By Andy Zee
(Transcript of speech at opening session of World Can’t Wait national meeting in New York, November 21, some slight edits, in brackets, for clarity.)
I want to thank World Can’t Wait for inviting me. I concur that this is a very important meeting. We’re at a really key moment. So let me begin.
“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the 20th time that day.
“No, no,” said the Queen. “Sentence first, verdict afterward.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first.”
“ Hold your tongue” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t,” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted, at the top of her voice.
Clarifying things in Japan, President Obama said to those who were offended that he is planning to bring Khalid Sheik Mohammed to trial in New York, and I quote, “They will not find it offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.” Sentence first, verdict afterwards.
This is precisely the logic that Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder elucidated this past week in his plan for a smorgasbord of trials. Some people, he’ll try in the federal courts, if he’s sure he can get a conviction, and if he thinks he can get a lot of positive public opinion for the war on terror. If that doesn’t work, he’ll send them to a military commission, where there are lesser standards of procedures and then he can execute or imprison people that way. And, should things be so botched up that he doesn’t think he can get a conviction at all, he always has the option, and he has continued the option, of preventive detention — locking people up without charges and indefinitely. .
And if for some reason, a juror finds principle in one of these cases, and somebody is acquitted, or there is a mistrial, well then they’ve assured us they still have the right to preventive detention. So we don’t only have Lewis Carroll, but we also have Orwell here. And this is exactly and precisely what people were so upset about under the Bush regime. Not exactly, because there is something new here. There’s a thin and eclectic smorgasbord and the appearance of due process. And this is something I’m going to get into a bit further, because I think it’s a part of what deceives people who are still going along with this administration.
Because what’s not new in all of this, is the very architecture of torture and preventive detention. Including that there are people who do know better, and should know better, but are looking at only part of this, the fact that there are trials – such as Anthony Romero (ACLU) who recently gave a mixed message [in response to Holder’s announcement], saying we should praise this decision for bringing people to trial in Manhattan, failing to see the essence of this is a continuation of the very same policies. This is disarming and demobilizing people and obscuring the real nature of this.
So, what’s new and what’s not? It’s a new and improved war on terror which is still a horror for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and indeed the people of the world. What’s new and improved is the branding, which has anaesthetized and co-opted people in the U.S. and much of the world, into supporting all of this. Elaine [Brower] has spoken of [the military in] Iraq. Others [on the panel] are speaking [about how the Iraq] War continues. The US did not build the world’s largest embassy in the history of humanity for the purpose of leaving Iraq.
I want to talk a little about Afghanistan, and I want to get at the character of this war which others have spoken to, but it’s worth repeating because I think there’s a numbing quality to what’s going on. … People are numb to this. [The previous speakers] mentioned the drones. One of the most prevalent drones they’re using is called The Predator, I don’t know if you’ve looked that up in a dictionary lately, but there’s two definitions to it. First, it’s an animal that preys on others. And second, it’s a person who exploits others. So, you really can’t fault them too much on the branding question here.
All these drones are launched from secret air bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the controls are turned over after they’re in the air to operators in Langley, VA, who watch these [unmanned aircraft] on large flat screen TV’s – not unlike what people encountered at that recruiting center that World Can’t Wait quite justly shut down in Philadelphia. [1] Jane Mayer writing in the New Yorker captures some of this. I want to read a little, she’s speaking of what’s on the screens:
“This is awe-inspiring and horrifying. You can see these little figures scurrying, the explosions going off. When the smoke clears, there’s just rubble and charred stuff, a former C.I.A. officer said. The human beings run for cover and are such a common sight that they have inspired a new slang term: ‘squirters.’” The un-reality of this is also felt by some of these “pilots, “ and that’s said ironically, “some of them wear flight suits when they operate the drones’ remote controls in Virginia.” However, when their shifts end, these cubical warriors, Jane Mayer writes, “can drive home and have dinner with their families.”
