An amazing and insightful speech by Professor Dennis Loo at the
“Meeting of the Minds” event in L.A. Loo is also the co-editor of the
book “Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney”.
An excerpt of the speech:
The battle for impeachment
therefore isn’t just about Bush/Cheney. It’s about the very nature of
our society and our world. We”re at a critical point in history, not
just in human history, but in the history of the planet. Because of the
complicity of the existing political leadership and opinion-makers in
our society, the true nature and magnitude of these dictatorial and
outright fascist moves have been concealed from the people.
Full Speech:
On October 5, 2006 after I got through speaking at the World
Can’t Wait (WCW) rally, a local TV network team interviewed me and the reporter
asked me where are all the students? I said, they”re doing stuff, but in my
mind I was thinking, damn it, this guy’s got a point. And then a couple months
ago I was meeting with a group of impeachment activists in Northern
California and the question of where the students and the campuses
were at came up. Why aren’t the campuses more actively engaged in this
political fight? Why has the political fight not yet become more two-sided? One
of the people there cited a survey he said was done recently of students that
found that students were really apathetic and really into getting stuff –
hooked into their iPods and so on. I pointed out that in China just before the
massive protests against Deng broke out in 1989, a similar survey was done that
found that students in China were really apathetic and just into getting
material things. And then, of course, seemingly out of nowhere, erupted these
gigantic protests involving millions. [For more on this, click
here to read my four part series on China 1989].
If you were paying attention, these protests didn’t just
materialize out of nowhere. There were signs that something like this was
possible, there were clues and there were some preliminary eruptions of smaller
numbers of students. So what are the signs now and what are the possibilities?
The Two Aspects
In my mind, there are two major aspects to this situation.
On the one hand, you have the people who are already convinced that removing
them from office is long overdue – 58% according to a Newsweek poll taken
January 24-25, 2007. By comparison, only 26% supported impeaching Clinton when he was
impeached. This large majority for impeaching Bush and Cheney is a strategic
factor very much in our favor. On the other hand, we”ve got the reality that
this 58% plus, while really, really huge, is still largely untapped.
The Bush regime has its hands on institutional power and the
cooperation of the Democratic Party leadership and the mainstream media. The
Democratic Party’s opposition to any real impeachment fight is being reflected
in the sharply lowered sights of many people who have been won over to the idea
that somehow impeachment’s a distraction and is some kind of vendetta. This has
blinded people from seeing the truly extreme and momentous nature of what Bush
and Cheney have been doing.
As I wrote in Impeach the
President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney), at no time in this
country’s history have the political institutions and the media been more
distant and more opposed to where the people are than they are today. How did
we get to this place and what’s it going to take to make a decisive
breakthrough to alter the political balance of forces?
If someone like
John Kerry or the New York Times were to call for impeachment the outpouring of
support from this nationwide would be mind-boggling. Of course, this isn’t happening and won’t happen absent
a very dramatic change in the political atmosphere. I want to get to the
question of how we can effect this dramatic change in the political dynamic, but
before I do it’s important to address what the Bush regime and what our
government are doing because these things set the stage and set the terms of
what we confront.
It is almost
impossible to overstate what they”re doing and how extreme it is. One of the
things I”ve been telling audiences that I”ve been speaking to since ITP came
out is how much worse the Bush/Cheney regime is than you think and how there is
no bottom to the pit that they represent. As bad as you think they are, the
more you find out, the more you realize that they are much, much more dangerous
and horrible than that. They”re fundamentally remaking what America is. As
WCW has pointed out, this is no mere swing of the pendulum. It’s a momentous
shift that has been underway, actually, for three decades, but has been put
into overdrive under Bush/Cheney.
When the
socialist bloc collapsed [beginning with Mao’s death in 1976 and ending with
the Soviet bloc’s collapse in the late 1980s], the US was left with no real rivals. It
was the sole remaining superpower. Globalization, which began in earnest about
30 years ago, was given a huge boost by the socialist camp’s demise. The
neocons, who represent the most aggressive, most cutting edge of the ruling
group, have a plan to fashion a New
American Century in which no one will be allowed to pose any threat to
their Empire. In order to accomplish this wildly ambitious program, they need
to knock down any barriers, de facto and de jure, that present any obstacles or
resistance to them. This includes much vaunted principles in the US
Constitution and precious civil liberties in the Bill of Rights.
This is why they
are not only expressly violating international law, including the UN Charter
and the Geneva Conventions, abrogating habeas corpus and carrying out massive,
unwarranted surveillance and so on, but why they have legalized and are widely
practicing torture. Think about what this means and where things are at: not even
the Nazis ever dared to brazenly declare to the world that they were legalizing
torture and making it part of their explicit, express doctrine that they would
invade other countries that hadn’t attacked them first without even making a pretence of creating a pretextual
invasion by the other side.
