left on Milosevic. But I just went to the Socialist Register’s website, which has very extensive searchable archives, and plugged “Milosevic” into the search engine. Only one reference came up—an article by Michael Lowy from 1993 called “Why Nationalism?”.

---

Lowy’s article is fairly dated. I myself was thinking along those lines in 1993. As the decade wore on, the SR editors and myself began to reevaluate things. I think that articles from the 2004 edition are more in line with the sort of thing that Edward Herman is saying:

* Amy Bartholomew and Jennifer Breakspear: Human Rights as Swords of Empire?
* Paul Rogers: The US Military Posture: ‘A Uniquely Benign Imperialism’?
* Tina Wallace: NGO Dilemmas: Trojan Horses for Global Neoliberalism?

---

Emma: “can we make it better? How is that rancid?”

Who is “we”? You and the US Marines?

Posted by Louis Proyect on 08/10 at 03:40 PM
People keep asking why the left should be criticized, given its powerlessness. Here’s one reason: in order to convince those liberals who have grown up with “no enemies on the left” that the left’s failures are not ours. Both the left *and* the conservatives agree that liberalism doesn’t exist—the left thinks that all liberals are neoliberals, and therefore actually conservatives, and the right thinks that liberals are leftists. They’re both wrong.

Hey Rich, wanna guest-blog for a while? Because you’re phrasing all this much more succinctly and cogently than I am.

you blast the radical left for not supporting Lamont

I’m sorry, Christian, I didn’t realize I did this. I certainly didn’t mean to.

But it would be easier for me to take that position if you avoided describing these posts (in your last post, e.g.) as your “disagreements with the further left.” The point I’m making is that there are those of us (like myself and Chris Clarke) who are both further left than you _and_ very much opposed to the nonsense you’re blogging against in these posts.

Point taken, Ben. I’d put Nathan Newman in that camp too. I will fix. As for your second nitpicking point in comment 5 (Alpers 5.2.ii), I happen to agree. I wasn’t saying that we should denounce Herman in order to get the harpies off our backs; I was saying that Weisberg is positively Coulteresque in his conflation of Hermanians with Lamont voters. So when you say

Denouncing folks on the far left—even those who deserve denunciation—will not in any way innoculate liberals against unreasonable charges from the right

I say, hey, I said almost the same thing in my post on “The Beinart Effect”:

as Rick Perlstein pointed out to me a few days ago, there’s something very, very troubling about the whole Beinart analogy between anti-Islamism and anti-Communism, and “principled realists” ought to be much more wary of it than they are. Yes, the Americans for Democratic Action met at the Willard Hotel in 1947. Yes, they announced their opposition to Communism “because the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere” and America should support “democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over.” And yes, they had a better sense of totalitarianism than did their critics on the left at the time. But it doesn’t seem, in retrospect, that this managed to inoculate American liberals and progressives against McCarthyism over the course of the ensuing decade. A fat lot of good it did, actually. When the shock troops of the Right broke down your door fifty-odd years ago, searching for spies and softies and fellow travelers and people who’d voted for Norman Thomas in 1932 and people who knew someone who’d just denounced the Taft-Hartley Act, and when you insisted, as you were being led away, that you were in fact an anti-Communist, you remember what the reply was: they didn’t care what kind of Communist you were.

So yes, let’s have a fighting liberalism: let us oppose violent, fundamentalist, patriarchal, homophobic, and theocratic forces abroad, just as we do at home. But let’s not give in to the Orwell Temptation, or its corollary, the Beinart Effect. And let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that adopting a “fighting liberalism” will keep the wolves of the Right at bay.

So let us be one in the No Inoculation Party! But I insist that we spell it with one “n.”

Captcha: freedom. Go figure.

Posted by Michael on 08/10 at 03:45 PM
When the liberal left opposes an intervention, as is the case with Iraq today, it is not on any kind of principled grounds but because it is expected that it will fail.

This is false, and I mean “false” as opposed to “true.” See, for example, Ken Roth’s fine and principled response to Michael Ignatieff et al., insisting that invasion of Iraq did not constitute a “humanitarian intervention.” Or check out Michael Walzer’s recent essay in Dissent, arguing (against Jean Bethke Elshtain, shudder) that the war in Iraq does not meet the criteria for just war theory.

Posted by Michael on 08/10 at 03:50 PM
I have to take exception with various commenters over the past few days who are advancing the “it’s pointless to address the “radical” “left” because the right wingnuttia will just make shit up anyway” argument in one form or another.

This may be perfectly true, but I see no reason to aid and abet them by failing to distance one’s self from poor reasoning and radical ideology. Yes, if ANSWER didn’t exist, the right would most likely invent them, but I maintain that they would get far less mileage out of bashing an imaginary enemy than they do with a real one. U.no. and Co. need to be able to point to ridiculous leftists or they’re out of business. Yes, they will lie and cheat, but all the better if those are their only options.

