In these days, under the influence of democracy, the virtue of co-operation has taken the place formerly held by obedience. The old-fashioned schoolmaster would say of a boy that he was disobedient; the modern schoolmistress says of an infant that he is non-co-operative. It means the same thing: the child, in either case, fails to do what the teacher wishes, but in the first case the teacher acts as the government and in the second as the representative of the People, i.e. of the other children. The result of the new language, as of the old, is to encourage docility, suggestibility, herd-instinct and conventionality, thereby necessarily discouraging originality, initiative and unusual intelligence. Adults who achieve anything of value have seldom been ``co-operative'' children. As a rule, they have liked solitude: they have tried to slink into a corner with a book and been happiest when they could escape the notice of their barbarian contemporaries. Almost all men who have been distinguished as artists, writers or men of science have in boyhood been objects of derision and contempt to their schoolfellows; and only too often the teachers have sided with the herd, because it annoyed them that a boy should be odd.
It ought to be part of the training of all teachers to be taught to recognise the marks of unusual intelligence in children and to restrain the irritation caused in themselves by anything so unusual. Until this is done, a large proportion of the best talent in America will be persecuted out of existence before the age of fifteen. Co-operativeness, as an ideal, is defective: it is right to live with reference to the community and not for oneself alone, but living for the community does not mean doing what it does. Suppose you are in a theatre which catches fire, and there is a stampede: the person who has learnt no higher morality than what is called ``co-operation'' will join in the stampede since he will possess no inner force that would enable him to stand up against the herd. The psychology of a nation embarking on a war is at all points identical.
I do not wish, however, to push the doctrine of individual initiative too far. Godwin, who became Shelley's father-in-law because Shelley so much admired him, asserted that ``everything that is usually understood by the term `co-operation' is in some degree an evil.'' He admits that, at present, ``to pull down a tree, to cut a canal, to navigate a vessel requires the labour of many'', but he looks forward to the time when machinery is so perfected that one man unaided will be able to do any of these things. He thinks also that hereafter there will be no orchestra. ``Shall we have concerts of music?'' he says. ``The miserable state of mechanism of the majority of the performers is so conspicuous as to be even at this day a topic of mortification and ridicule. Will it not be practicable hereafter for one man to perform the whole?'' He goes on to suggest that the solitary performer will insist on playing his own productions and refuse to be the slave of composers dead and gone.
All this is, of course, ridiculous, and for my part I find it salutary to see my own opinions thus caricatured. I remain none the less convinced that our age, partly as a result of democratic sentiment, and partly because of the complexity of machine production, is in danger of carrying the doctrine of co-operativeness to lengths which will be fatal to individual excellence, not only in its more anarchic forms, but also in forms which are essential to social progress. Perhaps, therefore, even a man like Godwin may have something to teach those who believe that social conformity is the beginning and end of virtue.
We are often reproached for accepting as a label this word *anarchy*, which frightens many people so much. "Your ideas are excellent", we are told, "but you must admit that the name of your party is an unfortunate choice. Anarchy in common language is synonymous with disorder and chaos; the word brings to mind the idea of interests clashing, of individuals struggling, which cannot lead to the establishment of harmony".
Let us begin by pointing out that a party devoted to action, a party representing a new tendancy, seldom has the opportunity of choosing a name for itself. It was not the *Beggars* of Brabant who made up their name, which later came to be popular. But, beginning as a nickname - and a well-chosen one - it was taken up by the party, accepted generally, and soon became its proud title. It will also be seen that this word summed up a whole idea.
And the *Sans-culottes* of 1793? It was the enemies of the popular revolution who coined this name; but it too summed up a whole idea - that of the rebellion of the people, dressed in rage, tired of poverty, opposed to all those royalists, the so-called patriots and Jacobins, the well-dressed and the smart, those who, despite their pompous speeches and the homage paid to them by bourgeois historians, were the real enemies of the people, profoundly despising them for their poverty, for their libertarian and egalitarian spirit, and for their revolutionary enthusiasm.
