The Rally Effect Wags the Dog

“The sonuvabitch got what he deserved.”

I sipped my drink and grunted, neither agreeing or disagreeing.

We were sitting in the bar at a local restaurant, watching the TV news.  The place is a little out of the way, and even in the midst of ski season it was devoid of customers except for me and the other guy as we waited for the kitchen to open.

The segment we were watching dealt with the targeted killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.   Soleimani, as you undoubtedly know by now, was the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.  In recent years, he has been a key player in Iran’s support of Syrian strongman Bashir al-Assad and a leader of Shiite militias in the war against Islamic State in Iraq. 

President Trump’s justification for ordering the killing was that Soleimani posed a threat to American lives.  The unrest in Baghdad in past weeks, which included an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, is simply the latest symptom of the power vacuum created by the 2003 invasion and should have been little surprise to anyone.  Similarly, Iran has actively meddled in regional politics as far back as its support of Hezbollah in the 1980s Lebanese Civil War. 

In short, business as usual.  Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon exist at the intersection of a number of religious and ethnic groups making national unity impossible absent a one-party state with a strongman at its apex.  And yet the United States and other Western powers assume they can maintain order and security while fostering Western-style democracy.  In Iraq’s case, the U.S. withdrawal in 2011 practically ensured its Shiite-majority government would become a client of Iran.

Soleimani and the Iranian leadership doubtlessly welcomed the deepening of anti-American sentiment among Iraqis.  Iran has engaged in state-sponsored terrorism in the past and Soleimani’s high-profile presence in Iraq was not encouraging, his role in defeating ISIS notwithstanding.  However, I’m inclined to take Mr. Trump’s assertion with a grain of salt.

This isn’t the first time a U.S. president facing an impeachment trial has leveraged a foreign policy crisis.  Bill Clinton was one lucky so-and-so as 1998 drew to a close.  Saddam Hussein had threatened to expel U.N. weapons inspectors, triggering U.S.-led airstrikes.  The Kosovo War for independence was well under way.  And, over the summer, al-Qaeda made its international debut by detonating car bombs outside our embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. 

You don’t want to change commanders in chief in the midst of a perceived national security crisis.  This is arguably one of the reasons the Senate merely censured Clinton.  (I think, too, that the Republicans would have preferred not to have gone into the 2000 election facing an incumbent President Gore.  But that’s just one of my crank theories.)  It didn’t hurt that Clinton’s approval numbers actually went up before the trial.  I haven’t seen this week’s polls, but the White House is surely counting on the rally effect to further cement Trump’s apparent acquittal whenever the Senate decides to hold the trial.

The timing of Clinton’s sudden emergence as a quasi-war leader didn’t go unnoticed by a skeptical media.  The resemblance to the recently released Dustin Hoffman movie Wag the Dog was uncanny and was frequently invoked as the impeachment trial drew nigh. 

For those of you who have never seen a movie made before the turn of the century, the plot goes like this: An unpopular president facing defeat at the polls cooks up a hoax war with Albania on the advice of his spin doctors.  Hilarity ensues.

Wag the Dog was just okay as a comedy, but the film’s conceit wasn’t lost on the chattering classes.  Even journalists sympathetic to Clinton invoked its title when discussing how foreign policy had suddenly become so important to an administration more concerned with domestic issues.

The killing of General Soleimani was handled in the maladroit, hamfisted fashion typical of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.  It’s so all over the map it doesn’t know which direction it’s going if it ever did.  But I think that makes scant difference to the base.  Something went bang, and a brown-skinned Muslim was dead.

Which was probably what my bar companion meant with his remark.  I guess I could have provoked an argument by pointing out the nuances of Middle Eastern politics, or that if Soleimani had committed war crimes he should have been afforded due process and put on trial.  But why spoil the prospect of a good meal?  I sipped again at my drink and perused the menu.  The news moved on to another story.  Out of sight, out of mind…for now.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

The Good Fight

There are only a handful of surviving Second World War veterans.  This week’s D-Day commemorations here and abroad remind us, as with those of recent years, that their time with us is short.

