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August 9, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
War,
the Military and the Hunt for the "Violence Gene"
August 8, 2002
Ron Jacobs
Iraq:
The Final Storm?
Dave Marsh
Now Ain't
the Time
for Your Tears
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Tries to Hide Role in Venezuela Coup
Anthony Gancarski
AIPAC,
Congress and Iraq
Robert Fisk
Families
of the Disappeared Demand Answers
Gary Leupp
Karzai's
Bodyguard
August 7, 2002
Anis Shivani
The First
21st Century
Police State
Jeffrey St. Clair
Fallon's
Fallen
Is the US Navy Killing
Children in Nevada?
Robert Fisk
For the
Forgotten Afghans,
the UN Offers a Fresh Hell
Dr. Susan Block
Rigas in
Cuffs
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral Damage
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
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August
9, 2002
The End of the
Pax Americana?
by Ansar Ahmed
To me, perhaps the most unspoken national level
tragedy marked by September 11 is the fast waning of Pax Americana.
The worst hit victim is the democratic ideals many of us cherish
and uphold. Paradoxically, most of the actions taken by the
political administration in the aftermath were rationalized and
professed as the protection of democratic ideals. But then,
neither the actions, nor many of the parties who formed the International
Coalition, can be remotely considered democratic in nature.
How do others view American greatness
today? I have had the chance to be in Europe, Asia, and (should
I even acknowledge this?) the Middle East (Ok, Ok, it
was a one-day unscheduled stopover) since the horrifying
event, and of course I have communicated with people from all
over the world via email. I have heard innumerable sympathies
for those who died on 9-11 and for their families, but I haven't
heard a lot of support (actually, any) for the American
governmental actions from people (none of them representatives
of any government) who live in other countries. Bad sampling
and methodology? Perhaps; but you will agree it is uncanny
how there is a very cohesive community in this aspect spanning
different kinds of political and economic structures. What I
have also heard are pitiful sighs about America having lost its
image. They also talk about shameless governance and a blatant
disregard for ethical conduct. Do they still want to come to
the US? Of course, but they also want to migrate to Canada,
Australia and different parts of Europe. Life, along with it
aspirations, does not come to a screeching halt even with major
tragedies. Do they envy American wealth and power enough to
try and bring it down destructively? No, if that was indeed
the case, then the underclass of every society would be rampaging
the wealthier sections, and the wealthy would not have enough
left for others to feel envious.
The above are viewpoints. My academic
prediction of American greatness, assuming current conditions,
would include the following:
A movement away from true democratic
ideals in practice, without a corresponding change in the label
(a pretension that the system continues)
Increased legitimization and rationalization
of racism, with particular emphasis on ethno-religious characteristics
A drop in the professional and technical
category of immigrants; increased number of immigrants in peripheral
positions
An economy that further dichotomizes
the wealthy from the poor
Even bigger government
Let me elaborate briefly on these issues,
at times necessarily in an overlapping fashion. What you have
to judge is whether this is the kind of greatness you would like
to stand by, for whatever reason.
Make absolutely no mistake about it--overall,
the United States of America is still the great nation that it
was; I dare say perhaps greater today under duress, save for
some super patriots (pseudo patriots, as one CounterPunch
reader remarked in an email to me) lost in the zeal and thereby
part of those who lost track of the ideal. The concept of nation
that I refer to here of course implies only the people and its
culture. I am afraid that I cannot make the same kind of remark
of greatness about the current American system, powered by a
political machinery that is bent on war mongering and incapable
of fixing a crumbling economy.
When the political economy of a society
becomes dysfunctional, the system comes to a crisis, and what
might eventually occur in an evolutionary fashion given time
infinity unnoticed by most as citizens adapt to "regular"
problems, is hastened revolutionarily. Theoretically, and what
we have observed in practice, each system has an inception, a
movement towards a peak level (not the same for different
systems), and then (typically) a slow movement towards
entropy. In a subsequent cycle, a new system replaces the old.
What survives is the nation. The Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese,
and the British still exist as a nation (and as a society)
today; only that their global dominance is now no more than of
historical relevance. No human devised system is perfect, and
therefore, the tendency is first toward greatness, and once that
has been achieved or recognized by others as being so, the tendency
is toward negative entropy and managing homeostasis. Under normal
conditions, the system falters periodically, but not to a point
where it crashes. That is, until the political economy becomes
irreversibly dysfunctional.
Ever since the United States came into
being, democracy and capitalism has remained the professed and
acceptable institutionalized political-economic goals. The face
of the nation changed, though, mainly with shifts in immigration
patterns and with technological growth. Still, democracy and
capitalism, a bad marriage in itself but who stayed in the union
for the sake of the kids (that is another story), served
its purpose through all of the demographic kaleidoscopic movements.
