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International Socialist Review Issue 44, November–December 2005
R E V I E W S
How symbols take the place of struggle
Norman Kelley
The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics
Nation Books, 2004
208 pages $14
Review by KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR
THE DESTRUCTION and mayhem caused by Hurricane Katrina revealed many things. It showed that racism still deeply afflicts the United States. It showed that the U.S. is as divided between rich and poor as any other country on the planet and that Black workers are bearing the brunt of that poverty. Katrina also may have revealed the final nail in the coffin of Black politics as we have known it.
Black leaders were correct when they quickly condemned the painfully slow and ill-equipped response to the disaster.
The Congressional Black Caucus staged a press conference denouncing the inadequate relief and rescue effort. The head of the NAACP, Bruce Gordon, flew down to the affected areas and helped to coordinate relief efforts. Rev. Jesse Jackson has led efforts to secure both the New Orleans evacuees “right to return” to New Orleans as well as the right to take part in the reconstruction efforts.
While there is nothing wrong with these efforts, they are simply not enough. There is a showdown brewing in Congress as Republicans have waited until the hurricane moved beyond the front pages to begin reneging on the promises to rebuild homes and lives. They and their leader, George W. Bush, want to cut poverty programs just now, as hundreds of thousands more have been thrown into poverty.
This type of fight requires much more than press conferences, photo-ops, and sound bites. It requires a political strategy bent on organizing and taking to the streets to make sure that not only are there no bud-get cuts, but that budgets are expanded to meet the needs of the poor and oppressed.
A recent book by Brooklyn-based political columnist, Norman Kelley, The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics, discusses in full the paralysis and ineffectiveness of Black politics today—and explains the historical causes of why a new movement has not yet materialized.
As its title suggests, the book is cantankerous and borderline snarky. “Head negro in charge” is an insult in the Black community for someone who has either appointed himself or been appointed by a white person to oversee or supervise other Black people. Kelley classifies the most well known Black political leaders as head negroes in charge mainly because they are unaccountable to anyone. Black leadership, says Kelley,
no longer functions as a means to the end of creating the conditions under which Black Americans might enjoy material, cultural, and social equality with white Americans. The inability…to solve problems…has led to the rise of “symbolic politicians”…who aspire to the pretense of leadership without being accountable or presenting solutions.
Kelley also rebukes Black intellectuals like Cornel West and bell hooks—whom he derisively refers to as “the niggerati.” He sharply mocks bell hooks’ last book, which was about Black men and love, and West’s latest effort, which was a hip hop album.
Kelley claims today’s Black intellectuals are more interested in cultural questions and theory than they are in dealing with the key issues surrounding Black oppression. This is not completely true, of course, especially given Michael Eric Dyson’s excellent recent rebuttal to Bill Cosby’s racist attacks on the Black poor. But the point is that many of the “market intellectuals” are sorely out of touch with their subject matter.
Kelley links the paralysis of both Black intellectuals and political figures to two factors. The first is what he sees as the inability of the civil rights movement of the 1960s to leave lasting institutions as a means of carrying on the political struggle for Black freedom after legislative gains had been garnered.
The other factor is the “incorporation of the Black freedom movement” into the Democratic Party. For Kelley both of these factors are linked: “because it didn’t have an independent political apparatus, the Black vote became a dependable adjunct to the Democratic Party.” Kelley describes the end result of this reality:
The rise of…symbolic politics has been aided and abetted by the political capitulation of the Black Democratic political establishment and civil rights movement that has long turned into an industry based on affirmative action and set-asides for the new Black middle class. The political incorporation of the Black freedom movement, while achieving some aims, has not been successful in ameliorating the conditions that confront the lower strata of Black America. In the long run, Black America has been demobilized, rendering the Black political establishment irrelevant.
He continues about the relationship of Blacks to the Democratic Party:
The national Democratic Party, the party of most Black federal, state, and local elected officials, treats the Black vote as a dependable booster component: It rockets white candidates into the orbit of elections, yet Black concerns are later routinely jetti-soned and treated as “special interests.”
Kelley is sharpest when looking at the role that Democrats, including Black Democrats, have played in demobilizing Black struggle. He goes after Bill Clinton and his bogus legacy as a president who was good for Black Americans.
Black politics and Black culture regressed during the age of Clinton. The Black intelligentsia apparently had no interest in pointing out the glaring contradictions between Clinton’s symbolic politics and his antiblack politics…Instead, Toni Morrison and Manning Marable discoursed on Clinton’s “blackness,” or the tropes of such, but one did not hear a single J’accuse! from them.
Kelley calls for ordinary Blacks to re-evaluate their relationship to the Democratic Party, but, unfortunately, he doesn’t call for a total break:
Now is the moment for Blacks to consider the merits of creating a new relationship with the Democratic Party and with their political representatives; it is now time for them to consider the merits of electoral instability. In other words: strategic non-voting.
Kelley does not explore this political advice far enough. While he writes much about the 2004 election and the lack of choices for voters—he refers to Rev. Al Sharpton’s campaign as a “scampaign”—he mentions Ralph Nader’s campaign only in passing. Kelley never fully develops an analysis of the impact of Nader’s presidential campaigns or the potential a left-wing third party could have on Black politics and electoral politics in general.
