Canada and facts on US's STAR WARS.
The following appeared in 1/16/04's Ottawa Citizen. Written by Jack Layton, who is leader of the federal NDP.
But we are starting talks with the United States on Star Wars missile defence.
With a full year's lead time before
becoming prime minister, Mr. Martin surely
could have done better for his first major initiative.
He has not, and
his choice to make Star Wars a priority speaks volumes of where
he sees Canada in the world: Not an independent voice for
peace and multilateral
peacekeeper, but a participant in a destabilizing weapons shield to shoot down
missiles from
unnamed enemies.
It is important to first dismiss the notion that Star Wars makes us safer. The
only tests
that have succeeded are ones in which the incoming test missile has
been painted with a device that makes it easier to
hit. Without such
assistance, the American military has yet to be able to hit a test missile, even
knowing the time of launch and trajectory of the incoming missile. It's
unlikely a rogue state would let us know
the time of launch and destination of
their missiles, making a working shield that much more difficult.
The fact
the system doesn't work has not stopped George Bush from announcing it will be deployed later this year.
The Pentagon, however, has cancelled tests
lest it be seen to fail again.
Already, Star Wars has cost the world
a cornerstone of arms control since Mr.
Bush literally tore up a treaty that prohibited its development. As a result,
the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is dead and if Mr. Martin has any respect for
multilateral foreign policy, he wouldn't reward
Mr. Bush for abandoning it - he
would challenge him.
How can we, for instance, urge India and Pakistan to comply
with arms treaties,
while participating in a weapons system that violated an arms treaty to the
point
of destroying it? How can we, indeed, condemn China or North Korea for
building more weapons to penetrate the shield,
when we helped trigger the new
arms race to begin with?
We cannot, and in the process we will help weaponize space.
Last week, the Liberals launched an attack on me, saying I had distorted Mr.
Martin's support for missile defence and
misrepresented its space implications.
A week after their charge the Citizen released a Department of National Defence
paper
that said missile defence reinforces the trend towards weaponizing space.
DND also noted the alleged security improvements
that a functioning missile
defence system could be overplayed, given rogue states may attempt to circumvent the shield
through drones or cruise missiles.
There are indeed valid reasons for concern. The Pentagon's
own document, Vision for 2020, leaves no ambiguity as to its desire. In one chilling sentence, it
refers
to missile defence being fully-operational only when it includes space.
Other Pentagon documents speak hopefully of "full
spectrum dominance" in space, which has a price.
The cost of fully operational Star Wars exceeds
$1 trillion (U.S.). Were Canada
told to contribute only one per cent of the cost - and it's
unfathomable given
Mr. Bush's fiscal situation we'd be told to pay nothing - we would have to pay
$10 billion (U.S.).
That's more than four times the cost of sharing half the
gas tax with cities.
It's also more than 10 times the
cost of Canada's current Kyoto plan.
This is a view of security rooted in the past that does not prepare us for this
century's
security challenges, most notably the human upheaval that rapidly
changing weather patterns will bring. By any standard,
climate change is a more pressing security issue than missiles.
Perhaps Mr. Martin has forgotten
his photo opportunities with forest fires in
British Columbia, or hurricane-stricken Nova Scotia. He should remember,
because
climate change-related disasters impact Canadians' lives far more than
rogue states.
Indeed, even as Mr. Martin
clings to a narrow definition of security, he must
agree that nuclear plants and large-scale fossil fuel generating stations
represent
a more attractive terrorist target than launching an antiquated
missile across the Pacific, hoping ancient guiding systems
can hit Vancouver.
Yet, despite alleged fiscal problems, there is silence on spending almost $1
billion a year
in subsidies to unsustainable fossil- and nuclear-fuel
industries.
But we will pursue expensive Star Wars missile
defence, to say nothing of
contracting out our next census to its chief manufacturer, US arms giant
Lockheed
Martin.
Come the next election, I can't wait to ask what happened to our country: Why we would spend billions
on military technology that doesn't work, while delaying an investment in environmental technology that does.