Being the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion, the spotlight shone especially bright.  President Trump stood alongside Queen Elizabeth at the celebration in Portsmouth, as actors read from the letters and diaries of those who served and jet fighters performed fly-bys in between rousing song and dance numbers.  Theresa May and Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron each spoke, as did Trump himself.  The Queen gave the closing remarks, praising the resilience of the war generation.

Her Majesty is well aware of the thin strand the living vets represent, linking us in the present with the deeds of the past.  She is herself a Second World War veteran in a manner of speaking, having served in the British army at home during the war’s last year or two (though she returned to Buckingham Palace each evening).  This year’s commemoration will likely be the last to be celebrated on such a large scale.

Here in America, we subscribe to the same mythos surrounding that war.  It was a good fight, we were unquestionably the good guys, and the enemy, particularly the Germans, were evil.  It has been so even before the guns fell silent.  When I was a kid, the WW2 vets were fixtures in the community who shared their stories with elementary school classes and served as community and business leaders.

Sometime in the mid-Nineties, as the veterans began passing away in noticeable numbers, popular culture became particularly laudatory in its treatment of them.  Even as films and literature treated our other recent wars, particularly Vietnam, as morally ambiguous at best, the black and white view of the Second World War persisted.  Five decades after it ended, mythology became hagiography.  Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign was lauded by the talking heads as one last call to service even as they seemed to assume that Bill Clinton, derided by conservatives as a Vietnam draft dodger, would easily win a second term.  The ever-bombastic Tom Brokaw, who himself somehow missed out on his own generation’s war, dubbed those who lived through the war years as the Greatest Generation.

It was at the movies and on cable TV where the mythologizing reached its apotheosis and shaped the narrative in the everyday discourse into the present day.  Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are of course the main culprits.  Saving Private Ryan and the miniseries Band of Brothers were both technical tours de force and powerful storytelling.  The verisimilitude of the first film in capturing the horrors of combat is striking on first viewing and it still hits hard every time thereafter.  Nevertheless, both works and the volume of derivate films and TV shows following in their wake, engage in cheerleading for an American exceptionalism that we as a nation can’t seem to let go of.

The Second World War continues to resonate because so few of our conflicts have been so morally clear cut.  Only the Civil War, on the Union side at least, possesses the same clarity of purpose in the popular mind.  The others have been mainly exercises in imperialist expansion, large and small.  The Indian Wars aren’t discussed much anymore, even though the genocide of indigenous peoples made America as we know it possible.  Even less is said of our guerrilla war in the Philippines at the turn of the last century.  The Banana Wars involved the subjugation of Latin American states for the benefit of U.S. corporations.

Our military ventures after 1945 are no less problematic.  One could make a case in favor of our intervention in Korea, given the odiousness of the North Korean regime and the fact that Harry Truman shrewdly used the United Nations as a fig leaf for our unilateral butting-in.  By comparison, we sacrificed nearly 60,000 American lives in Vietnam—not to mention the lives of countless Vietnamese—over a pretext so slim that an exchange of diplomatic notes normally serves to settle such disputes as that which led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

After a brief funk in the late 1970s, we resumed flexing our muscles and making self-serving justifications for it.  The invasion of Grenada, the smallest country in the Western Hemisphere, was justified because the Cubans gave material support to a popular revolution.  The invasion of Panama wasn’t a violation of another country’s sovereignty, it was sort of a law enforcement action to catch a drug kingpin.  But the real turning point was just around the corner.

The 1991 Gulf War brought us into the present era of militarism.  A war fought to make the world safe for Exxon was packaged partly as a media event and partly as a case for ramped up interventionism cloaked as the liberation of oppressed peoples.  (Liberation of the oppressed—just like in the Second World War!)  We are now at the point where more than 70 countries host U.S. military bases.  The public has been culturally intimidated into supporting our ventures abroad, and attempts to debate the matter in the mainstream are a non-starter as a consequence.   

In a college history class, we were assigned to read Empire as a Way of Life by William Appleman Williams.  This was circa 1984, and revisionist historian Williams was somewhat passé even then and he is mostly forgotten today.  That’s too bad.  Empire as a Way of Life is a plainly worded account of America’s imperial adventures as the prominent, recurring theme in American history.  Williams made a moral argument for rejecting imperialism and embracing a renewed role for the United States as an ethical member of the family of nations.