But look, this is targeted assassination. This is one of the things that people were so upset about, protested, and raised their voices against the Bush regime. And now it’s happening on an enormous scale. I am going to give you some of the statistics on the collateral damage. In going after just one of these people who were vetted by the Pakistani government and C.I.A., Jane Mayer says that they made at least 16 drone attacks to get one guy, and depending on the press reports you read, there were between 207 and 321 additional people killed to get that one “terror asset.”
So, this is one aspect of the war, but it’s not the only aspect. There are 68,000 troops on the ground, and there’s a plan, if they go with the full McChrystal plan, to add another 80,000. We’ve been hearing a lot about these two choices. Debra [Sweet] spoke some to that. There’s also a third choice that the media has been advocating, particularly David Broder of The Washington Post which is “Just decide something, for God’s sake. . . . anything is a good decision.” I don’t know if you’ve seen all these articles about “what’s [1]with all this procrastination?” It’s important to take a look at that message because it’s one that says all this focus on the war and what direction to take is actually beginning to arouse people. And that’s something you should pay some attention to. But the two choices are [1] that McChrystal is arguing for a typical counter-insurgency strategy, adding 80,000 more troops and they’ve got a whole hamlet kind of approach to this which I’m not going to go into in depth now.
And the other, the “peace strategy,” the doves in this game are exactly the people more advocating the use of drones, and this has been personified by Joe Biden, and they are agreeing that they’ll keep the troop level at the same point [it is now] and they want to strike a deal with a section of the Taliban and rebuild the Afghan army and go after Al Qeada.
Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says no part of their conversation has involved leaving Afghanistan.
I want to sum up just what these two choices are because it gets to some of what is continuing here. This is from Larry Everest in REVOLUTION newspaper, which I recommend you read every week because it will give you an understanding of the forces underlying this whole war. “In short, McChrystal’s option A calls for more death and destruction wreaked on the Afghan people from the ground, along with more forcefully trying to control life in Afghanistan, including at the village level, and strengthening the Afghan state through economic aid, bolstering its military and police, and other measures. Biden’s option B would bring more death and destruction from the air, escalate the expansion of the war into Pakistan, and strengthen the reactionary Afghan army and police while leaving the majority of the Afghans, who live by the way in the countryside, to the mercies of the Taliban and local warlords”.
Look, this is not a “good war” and it never was. It’s a war for empire, and from the beginning, the objectives were stitched together by the overarching goal of expanding and fortifying U.S. power and creating an unchallenged and unchallengeable empire. This war on terror was congealed after September 11th but it was structured and written about and mapped out for a decade before that, both by the Project for New American Century, as well as within the Democratic Party. These objectives were posed for U.S. imperialism after the fall of the Soviet Union. And in the wake of September 11, and continuing to today, the stakes for the U.S. has been the continued dominance of U.S. imperialism, in a time of really acute crisis – which has only grown more intense since the start of this war. It’s for the control of strategic resources. 80% of the world’s gas and oil resources come from the region of South Asia, the Middle East, and the southern part of the former Soviet Union. This is both for control of the strategic resources in relation to [dominating] both the U.S. allies in Western Europe, but also [thwarting] its potential and actual rivals in China and Russia — notwithstanding the Chinese flag flying over Wall Street today . . . I guess that’s because Obama is in China. [The meeting took place near Wall Street & the Chinese & US Flags were flying over the Wall Street “ Bull.”]
This also is a matter of [redressing the] weakening of the credibility of the U.S. This is something that’s very important in that Obama’s main mission is to restore that credibility. It’s important to recognize that it’s also a fear that if the U.S. were to pull out it would weaken NATO, and undermine support for other U.S. wars of occupation.
Look, here’s the deal. This is a system. All of these things that you’re seeing going on here are not incidental. They’re integral to the very functioning of the U.S. empire. It’s not Halliburton, it’s not Blackwater, (it’s now called Xe, but it’s no relation, I promise). It’s not democracy. They’re not trying to spread democracy or the liberation of women. For god’s sake, just look at this. Even they have to admit looking at this Karzai election that this is not about democracy. This is a very thin cover. But yet it is just enough for some people to hold onto.