Posted by on 08/10 at 03:57 PM
Thanks for the suggested articles, Louis.

The Wallace piece is unavailable online.

But, so far as I can tell, neither the Bartholomew and Breakspear piece (which can be found here) nor the Wallace piece (which can be found here ) say anything whatsoever about Slobodan Milosevic, positive or negative.

Posted by on 08/10 at 03:58 PM
I’ll risk carpal tunnel one more time, as I owe Michael an apology:

you blast the radical left for not supporting Lamont

I’m sorry, Christian, I didn’t realize I did this. I certainly didn’t mean to.

That’s because you didn’t. I apologize.

Posted by on 08/10 at 04:37 PM
Here’s another piece by the cabal of Al hizbolosevic who ‘hates our freedoms’(tm):

WAR AND GLOBALIZATION IN YUGOSLAVIA

Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis

The NATO-Yugoslavia war should be understood in the context of the major developments that have shaped politics in the Balkans and internationally through the 1980’s and 1990’s. Prime among these developments are: the process of “economic globalization,” by which international capital has imposed a neo-liberal agenda on every region of the world, and placed much of the Third World and the former socialist countries under the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank; the crisis of state-communism in Central and Eastern Europe (in large part activated by the adoption “market reforms"), which has opened the way for the establishment by the US and its European allies of a new global hegemony; the deepening capitalist crisis (reflected in the collapse of the Asian economies, and the profit stagnation in Europe), which has accelerated the rush of corporate capital to commercially exploit new areas of the world and find new sources of cheap labor; and the renewed assertion by the US as a global force, as the leading capitalist nation and the prime military defender of the so-called “free market.”

Viewed in the context of these developments, NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia – the last act in the dismemberment of what used to be the Yugoslavian Federation – achieves many objectives.

The most explicit one is the enlargement of NATO through its eastward expansion. Promoted as a doctrine by the Clinton Administration since 1994 and already put into practice with the establishment of a NATO protectorate in Bosnia, and with the entry earlier this year of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance, this expansion foresees the construction of one capitalist bloc stretching from the Adriatic to the Russian border (adoption of market reforms being a condition for integration)

[...]

Until 1999, Yugoslavia maintained in part the economic system created during the Tito era, in which major industries were state-owned, factories self-managed, and unemployed workers and farmers received subsidies. (In July of 1994 the Serbian National Assembly passed “a law on the revaluation of privatized assets, which halted the privatization process;” so that by the late 1990’s, “the private sector accounted for only some 15%-20% of the business sector.") Similarly, the Yugoslavian agricultural sector in the late 1990’s still operated according to the system inherited from the Tito period: a combination of large socialized farms and small private ones.

More than two months of relentless bombing and 30,000 air raids have accomplished what the World Bank and IMF could not: they have pulverized Yugoslavia’s industry and reproductive infrastructure (factories, roads, railroad lines, bridges, power plants); dismantled the last state-owned industries, depriving the Yugoslavian people of viable means of survival, other than emigration, or acceptance of work at any condition; and making sure that the country has no alternative but integration within the ‘global economy’ and privatization.

This outcome is especially important for the NATO “free-traders” considering that resistance to “market reforms” has been strong also in the rest of Eastern Europe, as witnessed by the case of Romania, where earlier in 1999, the coal miners had to be defeated militarily after an intense confrontation with the government, which was pressured by the IMF to close the mines. (After thousands began to march on the capital, resisting the police sent to crush them, the miners were attacked by the army which arrested their leaders, and smashed their buses to prevent them from going again to the capital to press their demands). Also in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic the enthusiasm for “market reforms” is much less intense than the zest with which workers destroyed the symbols of Soviet power. In fact, only the intervention of US companies, with a well-financed publicity campaign, promising prosperity around the corner, could convince the population there to vote in favor of entry into NATO.

In this context, the defeat of Yugoslavia serves to demonstrate that there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism and the futility of resistance to it. That the Yugoslavian Federation was, for 40 years, a model example of socialism and multicultural coexistence makes this defeat even more crucial. There is a continuity, here, between the attack on Yugoslavia and the anti-communist crusades that the US has launched against Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Angola, Mozambique – all countries where socialism had emerged out of mass, popular struggles, and that were consequently subjected (like Yugoslavia today) to a relentless process of destruction and recolonization…
via http://lecolonelchabert.blogspot.com/2006/08/1999.html

Posted by on 08/10 at 04:56 PM
I’m on deadline putting out Earth Island Journal, so I can’t respond at length, but I just wanted to inform you that Ann Bartow and I held a meeting of the People Who Have Totally Pwned Professor Bérubé Society last night over dinner, and though we lacked a quorum — Jamie Bérubé failed to show — we voted provisionally to decline Edward Herman’s application for membership in our society.