Today, we may still characterize our political system as democratic,
but can do so only marginally. A very simple comparison to the
American democratic system about a hundred years ago versus the
contemporary brand would evidence this remark. Of course, I
tread thin ice here.
If democracy represents equal voice,
equal status, and equal participation, then each of these tenets,
previously scratched (sometimes badly) by normal and regular
societal operations, are severely wounded today. What we despised
in the former Soviet Union--a government larger than life, a
strong military presence and an even stronger military budget,
an obsessive concern with how citizens think, what they say in
public, what they read, threatening any differences in opinion
with punishment, contemplating harm to family members of those
who disagree, religious persecution, and rampant injustice to
humanity in the name of liberty and security--is quite true of
the United States today. With the state of the economy the way
it is, the long lines for toilet paper are not far away. The
lines for bread will form a couple of blocks away, if you please.
It appears to me that we are in a phase preceding a major systemic
shift. The really bad news is that we will continue to call
this new system "democratic", and do much in the way
of protecting it, holes in the bag and all. This potential systemic
shift does not foretell good news for the masses, and all who
favor true democracy should necessarily oppose that. A much
more viable and much more easily achieved target is to seek a
reversal to the freedoms that were promised to us as a birthright,
or that were voiced to us as we raised our right hands to pledge
allegiance to the United States as newly naturalized citizens.
An obvious connection to the loss of
democratic ideals is the way the US government is dealing with
terrorism. The political machinery behaves as if all defines
terrorism exactly in the same fashion. From the Coalition governments'
perspective, terrorism does not require an academic definition;
rather, all it requires is an identification of who are
terrorists. The bulk of the American media is their spokesperson.
They consistently and persistently identified the terrorists
for the rest of the world--they are Muslims. They have also
spread the malformed images that not only are all Muslims terrorists;
they are bearded Arab men who are fundamentalists that run repressive
regimes. The fact of the matter is, all Arabs are not Muslims
(there are significant numbers of Arabs who are non-Muslims),
all Muslims are not fundamentalists (the majority of Islamic
adherents are moderates), and all fundamentalists are not
terrorists (fundamentalism exists in all kinds of religions
and adherents do not necessarily carry out terrorist activities--maybe
I tread thin ice again here?). Beards and repression--well,
these are part of any societal arrangement, including the US.
Once we define terrorism as who it
is and not in terms of what it is, there are at least
two severe shortcomings that necessarily follow: one, it stereotypes
and includes as terrorists those who may belong to the same or
similar religious-ethnic backgrounds but are not engaged in activities
that are terrorist; secondly, it excludes those who are not part
of the religious ethnic groups defined as terrorists, but are
engaged in terrorist activities. Chomsky in his book 911 indicates
the US Defense Department does have a working definition of what
terrorist activities are; however, at the same time, it does
not either profess or relay it openly since it may in essence
define itself and coalition members as terrorists alongside the
very people they pursue. It is easier to lay out an ethno-religious
profile so that the enemy is easily identifiable visibly (not
by what they do, but by who they are). Obviously, this has
ramifications in the status reduction of otherwise legitimate
and law-abiding citizens, and who are faced with racism carried
out in the name of patriotism; racism that is sanitized and guiltless;
racism that becomes institutionalized. Common services (purchasing
supplies, renting a car, buying insurance), employment, health
services and a host of others can have changed rules to operate
by. In other words, racism can be institutionalized in a fashion
that it was never before. Innocent people are bound to suffer,
and at times perhaps even rationalized as collateral damage.
Please be assured that I firmly believe those who do engage
in terrorism must not be tolerated and must be brought to justice.
In the current situation, where the enemy
has been defined in terms of ascribed status, rather than on
the basis of their actions, a greater loss of civil liberties,
not only because of routine prejudicial attitudes but arising
from newly instated laws and agencies, can be expected. It is
curious that the Homeland Security agency needs to spend additional
billions for enhanced security without making the average
citizen feel any more safer than what s/he felt 60 to 80 billion
dollars before. As for the Terrorism Bill, it provides a carte
blanche right to law enforcement agencies to detain indefinitely
anyone suspected of being associated with terrorism without
legal counsel. This Bill, when first introduced, met with
challenges from civil rights groups, but "sneaked"
through a couple of weeks later when all the hullabaloo over
the debate died down. By any definition, this takes away from
the true democratic ideals, but does not seem so in times of
crises because it is so necessary to pursue the enemy. In times
of crisis, citizens are more likely to agree to regulations that
would otherwise be dismissed as a threat to core societal ideals.
However, regulations, once created, hardly vanish once the circumstances
that led to its creation vanish (Is there still a ban on married
men flying on Sundays in Burdoville, VT?). It may not be
too far off to remark that the US government has become, or on
its way to become, as big as the dictatorial governments it once
so vehemently criticized, and some which so paradoxically form
part of the coalition to protect democracy against terrorism.