Williams the man was a singular character.  A military brat, an Annapolis graduate, and a Second World War veteran, he left the Navy to pursue an academic career.  (The circumstances leading to this have been described variously as an early retirement for service-related injuries or for those inflicted upon him while participating in a civil rights march in the Deep South.)  By the 1960s, Williams was a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in a history department featuring such luminaries as George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg.  Williams was a high-profile participant in the intellectual controversies of the era, opposing the Vietnam War while locking horns on occasion with the campus New Left.

Williams’ career stalled a bit the following decade as the discourse surrounding American history and foreign policy shifted and morphed and his work was nudged to the margins.  He migrated westward and concluded his career at Oregon State University.  Distrustful of large institutions, he continued to argue for a return to decentralized government which mirrored his critiques of U.S. foreign policy.  Williams retired in 1980 and died ten years later.

When the Iraq War was at its height, Williams’ writings enjoyed a minor renaissance thanks to academics like Andrew Bacevich but remain fairly obscure.  However, Williams’ ideas retain a certain authority applicable to our present predicament.  We must face the truth that few fights are truly good fights and address the questions of war and peace in language detached from nationalistic sentimentality.  When this discussion takes place at last, may the spirit of Dr. Williams moderate.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar 

Climate Change

Going through this morning’s campus mail, I found a hand-addressed envelope among the usual clutch of publisher’s circulars and club announcements.

This is unusual.  I rarely get personal mail through the college.  The missive was formally addressed to “Mr. Unassuming Scholar” at my college’s main campus where I’d taught during summer session.  That explained the delay between the day it was mailed and my receiving it at the satellite campus where I normally work.  I surmised it was from one of the students in that class, but there was no return address.

I’d hoped it was good news about the sender’s transfer to a prestigious four-year uni, or an award or scholarship won.  No such luck.  Instead, the envelope’s only contents were a clipping from the Wall Street Journal.  It was an editorial by David Gerlenter published last week.  Its heading: “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” 

Evidently the sender considered me to be one of the titular they.  The gist of the article is that those in the “Left” (i.e., mainstream centrist Democrats who oppose the president’s policies) do not have any program aside from attacking him.  More to the point, “they” hate Donald Trump because he’s a larger than life version of the average American.   The sender highlighted what he (presumably it was a he) believed were the most important passages in case I missed it in my liberal cluelessness. 

In a week which witnessed such horrors as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and the murder of two African Americans by a white supremacist in Louisville, receiving a clipping from an anonymous critic is beneath trivial.  But in one sense it’s all of a piece, reflections of the sea change in an already poisonous social climate which existed well before the 2016 election.  Incivility has become an accepted social norm.  We choose our “enemies” and proceed to dehumanize them.  For a few of the less balanced among us, it is a short leap to violence.

Most of what we experience is petty nastiness from the people we disagree with or have chosen to dislike us for who we are.  Unreasonableness festers on both sides of the divide.  Among some of my colleagues, political discussions that don’t categorically vilify Trump are met with knee-jerk hostility.  Early on in the Mueller investigation, a friend asked when (not if, when) the president would be impeached.  I said that as far as I could tell The Donald’s misdeeds did not rise to treason or bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.  Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed slightly, and she asked in a strained voice why I was taking his side.  I wasn’t defending him by any means; I was simply reading the tea leaves of the news and offering an opinion of what was politically feasible. 

The Gerlenter article gets one thing right in that Democratic leaders have been tone deaf when discussing the very working people the party has historically championed.  Barack Obama saying that they needed to let go of religion and guns and Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as “deplorables” are the most cited examples of this.  Such attitudes percolate through affluent liberal social circles, an implicit criticism which is as much of working class culture and tastes as it is of their political preferences.

This trend cuts both ways, and again it’s often a matter of style.  While affluent liberals take a condescending approach, some of the symbolic blows struck by the Trump crowd verge on the childish.  Sometimes it’s merely offensive bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans.  Other times it’s less benign such as the practice of diesel pickup owners disabling emissions controls so as to produce sootier exhaust while passing Priuses, a pastime called “rolling coal.”  Sometimes it takes a dark turn in the form of racist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic websites and social media posts.