This was not without its downside, as we won’t be able to have the hotel desk clerk announce “Paging Mr. Herman, Mr. Herman, you have a telephone call at the front desk” into the PA at our next Annual Meeting. But integrity demands sacrifices at times.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 08/10 at 05:00 PM
Ben Alpers:
Thanks for the suggested articles, Louis.

The Wallace piece is unavailable online.

But, so far as I can tell, neither the Bartholomew and Breakspear piece (which can be found here) nor the Wallace piece (which can be found here ) say anything whatsoever about Slobodan Milosevic, positive or negative.

---

Quite right. I posted these references when I was at work today and not near my collection of SR’s at home. I just found, however, what I was looking for--Peter Gowan’s article from the 2000 edition titled “Making Sense of NATO’s War on Yugoslavia”. Here’s a quote:

In the course of the riots in 1981, Serbs and Montenegrins in Kosovo were beaten, their homes and businesses burned, and their shops looted. Also a mysterious fire was started at one of Serbia’s most cherished religious shrines, the Pec Patriarchate in Kosovo, a complex of medieval churches and the historical seat of the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Thousands of Serbs left Kosovo following the violence. Pressure from Albanian nationalists on the Serbian minority in Kosovo continued during the 1980s. Some authors have tried to claim that the Serbian minority and Serb nationalists exaggerated or even fabricated claims of pressure and that the Serb emigration from Kosovo was largely an economic migration. But Miranda Vickers and other authors have shown that this was not in fact the case. There was substantial pressure on the Serbian minority to leave. Vickers has concluded: ‘many Serbs and Montenegrins who decided to leave Kosovo [in the 1980s] had experienced intimidation, pressure, violence, and other severe abuses of their human rights because of their ethnicity.

Posted by Louis Proyect on 08/10 at 06:43 PM
try to make sense of Herman’s proposition that “the left’s criterion of success is not the extent to which it is listened to or heard, irrespective of message content; it is its success in getting a left message across, and it is listened to by ordinary citizens when they can be reached.” So the important thing isn’t whether the left is being listened to, it’s whether it’s being listened to, which it is, except when it’s not.

Agree or not, Herman is here drawing a perfectly intelligible distinction between “listened-to-irrespective-of-content” (i.e. tell the people only what you know they want to hear) and “listened-to-with-a-left-message” (i.e. tell them what you want to tell them, whether they approve or not.)

Posted by on 08/10 at 06:44 PM
Ann Bartow and I held a meeting of the People Who Have Totally Pwned Professor Bérubé Society last night over dinner, and though we lacked a quorum — Jamie Bérubé failed to show — we voted provisionally to decline Edward Herman’s application for membership in our society.

First of all, I don’t even know how to pronounce “Pwned”, but as a 33rd level archon in the “Having Embarassed Oneself Trying To Outdo (Rhetorically, Logically, Or Otherwise) Professor Bérubé Association”, I am pleased to offer Mr. Herman not only a laurel and hearty handshake, but also full membership in our merry band.

Posted by corndog on 08/10 at 07:02 PM
Although it’s true that hippies did listen to the Grateful Dead, thereby driving the Southern states into the GOP column

All hail the amazing power of a hit of Purple Barrel and the awesome Dark Star > St. Stephen > The Eleven part of Live/Dead!

Fascinating reading the last few days. At the freeway onramp that I take to get to work is a poster from ANSWER announcing an anti-war march on Sunday here in Los Angeles. I stopped next to it the other day waiting for the light and I was taking aback at the wording: Defend the People of Lebanon & Palestine.

Now, I have my own issues with Israel, but I was appalled at the wording; how naive of me to think that ANSWER would have somethihng like “Help stop the Lebanese and Israeli’s from killing each other”. The only props I’ll give them is that they know how to run a march from a permits/cops point of view.

Encountering ANSWER and the like is like being in a time machine that’s permanently stuck in 1968. Dinosaurs, the lot of ‘em.

Posted by on 08/10 at 07:11 PM
Agree or not, Herman is here drawing a perfectly intelligible distinction between “listened-to-irrespective-of-content” (i.e. tell the people only what you know they want to hear) and “listened-to-with-a-left-message” (i.e. tell them what you want to tell them, whether they approve or not.)

Reasonable, justifiable, defensible - perhaps… Intelligible - not so much.

Posted by on 08/10 at 07:14 PM
Ah, now I understand where the “irrespective of message content” bit fits syntactically. Thanks, O rootless one. I still don’t get the “we’re listened to except when we’re not,” but then, that’s basically my theoretical problem with Manufacturing Consent in a nutshell. (I really do think Stuart Hall’s work on Thatcherism reveals this to be a happy leftist illusion.)

Posted by Michael on 08/10 at 07:20 PM
Part 1.

