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CounterPunch
November
14, 2002
American
Journal
The Anti-War Movement and Its Critics:
Merle
Haggard Locates Osama; General Hitchens, Hie Thee to Fort Bragg;
Whose Left Is It Anyway?
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Do we have an antiwar movement? We're getting
there. We must be, because we're catching flak from the anti-anti
war movement, Light Infantry division, staffed by Marc Cooper,
Todd Gitlin, David Corn, and Christopher Hitchens.
Marc Cooper, like Gitlin, has carved
out a pleasant niche for himself, belaboring various left causes
from a position purporting to represent robust common sense.
It's a posture endearing to op-ed editors, particularly if there's
an insinuation that somewhere, way back, the author had left
credentials. It's fair to raise the issue of credentials, since
the prime line of attack by the Light Infantry is to belabor
the credentials of the antiwar left, as dumbos, catspaws, dictator-lovers,
cultists, practitioners of unmentionable vices.
Back of the start of 2000 Cooper publicly
prayed to God to make that same year "free of Mumia".
How precisely the year would be liberated from this man on Death
Row he tastefully left unstated. In the jibes at the Mumia cult
that followed Cooper hiccuped bashfully that Mumia "probably"
didn't get a fair trial, then suppressed important facts about
the fatal encounter between and the police officer , or even
that the Mumia "cult" probably saved his life by drawing
attention to Mumia's situation in the mid-80s when no one cared
a whit.
In a recent Los Angeles Times column
Copper prays once more, this time for "an effective, attractive
and moral opposition". And how can the antiwar opposition
become effective, attractive and moral? Cooper's recipe: condone
the US rationale for continuing sanctions; accept as framework
for discussion of the war and military action the rationales
offered by George Bush and his associates.
Cooper derides Ramsey Clark for calling
the sanctions "genocidal". Would you march with Clark
or Cooper? If you are hesitating read Joy Gordon's chilling description
in the November Harper's of how the US has been applying sanctions
designed to kill children in Iraq, then make up your mind.
Todd Gitlin has made a career out of
issuing advisories about the "hard left", the "Old
Left" and other. Though Gitlin usually pretends that he's
trying to counsel the left towards improved conduct under the
Gitlin Seal of Approval, I don't think he has much interest in
the left, as anything other than raw material for his unctuous
punditry.
In a recent Mother Jones Gitlin reports
that at a rally outside the UN he spotted placards saying "No
Sanctions, No Bombing". Snappy, you say. Exactly the message
a peace movement might want to get across. Gitlin disagrees.
His preferred placard would be the most heavily footnoted text
since Lynn White Jr's history of the stirrup. Like Cooper, Gitlin
craves for respectability which means that he wants the placard
to make it clear that (a) Saddam bears responsibility for his
country's plight, (b), the bombings of Iraq since 1991 by the
US (tactfully described by Gitlin, echoing the DoD, as "no
fly zone sorties") are okay. Tough placard to design, and
pretty heavy, if you factor in the square footage required for
Gitlin's text.
David Corn's most substantial piece of
work to date is The Blonde Ghost, which could described as a
not unsympathetic account of Ted Shackley, a CIA supervisor of
one bloodbath after another, most notably the Phoenix program.
Corn has now taken to issuing cop-style intelligence reports
reminiscent of FBI field advisories to Hoover, on the Workers
World Party. stigmatizing the Workers World Party for its nefarious
role in the DC and Bay Area antiwar demonstrations.
No need to dwell any longer on Hitchens, at least as a "left"
commentator, speaking in good activist faith. When Hitchens libels
the left (in modes excellently pilloried by Katha Pollitt) he
now does so as one who has foresworn any left credential, and
who is new born as a neocon, dispensing to the Washington Post
anti-left prose whose frothing crudity eerily echoes that of
his erstwhile butt, Norman Podhoretz.
A recent Hitchens piece in Slate attacks
the term "chicken hawks", while carefully avoiding
the main point of its use now, which is to indicate that many
of the current civilian war-whoopers like Bush or Cheney shirked
the call to duty back in the Vietnam period but are mustard keen
on deploying others to the front lines. It now seems that G.
Bush was an actual deserter from the National Guard. It's well
documented on www.awolbush.com: that George W. Bush never showed
up for National Guard duty for a period of approximately one
year, possibly more, in 1972-1973. Some definitions: AWOL, absent
for 30 days or less. Desertion, absent for more than 30 days
with evidence of no intent to return to duty.
General Hitchens invokes the "fairly
good pay" of the Armed Forces, a view he should impart personally
on his next tour of inspection at Fort Bragg, where members of
the Special Forces get $25,000 a year, which is probably less
than Hitchens' annual bar bill. As with Poddy, Hitchens' mind
appears to have become clouded by the fog of warwhooping. He
reviles his old chum Bob Kerrey, seemingly unaware that this
particular war criminal favors attacking Iraq, then states flatly
that "Lincoln became the first and last president to hear
shots fired in anger." While president? What about Madison,
fleeing the advancing troops commanded by Admiral Sir George
Cockburn? TR too if you count the angers and joys of the chase.