Kelley wants to come up with “new” forms of protest because
the social and economic situation of a vast number of African Americans has improved, and the kind of mass defiance that was led by the civil rights movement during the 1960s may no longer be applicable. Instead, rather than confronting the system, Blacks may need to tweak it.
This option will be most attractive to the Black middle class, since, as Kelley acknowledges, “Black America is riven by class interests,” but it will take much more than tweaking to overcome the nationwide crisis of Black urban life that was exposed in the wake of Katrina.
A mass movement against racism is long overdue. It just won’t be led by leaders like today’s, who see their main objective as getting a seat at the proverbial table. They’re now skating around the issue of protest and mobilization—and remain focused on mid-term congressional elections and getting Bush out of the White House in 2008.
The human potential for such a mass movement already exists. It is not hard to imagine both Blacks and whites mobilizing en masse to the capitol to demand affordable housing, more food stamps, and health care instead of war. In fact, the Millions More Movement could have been a perfect receptacle for the mass anger aroused by Katrina. Instead, Jackson, Sharpton, and Rev. Louis Farrakhan were slow to direct people to Washington to demand more aid, jobs, and a role in rebuilding. In fact, in the days leading up to the march, organizers downplayed the importance of numbers.
Katrina is only the latest litmus test for the established Black leaders. To break through their paralysis, new organizers and leaders need to emerge from the grassroots—as they began to do in the efforts at relief and rescue.
Challenges to the “one-idea” system
José Corrêa Leite, in collaboration with Carolina Gil
Translated by Traci Romine
THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE
Haymarket Books, 2005
264 pages $12.
Ignacio Ramonet
WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY: NEW THREATS, NEW FEARS
Ocean Books, 2004
186 pages $17
Review by LANCE SELFA
THE YEARS since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War haven’t been kind ones for the Left. Much of the Left that had identified, however wrongly, with the USSR and the Eastern Bloc suddenly found itself adrift. Meanwhile, on both sides of the East/West divide, an aggressive neo-liberal program of free-market orthodoxy asserted itself.
Despite the fact that the majority of the world’s people were clearly not benefiting from these trends, the biggest obstacle to challenging the new orthodoxy seemed to be the ideological mantra that governments and the media repeated over and over: “there is no alternative.”
“World development, and socialist alter-natives—collapsed at virtually the same time…with the only, very uncharacteristic survivor a social democracy adhering, to different degrees, to liberalism,” writes José Corrêa Leite in The World Social Forum: Strategies of Resistance.
But several struggles that broke out in the last decade pointed in a different direction. Of these, Leite highlights the 1994 Zapa-tista uprising, the 1995 French public sector strikes, and the 1999 protests that disrupted the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Together these struggles—and many others, from protests against multilateral economic institutions to the overthrow of neoliberal governments in Latin America—formed a growing movement against corporate globalization.
“Seattle represented a qualitative leap in the trajectory of resistance to neoliberal globalization, a moment in which a group of activists lost the illusion that it was possible to work in harmony with the multilateral institutions,” he writes.
This history forms the backdrop to Leite’s book, an account of the development of the World Social Forum (WSF), the global meeting of the social movements and the Left that held its first installment in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Conceived as an open forum of the social movements to debate positive alternatives to neoliberal orthodoxy, the World Social Forum popularized the slogan “Another World is Possible.” Originators of the WSF underscored their desire to make the forum a challenge to the neoliberal order by holding it at the same time as the World Economic Forum, the meeting of the world’s rich and political leaders held in Davos, Switzerland.
As activist scholar Michael Löwy puts it in an article reprinted in the book, the movement represented at the WSF is “not anti-globalization: it is against this capitalistic, neoliberal world, unjust and inhumane, and it seeks another world of solidarity and fraternity. This new world is perhaps beginning in Porto Alegre in January 2001.”
Leite has provided us with a valuable account, appearing for the first time in English in this edition, of the development of the WSF through its fourth installment, held in Mumbai, India, in 2004. In addition to the text of Leite, a Brazilian member of the WSF’s International Secretariat, the book includes valuable supplementary materials, from WSF documents to reprints of articles by leading movement intellectuals.
In many ways, the most interesting part of the book is its first two chapters. These provide a “big picture” view that situates the WSF in the ideological currents of the early twenty-first century. “If the collapse of the Soviet Union represents the end of a great political period within which the twentieth century moved and, in this sense, the end of an historical epoch, the decades of crisis open a transition for the world in which we live, whose contours are still being established,” Leite writes.
The first WSF took place only ten days after George W. Bush’s regime was installed after stealing the White House. By the time the next WSF unfolded in Porto Alegre in 2002, the movement against corporate globalization was confronting a new and unanticipated challenge: that of a newly aggressive militarism and imperialism led from the White House and given license by the September 11 attacks.
As a result, the movement as represented at the WSF in-corporated the protests against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, the enormous and unprecedented February 15, 2003, protests before the Iraq War emerged from a call to action issued by the European Social Forum, one of the WSF’s regional affiliates.
Much has changed in world politics since even the first WSF was held. In Brazil, the Workers’ Party that had helped launch the event when it was an opposition party, is under siege from corruption allegations and from protests against its neoliberal policies now that it’s in government. The movement against corporate globalization is increasingly divided between reform-minded non-governmental organizations and those activists looking for more radical solutions.
