Revolution #61, September 17 2006
George Bush has spent the past two weeks on an ideological and
political rampage. The war-time rhetoric and crusader-posturing is
back, and with a vengeance-this time aimed not only at shoring up and
possibly escalating the occupation of Iraq, but also at attacking Iran.
The fascist tone and measures are likewise being ratcheted up-with Bush
demanding that Congress overturn a Supreme Court decision that put
impediments in the way of the government openly torturing people, and
legally lock in place the ability of the government to torture and
remove basic legal rights from anyone it deems to be a “terrorist” and
to spy on millions of Americans. And, once again, those who oppose this
find themselves with no “official voice” in Washington, as the
Democrats refuse to take on either the war-mongering preparations or
the horrendous legislation now being shoved through Congress.
Anyone
who thought that Bush and the people around him planned to spend two
years as “lame ducks” needs to think again. Anyone who thought, or
still thinks, that “they wouldn’t dare”,” needs urgently to understand:
these people will dare. They are daring. And they are
saying as much, in the loudest possible tones. They are answering, you
see, to a higher authority: not “God,” but the imperatives of the
imperialist system that they (and the Democratic Party as well) serve,
and that requires that the U.S. not be seen to lose a war nor to be
defied by an “upstart power” in what for them is a strategic region of
the world.
Escalating the War(s)
The
Bush regime began their offensive with speeches by Rumsfeld, Cheney,
and Bush at the end of August. In Salt Lake City, on August 31, Bush
called for continuing the occupation of Iraq. Last winter’s talk of
“drawing down” U.S. troops has now receded into the background, and
John McCain-among others-has recently been calling for a serious
increase in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. (Democratic talk of
“setting a withdrawal date” is so vague and filled with hedges as to be
meaningless, except for its function of clouding the issues and
attempting to reassure people that those who purport to represent them
are “doing something.”)
Then Bush turned up his next
card: “This summer’s crisis in Lebanon has made it clearer than ever
that the world now faces a grave threat from the radical regime in
Iran.” Let’s pause here to note that the “crisis” to which Bush so
blandly refers is nothing less than the Israeli military assault on
Lebanon, in which nearly 1300 Lebanese people were killed and nearly a
million made homeless. This war had been in the works for a year,
jointly planned by the U.S. and Israel, and was apparently viewed by
many in the Bush Regime as a dress rehearsal for a similar attack on
Iran. And Bush’s use of the term “grave threat” to refer to Iran is
itself a grave threat, echoing as it does Bush’s characterization of
the Hussein regime in the run-up to that invasion.
Bush
went on to accuse Iran of “pursuing nuclear weapons,” and concluded
that “there must be consequences for Iran’s defiance, and we must not
allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.” Of course, for all Bush’s
scare-mongering about Iranian “pursuit” of nuclear weapons, Seymour
Hersh revealed last April that the Bush Regime has been actively
considering using nuclear weapons against Iran. Reuters news service
reported on April 18: “U.S. President George W. Bush refused on Tuesday
to rule out nuclear strikes against Iran if diplomacy fails to curb the
Islamic Republic’s atomic ambitions. Asked if options included planning
for a nuclear strike, Bush replied, “All options are on the table.””
Almost
as important in all this has been Bush’s casting of the current and
possibly future U.S. wars as part of a titanic global struggle against
“Islamo-fascism.” This enables him to evoke memories of World War 2 and
to broaden the scope of his targets to every Islamic force that poses
an obstacle to U.S. imperial plans. It takes those he aims to appeal to
out of the unpleasant contemplation of the situation in Iraq-the
continuing murderous U.S. occupation and, now, the terrible sectarian
war between Sunni and Shia Muslims-and into dreams of an apocalyptic
showdown where everything gets sorted out and U.S. domination is
restored. It also provides the justification for what Bush supporters like William Kristol predict will be a war against Iran in early 2007.
As
we have pointed out, and as we will continue to stress, such a war
would be DISASTROUS. It would be a humanitarian disaster, with
thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands killed and with
unpredictable consequences and ramifications for the whole region. And
it would be a political disaster, continuing the deadly dance in which
U.S. imperialism on the one hand and the dead-end reactionary movements
of Islamic fundamentalism reinforce each other as the only ideological
and political alternatives available to hundreds of millions.