Chris,

I’m going to try to write what I wrote previously, and only I and some (malicious) blogware actually saw, er, parsed. Naturally, it will be different the 2nd time around, but its your first time, even if this also gets eaten by (malicious) blogware.

In your current comment to the decade-old conversation you had with Ward, you wrote the following:

I suspect that the thing about “absolute latitude of action” within Indian societies is a bit of a gloss. Certainly slaves were not completely free to do as they wished, and despite the fact that many North American native cultures granted a significant amount of respect and/or political power to women, I have trouble believing that women were truly autonomous. And are we reallly saying that the Haudenosaunee, the Kwakiutl, the Hupa and the Aztecs were all libertarian environmentalists? Some of the sustainability in Native cultures almost certainly had to do with lack of access to European tech, as some — the Aztecs and Incas, for starters — certainly had the seeds of resource-extraction-based empires within them, if not the actualities.

The distance we have to reach across is staggering. Some indigenous cultures were matrilocal-matrilineal before Contact, some were not. Of those that were, some retain the matri-matri social relationships, and some do not. Just to make it more confusing, in the mid-west, Woodlands Culture was patri-patri and its successor, Mississipian, was matri-matri.

I come from a matrilocal-matrilineal culture. I married someone also from a matrilocal-matrilineal culture. I took my wife’s name and joined her family.

The phrase “women were truly autonomous” is so far from what matri-matri means.

You just don’t get it until you get that all land, all inheritance, all clan affiliations, arise directly from women, and that political power never existed independent of women, for some cultural groups, for which “tribes” is a poor alternative label space to assign names from.

To give a modern example, SANTA CLARA PUEBLO v. MARTINEZ, 436 U.S. 49 (1978), is the controlling case in Federal Indian Law (US) on self-government by Indian Tribes. A Pueblo ordinance denies tribal membership to the children of female members who marry outside the tribe, but not to similarly situated children of men of that tribe. It was argued that this violated Title I of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA).

The underlying facts are that a scarce resource, irrigated land, is passed from mothers to daughters in Santa Clara Pueblo, and the women of SCP adopted the marry-out-takes-no-land rule. What the men in SCP do does not affect land, so it doesn’t matter.

Then there is the (mercifully short) catalog of ships—“the Haudenosaunee, the Kwakiutl, the Hupa and the Aztecs”.

The issue you attempt, the “libertarian” question should be set against the development, and undevelopment, of rank or chieftancy, vastly predating the 13th century formation of the Haudenosaunee as a unified political polity, or the 15th century formation of the Aztecs as a unified political polity.

Similarly, the “environmentalist” question should be set against the development of agriculture, of the aquisition of maize, and its precursors, which would (sorry) drag back in gender, land and power.

Non-sustainability was achived without “European tech” in Mayan Yucatan by the 12th century, when Europe didn’t have “European tech”. See William Cronin’s “Changes in the Land” for an accessible monograph, which has several instances of non-sustainable over-exploitation.

Ditto for soft-shell clam in the North East by the Contact Period. See Cheryle Claason’s et al’s work on shellfish.

My wife’s culture was still dominant in New England and the Maritimes up until King Phillip’s War, and had access to “European tech” for between 50 and 150 years prior to that date (metal tools, etc.), over the same period, where the English were dominant (coastal enclaves) they were environmentally ruinous. It wasn’t “tech”, it was culture. Recall, Verrazano described the Long Island Sound, in March of 1524, as so populated, that the village fires light the night sky. There were more people living there then, then there are now.

Indians had the capacity to ruin their environment, and did so at some times and places, but as a general rule, “European tech” was not materially significant.

Finally, there is this—the Aztecs and Incas, for starters — certainly had the seeds of resource-extraction-based empires within them, if not the actualities.

How could we know this? The Aztec polity predated the ethnographic contact (H. Cortez et cie) by only a generation. The Inka polity predated the ethnographic contact (F. Pizarro et cie) by only a generation.

Posted by ebw on 08/10 at 07:23 PM
And thanks, hollowentry! That certainly explains why we brought Milosevic to Dayton in 1995, and why John Major’s Conservative government opposed any intervention in the Balkans right up through 1997.

Poor Slobodan. The last true socialist, hounded by the neoliberal ghouls.

Posted by Michael on 08/10 at 07:24 PM
Part 2.

In sum, as poor as Ward knows post-Contact, Contact Period, pre-Contact, and temporally deeper cultures, he knows them better than you do, just to use his quote and your comment as the complete statements of each of your bodies of knowledge on the subject. Therefore, when you substitute your critical facilities for his, your conclusions are less interesting than his. Except perhaps to yourself, of course.