Look this is imperialism. It’s a system; it’s the nature of the beast. What is the beast? Raymond Lotta has written in REVOLUTION newspaper that “this is a system that operates according to the imperatives of economic expansion, the pressures of competition, and the drive among contending world powers for strategic position and advantage over regions, markets, and resources.” And this empire rests on military might. That was true in Vietnam, it’s true today. It was true for the Spanish American war. It’s been true for the whole history of this country.
But let’s look at little more at the political dynamics that underlie the current configuration in terms of why we’re in the situation we’re in, where there has been the evaporation, or in reality, the collapse, the abandonment of the anti-war movement. For seven of Bush’s eight years the Democrats argued that they could administer and sell the war on terror better than Bush and the Republicans. This is the one promise that they have delivered on.
For eight years, Bush would do something, or propose an outrage; people would discover it; somebody would expose it, the Democrats – or, at least a few of them, would get up and say: “Oh this isn’t the way to do this. We would do this better.” And then Bush would call the question, and [the Democrats] would go in and they’d vote for it. Elaine has indicated how many times they voted for war appropriations over the last several years.
But there was something deeper going on here than just the spinelessness of the Democrats. That was well captured in a remark by Al Gore running into the 2006 election, where he was posing as a friend of the people, and indeed was the darling of a good deal of the anti-war movement. He called for Rumsfeld’s resignation, but he said, “look in some ways, we’re all lashed to the mast of our ship of state here.” Well, Gore is lashed to the mast of the ship of state. But we should not be. If you don’t want to live in a New Rome, stop thinking like the emperor! (Applause.) Or, like one of those venal and corrupt senators.
If you want a far better and a far different world, you need to stop thinking like an American and start thinking and acting in the interests of humanity. A whole movement has been linked to and lashed to this whole political dynamic. It’s time, and it’s possible, to break out of this whole system think, to break out of that whole framework of thinking and acting like Americans, whoever lives in that slave house. That’s not your house, and you need to start thinking like that. And, the people in this room who understand that, need to get out there and fight with others about it. It is necessary and it is time to lead people to break out of their comfort zones. And this means, most of all, confronting straight up, the reality that we face, and then acting on it.
Two points:
1} All too many progressives still keep looking at the world from Obama’s point of view, which is the point of view of America. Bush may have been, and he actually was, an extreme concentration of imperialism in America, but he was not an aberration. This was not a good country gone bad in 2001. Its history is one of empire. There’s a new biography out of Theodore Roosevelt. I read some reviews and it seems worth reading, because you’ll actually see the roots of all this, including water-boarding. Someone wrote a piece on World Can’t Wait’s website that there used to be a little jingle they would sing in the Philippines about water-boarding. So this is not anything new, this is intrinsic to the U.S. Empire.
A movement that fails to understand that, and that consciously obscures the nature of this will lead people into the arms of imperialism, and will lead people into betraying the interests of the people of the world. And this is not just something I’m saying here, this is our reality. I don’t have time to go into all of this, but you should read Jim Wallis’ letter that was written last week to Obama, offering to go into the White House and counsel him on how to do this better. Or the plea from the political director of the American Friends Service Committee, that again has one of these positions of how to counsel Obama to put more money into the infrastructure in Afghanistan. Then read today’s New York Times [11/21/2009] and see the hypocrisy and the actual results of putting that money into the infrastructure in Iraq. Or, what’s really flying around the web is a letter that appeared on TomDispatch.com which is the [imagined] speech that Tom [Englehart] wishes Obama would give around the war. Look, this is pure fantasy.