More
than a few people brush this off. “The Bush people wouldn’t do it,”
some people say. “They don’t have the forces or the political support,
and it would be too dangerous, too filled with unforeseeable
consequences.” This kind of thinking ignores what a spate of recent
books about the war against Iraq-Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, or Cobra II,
by Gordon and Trainor to take just two-illustrate: this regime does not
let the contemplation of possible negative consequences get in the way
of the urgency they feel to remake the world. It also ignores the fact
that no less a figure than John McCain-who, remember, is now positioned
as the “responsible opposition”-has called for both raising the level
of troops in Iraq and going after Iran, should that government refuse
to end its nuclear program. And finally, it ignores the concrete
preparations being made by the regime, their exposure by people like
Hersh, and the lack of any high-level political opposition to this.
Making Fascism Legal
Last
week witnessed yet another chilling spectacle-Bush’s announcement,
complete with the tone and body language of a braggart, that yes, the
U.S. had been holding people in secret prisons and his demand that
Congress now ratify his policies that allow torture and that deny what
has come to be seen over centuries as “due process” in courts of law,
as well as approving what has been up to now his utterly
outside-the-law programs of massive surveillance.[See “Bush Calls for Fascist Changes to Laws on Trials and Torture.”]
This
is NOT a mere “election-year ploy” as some maintain (though the
elections do figure strongly into this whole offensive-a point we”ll
address later). This marks a very serious LEAP in what has been a
trajectory toward fascism. Bush is now demanding to lock in as law the
outrageous illegal practices of his administration. This is an
important part of his program: permanently changing what had been
certain “core” elements of American society. Some of these-the right of
the accused to see the evidence being used to convict them, and to
defend against that evidence-have been around since before the U.S. was
even founded. The right to be free of a search without probable cause a
crime has been committed-and wiretapping is a search-goes back to the
Magna Carta in 1215! The abolition of torture was a core demand of the
bourgeois revolutions of the 1700s and 1800s, and the U.S. Constitution
itself forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” In actual practice, the
U.S. bourgeoisie has often construed these rights very narrowly and
flagrantly violated them, sometimes in extreme fashion-the torture of
suspects by the Chicago police during the 1980s and 90s, for instance,
was just admitted this past summer. And if you go back to the 1960s,
thousands of people had their homes illegally searched and their phones
illegally tapped, and the revolutionary leader Fred Hampton was
murdered while he slept in his Chicago bedroom, by a joint operation of
the local and federal governments. And there was torture as well by
U.S. troops in Vietnam, amply documented in news photos of the times.
But it is something else when things that were once admitted to be violations of the law, even if done by the authorities, becomes
the law. Such steps are not lightly taken, and signal that the core of
the ruling class has agreed that it is time to go to new extremes and
to actually remake the legitimating norms of society to accommodate
those extremes. This amounts to taking some of the moves toward fascism
from the shadows into the light of day, with Congress-including the
Democratic leadership-signing their names in blood on the dotted line.
The Elections
We
said above that this was not an election-year stratagem. You don’t
prepare the ground for a new war and remake what had been historical
norms of U.S. law to defend a few seats in Congress.
But
you do, if you are the Bush Regime, take advantage of the politicized
atmosphere of the elections to marshal public opinion for radical
changes in extreme times. Case in point: 2002. Bush campaigned hard on
the need to go to war with Iraq and the need to clamp down at home (the
so-called “homeland security” bill). But this was not so much about
winning those elections (the verdicts of which are generally decided
elsewhere anyway), as it was one part of a bigger agenda: to actually
prepare public opinion for exactly what he said he was going to
do-launch an unprovoked war against Iraq and ratchet up the repressive
apparatus. He’s gone back to that playbook this year, and no one can
afford to ignore that pattern.
During that electoral
season, the Democrats refused for the most part to oppose Bush’s
saber-rattling. They even tried to outdo Bush on the need to bulk up
the repressive apparatus. Again, this was not due to spinelessness or
poor political judgment: it flowed from their essential agreement,
based on their class nature and interests as imperialist
politicians, with Bush’s objectives. The result was a war for empire in
Iraq that has left over 100,000 dead in its wake and a regimen of
torture, unlawful detention and surveillance, and the destruction of
fundamental rights at home and abroad. And further: the acceleration of
a fascist, theocratic trajectory for U.S. society.
And
what are the Democratic leaders doing now? Complaining that Bush and
his people aren’t giving them the proper credit for supporting the “war
on terror.” Remaining silent, if not supporting, the Bush course on
Iran. Staying mute on the question of legalizing torture and removing
due process, and letting John McCain be “the opposition” to this. To
judge by last fall’s brouhaha around legislation that was going to
supposedly ban torture (remember that?), this means that McCain will
make some high-profile petty amendments, then gut these in a backroom
deal, and finally and quietly allow the whole thing to be nullified by
a presidential signing statement anyway.