I’ll close with a fragment from a series of pieces I wrote on Indians and Environmentalisms, Crown Trees part 1:

A personal note. In 1969 the NPS burned down the cabins of the Ahwahnee still living on 10 acres of unsectioned land in Yosemite Valley, a half mile west of Yosemite Village, and told the Ahwahnee families to relocate outside of the National Park. That village was built during the NRA, and as a kid I played there under the eye of an Auntie when my mom was off walking. The NPS plan of record was that area from then on would be protected as an environmental restoration area.

European pastoralism cannot allow Indians or Hawai’ians to live in paradise. Parks are for Europeans.

Posted by ebw on 08/10 at 07:30 PM
Man, has this site slid down the slope over the past couple of years. Good thing there’s less time on my hands now, lest the feet might come into inept play. Put me in, Coach...

Anyway, keep on sockin’ ‘em, MB.

Posted by on 08/10 at 07:46 PM
ebw, I’m in your debt for your thoughtful response to what I wrote. I will chew it over, and I appreciate your taking the time to correct my ignorance.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 08/10 at 08:15 PM
Berube: “That certainly explains why we brought Milosevic to Dayton in 1995, and why John Major’s Conservative government opposed any intervention in the Balkans right up through 1997.”

Are you suggesting because in one particular instance a government had certain interests in negotiating with an “evil empire”, it would not engage in imperialism?

If this is your response to that piece, it’s pretty simplistic. Have you seen the picure of Rumsfeld with Saddam? Until the first Iraq war the Americans government was arming Iraq. How about responding to the substantive points about the actual interests and ramifications of the NATO-Yugoslavian War addressed by Federici and Caffentzis?

Posted by on 08/10 at 08:21 PM
Doesn’t seem to me that Herman is saying “give up now.” What he’s saying is that given current institutional arrangements, our problem isn’t that we have the “wrong leader” and that a “better leader” would solve what Herman considers to be a pattern of global imperial domination. To co-opt the abolitionist metaphor for my own nefarious purposes, we might say: a really friendly and nice slavemaster will undeniably improve the slave’s quality of life, but having a nicer master won’t solve the slavery problem.

At the heart of the difference between people like Herman and what he calls the “Cruise Missle Left” is a dispute over an empirical claim: Herman would say that current socio-econo-political arrangements produce persistent and predictable patterns of imperialism. The liberal-left would deny that claim. Different stratetic and tactical recommondations follow naturally. I think the weight of the historical evidence supports the case of the leftist thesis.

If the leftists are right, as I (generally) think they are, then allowing Kerry to become our Grand Imperial Overlord would certainly improve lots of things (Chomsky has said as much, and endorsed Kerry, taking flack from the lefter-than-thou folk), but we won’t solve our Persistent Imperialism Problem unless we change the very fabric of our socio-economic-political life and the political culture that supports it. Including our media.

That’s why lots of leftists in the Z camp are engaged in various participatory society and alternative media projects. They’re mostly not Marxists, but they agree that revolutionizing our institutional structures, including its economic structures, is a necessary (but of course not sufficient) condition for the aspiration of creating a Persistently Better World. It’s actually a very hopeful message if you think about it.

Posted by on 08/10 at 08:21 PM
Are you suggesting because in one particular instance a government had certain interests in negotiating with an “evil empire”, it would not engage in imperialism?

Um, no. I am suggesting that neither Federici and Caffentzis, nor any other poor-old-socialist-Slobo writers I have come across, have explained the West’s policy shift in the Balkans. And that’s because they don’t pay any attention to, for example, Milosevic’s actual actions in Vukovar or Sarajevo or Srebrenica.

If this is your response to that piece, it’s pretty simplistic. Have you seen the picure of Rumsfeld with Saddam? Until the first Iraq war the Americans government was arming Iraq.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Posted by Michael on 08/10 at 08:49 PM
Thanks for the substantive answer.

Posted by on 08/10 at 09:06 PM
Lee K. wrote:

At the heart of the difference between people like Herman and what he calls the “Cruise Missle Left” is a dispute over an empirical claim: Herman would say that current socio-econo-political arrangements produce persistent and predictable patterns of imperialism. The liberal-left would deny that claim.

Although its scope is broader than this single issue, the article by Moishe Postone that Michael cites approvingly (see his post of Monday, August 7th as I, alas, lack the “know-how” for how to link to it) makes a similar claim. In the early pages of the article, Postone makes the case that contemporary political trends need to be understood as part of large-scale historical patterns rooted in the dynamics of capital rather than merely as the manifestation of the ascendancy of particular political outlooks. The latter explanation fails, in Postone’s view, to explain the general trend towards expansion of welfare state institutions during the 50s, 60s and 70s (regardless of which political party was in power) and their curtailment in subsequent decades. The upshot of Postone’s argument here is that the imperialist charge is often reductively misapplied to the United States alone, a misapplication which fails to take stock of the large-scale historical transformations within supra-national capitalism of which the United States is the chief, but by no means the only, beneficiary. More importantly--and this is where I frequently find myself at odds with some members of the liberal-left--Postone’s piece suggests that changes at the political level are not sufficient to alter the present course of capitalist and imperialist development. This message, however, should not leave us in despair. Rather it should makes us more keenly aware of the substantial work that needs to be done and the fronts on which such work must proceed.