Revised Patriot Act Will Make It Illegal To Read Patriot Act
WASHINGTON, DC—President Bush
spoke out Monday in support of a revised version of the 2001 USA Patriot Act that would make it illegal to read the USA Patriot
Act. "Under current federal law, there are unreasonable obstacles to investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, including
the public's access to information about how the federal police will investigate and prosecute acts of terrorism," Bush said
at a press conference Monday. "For the sake of the American people, I call on Congress to pass this important law prohibiting
access to itself." Bush also proposed extending the rights of states to impose the death penalty "in the wake of Sept. 11
and stuff." (The Onion, Vol 39 Issue 36)
Branding is to instill an emotion with the sight of
a product or logo. To unbrand, I suppose, happiness and self-esteem must be given to all people, free of charge.
--Adbusters
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GOFF: An
Open Letter To GIs In Iraq
Nov 22, 2003
By Stan Goff (Ret.)
Hold On to Your Humanity
"You do not owe them your souls." "So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A
lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you
up for a fight." |
Dear American serviceperson in Iraq,
I am a retired
veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of
you -- some more extreme than others -- are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some things to you straight up in
the language to which you are accustomed.
In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern
Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of shit: s... from the
news media, s... from movies, s... about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and shit from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors
who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war at all.
The essence of all
this ...was that we had to "stay the course in Vietnam," and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad
Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans
were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active
duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.
When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction
that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by
an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country
presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States.
Including me.
When that bullshit story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked
up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam
to make sure everyone there could vote.
What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American
armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing
whole villages, and committing rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren't in a position
to figure out the difference between me -- just in country -- and the people who had done those things to them.
What
they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect,
and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children.
My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now.
Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire
world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to
forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids.
So the lie
that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their
purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight.
And when you put this into perspective, you
know that if you were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and cities either.
This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of
the Vietcong.
But there we were, ordered into someone else's country, playing the role of occupier when we didn't
know the people, their language, or their culture, with our head full of bullshit our so-called leaders had told us during
training and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got there. There we were, facing people we were ordered to dominate,
but any one of whom might be pumping mortars at us or firing AKs at us later that night. The question we stated to ask is
who put us in this position?
In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of trying to expel an
invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their innocents, we were faced off against each
other by people who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other on the back in Washington, DC
with their fat f... asses stuffed full of cordon blue and caviar.
They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped.
That's
you now. Just fewer trees and less water.
| This image of
a U.S. soldier looking back over the shoulder is a telling one. Former UN arms inspector Hans Blix said in Stockholm recently;
"There's a hatred against the United States and you have 130,000 American troops sitting there as a big target." (Photo: Michael
Kamber/Polaris, for The New York Times) |
 |
We haven't figured out how to stop the pasty-faced, oil-hungry backslappers in DC yet, and it looks like you all might
be stuck there for a little longer. So I want to tell you the rest of the story.
I changed over there in Vietnam and
they were not nice changes either. I started getting pulled into something -- something that craved other people's pain. Just
to make sure I wasn't regarded as a "f... missionary" or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group that
was untouchable, people too crazy to f... with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting someone's
house on fire just for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman, or child, with hardly a second thought.
People who had the power of life and death -- because they could.
The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone you
can't trust because of your circumstances, and to rage about what you've seen, what has happened to you, and what you have
done and can't take back.
It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn't name, and the reason I
know that is that we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing
was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to
be reduced to "niggers" here before they could be lynched. No difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to survive,
even when that wasn't true, but something inside us told us that so long as they were human beings, with the same intrinsic
value we had as human beings, we were not allowed to burn their homes and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes even kill
them. So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their essential humanity, and then we could
do things like adjust artillery fire onto the cries of a baby.
Until that baby was silenced, though, and here's the
important thing to understand, that baby never surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That's the thing you might not get
until it's too late. When you take away the humanity of another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul because
it is standing in the way.
So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can see that even though we function,
we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more, and maybe we can go for months or even years before we
fill that void where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics -- drugs, alcohol, until we realize that the void
can never be filled and we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can disappear with the flotsam of society,
or we hurt others, especially those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration statistic or a mental patient.
You can never escape that you became a racist because you made the excuse that you needed that to survive, that you
took things away from people that you can never give back, or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never get back.