“The future of the WSF will be, therefore, affected profoundly by the shocks of the reconfiguration of the Left and of the world political landscape stemming from the Bush doctrine of preventive war, the emergence of new interimperialistic conflicts within multilateral institutions, and the agreements on the management (and repartition) of the global market (within the WTO, FTAA and the European Union),” Leite concludes.
One of the most polemical of the supplementary contributions to The World Social Forum is the article entitled “The One Idea System,” by Ignacio Ramonet. Ramonet is the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, the France-based monthly newspaper that has played a crucial role in promoting the WSF and the movements against war and corporate globalization. To Ramonet, the “one idea” of neoliberalism has become a “catechism” repeated throughout the main institutions of society.
Ramonet has done as much as any contemporary intellectual to challenge this catechism. A collection of his writings, The Wars of the 21st Century, illustrates this. While the writings that appear in this volume are somewhat uneven, the passion with which Ramonet makes his case is constant. He ends with this challenge:
If we want to change the world, we need to think about how to construct a different future. We can no longer accept the fact that one billion people of the planet live well while the other five billion are forced to survive in conditions of appalling wretchedness.
Karl Marx, philosopher
Allen W. Wood
KARL MARX
Second edition
Routledge, 2004
344 pages $35
Review by PHIL GASPER
IN JULY, listeners of the BBC radio program In Our Time voted Marx the world’s greatest philosopher by an overwhelming margin. Ironically, Marx himself was rather contemptuous of philosophy, famously declaring, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Most of his mature writings are on political economy and contemporary events, and he rarely addresses philosophical questions explicitly.
Yet in a broad sense of the term, Marx clearly is a philosopher. As Allen Wood notes in his introduction, “Marx is…a systematic thinker who attaches great importance to the underlying methods and aims of his theory and the general outlook on the human predicament expressed in it.” Marx also explicitly acknowledges his debt to both eighteenth-century Enlightenment materialism, and the tradition of German idealist philosophy that culminated in the work of Hegel.
Anyone who wants a better understanding of Marx’s philosophy can do no better than to begin by consulting Wood’s book, originally published in 1981. This second edition includes an additional chapter (on capitalist exploitation) and a marvelous new preface in which Wood explains why Marx’s ideas remain relevant in the twenty-first century, and why the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire (which he describes as “experiments in rapid industrialization under ruthless state capitalism”) in no way refuted them.
Wood, an eminent Kant and Hegel scholar now teaching at Stanford, ad-dresses five main topics: alienation, Marx’s theory of history, morality, materialism, and the dialectical method. Despite the complexity of the material, Wood’s discussions are models of clarity in which the central issues and the debates about them are lucidly explained. This is especially noteworthy since many discussions of Marxist philosophy are impenetrable to the non-specialist, and sometimes to most specialists as well.
Wood has a wide knowledge of Marx’s writings and quotes from them frequently, often noting similarities and differences with the ideas of other major philosophers.
But Wood’s book is not simply a work of exposition. He frequently defends his own interpretations of Marx’s views, which are often novel and sometimes controversial, but always worth considering.
His discussion of alienation—a central concept in Marx’s early works, which Wood explains as “the failure (or inability) to actualize one’s human essential powers”—is particularly clarifying. Wood argues, convincingly I think, that Marx began by mistakenly thinking that alienation is the underlying explanation of everything that is wrong with capitalism (for instance, the fact that workers don’t own the product of their labor), but later came to regard it not as an explanation but as simply a symptom of deeper problems.
The most controversial of Wood’s interpretations concerns Marx’s views about morality. Wood argues that Marx does not criticize capitalism on moral grounds, never saying, for example, that it is unjust or that it violates workers’ rights. Indeed, according to Wood, Marx regards the exploitation of wage labor by capital as just when judged by the only applicable historical standard, since “justice” in any society merely means functional for the existing mode of production.
In Wood’s view, Marx believes that his historical materialist framework, in which social existence determines consciousness, implies that all morality—not just bourgeois morality—is an ideological illusion. Rather than making moral criticisms of capitalism, Marx condemns it on the basis of what Wood claims are non-moral values, such as its tendency to frustrate “self-actualization, security, physical health, comfort, community, freedom” for most people.
After Wood first published these views in an article in the early 1970s, a virtual academic sub-industry emerged to debate and contest his interpretation. Some argued that Marx does make explicit moral criticisms of capitalist exploitation (which he sometimes describes as “robbery,” for example); others that while he explicitly rejects such criticisms, he is implicitly committed to them anyway; still others that Wood’s conception of morality is too narrow and that on a more reasonable understanding, Marx does judge capitalism to be morally deficient.
Setting aside the issue of how to interpret what Marx actually says, is it true that historical materialism entails that morality is an illusion? Sometimes tracing ideas back to their material roots is sufficient to debunk them—this, for instance, is why Marx is a critic of religion. Religious beliefs, he thinks, can be fully explained in terms of the material and social circumstances that give rise to them, without supposing that there is a supernatural reality to which they correspond.
But Marx also thinks that scientific ideas can be explained in the same general way, and this rightly does not lead him to reject the notion of scientific truth, even though science under capitalism is frequently distorted by the interests of the ruling class.
In principle, something similar might be true about morality, as Wood acknowledges. This may have been what Engels had in mind when he wrote, “there has on the whole been progress in morality,” but a “really human morality…becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.” In this view, while morality in bourgeois society is systematically twisted, this is not a reason for rejecting the moral point of view in its entirety.