Hitchens invokes the "glorious Douglas McArthur". Is
this written with a straight face? Hard to know these days with
General Hitchens. He's offended that chickenhawk's original meaning
was that of preyer on young people. Reading the above-mentioned
article on sanctions, this seems appropriate.
So, having scouted out the anti-anti-war
movement, now we can ask, what sort of an antiwar movement do
we have?
Look back to the early 1960s. In 1962,
a full eight years after President Eisenhower had decreed secretly
that Ho Chi Minh could not be permitted to triumph in open elections,
the left was just beginning to educate itself about Vietnam.
When President Kennedy was sending the
first detachments of US troops to South Vietnam and setting the
stage for the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo
Dinh Diem there was scarcely the semblance of an antiwar movement.
In Oxford in 1962 I remember being incredulous when one of my
radical mentors, the historian Thomas Hodgkin, remarked to me
that the next big anti-imperial battleground would be Vietnam.
It wasn't until 1966 and 1967, that the
left, particularly the Socialist Workers Party, managed to stage
the big anti war rallies that that broke forever the pro-war
consensus, and set the stage for more radical actions. And by
then there was that potent fuel for an antiwar movement, the
draft, which prompted Stop the Draft Week.
By 1968 we had a worldwide anti-imperial
movement; we had the May-June upheavals in Paris; we very definitely
thought history was on our side. Not any more.
Today? We have the premonition of a big
antiwar movement. Like the SWP forty years ago, the Workers World
Party did much of the organizing of the recent demonstrations,
which doesn't mean the 150,000 or so who marched in the Bay Area
and in Washington DC are dupes of Karl Marx, Ramsey Clark and
Saddam Hussein, but merely that organizing big demonstrations
takes a lot of dedication, energy and experience. I have a dream,
said Martin Luther King, and so he did, but the Communists in
the south helped him put flesh on that dream as they did the
dreams of Rosa Parks.
Will there be a war with Iraq? To judge
by the amended US resolution rubber stamped by the UN Security
Council we can have one any time the commander in chief decrees
it, with February/March 2003 as probably the earliest practical
slot. A draft? No time soon. A calling up of the National Guard?
More likely, and already there are tens of thousands of reservists
on duty, many of them no doubt chafing at their condition.
And if George Bush lets loose the dogs
of war on the grounds that Saddam wouldn't submit to a full personal
cavity search, will we see a new age of protest? Certainly, if
the war goes on long enough and Americans get killed in large
numbers. There's a slab of the right that's denouncing America's
imperial wars. That wasn't happening in the early Sixties. If
the left could ever reach out to this right, which it's almost
constitutionally incapable of doing, we'll have something.
Merle Haggard
on Ashcroft and W's Colonoscopy
The night after the Democrats nose-dived I drove fifty miles
through the first storm of the fall to my local town of Eureka,
for a concert by Merle Haggard. Merle has a rap sheet for no-shows
and there'd been worrying talk about him canceling on this tour
because of a herniated disk. But at 9 pm there he was on the
stage with his band, The Strangers, walking a bit stiffly but
looking and sounding good.
When it comes to the big themes of love
and war and history nothing concentrates the mind like a few
songs by Merle, whose 1969 pro-war country anthem Okie from Muskogee
lambasted the dope-smoking hippie peaceniks and earned the former
resident of San Quentin a full pardon from Governor Ronald Reagan.
Sitting there in a white, mostly working
class audience even a tad older than the equally white crowd
listening to Bob Dylan in the Greek amphitheater in Berkeley
a few weeks ago, an obvious question bulked as large as the Stars
and Stripes hanging above Merle: had Merle changed since the
time when he riposted to the antiwar movement of the Sixties
with Muskogee and The Fighting Side of Me? Back to Merle.
Yes he has, as we already knew. Cheryl
Burns reported to CounterPunch this a few weeks ago from Kansas
City: "I saw Merle Haggard tonight in KC--great show. He
said something about 'so now we're in another war' and went on
to say he was still proud to be an American and all that, so
I was wondering just where he was headed. But then he said there
was nothing good about any war except the soldiers, sailors,
etc.
"Then he says, 'I think we should
give John Ashcroft a big
hand...(pause)...right in the mouth!' Went on to say, 'the
way things are going I'll probably be thrown in jail
tomorrow for saying that, so I hope ya'll will bail me out.'
Merle wasn't in this ripe form in Eureka,
but he dropped some hints. "Friends and conservatives",
he began, then he made a joke about George Bush's colonoscopy,
and the search for Osama bin Laden. "He's up there somewhere,"
Merle said somewhat cryptically, and the crowd wasn't quite sure
how to take it. Then he said off-handedly, without enthusiasm,
"Looks like we're in another war," and sang The Fighting
Side of Me.
At another concert, June a year ago ,
he was quoted by John Derbyshire in National Review online as
saying, "Look at the past 25 years we went downhill, and
if people don't realize it, they don't have their fucking eyes
on ... In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I
had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available
to an average citizen in America right now... God almighty, what
have we done to each other?"
Whose Left
Is It Anyway?