It was the same with the name of the *Nihilists*, which puzzles journalists so much and let to so much playing with words, good and bad, until it was understood to refer not to a peculier - almost religious - sect, but to a real revolutionary force. Coined by Turgenev in his novel *Fathers and Sons*, it was adopted by the "fathers", who used the nickname to take revenge for the disobedience of the "sons". But the sons accepted it and, when they later realised that it gave rise to misunderstanding and tried to get rid of it, this was impossible. The press and the public would not describe the Russian revolutionaries by any other name. Anyway the name was by no means badly chosen, for again it sums up an idea; it expresses the negation of the whole of activity of present civilisation, based on the opression of one class by another - the negation of the present economic system. The negation of government and power, of bourgeois morality, of art for the sake of the exploiters, of fashions and manners which are grotesque or revoltingly hypocritical, of all that present society has inherited from past centuries: in a word, the negation of everything which bourgeois civilisation today treats with reverence.
It was the same with the anarchists. When a party emerged within the International which denied authority to the Association and also rebelled against authority in all its forms, this party at first called itself *federalist*, then *anti-statist* or *anti-authoritarian*. At that period they actually avoided using the name *anarchist*. The word *an-archy* (that is how it was written then) seemed to identify the party too closely with the Proudhonists, whose ideas about economic reform were at that time opposed by the International. But it is precisely because of this - to cause confusion - that its enemies decided to make use of the name; after all, it made it possible to say that the very name of the anarchist proved that their only ambition was to create disorder and chaos without caring about the result.
The anarchist party quickly accepted the name it has been given. At first it insisted on the hyphen between *an* and *archy*, explaining that in this form the work *an-archy* - which comes from the Greek - means "no authority" and not "disordeR"; but it soon accepted the word as it was, and stopped giving extra work to proof readers and Greek lessons to the public.
So the word returned to its basic, normal, common meaning, as expressed in 1816 by the English philosopher Bentham, in the following terms: "The philosopher who wished to reform a bad law", he said, "does not preach an insurrection against it.... The character of the anarchist is quite different. He denies the existence of the law, he rejects its validity, he incites men to refuse to recognise it as law and to rise up against its execution". The sense of the word has become wider today; the anarchist denies not just existing laws, but all established power, all authority; however its essense has remained the same: it rebels - and this is what it starts from - against power and authority in any form.
But, we are told, this word brings to mind the negation of order, and consequently the idea of disorder, or chaos.
Let us however make sure we understand one another - what order are we talking about? Is it the harmony which we anarchists dream of, the harmony in human relations which will be established freely when humanity ceases to be divided into two classes, one of which is sacrificed for the benefit of the other, the harmony which will emerge spontaneously from the unity of interests when all men belong to one and the same family, when each works for the good of all and all for the good of each? Obviously not! Those who accuse anarchy of being the negation of order are not talking about this harmony of the future; they are talking about order as it is thought of in our present society. So let us see what this order in which anarchy wishes to destroy.
Order today - what *they* mean by order - is nine-tenths of mankind working to provide luxury, pleasure and the satisfaction of the most disgusting passions for a handful of idlers.
Order is nine-tenths being deprived of everything which is a necessary condition for a decent life, for the reasonable development of intellectual faculties. To reduce nine-tenths of mankind to the state of beast of burden living from day to day, without ever daring to think of the pleasures provided for man by scientific study and artistic creation - that is order!
Order is poverty and famine become the normal state of society. it is the Irish peasant dying of starvation; it is the peasants of a third of Russia dying of diptheria and typhus, and of hunger following scarcity - at a time when stored grain is being sent abroad. It is the people of Italy reduced to abandoning their fertile countryside and wandering across Europe looking for tunnels to dig, where they risk being buried after existing only a few months or so. It is the land taken away from the peasant to raise animals to feed the rich; it is the land left fallow rather than being restored to those who ask nothing more than to cultivate it.
Order is the woman selling herself to feed her children, it is the child reduced to being shut up in a factory or to dying of starvation, it is the worker reduced to the state of a machine. It is the spectre of the worker rising up against the rich, the spectre of the people rising against the government.
Order is an infinitesimal minority raised to positions of power, which for this reason imposes itself on the majority and which raises children to occupy the same positions later so as to maintain the same privileges by trickery, corruption, violence and butchery.
Order is the continuous warfare of man against man, trade against trade, class against class, country against country. It is the cannon whose roar never ceases in Europe, it is the countryside laid waste, the sacrifice of whole generations on the battlefield, the destruction in a single year of the wealth built up by centuries of hard work.
Order is slavery, thought in chains, the degradation of the human race maintained by sword and lash. It is the sudden death by explosion or the slow death by suffocation of hundreds of miners who are blown up or buried every year by the greed of the bosses - and are shot or bayoneted as soon as they dare complain.