In fact, as a practical matter, it would be very hard to do so. Should socialists try to drop such concepts as “social justice” and “women’s rights” from their vocabulary? Marx rightly viewed mere moralizing about capitalism’s defects as a waste of time, but a moral critique, coupled with a class-based analysis of how to change things, can be a powerful force. People fight more passionately for their interests when they believe that justice is on their side.
The debate on Marxism and morality is far from over, and I recommend anyone interested in pursuing it, or any of the other topics mentioned above, to read Wood’s fine book. It helps to show why Marx’s ideas continue to resonate—which is no doubt why he won that BBC poll.
The doing side of war
Ishikawa Tatsuzo
Zeljko Cipris (Translator)
SOLDIERS ALIVE
University of Hawaii Press, 2003
216 pages $18
Review by DAVID WHITEHOUSE
ONE EVENING, the regimental headquarters of an invading army—a comman-deered house—suddenly burst into flames. Soldiers found a shabbily dressed young man nearby and accused him of setting the fire. They fetched an interpreter, who began a quick interrogation:
In a quiet voice, the youth briefly replied. The interpreter suddenly struck him across the face. The youth staggered.…
“What did he say?” asked the watching soldiers.
“Bastard says setting fire to his own house is his own business!”
A corporal grabbed the young man, took him to the edge of the village, and hacked him to death.
This incident forms the opening scene of Ishikawa Tatsuzo’s Soldiers Alive, a short, haunting novel about the Japanese invasion of China. Written in 1938, just weeks after the events it describes, the book was banned in Japan during the war. It has just recently appeared in English.
Ishikawa did not intend to write an antiwar book. The translator, Zeljko Cipris, notes in a useful historical introduction that, “Ishikawa aims to deglamorize the war against China, not denounce it.” This aim lies behind the title, as Cipris explains: “The soldiers are “alive” not only because they have not yet been killed, but also because they are creatures of flesh and blood rather than idealized models of chivalrous virtue.”
Ishikawa based the novel on interviews with Japanese soldiers in the then-capital of China, Nanjing. He arrived in January 1938, just three weeks after the city’s capture and shortly after the peak of what is known as the Nanjing massacre.
The massacre involved the rape of 20,000 women and the murder of some 200,000 civilians and captured soldiers.
The soldiers probably didn’t tell Ishikawa the worst details, but he learned enough to create a vivid picture of how such atrocities come to happen.
The novel focuses on a half-dozen soldiers from a single company as they fought their way 170 miles inland from Shanghai. Historians note that the Nanjing massacre really began on this campaign.
As they dashed to Nanjing, the army outran its supply lines and had to steal their provisions from the Chinese. After knocking down an old woman who tenaciously fought to keep her only ox, Ishikawa’s soldiers felt released from the inhibitions of peacetime:
The soldiers felt elated. This continent teemed with boundless riches; one merely had to take them. A vista was opening up before them in which the inhabitants’ rights of ownership and private property were like wild fruits for the soldiers to pick as they chose.
Even the company priest, Gencho, joined in dehumanizing—and killing—the Chinese. Supposedly unarmed, he picked up a shovel in one battle and “dealt one lethal blow after another, the rosary at his wrist dryly rattling.”
Gencho could not bring himself to pray for the Chinese, even for the dead. “When I think of them as my comrades’ enemies,” he told his commander, “I hate them.”
The war changed the other soldiers, too. One, a romantic, became a sadist, a bachelor of science became a detached killer, and a petrified lieutenant set examples of bravery because he fought in a blind rage.
Their personalities converged on corporal Kasahara’s, a peasant youth to whom “killing enemy soldiers was no different than killing carp.… The one emotion that did move him mightily was a virtually instinctive love for his comrades.” Given Ishikawa’s prowar stance, it is with regret but no irony that he calls Kasahara “a splendid soldier, the very epitome of a soldier.”
They faced a harrowing fight to take Wuxi, a city of 200,000 that they later burned to the ground. But first, the men went in search of women:
Each of them felt as triumphant and willful as a king, a despot.… Enemy stragglers were still hiding in the area and many of the inhabitants had arms, but this did not make the soldiers hesitate in the least. They felt themselves the mightiest creatures alive.
They returned wearing the silver wedding bands of the women they had raped, joking, “It’s a memento of my late wife.”
As time went on, civilian resistance grew, and a girl “of eleven or twelve” shot down a Japanese lieutenant from close range. This infuriated the soldiers, and the high command issued an order giving permission to shoot “anyone who resists, civilians included.”
As Chinese soldiers retreated toward Nanjing, the pursuing Japanese captured more and more of them—but this was a problem:
Soldiers about to take part in heavy fighting could hardly afford to guard and shepherd them along. The simplest method of disposal was to kill them. But even killing was difficult once the hordes of prisoners had been brought in. The explicit order to kill captives was not actually given out, but it was the general course of action indicated by the top command.
The soldiers’ fury increased all the more as fleeing Chinese fighters tore off their uniforms and blended into the civilian population.
As Cipris notes, “the narrative of Soldiers Alive drives toward a violent conclusion that does not entirely take place”—the rest of the massacre in Nanjing. But Ishikawa makes the atrocity comprehensible, even if his soldier-interviewees kept him unaware of its extent.