Given that Michael identifies himself, if I am not mistaken, as a member of the liberal-left (democratic left is probably more to his liking) and given his confessed admiration for Postone’s piece, I think it is inaccurate to say that the liberal-left would deny your claim that there are structural issues at work that perpetuate imperial patterns.

Eric

P.S. On a completely tangential note, are there any other folks here who feel that, in contrast to an earlier generation, they have somehow been bereft of that all-important birthright, namely “know-how.” My father had a pretty good stock of “know-how,” and my grandfather for-damn-sure had it. There was “know-how” that my grandmother had on any manner of subjects--canning, how to grab a garden snake, how to alter the color of flowers with rusty nails, etc etc--so why didn’t this vast body of expertise descend to me along with the photo albums, quilts and all the rest? Why do I regularly feel like this pathetic and feeble ganglion, far down the family tree and miles from the collective cerebral cortex, a tiny bundle of nerve cells barely receiving any impulses at all from the great ancestral brain?

Is it just me or is there a support group somewhere that I can join?

Posted by on 08/10 at 09:28 PM
Ah, but Eric, could your grandfather design a spreadsheet or trouble-shoot a CSS document? Could Great-Grandma program a VCR? Could your father finish Doom II set on “ultra-violence” in an hour?

Posted by G. W. von Pangloss on 08/10 at 10:53 PM
Ah Pangloss, but you assume too much, namely that I can do any of those things!

Well...perhaps I could pull off the VCR thing on a good day, but by and large I am as lost to the technological world as I am to the mysteries of canning peaches.

Posted by on 08/10 at 11:14 PM
Thanks for the substantive answer.

No problem. I was trying to suggest that accounts of the Balkans should include some of the history of the Balkans, because I’m just that way.

Posted by Michael on 08/10 at 11:44 PM
ok, sorry if this is becoming a macho war of last words or something, and I think it’s great that you

“suggest that accounts of the Balkans should include some of the history of the Balkans, because I’m just that way.”

but

1) this seems to elide the question of actually answering what has in fact happened as Federici and Caffentzis analyze (historically), because there cannot be irrefutable proof of conversations about earlier intent that will satisfy you, conversations that will likely be difficult to find or prove until government archives are opened. Historians don’t wait for these kinds of proofs, many of which don’t exist for events we know are true, they study economic and social patterns as well as individual intent. In other words, what has happened due to the NATO occupation of the Balkans is historical, and all too real.

2) you concluded your post leftover businesss II with the line:

“All I’ll say for today is this: the Iraqi resistance is not the French resistance (not by a long shot), and it’s not the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, either. It’s the job of thinking leftists to make these calls one by one. Mine is this: though I wholeheartedly opposed this disastrous war, the battle of the so-called Iraqi maquis is not “my” battle.”

to which I replied,

“I think it’s anachronistic to draw attention to reactionary and horrible elements of the Iraqi resistance while refusing to do the same for other struggles. For instance, the French Resistance (a comparison you make) comprised a host of competing different groups, mostly leftist, but also including antisemitic ultra-conservatives, some trained at the Uriage as future elite ‘knights’ of the Vichy regime (including the chameleon Mitterand btw)--see John Hellman, The Knight-monks of Vichy France, Uriage, 1940-1945. They were committing acts of terror, and publicly shaming and torturing French women who were seen to be consorting with Germans. Even with these components of the French resistance, what would it have meant to equivocate support to end the occupation of France?”

I don’t like pursuing a comparison with a nazi occupation as opposed to an american one as you made, but regarding the French Resistance, what would it have meant to those pursuing such a war, to have everyone condemn both sides of this violence, truly despicable violence? To condemn the Polish resistance and French resistance presently, in all of its sometimes awful actions, is a necessary critique that will never be to the detriment of European people who are not presently suffering under the Wermacht (and for some the resistance). But this is certainly, at the very least, a real threat right now. Why are you so strategic about emphasizing real historical comparisons?

Posted by on 08/11 at 12:23 AM
We are also writing in real (all too real)historical circumstances now. To whose advantage in the war in Iraq is it to emphasize the savagery of a resistance? I’m not saying I like anyone in the Iraqi resistance, I haven’t met anyone in the Iraqi resistance, but to whose advantage is it to condemn it?