Some of us do. We get lucky and someone gives a damn enough to emotionally resuscitate us and bring us back to life.
Many do not.
I live with the rage every day of my life, even when no one else sees it. You might hear it in my words.
I hate being chumped.
So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive, however you define
survival, while we do what we have to do to stop this thing. But don't surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove
yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching f...
military careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium.
The big bosses
are trying to gain control of the world's energy supplies to twist the arms of future economic competitors. That's what's
going on, and you need to understand it, then do what you need to do to hold on to your humanity. The system does that; tells
you you are some kind of hero action figures, but uses you as gunmen. They chump you.
Your so-called civilian leadership
sees you as an expendable commodity. They don't care about your nightmares, about the DU that you are breathing, about the
loneliness, the doubts, the pain, or about how your humanity is stripped away a piece at a time. They will cut your benefits,
deny your illnesses, and hide your wounded and dead from the public. They already are.
They don't care. So you have
to. And to preserve your own humanity, you must recognize the humanity of the people whose nation you now occupy and know
that both you and they are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are calling the shots.
They are your enemies --
The Suits -- and they are the enemies of peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they are Black families, or
immigrant families, or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never give, and they say they will "never
run" in Iraq, but you and I know that they will never have to run, because they f... aren't there. You are.
They'll
skin and grin while they are getting what they want from you, and throw you away like a used condom when they are done. Ask
the vets who are having their benefits slashed out from under them now. Bushfeld and their cronies are parasites, and they
are the sole beneficiaries of the chaos you are learning to live in. They get the money. You get the prosthetic devices, the
nightmares, and the mysterious illnesses.
So if your rage needs a target, there they are, responsible for your being
there, and responsible for keeping you there. I can't tell you to disobey. That would probably run me afoul of the law. That
will be a decision you will have to take when and if the circumstances and your own conscience dictate. But it's perfectly
legal for you to refuse illegal orders, and orders to abuse or attack civilians are illegal. Ordering you to keep silent about
these crimes is also illegal.
I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you are never under any obligation
to hate Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to give yourself over to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for
the sake of killing, and you are never under any obligation to let them drive out the last vestiges of your capacity to see
and tell the truth to yourself and to the world. You do not owe them your souls.
Come home safe, and come home sane.
The people who love you and who have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to
look us in the face. Don't leave your souls in the dust there like another corpse.
Hold on to your humanity.
Stan
Goff
US Army (Ret.)
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000)
and of the upcoming book "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating
committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. E-mail for BRING THEM HOME
NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org |
How To Start A War In Iraq
By William Rivers
Pitt
1. Lose an election and win a lawsuit. Move into the White House. Surround yourself with ideological extremists from the far-right wing of the Republican Party. Put them get to work planning 'regime change' in Iraq, something they themselves have been planning for years.
2. Pointedly ignore a variety of specific warnings about a looming terrorist attack against the American homeland. Capitalize on the chaos and fear after the attack has
come. On the very day of the attack, get your people to start making public connections between the terrorist attack and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
3. Use the terror attack to pass ruinously contra-constitutional legislation like the Patriot
Act, and later the Homeland Security Act. Send your Attorney General to Congress and have him state bluntly that anyone who
disagrees with these bad new laws is aiding terrorism. This new legislation will help quash dissent surrounding the actions
you plan to undertake, and will also help to insulate you from serious investigation, as the Homeland Security Act essentially
destroys the Freedom of Information Act.
4. Periodically terrify the American people with warnings of looming death and destruction, so as to cow them into submission. Time these agitated warnings to coincide with moments when your own political standing
is under assault because of your actions.
5. Lose any shame whatsoever about using the massive terror attacks as a rhetorical tool against
your own people in the pursuit of your ideological goals. Say things like, "We need to counter the shock wave of the evildoer
by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates" (G.W. Bush 10/4/01) to help get what you want.
Remember: No shame.