The whitewash of the incident continues in Japan’s popular press. And early this year, the government approved a new textbook that downplays this and other wartime atrocities—a move that provoked anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, South Korea, and Vietnam.
Despite the book’s honesty about some of the horrors of war, the inevitable question for anyone reading Soldiers Alive today is: “How can somebody be in the middle of a massacre without realizing it?”
Modern-day Japanese novelist Makota Oda recently provided some insight when he contrasted how things look from “the doing side of war” with the view from the “downside.” In these terms, Ishikawa interviewed those who were on the doing side, and he wanted to believe them. This is a point to keep in mind when we hear the next reports about an assault on some faraway Fallujah.
Professional cooker of books
John Perkins
CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004
264 pages $25
Review by MARTIN SMITH
JOHN PERKINS’ exposé, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, reveals the sordid underbelly of Corporate America and its ties to U.S. foreign policy, exposing a world of CIA assassinations, money laundering, sex work, slave labor, and corruption at the heart of global capitalism.
Recruited to work as an economist at Chas T. Main, Inc. in 1968 while serving in the Peace Corps in Ecuador, Perkins soon learned what his real job was. Main was no ordinary consulting firm, but rather an institution—not unlike many other corporations with foreign ties, Perkins suggests—that had covert ties to the National Security Agency, the country’s largest spy organization.
Perkins’ job was to be an “economic hit man” or EHM, as such workers call themselves. EHMs work toward two main goals. One, to manufacture data and reports that speculate great returns for business development in a given country as a means to justify huge loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. And two, through such unpayable loans, these countries were to be bankrupted and eternally indebted so they would remain in the sphere of U.S. influence.
Perkins’ phony forecasts for economic development in the 1970s and 1980s ensured loans to finance massive infrastructure projects—to be contracted to companies like Bechtel and Halliburton, the current “rebuilders” of Iraq.
Starting in Indonesia in 1971, as U.S. rulers realized they were losing the war in Vietnam, Perkins began his first mission. Indonesia, with its untapped oil reserves and large Muslim population, was seen as a key player both in preventing the spread of communist influence in Southeast Asia and in setting an example of success that might have repercussions in other oil-rich countries in the Middle East.
Perkins’ role was to cook the books and predict massive potential for development so that U.S. contractors could get a piece of the pie through guaranteed contracts from the Asian Development Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Indonesia, while at the same time serving U.S. foreign policy.
Perkins quickly rose to fame within the inner circle of EHMs, and his services were sought after for work in other countries such as Saudi Arabia, Panama, and Ecuador. While such schemes proved extremely profitable to the U.S. and local elites, the story of poverty and degradation for the indigenous populations reveals the underside of the U.S. empire. According to Perkins, 24,000 people die daily from starvation, and the cost of servicing Third World debt was more than $375 billion per year as of 2004—more than all Third World spending on health and education combined.
If an EHM fails, says Perkins, the “jackals” —CIA assassins—move in for the kill. During Perkins’ time as an EHM, the jackals sank their teeth into two leaders who stepped beyond the permissible.
The first victim was the democratically elected president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldós (1979–1981). Though widely viewed as left-wing, his actual policies were more conservative than his rhetoric, including a hydrocarbons policy that made false promises to share Ecuadorian petroleum riches with the poor. Nonetheless, Roldós represented a thorn in the U.S. and oil companies’ plans. And as such, he died in a mysterious plane crash in 1981.
Soon after, Panama’s General Omar Torrijos died in a similar cryptic plane crash. Torrijos ruled through a mixture of nationalism and populism, but he was best known in the U.S. for negotiating the Panama Canal treaties with Jimmy Carter. The terms of the 1977 treaty would have given full control of the canal to Panama by 2000.
Perkins suggests that segments of the U.S. military ruling clique were incensed by provisions of the treaty that forced the closing of the School of the Americas and the U.S. Southern Command’s tropical warfare center in Panama—schools infamous for training Latin America’s death squads. The deaths of Roldós and Torrijos proved that if an EHM couldn’t get the job done, then the jackals would have no problem cleaning up.
If even the jackals fail, says Perkins, the armed forces can be used as well—from the Panama invasion in 1989 to the current conflict in Iraq. Perkins suggests that Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez’s thumbing his nose at the U.S. may provide a pretext for the next U.S. military attack, since the jackals have failed to remove him through a coup and a recall vote.
Like the testimony of other whistle-blowers, Confessions is weakest in its -analysis of the source of the problems that he helped to create. He tends to blame imperialism on Republican administrations alone. But while we shouldn’t look to Perkins to explain where imperial policy comes from, he pro-vides a revealing look at how it’s carried out.
“Friends” of Armenia
Peter Balakian
The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response
HarperCollins, 2004 (hardcover 2003)
528 pages $15
Review by JOE ALLEN
DURING THE First World War, the dying Ottoman Empire tried to destroy its Armenian population. This genocidal policy killed about half of the 3 million Armenians who lived within the Empire’s borders. To this very day, the Turkish government denies that any genocide took place, despite the fact that almost all of Turkey’s NATO allies have formally recognized the Armenian genocide, with one notable exception—the United States.