Finally, order is the Paris Commune, drowned in blood. It is the death of thirty thousand men, women and children, cut to pieces by shells, shot down, buried in quicklime beneath the streets of Paris. It is the face of the youth of Russia, locked in the prisons, buried in the snows of Siberia, and - in the case of the best, the purest, and the most devoted - strangled in the hangman's noose. *That is order!* And disorder - what *they* call disorder?
It is the rising of the people against this shameful order, bursting their bonds, shattering their fetters and moving towards a better future. It is the most glorious deeds in the history of humanity.
It is the rebellion of thought on the eve of revolution; it is the upsetting of hypotheses sanctioned by unchanging centuries; it is the breaking of a flood of new ideas, or daring inventions, it is the solution of scientific problems. Disorder is the abolition of ancient slavery, it is the rise of the communes, the abolition of feudal serfdom, the attempts at the abolition of economic serfdom.
Disorder is peasant revolts against priests and landowners, burning castles to make room for cottages, leaving the hovels to take their place in the sun. It is France abolishing the monarchy and dealing a mortal blow at serfdom in the whole of Western Europe.
Disorder is 1848 making kings tremble, and proclaiming the right to work. It is the people of Paris fighting for a new idea and, when they die in the massacres, leaving to humanity the idea of the free commune, and opening the way towards this revolution which we can feel approaching and which will be the Social Revolution.
Disorder - what *they* call disorder - is periods during which whole generations keep up a ceaseless struggle and sacrifice themselves to prepare humanity for a better existence, in getting rid of past slavery. It is periods during which the popular genius takes free flight and in a few years makes gigantic advances without which man would have remained in the state of an ancient slave, a creeping thing, degraded by poverty.
Disorder is the breaking out of the finest passions and the greatest sacrifices, it is the epic of the supreme love of humanity!
The word *anarchy*, implying the negation of this order and invoking the memory of the finest moments in the lives of peoples - is it not well chosen for a party which is moving towards the conquest of a better future?
April 5, 2008 | Asking an academic to explain humor to you is like getting Kenneth Starr to explain the sex act: The explainer has already waged war on the thing being explained. And so anyone looking for yuks in Russell L. Peterson’s "Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke" will have to get past the following hurdles: extensive endnotes; a killjoy thesis, relentlessly iterated; and, most deathly of all, repeated references to Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson.
The funny bone, in most cases, is no match for the pointy head. Peterson’s head, though, is something a good deal more: zesty and contentious and sophisticated -- and capable even of coughing up a good line or two on its own. An American studies professor at the University of Iowa, Peterson is a former stand-up comic and political cartoonist who wants to know how we’re changed by the act of laughing. Not just any laughing, either, but the kind that happens late in the evening, when the Lenos and Lettermans and Stewarts and Colberts are making merry with the day’s carnage.
The combined ratings of all their programs may be less than Johnny Carson in his heyday, but late-night TV matters now as never before. For all its parodic inflections, it has become one of the main news sources for Americans, particularly young Americans, and politicians of every stripe happily perch themselves in whatever dunking booth they can find for the chance of an uninterrupted 10 minutes with the 18-to-29 demographic.
Four years ago, John Kerry was so eager to ride his Harley onto "The Tonight Show" stage that he agreed to follow Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Arnold Schwarzenegger used the same forum to launch his 2003 gubernatorial bid. John McCain announced his most recent candidacy on "Letterman," and with every change of season comes Hillary Clinton, brandishing a new Top 10 list. These appearances tend to follow the same arc of humiliation. Candidate takes good-natured ribbing from host; host claps candidate on shoulder, ushers him or her offstage ... and then carries on joking about candidate as if person had never been there. Ain’t America great?
Well, on that last question, Peterson is suggestively mum, but he’s quite voluble on another subject: the jokes themselves. "In spite of the fact that comedy about politics is now as common as crabgrass, political comedy -- that is, genuine satire, which uses comedic means to advance a serious critique -- is so rare we might be tempted to conclude it is extinct."
Go ahead. Think back on the monologue you heard the other night on TV. Chances are good that, whether it was delivered by Jay or Dave or Conan O’Brien, it was nothing more than a theme-and-variations spin on the same old equations: Bush = dumb; Clinton = cold; McCain = old. Oh, boy, is he old! His Secret Service name is "Enlarged Prostate," and the two State Department employees who were looking into Barack Obama’s passport file were also inspecting McCain’s Civil War records, and John McCain is so old he remembers when Iraq was called Mesopotamia, and hey, have we cracked a Monica Lewinsky joke lately? No?