6. Have your Defense Secretary organize a group of like-minded ideologues whose task will be to cherry-pick, and often manufacture, evidence to support your push for war in Iraq. Call this group
the Office of Special Plans, and remove them from any Congressional oversight. Have the powerful office of the Vice President
be their sponsor and defender. When the CIA and State Department tell this Office that their plans and intelligence make no
sense, use the influence of the Vice President's office to cut them completely out of the loop. Your Office of Special Plans
will now be the main source of information delivered to the National Security Council, Congress, and the American people.
7. Pile up a couple hundred thousand of your troops on the border of Iraq before any consensus
has been reached for war within your own government or the international community. This will help develop a sense of inevitability
about your plans for war, no matter who disagrees
8. Go to the United Nations and deliver a lot of cooperative happy talk about wanting to work
with the United Nations. Get a unanimous vote from the Security Council for your resolution on the matter, sure in the knowledge
that this body has no idea that you have no intention of actually working with them. When weapons inspectors are dispatched
to Iraq, per the resolution you saw passed, denigrate and insult their work as being useless. Have your troops on the border
begin publicly sharpening their swords.
9. Deliver the information from the Office of Special Plans to the American people on a daily
basis, making connections each time between the terrorist attack and the nation of Iraq. Scare the citizens you are supposed
to lead, and scare them often. When career intelligence officials complain about your rotten intelligence and outright lying, ignore them completely.
10. When the international community begins to realize they've been led down the primrose path,
start denigrating and insulting the United Nations. When no proof of your allegations about Iraq can be found, begin attempting
to bribe nations like Turkey with billions of dollars in trade agreements, weapons, and cash on the barrelhead to get them
to come along for the ride. When they refuse, proclaim that you can go it alone.
11. Stand before the American people during your constitutionally-mandated State of the Union
address and lie like a rug about the threat posed by Iraq. Use evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program based upon crudely forged documents from Niger.
Ignore other career intelligence officials, including the one you sent to investigate your 'evidence' who returned to label
it fake and forged, when they state flatly that your estimations of the Iraq threat are far from accurate or honest.
12. Send your Secretary of State into the well of the United Nations Security Council to make
your case, full in the knowledge that you are going to war no matter what that body decides. Show the UN absolutely no respect
by allowing your Secretary of State to argue for war using intelligence data that is ten years old and plagiarized from the work of a graduate student. Note the irony surrounding the fact that this presentation comes a week after your State
of the Union address, but that your Secretary of State refused to use the evidence you used before the American people in front of the international community.
13. Do not, at any point, stop lying. Lie about the weapons Iraq possesses. Lie about the threat
posed to the American people, thus deepening their fear. Lie about connections between Iraq and al Qaeda. Lie about the efficacy
of weapons inspections. Lie about how much the war will cost. Lie about how long we will be there. Lie about your goals. Do
not forget that shame has no place here. Avoid press conferences whenever possible.
14. Use the same discredited intelligence from Niger to convince Congress that a vote for war
is absolutely necessary. Try to get them to pass a resolution that authorizes you to make war "on the region" surrounding
Iraq as well as Iraq itself. When you don't get those three important words in the resolution, settle for what you did get.
15. With the world essentially united against you, with half of the American people convinced
that your rhetoric connecting Iraq to the terrorist attack is actually true, with that half bolstering questionable approval
ratings for war, with Congressional approval for war in hand despite the fact that their approval was motivated by your lies,
and with four full divisions of your young troops ready to go, begin the attack.
16. Bomb Baghdad in a 'Shock and Awe' campaign that kills untold scores of civilians in their
beds and on their streets. Roll tanks and troops into the country and beat the hell out of it, knowing full well that there
is no army worth mentioning to stand against you after ten years of economic sanctions. To make sure, pay off the commander of Baghdad's Republican Guard to make sure neither he nor his troops fight at the city's gates.
17. Declare an end to combat operations. Strut across the deck of an aircraft carrier and
proclaim yourself to be the savior of the Iraqi people. When your soldiers continue to die, scoff at any concerns about this. Dare the killers of your troops to keep it up by sticking
your chin out and saying, "Bring 'em on."
18. Ignore the fact that none of the weapons you terrified your people with have turned up, despite
the best efforts of your troops and investigators to find them. Ignore the fact that no connections to al Qaeda have turned
up. Ignore the fact that more troops have died since your carrier strut than died during the war. Ignore the fact that your
war will cost billions and billions more than you said it would.