Posted by on 08/11 at 12:26 AM
ok, really really last point:

The single greatest ethnic cleansing of the war, according to the New York Times, was in August of 1995, Operation Storm and Lightning, where upwards of a quarter of a million Serbs were expelled by the Croatian military in a matter of days from the Krajina region, and so that, though, largely went – fell on deaf ears, and I’ll forever remember that long massive column of tens of thousands of Serbs having to flee their homes at the hands of the Croatian military. And so, there’s really an unfortunate reality that’s happened. As soon as Milosevic became Hitler, that then meant that the Serb victims became somehow less important than the others in the war.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/13/1429239

Slobodan Milosevic is characterized in the obituaries as the “Butcher of the Balkans.” If that is the story you want to read about, please go to almost any other media outlet and read it again and again. Some are now suggesting that death is Milosevic’s final revenge, that he “ended up cheating history” by dying before judgment was passed. But the world has already passed judgment on Milosevic and what is being cheated by his death is history itself.
What the corporate media overwhelmingly ignores in Milosevic’s death is what they ignored in his life as well--his intimate knowledge of US war crimes in Yugoslavia. While Milosevic was undoubtedly a war criminal who deserved to be tried for his crimes, he was also the only man in the unique position of being able to expose and detail the full extent of the US role in the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0313-29.htm

Posted by on 08/11 at 01:31 AM
Given the hegemony of left-right narratives in current political discourse, I can certainly understood your framing of this series of posts. However, this particular axis of projection has been so pounded by overuse the last century or three, that it should be allowed to sit out for a millenia or two. Much more interesting and profitable to explore axes such as authoritarian/collaborative, truth-by-revelation/truth-by-experimentation. To me the question this raises is; How to retire this tired old politically-exploitable left-right narrative? Do not know if you view it this way, but I think that this series and ensuing (and similar) discussions can at least be a start on this Herculean task.

Speaking of “milennia” and “truth-by-experimentation” - Richard Powers had a very interesting read on the primacy of the scientific method in the New York Times Magazine Best Idea of the Millenium series. This is the “frame” I find most intriguing for the next few centuries as this somewhat recent innovation continues to battle older memes for explicit recognition as the preferred means to the truth.

... now of course I recognize that the above represents a “pre-9/11 mindset” (assuming I have the event placed in the right century) and that next millenial Best Idea may well be - “We Were Just Joking About Everything Last Millenium - No, Really” or maybe the introduction of Black Cherry Fresca.

Posted by on 08/11 at 01:56 AM
> Very very very few people in the Democratic
> electorate are blithe and dismissive about
> Islamic fanaticism.

Uh, what?

http://www.hillnews.com/york/102203.aspx

The survey — sponsored by Democracy Corps, the group founded by Greenberg, James Carville and Robert Shrum — focused on Democrats who take part in the nominating process in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. What Democracy Corps found was that Democrats, at least those who are most active in politics, simply don’t care about terrorism… In Iowa, 1 percent of those polled — 1 percent! — said they worried about fighting terrorism. It was dead last on the list. Two percent said they worried about homeland security — next to last. In New Hampshire, 2 percent worried about fighting terrorism and 2 percent worried about homeland security. In South Carolina — somewhat surprising because of its military heritage — the results were the same.

Or if you prefer a more recent reference:

http://www.dailykos.com/poll/1155215117_JSWnibHe

The thwarted U.K. plot was:

1. was legit. - 51 %
2. was more drama from BushCo to keep us all afraid. - 48 %

Posted by on 08/11 at 05:21 AM
Michael,

Thank you so much for hollowentry. Wherever did you find him? By the grammar I would say he is a Marxist-Leninist, an incredibly rare find. Moreover, he doesn’t seem to have any fear of humans. Look what he has brought us:

“To whose advantage in the war in Iraq is it to emphasize the savagery of a resistance?”

I think this goes right to the heart of the idea of ‘text that is aware of itself as text’. And I think that in answering the question he puts, we get to the difference between a structuralist, antihumanist Marxism where the expected answer is “the invader” or “the imperialist capitalist class” and the postmodernist, polyphonic answer where in addition to the first answer is the more important answer of the suffering human beings who endure this savagery.

I am so ready for Raymond Williams.

Captcha: “gave”. At the office.

Posted by on 08/11 at 05:25 AM
thanks phil. I should have put sarcasm quotes around the ‘savagery’--i was trying to draw attention, poorly, to the disjuncture between Berube presenting past resistances by people, who can be safely presented now as ‘the good guys’ as unproblematic events, whereas all we are presented with in the media, and this blog, vis a vis different Arab resistances to occupation, in Iraq, or Palestine, or Lebanon, are CNN 24/hr. looped orientalist images of ‘islamofascists’ and ‘fanatics’ ‘savagery’ etc…

Your second answer to, at the very least, the deaths of tens of thousands of lives in Iraq is crucial. If the US’ mass bombing, poisoning, burning and maiming of people in the invasion, the destruction of the economy and people’s means of living, the theft of resources, the wiping out of towns and cities, confining people in camps (like outside falluja) and torture prisons, the sponsoring of death squads, may actually be what a resistance resists, then perhaps you might get off your pristine horse you rode in on an wonder what are you doing to stop it? Complain about the evil resistance some more? The same charges about the savagery of Algerian resistance to French coloinalism were made countless times by colonialists--an equivocation that served the interests of the French state wanting to maintain control of an Algeria formally through sham elections.