The
Warner Act
As one example
of how far things have gone, consider the Warner Act
[John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007]. When I speak to audiences and
ask who has heard of the Warner Act, in almost every instance nobody raises
their hands – and these are often audiences of political activists! In brief,
the Warner Act enables martial law. It overrides the Posse Comitatus Act that
dates from the civil war and that prohibits the use of military forces in
domestic affairs. The Warner Act allows the President to take control over the
National Guard units over the objections of state governors and use the guard
to conduct roundups, mass detentions and anything else that might be justified
by him upon his declaration of a “public emergency.”
The Warner Act
specifies that should the President deem it necessary to declare a public
emergency that he must consult with a select group of Congress members to tell
them why he is doing this and what he is doing. So good of Congress to think of
that! In Bush’s signing statement
he declares in essence that he reserves the right not to consult with anyone: “The executive branch shall
construe sections 914 and 1512 of the Act, which purport to make consultation
with specified Members of Congress a precondition to the execution of the law,
as calling for but not mandating such consultation, as is consistent with the
Constitution’s provisions concerning the separate powers of the Congress to
legislate and the President to execute the laws.”
In other words,
he can declare martial law and not tell anyone why he’s doing it or what
he’s doing. There is a word for this: dictatorship. Yet, in spite of this
outrageous law and his outrageous signing statement, the media have been silent
on this. (On February 19,
2007 the NY Times finally editorialized about the Warner Act,
several months after Bush signed it in October 2006). We, the people, however,
cannot be silent in the face of these moves towards a fascist state.
What was
unthinkable a year or two ago is now an accomplished fact. They”re normalizing
torture and war crimes because they need to get Americans psychologically used
to accepting these awful, barbaric practices. Fox News shows viewers in a brief
simulated waterboarding that, see, hey that wasn’t so bad, and Fox’s show “24”
justifies and practices torture in primetime!
Bush et al recognize that torture doesn’t produce good
intelligence and that it doesn’t in fact prevent more terrorist attacks –
exactly the opposite. They are doing these terrible things for two major
reasons. First, their world outlook is anti-scientific and anti-rationalist.
(As Ron Suskind reported in his October 17, 2004 NY Times magazine article
entitled “Without
a Doubt”, the White House sees itself as part of the “faith-based
community.”) They didn’t get to where they are and how they see things through
a process of reasoning, so from their perspective, why should anyone else? What
good is trying to persuade people? When they encounter opposition their first
impulse is to try to fool or intimidate people into seeing things their way.
Second, and this is the principle factor here I think, they”re
torturing people because they need to intimidate anyone who stands in their way
in order to get their way. They know that what they want goes against the
interests of the vast majority of the world’s people and that the only way they
can accomplish it is to terrorize people into accepting their domination and
plunder.
This is where
their plans in motion to attack Iran
come in. As we speak, a third carrier fleet is steaming to the Gulf and they”re
engaging in covert OPS in Iran,
funding Sunni terrorist groups. Note
that the groups inflicting the most serious damage upon US troops in Iraq
today are Sunnis. Their wars on Iraq and Afghanistan
are utter disasters and like a desperate gambler, they intend to stake one last
throw of the dice on an attack on Iran. This only underscores how
voting, despite the powerful repudiation and message sent in November 2006 to
them by the voters, doesn’t decide public policy.
Note the
Democratic opposition’s position on this. Clinton
has said the only problem with the war in Iraq is that it hasn’t been handled
competently. Edwards and Obama have both said that all options are on the table
vis a vis Iran,
including the use of nukes. These people are no solution!
Bush and Cheney
are also aggressively pursuing a radical fundamentalist, theocratic fascist
program, an important part of which is a frontal attack on science and critical
thought because in order to do what they want to do they must silence critics
and any criticism. Thus, you have those who David Horowitz has dubbed the
“Dirty Thirty” among academics who are part of that opposition that they want
to silence and destroy. What they are up to cannot stand the light of day, any
more than a vampire can tolerate being exposed to sunlight. And just like a
vampire in the sunlight, these people’s agenda and outlook burst into flames
and ashes when the light is shined upon them.
A
Battle Over the
Very Nature of Society
The battle for
impeachment therefore isn’t just about Bush/Cheney. It’s about the very nature
of our society and our world. We”re at a critical point in history, not just in
human history, but in the history of the planet. Because of the existing
political leadership and opinion-makers” complicity, the true nature and
magnitude of these dictatorial and outright fascist moves have been concealed
from the people. ITP was written in part to address this problem by giving
people a comprehensive sense of what their actual program and ideology is. This
is one of the things that sets it apart from the other impeachment books.
(Forgive me here for saying a few things about our book here. It’s not because
I want to promote it for the royalties, but because there is a role for this
book that I think needs to be better understood).
We also designed ITP, and this is another dimension to it
that makes it unique among the impeachment books, to get into an analysis of why they”re doing these horrible,
monstrous things, and why they”ve
been allowed to get away with it. If the people are to be roused into direct
political action and to take things into our hands, the people broadly need to
understand exactly what it is that we”re up against – that this is a movement,
not just a couple of reactionaries, and that this is a whole direction that the
government as a whole and our economy as a whole has been going down, and that
it’s going to take a powerful insurgency that alters the whole political
atmosphere and balance of forces to have any chance of reversing this terrible
direction.