Coming from inside the Beltway in Washington
DC is Sam Smith's on-line Progressive Review. In the wake of
Hitchens' departure from the Nation and his foolish denunciations
of the left, Sam had some interesting reflections on what exactly
"the left" consists of, contrasting the "elite"
or old Marxist left with the colloquial, informal, spontaneous
left:
"I have always been far closer to
the idiomatic, colloquial left than to the more elite varieties
I have never gotten on that well with Hitchens' former pals in
the elite left because I never could find the time to straighten
out my paradigm. It turns out it wasn't all that important anyway,
because the people who made the difference were not the famous
talkers but the little known doers, ordinary people, who in Conrad's
phrase, for one brief moment did something out of the ordinary.
"They were people who had not studied
Marx and Hegel and couldn't tell a Trotskyite from a troll. But
they knew, in Pogo's words, when to 'stand on the piano and demand
outrage action.' These are the people of whom Carl Sandburg wrote:
'I am the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass. Do you know that
all the great work of this world is done through me? I am the
workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come
from me and the Lincolns. They die. and then I send forth more
Napoleons and Lincolns. . . Sometimes I growl, shake myself and
spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the people, learn to remember, when I, the People use
the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last
year, who played me for a fool--then there will be no speaker
in all the world say the name: "The People", with any
fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far off smile of derision.
The mob--The crowd--The mass--will arrive then.'
"Consistently, the East Coast shuttle
left from which Hitchens has departed has been indifferent about,
ignorant of, or even in opposition to the issues of the idiomatic,
colloquial left. The people who are changing the way other people
think about things are found scattered around the nation. And
when some of them came together in the most effective progressive
political organization of modern times--the Green Party--they
were not only not welcomed into the club, they were frequently
excoriated. And as for the critics of an Iraqi invasion, they
are typically just ordinary citizens who have learned without
the help of Ramsey Clark to be scared to death of what their
leaders are about to do to them.
"Hitchens and his ilk will continue
to have their little debates, all carefully framed in a manner
that excludes most of the people they claim to care about and
most of the people who actually produce change. It worked at
university and it works now. But it has little to do with either
America or the left as it really is."
I liked some of what Smith said about
the left and non-left, but I think his contrasting of the doctrinaire
sterility of failed old "left" with creative, non doctrinaire
spirited "real left" left a lot of the story untold.
In my years of going around the country
doing anti-intervention talks, fund-raisers, book tours etc,
etc, the first thing to notice is that there's a truly vast left
that is invisible to almost all east coast commentators. Church
people, labor people, public defenders, Lawyers Guild, faculty
people, farm people, radical greens, World Federalist types,
red diapered middle-agers, in almost every town. (And in every
town the left will tell you with gloomy pride how conservative
their town is. )
And in meeting after meeting you can
look at the audience and see older folk who were labor commies
in the 50s and who have certainly had their share of doctrinal
struggle and who have read Marx etc, and sixties vintage people
who might have fought their way through the RCP and out the other
side, and then younger people still who might have come aboard
in WTO wars and who read CounterPunch.
It's a rich geology that varies from
place to place. For example in one town in Wisconsin the two
most bustling left activists and organizers were both kind of
ex Revolutionary Communist Party. In the Deep South I've met
radical lawyers who are still the organizing backbone of their
communities who came down as Maoists in the 70s. In for the long
haul and lively and not deserving of Smith's misprision. A lot
of good organizers are still in left groups mainstreamers might
instinctively deride as fossilized Trots or Maoists or whatever.
Red-baiters like Corn may write long articles on the Nation site
about how the Workers World Party stage-managed the DC demo,
but so what? Corn's ideological forebears were redbaiting the
Commies for being behind the Civil Rights movement, which often
they were. Sectarians know how to organize. Someone has to do
it.
Sam was right in one thing: many of these,
especially the younger lot, couldn't give a toss about Hitchens.
I was reminded of this when I gave a speech in SF a few months
ago and derided Hitchens' positions and a lively young woman
in a left group asked me impatiently what was all the talk about
this "Clifford Hutchins". As for Hitchens, he parted
ways with anything decently radical long, long ago, as I occasionally
point out. My hope of course, which Jeffrey and I try to push
along in CounterPunch, is that the left should understand that
common cause can be made with many in the populist right who
take the Bill of Rights seriously. Ashcroft is doing his best
to help.
Yesterday's Features
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Totem
Thieves
Patrick Cockburn
America's
Saddam Obsession
Anthony Gancarski
Defending
MOM
Rick Giombetti
Wellstone
Assasinated?
The Onus is on the Conspiracy Theorists
Linda Heard
Horseman
Without a Horse
Debate Rages Over an Egyptian TV Series
Ben Roberts
Is It Possible to Underestimate Bush's Intelligence?
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- The Shafts of Death: Bush, Coal Mines, and Death
in the Tunnels;
- Speak Memory!: Carter and the Draft;
- Daniel Pipes' World: Smearing Pro-Arab Academics;
- Ashcroft's Gays: the War on Free Speech;
- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
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November 10,
2002
Ali Abunimah
Sharon's
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