The current position of the U.S. government is in sharp contrast to its position in the years right before and during the Armenian genocide, when they attacked the Constantinople government for its murderous policy toward the Armenian minority. What accounted for the change in U.S. policy after the war? For Peter Balakian, in his book The Burning Tigris, it was the “post–World War I power alliance with Kemal Ataturk’s new Turkish Republic, and the American drive for oil in the Middle East, [that] led to the abandonment of Armenia.”
Balakian brings to light the oppression suffered by the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, particularly from the 1890s onward—first under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, then under the successor “Young Turk” regime, which committed the genocide during the First World War.
One of the most interesting and disturbing chapters conveys the eerie parallels between the Armenian genocide and the future Nazi Holocaust.
Balakian also documents the thirty-year campaign by prominent Americans to “save Armenia”—also beginning in the 1890s—which ultimately failed. The failure of Armenian rescue had terrible implications for the future. The abandonment of the Armenians convinced Hitler that he would get the same non-response to exterminating European Jewry. Hitler is reported to have said on the eve on the holocaust: “Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Why did the various campaigns to “save Armenia” fail so miserably? While Balakian understands that the ultimate reason for the abandonment of the Armenians was the scramble for oil after the war, he avoids critically analyzing the political motivation behind the various Armenian rescue campaigns. Lurking just beneath the surface of great concern and outrage at the oppression of the Armenians was a greater concern for furthering the interests of American imperialism.
The Ottoman Empire, at the height of its influence, spanned most of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of southeastern Europe. But it was in decline throughout much of the nineteenth century. The various European imperialist countries circled around the empire like hungry wolves picking off parts of it as the century wore on, beginning with the British support for Greek independence in the 1820s. The French seized Algeria, the Italians took Libya, and the British got the jewel in the crown of the Ottoman Empire—Egypt—while Russia pressed in from the east.
The British, the Russians and, later, the Americans whipped up public support for aggressive policies toward the Ottoman Empire by highlighting the oppression of Christians by the Constantinople government. This campaign began with the slaughter of Bulgarian Christians in the 1870s and then the persecution of Armenians from the 1880s onward. While it is undoubtedly true that Christians were persecuted, the vast majority of people that the Ottoman Empire oppressed were Arabs and fellow Muslims.
Who were the “friends” of Armenia in the United States and what were they really after? Let’s look at a few.
Woodrow Wilson, president during the First World War, was one of them. Balakian says that Wilson was motivated by “moral idealism” in his concern for the treatment of the Armenians. However, Wilson was a notorious racist who extended Jim Crow into the nation’s capital while president. He watched D.W. Griffith’s racist film about reconstruction, Birth of a Nation, and described it as “History written with lightning.” He also invaded Mexico in a effort to crush the Mexican Revolution. Wilson was clearly not a supporter of the oppressed of the world.
Former president Theodore Roosevelt wanted Wilson to declare war on the Ottoman Empire to “save the Armenians.” Yet, Roosevelt was, in Balakian’s own words, an “Anglo-Saxon supremacist”—and a major architect of American imperialism from the Spanish-American War to the theft of the Panama Canal, plus a whole host of examples of “gunboat diplomacy.”
At the 1924 Democratic Convention, Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison attacked the Republican administration for abandoning Wilson’s mandate over Armenia, saying “Show this administration an oil well and it will show you a foreign policy.” Sounds like a good criticism until you find out that, not only was Harrison another terrible racist, but he opposed every effort to pass anti-lynching laws.
Walter Lippman, a liberal who co-founded the New Republic, spelled out clearly the politicians’ motivation for playing up the oppression of the Armenians. Americans, he wrote, wouldn’t fight for other countries’ imperial interests, but “they will fight for justice whether it is in Macedonia, or in Turkey.”
What all these “friends of Armenia” had in common was their loyalty to American imperialism. With “friends” like these, it’s not so surprising that the Armenians were abandoned to the horrible fate.
According to Balakian, “The Armenian question emerged, in some ways uniquely, as a humanitarian project at a time when imperialist designs were governing most American international interventions.” But it really was not so unique. During the long history of American imperialism, “humanitarian crises” have either been ignored or used by the U.S. government to further its own interests. The usual losers have been those who were suffering the most, such as the Armenians.
Chronicles of the one-sided class war
Jim Lardner and David A. Smith, eds.
INEQUALITY MATTERS:
The Growing Economic Divide in America and its Poisonous Consequences
The New Press, 2005
328 pages $26
Review by SHERRY WOLF
WARREN BUFFETT, the world’s second wealthiest human being according to Forbes, is pithy about the new Gilded Age of inequality, “If there was a class war,” he says, “my class won.” From the evidence summoned in the essays compiled in Inequality Matters, Buffett’s got a point.
Even the Buffetts of yesteryear—the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Mellons—could not have imagined the wholesale theft by their class that’s taken place over the last twenty-five years. No matter the social or economic gauge—income, education, health care, taxes, retirement—the rich in the U.S. today are inconceivably wealthy compared to the rest of us.
What’s more, they have raided the public coffers and snatched away the health, aspirations, and lives of American workers in order to claim their bounty. How else could 28,000 now “outearn” 96 million of us?
In essays compiled by activists, academics, and liberal think-tank policy wonks, Inequality Matters presents damning proof of the crisis of inequality in the U.S. today.
As for class mobility, fuhgeddaboutit. Children born to those of the bottom quintile of Americans have precisely a 7 percent chance of catapulting themselves from Wal-Mart to the boardroom. While those born at the top, as the saying goes about George W. Bush, are born on third base and believe they’ve hit a triple.