As I wrote in
ITP and in my blog [http://dennisloo.blogspot.com],
even if a Democrat was to take the White House in 2008, we will still have Bill
O”Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, the American Enterprise Institute and Hoover Institute,
Ann Coulter, Fox News, Pat Robertson and the theocratic fascist movement. These
people are entrenched in the military, the churches, the media, and the
government. Even if, for the sake of argument, a progressive Democrat was
elected, let’s say, Dennis Kucinich, how could he do anything any good absent a
wholly different political balance of forces in the country?
I’m a child of
the sixties. I wouldn’t be where I’m at politically and have the values I have
had it not been for the bravery and sacrifice of those who rose up so
righteously in the sixties against authority and reaction and fought for
justice and equality worldwide during the 1960s – the Vietnamese, the Chinese,
the people of Paris, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, the freedom riders
and the Black Panther Party, SDS, the people of South America and Africa, and
so on.
The last thing I
want to address here is how we”re going to turn this battle into a fully
two-sided fight for the future. Because we need another powerful insurgency like
the sixties if we”re to have any chance in the face of this crisis we face
today. This underscores the significance of the first stirrings of a new
student movement, what WCW has dubbed the Mission
of a Generation, that we saw a few weeks ago that was kicked off at UCSB [University of California
at Santa Barbara]
and spread to some 20 other campuses.
The
Impeach07 Campaign
Two weeks ago I
went to NYC to attend the Emergency Summit called by WCW and joined in by many
other organizations and individuals. This summit was pulled together over
something like two weeks and over two hundred people attended it. The
atmosphere was electric and you can watch the Sat. night plenary on YouTube.
The speeches by Ramsey Clark, Cindy Sheehan, Rev. Lennox Yearwood and Debra
Sweet were extremely powerful and moving. And we put together a coordinated plan to wage this fight. I’m
going to read from those plans here. [See www.impeach07.org]
We”re in this to
win, not just to have a good effort and feel good about that, or to make a
grand, but failing effort. We need to win this fight and we intend to drive
them out of office in 2007. The plans are designed in this way.
The genius of
the A28 formulation [www.A28.org] is that it reframes the issue of impeachment
on the very issue that the radical right/Bush regime have staked their claim –
the moral high ground. The vacuum in leadership created by the bankruptcy of
the existing leadership and opinion-leaders must be filled by an alternative
leadership. Otherwise the people cannot move, because leadership is critical.
One of the reasons that more of the public has not moved into direct political
action is because they see that the Democratic Party and the mainstream media aren’t acting like there’s a problem so
this must mean then that it must not be that serious.
Another reason is that people are accustomed to following
the lead of the existing leaders. It takes a lot to get people to stray from the
existing leaders. It’s a wrenching
process. For them to do so requires that they, frankly, be shocked into
awareness by what this government and its apologists/enablers have been doing.
We need to heighten the contrast and the contradiction between Bush et al’s
lofty words of freedom, democracy and liberty and their actual practices. If we
think that downplaying any of this will get us further, by making concessions
to ethnocentrism, national chauvinism and American exceptionalism, we make a
critical mistake.
We need to very
clearly articulate the moral choice that we face today and advance a crystal
clear moral authority in opposition to the other side’s utter immorality and
inhumanity. Moral leadership in this sense constitutes an extremely potent
alternative. I don’t mean necessarily that this moral leadership must come from
religious figures – although this must happen as well. Our adversaries are
committing and advocating war crimes and have legalized torture. The sharper that
we draw out this contrast, the more we make clear to people that our own
government is daily committing war crimes and torture, the better. Given the
fact that we cannot rely upon – what could be clearer? – the existing political
leadership and mass media to do this and that we ourselves must do this, we
have a very tall order to fulfill. But what choice do we have? As World Can’t
Wait succinctly puts it: Silence = Complicity.
Henry Kissinger
in his memoirs writes that there was a period in the 1960s when anti-war
movement leaders exerted a tremendous amount of influence in the US far, far
beyond their immediate numbers, because there was a leadership vacuum (dubbed
at the time the “credibility gap”). We are in a similar situation in
terms of possibilities if we recognize it and act boldly and decisively. The
existing political leadership of this country (and I’m speaking beyond just the
current White House’s criminal occupants) is vulnerable to being exposed to the
people as completely bankrupt.
To expose them
as they deserve requires that we be relentless and unsparing in our exposes of
them. There is no shortage of material that they generate every single day for
this. We need to expose them concretely and by using particulars to unfold what
they are doing more generally. We need to give people a sense of the whole, an
entirely different vision, while using the parts of the whole to construct that
picture. The moral terms of the fight are as clear as they will ever be. On the
one side are those who use torture and countenance torture. On the other side
are those who condemn torture as morally abhorrent. On one side are those who
are utter opportunists who will lie, deceive, steal and/or kill in order to
advance their interests and to protect those who now rule. On the other side
are those for whom truth and justice are like rain to a parched earth.