Mouloud Feraoun’s published journal (read it) details the suffering and fear of living through the Algerian war of indepedence, the fear of bombs exploding placed by settlers as well as Algerians, as well as the torture and mass murder by french troops--but he wrote of Camus and other settler colonialists ‘of good will’ (now loved by liberal-leftists) that you can’t sit between two chairs. In the end, he supported the war of independence, a war that would cost him his life when european militants dragged him from the school he taught, and shot him on the eve of independence.

Daniel Timsit, a doctor in Algiers, writes in his memoirs about how he hid bombs in the hospital he worked at, knowing their use would kill and maim, but also knowing that the status quo was the continued life under an occupation that resulted in milliions starved and immiserated through the nineteenth and twenteieth centuries by French policy of land theft and/or privatization, and hundreds of thousands of Algerians killed by French troops. How do you save more lives? Timsit made a a brutal choice in a brutal occupation, that you and I have the absolute luxury of never having to worry about--we can just keep blaming the bad guy savage islamofascists.

Posted by on 08/11 at 06:17 AM
...absolute luxury of never having to worry about--while we can just keep blaming…

and while we casually decide upon how reactionary people are who are left with no hope but suffering and violence with which to end this unending CNN/Berube spectacle mass murder by the US, a clash of civilizations that is really rather distasteful in an ironic way, but which is in reality a non-tv terror that is happening at this exact moment, with our silent complicity, bemused detachment, and equivocations about the latest in a long string of far off places where people always seem to engage in evil Hitler violence when the US comes to fix everything and *accidentally-only-through-incompetence-honest* engages in systemic mass murder.

Posted by on 08/11 at 06:49 AM
Always late to the party. Sigh.

Proyect’s trial balloon “When the liberal left opposes an intervention, as is the case with Iraq today, it is not on any kind of principled grounds but because it is expected that it will fail.” was already shot down in flames by Michael and Emma Anne but beating a dead dog is just in my nature.
The implications in that false dichotomy are ridiculous in themselves but I just wanted to mention that I personally opposed the Iraq invasion because it was sure to fail AND because it was immoral and illegal.

captcha: “view” from the liberal left (Is there a serendipity generator in the captcha software?)

Posted by on 08/11 at 08:28 AM
Yes, hollowentry, it’s true that there are people like Scahill who have given themselves over completely to the Serbian-nationalist line. This allows them not only to pass over Vukovar, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, etc., but to argue, to a certain strange “leftist” cheering section, that (a) you can’t trust the corporate U.S. media, because the corporate U.S. media was vilifying poor Slobo and cheering for a NATO war (even though this didn’t, you know, actually happen in much of the U.S. media) and (b) there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans anyway, see, because they’re both ruthless killers (even though, at the time, most Republicans strenuously opposed any intervention in the Balkans and ridiculed what they believed was Clinton’s “wag the dog” tactics).

I used to say that the Balkans represented the death of “guilt by association” politics on the left. People who opposed any kind of intervention would ask me, “how does it feel to be on the same side as Madeleine Albright and the New Republic?” and I’d say, “pretty bad! and how does it feel to be on the same side as Ann Coulter, Tom DeLay, and far-right Russian nationalists?”

But now I think that the Yugoslavia debate is extremely useful for bringing out people who will oppose the U.S. under any circumstances (as for me, I would have been OK with an intervention led by Sweden), and people who read once in a book that the economic is determining in the last instance, so obviously the real explanation in the Balkans has to do with neoliberalism. And there’s gotta be pipeline around here somewhere. . . .

Posted by Michael on 08/11 at 08:53 AM
Just a couple of things:

Herman wrote a book, must have been in the 80s, about the “real terror network,” about state-sponsored terrorism. It’s been a long time since I read it, but it was instructive and for that I am grateful.

+++

Much of the Z Mag crowd, though, have always been too radical for everyone else’s good. The whole Chip Berlet/Noam Chomsky argument that there couldn’t have been a conspiracy to kill JFK because he was part of the ruling elite was way too bogus for my digestion. I mean, one part of the ruling class is always plotting to get rid of another part of the ruling class. It’s a question of what silverware is being used.

+++

There’s plenty of information around to understand that “the West” was trying to take apart Yugoslavia. This has been going on since the Roman legions were trying to hold off the Huns by playing off different local tribes against each other. Divide and conquer along ethnic differences. In the end Milosevic was a war criminal because he was against the