by Stanley Rogouski, 4/7/06
Does
anybody remember the date January 21st
1998?
I doubt it will ring any immediate bells but it’s an important date in American
history. On January
21st, 1998, a member of the highest levels of the American
political elite issued a warning we all should have paid more attention to.
Remember it now?
“But
I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are
involved in this(they have popped up in other settings. This is(the great story
here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this
vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since
the day he announced for president.”
Eight years later and six years after that “vast right
wing conspiracy” took power, it’s clear what was at stake. We should have
listened to Hillary Clinton. Some of us let our mistrust of political power
itself and disgust over Clinton’s
own unpleasant personal qualities blind us to what was at stake. We were wrong.
Whatever we thought about President
Clinton, we should have recognized that the people gunning for him in 1998, the
Ken Starrs and Richard Mellon Scaifes were not critics of the abuses of
presidential power, but a well organized group of theocrats and crypto fascists
with deep roots in the most reactionary part of the ruling class determined to radically
remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come.
We should have formed ad hoc committees to protect the
president, wrote letters, poured into the streets in protest, organized
conventions, held study groups, done everything we could to shine the spotlight
on the vast right wing conspiracy and illuminate their agenda. We should have
crushed it before it had a chance to steal the White House. We should have at
least recognized it by November of 2000 and any of us who cared about American
democracy should have gotten down to Florida
any way possible and stayed there until the crisis was over. We wouldn’t have
been defending the conservative, dishonest Bill Clinton or the uninspiring Al
Gore. We would have been defending ourselves against the monstrous Bush Regime
waiting in the wings in November of 2000 to take power by any means necessary.
The ghosts of 2500 dead Americans in Iraq, 100,000 dead
Iraqis, the torture victims at Abu Ghraib and tens of thousands of American
citizens left on their roofs in New Orleans to die look up at me, living and
dead, and point their fingers. Why didn’t you stop this before it happened?
If
Hillary Clinton’s warning in 1998 was dire, then the alarms coming from the
highest levels of the political elite (people who by their very nature tend not
to speak in extreme terms) are ten times as loud. A long procession of whistle
blowers, from Richard Clarke to Paul O’Neil to Janis Karpinski to Joseph Wilson
has come out publicly and denounced the Bush regime as incompetent at best and
criminal at worst. As Senator Feingold has repeatedly pointed out, Bush has
broken the law by using the NSA to spy on American citizens and the proof is
right on TV. John Kerry, the waffling, ineffective presidential candidate who,
in 2004, never met an equivocation he didn’t like, has come out and called for
pulling all of our troops out of Iraq by the end of 2006 and
against any permanent bases in Iraq. Even Dick Cheney’s ex
chief of staff Scooter Libby has rolled on Bush and pointed out what we’ve
always known but could never prove, that the instructions to out CIA agent
Valerie Plame, came not from Karl Rove or Dick Cheney or Steven Hadley, but
from Bush himself. Never has a
presidential administration broken the law, lied, and been caught with their
hands in the cookie jar this many times. As Senate minority leader Harry Reid
has said, “I really do believe this man will go down as the worst
president this country has ever had.”
Once
again, take this seriously. Senate minority leaders by their very nature don’t
use this kind of extreme language in public unless they mean it. Even if you
don’t like Harry Reid (and I certainly have no use for the man), think about
just how bad things have gotten when the highest ranking member of the
opposition party in the Senate is so shut out of decision making process that
he can do nothing but label Bush the worst president in the history of the
United States. The government, quite simply, is broken. And it can get much
worse than we can imagine. Who in 1998 would have thought we would have had
150,000 troops bogged down in the middle of this generation’s Vietnam? Who would have thought Roe
vs. Wade and Griswold themselves would be at risk? Who would have thought that
the president would stand by and watch the destruction of a major American city
without lifting a finger to mount a relief effort for close to a week? Who
would have thought that the United States government would be openly
torturing people, spying on its own citizens, trashing the Constitution and,
when proven to be liars on national TV for all the world to see, would reply,
in essence, ‘tough shit. Do something about it’?
This
is not 1998 and all of us know better than to ignore these kinds of
warnings.
If Hillary Clinton’s alarm about the vast right wing conspiracy seemed
like a
bizarre throwaway line from a woman under attack then this was not
because Mrs.