"Topical comedians," says Peterson, "keep finding new ways to tell us what we already ’know’ about politicians." And because they harp so remorselessly on candidates’ individual quirks -- ignoring the hard, complex, often maddening substance of policy -- they declare, in effect, that every choice is equally bad and that the system itself is "an irredeemable sham." "Election after election," Peterson writes, "night after night, joke after joke, they have reinforced the notion that political participation is pointless, parties and candidates are interchangeable, and democracy is futile."
There are good and sound economic reasons for this, of course. Someone as focused on numbers as Jay Leno is not about to sacrifice half his viewers for the sake of bringing down George W. Bush’s immigration policy. Johnny Carson never even mentioned the Vietnam War. True satire can take root only in the exurbs of cable, where comic pioneers smoke out the vipers in democracy’s den. Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert -- in Peterson’s cosmology, these are the true heroes of late-night, because they ground even their harshest commentary in "a faith in the political process." And on that score, nobody has ascended higher than the "Lincolnish" Colbert, whose Gettysburg Address coincided with the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a normally inane and self-congratulatory affair prodded into fretful life by Colbert’s assault. Afterward, the dragoons of the press corps (Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, Richard Cohen) fell over themselves declaring that Colbert had bombed. In fact, he’d been throwing bombs. Right into their laps.
"Here’s how it works," Colbert explained. "The president makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home ... Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction!"
Colbert’s address perfectly meets Peterson’s criteria for genuine satire: It causes its targets either to take umbrage or to "adopt a studied silence." Pseudo satire, by contrast, is often embraced and even co-opted by its purported victims. Think of Bush père inviting Dana Carvey to the White House, Janet Reno bopping around with Will Ferrell, Al Gore competing with David Letterman to tell the best Al Gore joke. The lampooned pol can safely join in the bloodletting because no blood is actually being let. "Real satire," growls Peterson, "means it."
So, under all this funny and not-so-funny business, a decidedly moral argument is being advanced. And yet I would argue that personality and aesthetics enter into it, too. Dennis Miller meets at least some of the criteria of true satire: real, albeit retrograde, convictions declaimed without fear of offending. Peterson slams him for being too beholden to GOP talking points, but it really boils down to this: He doesn’t like the guy. "Like Holden Caulfield, [Miller] is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is too full of himself to notice."
No one, though, comes in for quite as much scorn as the glad-handing Leno: "more of a salesman than an artiste ... less like a political joker than a politician in his own right ... willing to stoop to almost anything." If you’ve ever wondered why Leno’s production company is called Big Dog, Peterson says, just watch him bounding onstage every night. "If he had a tail, it would be wagging."
This is spot on, and part of the fun of "Strange Bedfellows" is matching up your own likes and dislikes with the author’s. For my part, I think he undervalues Conan O’Brien, and I’m not sure why he feels the need to pound on performers like Sasha Baron Cohen, who have only a tenuous relation to the late-night world. Shock comedy, in general, brings out a latent strain of sniffiness in Peterson. Sarah Silverman, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, "Family Guy," even "Married ... With Children" are all lumped into the same unsavory stew of poo-poo jokes and mindless iconoclasm. "A society that has no taboos left offers nothing for humor to challenge," thunders Peterson. "If nothing is sacred, nothing is at stake." I would guess Lenny Bruce, back in his day, was whacked with that same dead fish.
As the late-night landscape continues to evolve, Peterson may well have cause to return to the subject, and if he does, I hope he’ll explore the tension that lies at the heart of his thesis. By his own reckoning, the democratically chosen entertainments of the masses are also democracy’s enemy, and the only ones who can save us from ourselves are a small and brainy elite that in fact looks less and less like modern America. It’s a strange irony that late-night comedy, at least since Dave Chappelle’s abdication, has become one of the most lily-white enclaves in TV. Are we still looking to white men to save the day? Is the rest of America, in Peterson’s estimation, just too dumb to be trusted with democracy?
Recorded in 2002 in Brooklyn, NY at Warsaw in Williamsburg. Ex Dead Kennedy’s frontman JelloBiafra speaks about the politics of the time.Topics range from neo-cons to (at the time) the forthcoming war in Iraq to the true meaning of government control a la 1984.
What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire
By Howard Zinn
With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.
However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the "Good War," even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American "Empire."