Sure, the average American household has more—and cheaper—gadgets and gizmos that have become necessary in our overworked lives. But due to layoffs and a lack of child and health care, those same households are each carrying a staggering $36,400 in consumer debt.
As Hurricane Katrina so eloquently expressed, being Black and poor in this country can kill you—and it’s gotten more deadly. In the mid-twentieth century, Black babies died at 1.2 times the rate of white ones before their first birthday. By 2002, the ratio was 2.4 to 1. Federal government researchers measure the disparities in minority mortality rates to white death rates in “excess deaths,” in other words, how many more Blacks died who would not have if they’d been white. In 1940, it was 66,000; by 1999, it was at least 100,000. “That’s the equivalent of one plane crash—with no survivors—occurring every day.”
Where Inequality Matters often falters, however, is in analyzing and advising those concerned with why the system has failed so miserably and what to do about it. In one essay by researcher Eric Wanner that asks if inequality could be a “self-perpetuating trend,” he not only advances the false proposition that white-collar workers benefited off the backs of blue-collar workers—debunked by facts elsewhere in the book—but seems to blame the poor for their abandonment of the voting booth. Given the open collusion of both political parties in creating the crisis, it’s hardly surprising that most workers and poor people have simply rejected politicians altogether.
In another essay, “Who’s the Elite? Turning the Tables on Corporate Conservatives,” the author repeats the well-worn theme of arch-conservatives that lefties are simply elitist latté-drinking snobs. The proof? Progressives supposedly repel workers by insisting that “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot”—as accurate a statement as any—and that workers and poor people lost out in the 2004 election due to “guns, gays and God.”
Surely some progressives are elitists—those that insist workers are too dumb or right wing to oppose the war or accept gay equality come to mind. The very same middle-class elitists who insisted that the fate of humanity rested in voting for the prowar and pro-corporate Boston Brahmin, John Kerry, in 2004.
Inequality Matters is at its most powerful where it describes the groaning disparities between those with bling and those without, and a few writers hit on the systemic cause. As Bill Moyers writes in his Introduction, “The middle class and working poor are told that what’s happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand.’ This is a lie.”
Immigrants under suspicion
Tram Nguyen
Foreword by Edwidge Danticat
WE ARE ALL SUSPECTS NOW: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11
Beacon Press, 2005
208 pages $14
Review by MANIJEH MORADIAN
THIS BOOK provides the harrowing details of lives turned upside down—or, in some cases, destroyed completely—through the personal testimonies from individual Pakistanis, Haitians, Mexicans, and Somalis who have been targeted since September 11.
A Somali man caught up in the Islamaphobic witch-hunts compares his experience in the U.S. to the refugee camps in Kenya from which he escaped. “There were flies everywhere,” Abdullah Osman said of the county jail in Oklahoma where he was detained for three months out of his nearly two-year imprisonment. “There were 75 or 80 people in one room. It was worse than any refugee camp. I saw people vomit blood.”
With chapters on Muslim communities in Brooklyn and Minneapolis, as well as one called “Crisis at the Border” about growing vigilante violence in the Southwest, Tram Nguyen shows how anti-terrorist hysteria has affected all immigrants.
In a chapter called “The New Racial Profiling,” Nguyen discusses the way racism pits oppressed groups against each other. He notes that a poll taken immediately after September 11 showed 71 percent of Blacks in favor of profiling Arabs while “the number of Black men in prison now matches the number of men enslaved before the Civil War.”
The scapegoating of immigrants in times of war is nothing new, and Nguyen sees the current round-ups as part of a long American tradition that includes the anti-immigrant Palmer Raids of 1919 and the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during the Second World War.
He also points out that the laws requiring mandatory detention for immigration violations, as well as many other provisions that make today’s xenophobic crackdown possible, were put in place under Democratic President Bill Clinton.
He argues that the destruction of welfare, the strengthening of the criminal justice system, and anti-immigrant legislation pushed through during the 1990s set the stage for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FBI, and now the Department of Homeland Security to wreak havoc on the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people, who suddenly became suspects simply because of their race or religion after September 11.
Among the shattered dreams of so many immigrant families who came to this country to find a better life, there is also cause for hope among the many voices included in this book. The profiles of activists like Bobby Khan of the Coney Island Avenue Project and Aarti Shahani of Families for Peace show that, even while their families and communities are under siege, it is possible for those targeted to fight back.
Separate and unequal
The Shame of the Nation
The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
Jonathan Kozol
Crown Publishers, 2005
416 pages $25
Review by SARAH KNOPP
FOR HIS new book, Jonathan Kozol visited more than seventy schools across America to describe the state of public education in the voices of the real experts—students and their teachers. He visited my classroom one afternoon and had the following conversation with my students, which is recounted in the book.
Mireya suddenly began to cry. “I don’t want to take hairdressing. I didn’t need sewing, either. I know how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I’m trying to go to college. I don’t need to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for something else.”
“What would you rather take?” [Kozol] asked.
“I wanted to take an AP class,” she answered.
Mireya’s sudden tears elicited a strong reaction from one of the boys who had been silent up to now. A thin and dark-eyed student, named Fortino, with long hair down to his shoulders who was sitting on the left side of the classroom, he turned to Mireya.
“Listen to me,” he said. “The owners of the sewing factories need laborers. Correct?”