Clearly, the
script for the next two months runs like this: at a time when Americans
have their attention turned to politics, the alternatives presented to
them will be about who will be “tougher” on Iran, who will fight the
war “better” in Iraq, and who will more efficiently and thoroughly
clamp down on people’s civil and legal rights. No matter who wins, the
net political effect of such an election campaign will be a mandate for
more war and more repression, with consequences likely to be even more
deadly and significantly more extreme than they were four years ago.
To
repeat, this is not a new script. This is something people have been
through-and gone for-before. And if you have, you have to ask yourself:
where has this led you? And now, where will more of the same lead you?
The reality is this: right now, anyone who confines or focuses their
political activity to electing Democrats must confront that this really
amounts to complicity with the direction things are headed. Wake the
hell up-and change course.
A Real Alternative Emerges
Thom
Hartman, an Air America radio personality speaking at the New York
World Can’t Wait meeting this past week, likened the situation in the
U.S. to Germany, 1937. He was far from the only person to draw this
sort of comparison. There is a growing feeling that this trajectory
must be stopped and that to do that, one must identify and confront,
fully, where it could very possibly lead. The time for mincing words,
if ever such time existed, is by now long since over. There is a
sentiment gaining momentum and confidence-and it is a sentiment based
on reality-that the window could close, and quickly; that one must act,
now.
In this light, it was very revealing that the August 31 Boston Globe editorialized against both Rumsfeld and the recent World Can’t Wait ad in the New York Times for using the word “fascism.” First, it must be said that the Globe mischaracterized the Times
ad, by making it appear as if the ad only concerned the racist attack
concentrated in the Bush Regime’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and
that same regime’s assault on the right to abortion. While extremely
important issues in their own right, the genocidal elements
concentrated in Katrina and the patriarchal attempts to severely
control women’s reproductive rights form parts of a larger package
which includes-in the words of the ad in question-“endless wars,”
“torture,” and “theocracy.” And in fact, the wars of aggression and the
evisceration of political and legal rights, including the
criminalization and persecution of whole sections of the people, along
with the increasing imposition of a repressive ideology (in this case,
fundamentalist Christianity)-all of which have been carried out by the
Bush regime and which continue to accelerate-are all things that people
rightly associate with fascism. But the Globe editorial writers left out all other “inconvenient truths.”
Beyond that, the Globe editorial board evidently feared that the Times ad had struck a nerve, and hoped to quiet any feeling among their mainly liberal readership that things are heading in an extreme-even fascist-direction, by equating such thinking to Rumsfeld. But it is also significant that the Globe
implicitly cast these-the Bush Regime (personified in Rumsfeld) and
World Can’t Wait-as the two potentially contending forces. There is
work to do to realize that potential-but the reality of that potential
is beginning to emerge.
A week later, on September 7, some of what the Globe
seems to fear took a big step toward coming into being. Over 1200
people attended organizing meetings in over 50 cities to make October 5
a nationwide day of resistance to bring this to a halt. The
size and breadth of the turnout, the prominence and spirit of the
speakers, and the plan put forth by the World Can’t Wait leadership
have made their vision for October 5 assume a whole new dimension of
possibility.
This is something very important to build
off. The extreme necessity facing people, underlined by the past two
weeks of the Bush offensive, as well as the growing possibility of
actually doing something real about it, must be made known to millions
more in the days ahead. They must hear, and be won and organized to act on, the truth of what is said in the essay on worldcantwait.org entitled “October 5: There is a Way! There is a Day!“:
“On
October 5, 2006, on the basis of the Call, the World Can’t Wait-Drive
Out the Bush Regime!, people throughout the country will be stepping
forward in a day of mass resistance. The breadth, the depth, the impact
and the power of that day depends not only on those in The World Can’t
Wait organization, and others, who are already organizing for this
day-it depends on you, on us, on all those who have been hoping and
searching for a means to do something that will really make a
difference.“If we fail to act to make this a reality,
then it will definitely make a difference-in a decidedly negative way.
But if we take up the challenge to build for this, and then do take
history into our hands on that day, through political action on the
massive scale that is called for-it can make all the difference in the
world, in a very positive sense and for the possibility of a better
future for humanity.”