I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called "The Age of Imperialism." It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire — or period of "imperialism."
I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion") which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes — what we now call "ethnic cleansing" — so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging "civilization" and its brutal discontents.
Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of "the five civilized tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as "emancipation" was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln’s administration.
That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled "Mexican Cession." This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country’s land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term "Manifest Destiny," used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: "We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle."
The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba, appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn’t the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the world. The word "imperialism" now seemed a fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war — treated quickly and superficially in the history books — gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I learned in university either.
The "Sole Superpower" Comes into View
Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: "I was an errand boy for Wall Street."
At the very time I was learning this history — the years after World War II — the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the world’s leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.
In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.
When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone’s Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in China.
Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the war.
When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country’s motives as a quest for "tin, rubber, oil."
Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I — indeed no antiwar movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.
Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower — even after the fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union — to establish its dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the CIA’s overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.
Justifying Empire
The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson’s book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.
Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.
When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew — what we had in common was that we both read books — that he considered this "an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.
In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.
The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."
We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence" is benign, that the "purposes" — whether in Luce’s formulation or more recent ones — are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for its idealism."
The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project — Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army… as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here… will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."
For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes — in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.
Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense — that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization — begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?
Howard Zinn is the author of A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, now being filmed for a major television documentary. His newest book is A People’s History of American Empire, the story of America in the world, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle in the American Empire Project book series. An animated video adapted from this essay with visuals from the comic book and voiceover by Viggo Mortensen, as well as a section of the book on Zinn’s early life, can be viewed by clicking here. Zinn’s website is HowardZinn.org.
The United States entered the 20th century with impressive concrete achievements in political and economic reform derived from the ideological ferment of the final two decades of the 19th century. Still it has failed to this day to address, much less resolve, several of the fundamental contradictions and problems that have plagued the young nation from the very beginning.
The Civil War brought about the abolition of slavery, but racial discrimination has continued unabated in US society and politics, keeping the nation divided along race lines, largely into two separate economies, two segregated societies and two antagonistic political cultures. Most equal opportunity among the races has been in the form of tokenism. Among those denied equal opportunity because of their race, the common complaint about tokenism is that the mainstream only lets in people who look like us, but not those who think like us.
The race issue The race issue is now threatening to torpedo the near-certain nomination of Barack Obama, born in the US of an African father and a white American mother, as Democratic candidate in the 2008 presidential campaign. The controversy on the seemingly shocking rhetoric of Reverent Jeremiah Wright, long-time mentor of a young Obama, and recently retired pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, shows not the pastor’s views as extremist as much as how clueless the white mainstream is about the centuries-long anger and frustration the majority of its black brethren are still laboring under.
Wright is not anti-US nor is he against what the nation’s ideals stand for; he is condemning those policies and practices that the US government and society have regularly forced on African American citizens in violation of the moral ideals of the nation. Can any self-respecting American do less?
The mainstream US press has focused, sensationally and out of context, on Rev Wright "God damn America" sermon. Readers can judge for themselves what Wright actually said:
The [US] government gives them [African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons [to incarcerate African Americans], passes a three-strike law [against African Americans] and then wants us to sing ’God Bless America’. No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people ... God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.
The test is less about Obama as a viable bi-racial candidate for president for being partially a product of the black political culture as much as about whether the United States can finally fulfill the national pledge of allegiance required of every grade school children of "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all". The test is whether the US can accept Obama as president without molding him as another empty token of racial harmony.
There is no need for Obama to deny reality or to reject justifiable black rage against racial injustice. Obama’s message of moving on towards a coming together of all races is right on. The issue of racial and religious harmony is of critical geopolitical importance because the president of the United States is also a world leader in a world where over 70% of the population is non-white and 65% non-Christian.
The economic Iissue The Civil War also destroyed agrarianism to firmly establish Federalism with policies that support economic centralization at the expense of economic democracy. By the end of the 19th century, populism had been co-opted into the two-party political system as progressive factions in both major parties. The subsequent period is known in history as the Progressive Era, led by Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson in national politics, three leaders of distinctly different ideologies.
Continuing the populist movement, early 20th-century progressive reformers campaigned against what they viewed as two related prime evils: growth of political corruption and the disturbing trend of government on all levels to grant, in the name of the national interest, special privileges and protection to organized wealth at the expense of popular wealth. Progressives professed a populist faith in the wisdom of the common people and insisted that good government must safeguard the common interest of all in the nation and respond to the voices of the common people. They worked to eliminate the control of government by political bosses and machines that were in the employ of narrow special interests, and to re-impose high standards of integrity and honesty along with transparency and accountability to make holders of public office more responsive to the general electorate.