Clinton didn’t speak strongly enough. She did. She all but smacked us
upside
the heads and said ‘you idiots. If a gang of right-wing theocrats can
humiliate
the president of the United States, what do you think they can
do to you?’ The problem in 1998 was that there was no mass movement of
people
in the United States willing to take these
warnings to heart and respond to them concretely. That’s changed. The
war in Iraq and the government’s
botched response to hurricane Katrina has produced a hard core of activists
willing to challenge Bush directly on the war in way that’s finally beginning
to bring some members of the elites around to their position. It’s no accident
that Kerry couldn’t support the war strongly enough in 2004 and that now he’s
coming out against it. All over the world, from French students in Paris to
Muslim immigrants all over Europe to orthodox Jews in Brooklyn responding to
police brutality people are beginning to chafe against the direction their
governments are taking them. Last month close to half a million immigrants in Los Angeles poured into the streets and by the sheer mass
of their numbers have all but killed the draconian HH4437.
This
April, as the protests in France continue and continue to
grow and as immigrants here in the United States break record after record
by the sheer massive numbers of people they can mobilize, we have an
opportunity.
Here
is how I think it could play out. On April 10th in NYC, the
immigrants will continue their agitation against HH4437 with the full support
of NYC’s unions, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, United for Peace and Justice
and the anti-war movement as a whole. On April 29th, also in NYC,
United for Peace and Justice and a coalition of liberal groups will hold a mass
rally against the war in Iraq. We have no idea if these
protests will fizzle and be remembered as yet a couple of more demonstrations
inside of police barricades or if we will see the same masses of numbers we’ve
already been shocked by in Chicago and Los Angeles. If the numbers of people in New York this April 10th
are anything approaching the titanic protest that’s already taken place in Los Angeles, all of us have to seize
this moment and look at the April 10th protests in exactly the way
the French are looking at their ongoing movement against their own draconian
workplace laws. We need to keep people in the streets in whatever numbers
possible and build towards April 29th.
What’s
more, the individual demands of stopping the war in Iraq, stopping HH4437,
defending voting rights in New Orleans have to unified around the single idea
of driving the Bush regime out of office since the Bush regime is the central
thread behind all of them. Yes, other people in the Democratic and Republican Party
are just as bloodthirsty about invading Iran and continuing to punish Iraq. And yes, Bush’s own
position on immigration is less extreme than some other people in his party.
But the Bush Regime is setting up the mechanism through which all of these
seemingly isolated but actually connected acts of repression and violence are
coordinated and by which they can actually be enforced. No one single act, the
repeal of Roe vs. Wade or Griswold, the criminalization of immigrations, the
continuing destruction in the Middle East and the continued threats to our
civil liberties can be put into practice without the radical new, theocratic
society that Bush is setting up. Once he does it, it’s unlikely any of them can
be stopped. And we all know this. Black people know that Bush is gunning for the
Voting Rights
Act. Immigrants know that they are coming into the crosshairs of the nativism
and racism that’s gripped this country since September 11th. Women
know that Roe vs. Wade is at stake.
In this
kind of situation, new forms of resistance can come seemingly out of
the blue.
On November 2nd, for example, World Can’t Wait Drive Out the Bush
Regime led the largest nationwide walkout of high-school students since
the
1960s. This was dismissed by many at the time as a mere childrens’
crusade.
Mobilizing people not yet old enough to vote was dismissed by some
people as a
waste of time. Yet less than 6 months later, after one movie by Edward
James
Olmos, one fascist immigration bill, and one huge protest in Los
Angeles
walkouts by high school kids are such an accepted part of ‘the
movement’ that
its almost impossible to imagine them not happening. Over the past
month, in Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris and all over Europe there have
been close to 5
million people involved in peaceful mass demonstrations against their
governments. This is a lot of people to have in motion at the exact
same time
that the political and economic elites are beginning to see the Bush
Regime as
a liability. Like 1848 and 1968 and in Europe at the end of the Cold
War
and in Tiananmen Square, masses of people engaged in non-violent
demonstrations once they
reach a certain point can build into a critical mass very quickly.
Business as
usual can be disrupted (this is happening in France as I write this)
and Bush
will either step down voluntarily or be forced out of office by people
who can
no longer afford to have him in power. This has happened many times in
history
and the conditions are right for it to happen now.
If
it doesn’t, get ready for the invasion of Iran and 5 dollar a gallon
gasoline.