“I guess they do,” Mireya said.
“It’s not going to be their own kids, right?”
“Why not?” another student asked.
“So they can grow beyond themselves,” Mireya answered quietly. “But we remain the same.”
“You’re ghetto,” said Fortino, “‘so we send you to the factory.”
These students recognize with sharp clarity that they would never be invited to attend the same schools as the children of their parents’ bosses. Schools have been resegregating for twelve straight years, so that “the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased to a level lower than in any year since 1968.”
Gary Orfield and the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University show that two million students attend these “apartheid schools” (a term used for schools where 99 to 100 percent of the student body is non-white). In addition, “almost three fourths of black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority.”
Kozol says that, “the four most segregated states, according to the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois, and California. In California and New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.”
The apartheid schools, driven by the testing and standardization mania, emphasize obedience and order. Kozol describes elementary schools where silent lunches have been implemented, and students spend at least thirty minutes a day “lining up.” Teachers become accountants and managers. Standards must be posted on the boards. Students must be labeled “Level Ones” at worst, or “Level Fours” at best, according to their reading abilities. These schools are run on the corporate model of efficiency, and they stress teaching corporate concepts to young children. They are given jobs like Homework Collection Manager, for example, and get paid in fake money for correct answers.
“ALL CHILDREN CAN LEARN!” the advocates for this [testing and accountability] agenda say hypnotically, as if the tireless reiteration of this slogan could deliver to low-income children the same clean and decent infrastructure and the amplitude of cultural provision by experienced teachers that we give to the children of the privileged. If the officials who repeat this incantation honestly believe all kids can learn, why aren’t they fighting to make sure these kids can learn in the same good schools that their own children attend?… [We] shortchange the victim, and then tell him he can “learn to his potential” if he and his teachers just try hard enough.…
At an early morning assembly in Seattle’s Thurgood Marshall School, the entire student body stood and chanted “I have confidence, I can learn” exactly 30 times. Similar sessions of self-exhortation are familiar at innumerable inner-city schools: “Yes I can, I know I can!” “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” In some schools, these chantings are accompanied by a rhythmic clapping of the hands or snapping of the fingers or by stamping on the floor.
The book is filled with stories about the psychological impact of the accountability craze. Kindergartners cry and throw up out of fear if they don’t understand the tests that they are supposed to take. Administrators ruin their health trying to live up to promises to meet “Annual Yearly Progress” testing benchmarks. In one story, a New York administrator dies from an asthma attack exacerbated by an extreme level of stress to meet “measurable” goals.
The book is compelling because it gives examples of teachers, students, and administrators who fight with dignity—and frustration—not to let these policies rip joy and art out of the school setting. Kozol’s conversations with children and educators contain more truth than all the studies of the Department of Education.
The regimen of testing and drilling in the worst urban schools is justified by the argument that these “no excuses” approaches will narrow the achievement gap between white students and students of color. In fact, however, drill-and-kill methodology has been dominant since about 1995, and there is a “widening achievement gulf in math and reading levels between minority high school students and their white contemporaries—a devastating five-year gap between the races.”
How did it get this bad? Kozol argues that education is essentially a “States Rights” issue. Education and civil rights advocates have largely been reduced to fighting for education as a state-by-state legal strategy because there is no federal guarantee of access to education. In recent cases, such as the Williams case brought by the ACLU (and settled in 2004) against the State of California and several others like it across the country, plaintiffs have not demanded desegregation, nor even equity in segregated education. Things have gotten so bad that the best that can be hoped for, say the litigators, is some kind of a “floor” beneath which segregated schools should not be allowed to fall.
He might have asked, what ever happened to the civil rights movement?
Kozol reports on conversations with many people who are trying to grapple with solutions to the crisis. “A political movement is a necessary answer,” says Gary Orfield. “We cannot look to courts to do it in the present age. We cannot look to the two political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, to do it. We need to reach out to a broader section of the nation to initiate a struggle.”
A columnist for Time magazine offers “a radical proposal…revive the Civil Rights Movement.” A teacher says, “We need our teachers marching in the streets.”
Kozol implicitly endorses these approaches, as well as everyday resistance. School administrators, teachers, and parents can collectively decide to try to step “out of the box” of the testing and accountability phase. Some neighborhoods and schools could be desegregated voluntarily with relative ease. After all, 60 percent of young adults surveyed report that “the federal government ought to make sure that public schools are integrated.”
Shame of the Nation rejects the idea that desegregation is unrealistic and unnecessary. It cites several examples of small-scale voluntary desegregation programs which, when fought for, enjoy community support. Prince Edward County, Virginia, Boston, Milwaukee, and St. Louis have integration programs and boast higher achievement for students of color within those programs.
“[The St. Louis program] works, so it will be killed,” says Kozol. “Unlike charter schools, which do not work and will be expanded.”
Access to decent education is one of the most visibly decayed edifices of the American Dream. Undocumented workers, people of color, working-class American parents, no less than the middle class, hope that education will open up not only doors of opportunity for their children but also doors of enlightenment and awakening.
Kozol quotes W.E.B. DuBois. “‘It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream’ to know ‘something was vanquished that deserved to live. All this is bitter hard.’” The fight for education will be a huge arena of struggle, and Shame of the Nation helps equip us for that struggle. It’s a must-read.
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