19. Most importantly, and do not forget: Ignore the fact that you have made your country far,
far less safe. You lied about Iraqi connections to the terrorist attack, and to al Qaeda. Your war will have turned Iraq into
what it was not before the war - a hotbed of al Qaeda activity. This war has also been an al Qaeda recruiter's dream. Pay
absolutely no attention to this. Smile. Talk about courage and staying the course.
20. Make plans to have the 2004 national convention of your party next to the hole in the ground
in New York which the terrorist attack caused. Dance on the graves of the dead who helped you get your war. Remember: No shame.
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Published on Thursday,
November 27, 2003 by CommonDreams.org |
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Hogtied and Abused at
Fort Benning |
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by Kathy Kelly |
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On Sunday, November 23, I took part in a nonviolent civil disobedience action at Fort Benning, GA, to protest the U.S.
Army´s School of the Americas (SOA, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation -- WHISC)
Shortly after more than two dozen of us entered Fort Benning and were arrested, US Military Police took us to a warehouse
on the base for “processing.” I was directed to a station for an initial search, where a woman soldier began shouting
at me to look straight ahead and spread my legs. I turned to ask her why she was shouting at me and was ordered to keep my
mouth shut, look straight ahead, and spread my legs wider. She then began an aggressive body search. When ordered to raise
one leg a second time, I temporarily lost my balance while still being roughly searched and, in my view, ‘womanhandled.’
I decided that I shouldn’t go along with this dehumanizing action any longer. When I lowered my arms and said, quietly,
“I’m sorry, but I can’t any longer cooperate with this,” I was instantly pushed to the floor. Five
soldiers squatted around me, one of them referring to me with an expletive (this f_ _ _ er) and began to cuff my wrists and
ankles and then bind my wrists and ankles together. Then one soldier leaned on me, with his or her knee in my back. Unable
to get a full breath, I gasped and moaned, “I can’t breathe.” I repeated this many times and then began
begging for help. When I said, “Please, I’ve had four lung collapses before,” the pressure on my back eased.
Four soldiers then carried me, hogtied, to the next processing station for interrogation and propped me in a kneeling position.
The soldier standing to my left, who had been assigned to “escort” me, gently told me that soon the ankle and
wrist cuffs, which were very tight, would be cut off. He politely let me know that he would have to move my hair, which was
hanging in front of my face, so that my picture could be taken. I told him I’d appreciate that.
I was then carried to the next station. There, one of the soldiers who’d been part of pushing me to the floor knelt
in front of me, and, with his nose about two inches from mine, told me that because I was combative I should know that if
I didn’t do exactly as instructed when they uncuffed one hand, he would pepper spray me. I asked him to describe how
I’d been combative, but he didn’t answer.
After the processing, I was unbound, shackled with wrist and ankle chains, and led to the section where other peaceful
activists, also shackled, awaited transport to the Muskogee County jail.
At our bond hearing on Monday, Nov. 24, a military prosecutor told the federal judge that the military was considering
an additional charge against me for resisting arrest. I explained my side of the story to the judge, grateful that there are
at least sevreal witnesses upon whom I could call.
The federal judge determined that most of us were “flight risks” and increased by 100% the cash bond required
before we could be released, from last year´s $500. to $1000.
Today I have a black eye and the soreness that comes with severe muscle strain. Mostly, I’m burdened with a serious
question, “What are these soldiers training for?” The soldiers conducting that search must have been ordered not
to tolerate the slightest dissent. They were practicing intimidation tactics far beyond what would be needed to control an
avowedly nonviolent group of protesters who had never, in thirteen years of previous actions, caused any disruption during
the process of arrest. Bewildered, most of us in the “tank” inside the Muskogee County jail acknowledged that
during the rough processing we wondered, “What country do we live in?” We now live in a country where Homeland
Security funds pay for exercises which train military and police units to control and intimidate crowds, detainees, and arrestees
using threat and force.
This morning’s aches and pains, along with the memory of being hogtied, give me a glimpse into the abuses we protest
by coming to Fort Benning, GA. As we explore the further invention of nonviolence in our increasingly volatile time, it’s
important that we jointly overcome efforts to deter our determination to stand together against what Martin Luther King once
called, “the violence of desperate men,” -- and women.