Also, it is no secret that the US (among
other countries) has been a favorite refuge for those who
seek relief from economic and political persecution, religious
persecution, and those who seek the western style higher education.
Typically, these individuals would work toward some degree of
assimilation and at being effective participants as they continue
to live in the US. No doubt that a larger number of the working
and lower class groups have formed the bulk of immigration from
the non-western nations (helped, in large measure, by the
Diversity Visa Program), but that has not prevented the influx
of the more professional and technical groups. For the former
group, economic gain is the primary focus, whereas intergroup
and social relations are very much peripheral and not of concern
unless it affects their conditions directly. For the latter,
after gaining some sense of stability, it is precisely the issue
of their own social status that is central to their participation
and existence in the US.
In an environment where social status
is determined more on the basis of ascription, and not on achievement,
the US becomes less and less attractive as a place to migrate.
In other words, an inflation of current attitudes can certainly
affect inversely the desire of the professional and technical
workforce to migrate to the US. A quick forecast would clearly
imply that a drop in this category of immigrants would have acute
and detrimental effects on the economy. The group which is satisfied
with dead-end jobs, and whose primary motive is economic gain,
would not see much of a statistically significant difference
in the migration patterns. Ultimately, this results in lowered
numbers of immigrants who have the ability to be upwardly mobile,
but maintains (perhaps increases) the numbers of those
who are locked into a caste-like system.
Recently, the US Attorney General announced
that the Justice Department is granting FBI field offices more
authority to launch undercover terrorism investigations, shifting
such responsibility away from the agency's headquarters in Washington.
The changes allow the FBI to gather information on individuals
even if they are not under criminal investigation. The
techniques would include monitoring Internet sites, as well as
libraries and religious institutions (why not simply say mosques?).
A closer look at this reveals some extremely disturbing trends.
The main issue is not the use of authority, but the abuse of
it. Paradoxically, in the pursuit of freedom and security, this
new authorization limits these same things for some segments
of the population. One may wonder how this ties in with, for
example, the principle of freedom of religious pursuit, and particularly
in the case of Muslim children, whether or not they will grow
up in a society where they feel less than equal, even persecuted?
There are Muslim children in the US who carry the names Osama,
Jihad, and Islam. Do they have to become Sam, Jared, and who-knows-what
for avoiding stereotypes and a legitimate identity made sacrilegious?
What can we do? In addition to being
educated political activists, it is equally important that all
of us become more culturally relativistic, and recognize that
people are products of their own environments and that competing
perspectives do and should exist. That is the essence of democracy.
This is not to say that there should not be any limits on tolerance,
but that differences of ideology alone cannot be the source of
conflict. Even then, the goals will not be achieved, for imperfection
and diversity are innate in the nature of human beings, but at
least we will be moving in a logical direction. We must defend
the democratic core values for the sake of social stability and
cohesion by believing in them, professing them, and by acting
accordingly.
The outcome of these prescriptions should
see better conditions for the world, for nations, for communities,
and for individuals. These, then, will allow us to live in a
world that does not headline warfare and conflict as the most
important global events, but rather something that is not so
unpleasant. It will also leave a legacy for future generations
that may not arrive otherwise. And, this seemingly utopian condition
is far from being unachievable.
Am I predicting gloom and doom? Not at all. The magic of a
democratic system (what's left of it) is that the common
people can truly effect a change in the only fashion that they
always could but many a times choose not to--vote. The magic
of the human spirit is that, becoming aware of potential catastrophes
we can devise ways to avert the same.
As Democracy breathes heavily in the
Intensive Care Unit, attended by fewer caregivers than necessary,
while South Carolina is busy banning tattoos, and as Russia provides
a helping hand to Iran to build a second nuclear reactor, what
we are left with is guarding Karzai, president of a country reduced
to less than nothing, first by years of Soviet occupation, and
by the more recent high-tech metamorphic ability of US weaponry;
guarding Karzai, personification of the democratic condition
in the US today; guarding Karzai with Special American
Forces wearing t-shirts and jeans, armed with heavy automatic
artillery, true to the Rambo form. Surely, we have more and
better purposes to serve other than guarding Karzai. I know
he must be happy, with perhaps a little bit of apprehension of
friendly fire in times of dissension.
Our captain has initiated the silent
self-destruct sequence of the US Enterprise, and cannot do much
about reversing it. Shouldn't surprise anyone; he's no Captain
Picard.
Dr. Ansar Ahmed
is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Baldwin-Wallace College.
He can be reached at aahmed@bw.edu.
Today's Features
Alexander Cockburn
War,
the Military and the Hunt for the "Violence Gene"
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