Specifically, progressives were alarmed by the unhampered growth of monopolies that routinely resorted to unjust exploitation of farmers and workers. They wanted government to promote the general welfare of all the people and to protect small businesses from predatory assault by big business.
Progressivism then and now A century later, progressives in 2008 stand for practically all the same reform objectives as their comrades in 1908, even as the specifics and context have changed with time.
Progressives in 1908 were conservative reformers rather than revolutionaries. They wanted to restore to the nation the early founding ideals of democratic government, individual liberty, the rule of law, and the protection of private property rights from predatory invasion by big business and big finance. What progressives wanted was a new set of legislative mandates and regulatory tools needed to preserve these founding national ideals that had been increasingly corrupted by arrogant big business and big-finance mentality in the industrial age. In other words, they wanted socio-political progress to keep pace with techno-economic progress.
Progressives in 1908 did not merely want a rich economy at any cost; they wanted a rich economy not exclusively benefiting the rich elite and created not by making the majority poor, but by preserving fair economic equity among all the people to share fairly the fruits of progress. They did not merely want a strong nation; they wanted a strong nation the security of which did not depend on an outsized military; but on being a "shining city upon a hill", an early self-image increasingly receding from reality a century after the nation’s founding.
"The shining city upon a hill" was an image first invoked decades before the birth of the United States by John Winthrop (1587-1649), who was elected 12 times as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Britain, to guide his new Pilgrim homeland as a communal, non-capitalistic society, drawing from the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus had addressed a large crowd:
You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven." (The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:14-16)
Republican president Ronald Reagan, echoing previous references by Democratic president-elect John F Kennedy in 1961 and unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984, invoked Winthrop’s image in his farewell speech to the nation on January 11, 1989:
The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
Continuing with his sugarcoated Disneyland version of history, Reagan continued:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.
The open doors to the shining city on the hill Reagan had in mind were meant for Soviet dissidents in the context of the Cold War. Pathetically, the current battle cry on the war against "illegal" immigrants by Reaganites is to close all the doors of the wall of the shining city upon a hill. The doors are closed for all practical purposes even for legal immigrants who routinely have to wait several years to get naturalized because of a large bureaucratic backlog. Multinational corporations are complaining that they have to relocate high-paying jobs overseas to skirt US immigration restrictions on highly skilled foreign workers.
The freedom myth Reagan’s "early freedom man" Winthrop, who incidentally was a British colonial and not a US citizen since he died 172 years before the founding of the United States in 1776, and who, because of his long tenure as governor of the colony, began to assume the undemocratic role of a feudal lord, did not have much good to say about democracy and much less about liberty.
Winthrop saw to the hanging of Mary Latham and James Britton in 1644, both found in adultery, notwithstanding that he also admitted to an illicit encounter with a Native American woman at an abandoned settlement not far from his home. Many volunteers searched for him all night during his unexplained disappearance fearing for the worst, only to find him the next morning not far from home with a fantastic story to excuse his awkward absence from home and family.
New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who brought about much progressive reform on Wall Street to protect small investors, and in the process created more enemies in big finance than he could handle, did not manage to command the same moralistic elasticity four and a half centuries later on a similar matter of personal transgression, even though much of the rest of the world has moved far beyond Puritan morality.
Winthrop, like his Puritan brethren, strove to establish a Christian community that held rigid uniform doctrinal beliefs that brooked zero tolerance for dissidents, leading to his presiding in 1638 over ...
I'm a twenty-something American Midwesterner who plays a part in the cloak and dagger melodrama known as local TV news. My hobbies span from vinyl record collecting to wine tasting to armchair philosophizing. I, also, enjoy star gazing, foreign films and narcotics. I'm ticklish right below my rib cage, on my sides and on the soles of my feet. Chinese food is my favorite cuisine. I don't believe in miracles, aliens or ghosts (but secretly believe in one of them). When I drink I never become confrontational or weepy but always become sappy and sentimental. One summer I watched nothing but silent films. My politics are by and large left-leaning, and I have an unhealthy passion for music (not making it, just collecting it). Groucho is the greatest Marx brother, a stiff dirty martini is the greatest drink and autumn is the greatest season.