Kathy Kelly is the founder of Voices in the Wilderness, a human rights group based in Chicago that worked to lift the
economic sanctions against Iraq. For more information, contact info@vitw.org, call (773) 784-8065, or visit www.iraqpeaceteam.org or www.vitw.org. |
Here's a compelling manifesto that reminds us why "keeping politics out of the classroom" is such a dangerous
thing.
Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash
By Luciana Bohne
08/12/03: You
might think that reading about a Podunk University's English
teacher's attempt to connect the dots between the poverty
of American
education and the gullibility of the American public may be a little
trivial, considering we've embarked
on the first, openly-confessed imperial
adventure of senescent capitalism in the US, but bear
with me. The question
my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been
educated
to such abysmal depths of ignorance.
"I don't read," says a junior without the slightest self-consciousness. She has
not the smallest hint that professing a habitual preference for not reading at a university is like bragging in ordinary life
that one chooses not to breathe. She is in my "World Literature" class. She has to read novels by African, Latin American,
and Asian authors. She is not there by choice: it's just a "distribution" requirement for graduation, and it's easier than
philosophy -she thinks.
The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and Shadows,"
set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class,
including the English majors, can write a focused essay of analysis, so I have to teach that. No one in the class knows where
Chile is, so I make photocopies of general information from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism or fascism is,
so I spend time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is, and I supply it because
it's impossible to understand the theme of the novel without a basic knowledge of that work - which used to be required reading
a few generations ago. And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated
Chile's mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply US de-classified documents proving US collusion with the generals'
coup
and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende.
Geography, history, philosophy, and political science - all missing from their preparation. I realize
that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" pointed out, and that they
are paying for their own oppression. So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not been the friend
of democracy in Chile; yes, our government did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the same goes for most
of Latin America. Then, one student asks, "Why?" Well, I say, the CIA and the corporations run
roughshod over the world in part because of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which apparently is induced
by formal education, reinforced by the media, and cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know and then
more indoctrinated they become, you get this national enabling stupidity to attain which they go
into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, it would be funny.
Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody work of death squads, juntas,
and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war we are waging - an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical,
and expensive war, which announces to the world the failure of our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping weakness of
our economic system. Every man, woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted water is a murder - and
a war crime. And it signals the impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the bare
necessities for democratic survival: analyzing and asking questions.
Let me put it succinctly: I don't think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch
in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted
is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce
the statusn quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a
third-tier university, servicing working-class, irst-generation college graduates who enter lower-echelon
jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal
justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses. This education
is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief and
useless--except to the powers and interests that depend on it. When A Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these shores,
writes the best-organized and most profound essay in English of the class, American education has
something to answer for--especially to our youth.
But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both planned and instrumental.
It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student
paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest intelligence sources.
It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up during his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing
the political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it protects.
Cultural fascism manifests itself
in an aversion to thought and cultural refinement. "When I hear the word 'culture,'" Goebbels said, "I reach for my
revolver." One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime mplemented was educational reform.
The basic goal was to end the university's role as a source of social criticism and political opposition. The order came to dismantle the departments of philosophy, social and political science, humanities and the
arts--areas in which political discussions were likely to occur. The universities were ordered to issue degrees only in business
management, computer programming, engineering, medicine and dentistry - vocational training schools, which in reality is what
American education has come to resemble, at least at the level of mass
education. Our students
can graduate without ever touching a foreign language, philosophy, elements of any science, music or art, history, and political
science, or economics. In fact, our students learn to live in an electoral democracy devoid of politics - a feature the dwindling
crowds at the voting booths well illustrate.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity that the industrial revolution created,
people first surrendered their minds or the capacity to reason, then their hearts or the capacity to empathize, until all
that was left of the original human equipment was the senses or their selfish demands for gratification. At that point, humans
entered the stage of market commodities and market consumers--one more thing in the commercial landscape.
Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official
lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations. Meanwhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a 10% cut across the
board for all departments in the state - including education.
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University in
Pennsylvania.
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