2} The second point is that people in the movement and more broadly in society recognize that Obama is under assault from the Republicans and a racist, fascist movement. These [reactionaries] are packed, and they are riled up. They have support running all through Congress, and up and down the military. I do have to say that while Barack Obama is no friend of the people of the U.S. or the world, he is head of the U.S. state, and he doesn’t represent anything progressive, any kind of move against him along the lines of what these people are advocating would be a reactionary outrage, and should be recognized and responded to as such.
There is a need to pull back the lens and see what this political dynamic actually is.
Jonathan Schell, who is widely seen as a progressive voice, and in many ways he is, recently posed this question in a column: “Must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right over national security? What is the source of the right wing veto over presidents, congressmen, and public opinion? Whoever can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half century of American history. And the forces that even now bear down on Obama over Afghanistan.”
Well, there is an answer, and a description of this, and it was provided by Bob Avakian a few years ago in answer to a question, described as the “Pyramid of Power.” This is important because it is the answer to the question that Jonathan Schell is correctly identifying. Why is it that the interests of the people – I think it’s 80% of the American people want to be out of Afghanistan, and most Americans support the right to abortion – but why do they keep doing this?
Well, on the one side of the power structure, you have these Republicans and these fascists, and they are organized all the way up and down, and right into their base, in cellular structures, very virulent and mobilized. And on the other side you have these Democrats who have the same objective interests of empire, but their job is to represent the women in society, the minorities, the immigrants, the enlightened progressive strata.
And yet, they don’t mobilize this stratum because this stratum is very angry at what’s going on. And they tell these people every time, and they tell us, well, if you would just vote for us . . . you won’t be voting for them. But they don’t want to mobilize this force, and why not? The thing about [the Democrats} is that they’re really, really afraid of calling into the streets the base of people that they appeal to, and who vote for them. The last thing in the world they want to do is call the people into the streets to protest these various things. This is something we have seen over and over again. Why not, and what are they afraid of?
Well, once people begin to see and feel their political strength, and at the same time, they begin to investigate and debate why all this was happening, and what could really be done to change it, then all kinds of possibilities for radical and actually even revolutionary change could open up. And for every section of the ruling class, this is a far worse nightmare than going along with what’s happening right now and letting this course proceed unimpeded. And the only way for us to get out of this is, to get out of it.
Now fundamentally and in an overarching way, to get out of imperialism requires a revolution and a whole different social system, and breaking that stranglehold of imperialism around the world. That’s something we can discuss in the Q&A and it’s beyond the time and the scope of this talk. But one critical part of creating the atmosphere and the conditions where another world is possible, is through really determined and passionate struggle against the whole direction of the war on terror that is being carried forward now under the Obama administration. And we here must begin to carve open this moment in history with a new spirit and a moment of resistance that is outside of and in opposition to this dominant political framework. And we need to do this with a great deal of passion, based on truth and substance, and with all the conviction that comes from acting in the interests of humanity.
I want to repeat just one thing from this [new draft] Statement of Conscience, if I can, because I think it really gets to the moment.
“Now is the time for such courage and defiance. Now, before the lessons and experience of a robust and world-wide anti-war movement fade from memory and the population settles into acceptance of permanent war. Now, before the violent curtailment of women’s control over their own reproduction becomes not only furthered by the state but granted moral legitimacy. Now, before the righteous desire for change decays into cynicism and acquiescence.”
Thanks.
[1] The Army Experience Center at Franklin Mills Mall in Philadelphia has been the subject of mass protest in 2009. See shutdowntheaec.org.
The \”justice\” system in this country, still run by Bush appointees, does what it damned well pleases or what it\’s order to do by superiors. We the People have been cut off from access to a government that is no longer our own. Try to exercise what used to be our rights, seek redress from \”our\” government, and you become a target for the violent thugs now wearing badges and the complicit judges who ignore the Constitution and any other law. Guilty if charged. It\’s going to take more than protest to change anything, and the very first prerequisite is to undo the division of the American people. Otherwise, we\’re all hanging out here alone in the breeze wearing big, red targets for the inJustice system to take pot shots at.
Ian