The White House’s protestations that the president is not responsible for the uptick in hate crimes are factually correct on their face, but it is a disingenuous argument nonetheless.  Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the bottled-up anger of poor whites.  Gerlenter’s thesis that Trump is what half of America sees in the mirror as their idealized self is spot on.  As another commenter said (and I don’t remember who), Donald Trump is a poor American’s idea of a rich person.  He’s the product of mass frustration over the perceived loss of an American dream. 

What’s left unsaid, or more accurately unacknowledged, is that even in the era of our nation’s “greatness” many of those sporting MAGA hats still would not have thrived.  The myth of equality in America is that it’s myth.  Always has been.  Consequently, the only thing propping up the self-image of many Trump supporters is the prospect of preserving white male dominance. 

Conservatism is all about hierarchy, and the only arena in which working class whites historically benefited from hierarchy was through racial and gender dominance.  That’s what’s driving the PC backlash; it’s an assertion of the supposed right of straight white men to dominate.  Trump’s antics with women, his xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric, his insensitivity to the rights of others, his bluster, his substitution of his own judgments for the actual expertise of others, and his gaudy, shameless persona are all a figment of their collective id. 

As for the assertion that liberals are devoid of solutions or a viable political program, I pretty much agree.  For three decades the Democrats have merely tread water; instead of offering an alternative to the Republican program it instead swung to the right so as to hold on to any kind of base.  Like my unnamed correspondent who sent the clipping, like Mr. Gerlenter, I can plainly see that the Democratic Party is adrift and rudderless.  That said, my unnamed correspondent misjudges my political stance.  I am not a liberal.  I am a progressive.

Republican candidates have muddied the ideological waters in the run-up to next week’s election by tarring centrist Democrats as dangerous radicals.  Whereas I once inwardly bristled when a professor in graduate school described the public of being politically unsophisticated, I’m beginning to think she was on to something. 

What were simple ideological descriptors have become epithetic projectiles.  Most progressives are not dangerous radicals, and the typical liberal certainly is not.  And yet half the voting public is being gradually convinced this is the case if they aren’t there already.  And although the mainstream Dems are short of new ideas, my fellow progressives, particularly those who espouse the idea of participatory democracy, are not only forging new ideas but organizing on the street as well.   Maybe their efforts will ultimately stem the tide of political climate change for the better…if they’re given half a chance.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Requiem for a Spectre

If you’re under forty, you were raised to fear Middle Easterners and Muslims.  For my generation, the bogeyman was communism.

This week marks the centenary of the October Revolution.  Strangely, the anniversary has attracted little comment in the media which is funny when you consider how large the U.S.-Soviet rivalry loomed over 20^th century history.

The Cold War was, in retrospect, more about national rivalry and global power politics than ideology.  While it’s true that the collectivist ethos of the former socialist states was inherently antagonistic to Americans’ individualistic worldview, the East-West standoff was really about global hegemony on both sides. 

Still, throughout my childhood and youth my teachers and the media played up the threat evil communism posed to our freedoms.  Atrocities such as the Cambodian genocide were offered up as proof of the ruthlessness of communist rule and what might befall us should they succeed in their goal of defeating the United States.

This statement, which seems overly dramatic from today’s perspective, would have been credible to a number of people when I was a kid.  Once, in a high school history class, the teacher asked us what was the goal of the communists.  A student in the back of the room promptly answered in a loud, emphatic voice, “The goal of communism is world conquest!”  No one disputed him.  The teacher appeared pleased.

This was in the early 1980s, when President Reagan was doing his level best to antagonize the Soviet leadership.  Anticommunism had become conflated with “patriotism,” and the popular rhetoric ignored realities on the ground.  The Sino-Soviet split had occurred twenty years earlier.  The recently concluded Vietnam War was more about national sovereignty than communism, a truth recognized by many scholars from its start though clearly not by most Americans and their poliicians.

We have a tenuous relationship with truth that goes back much further than the current debate as to whether we’re living in a “post-truth” era.  Our thinking tends toward either/or, black and white reasoning.  We categorically reject any evidence which contradicts our narrative, however manifest it may be to a less partial observer.  This tendency becomes pernicious when it results in defining ourselves not by what we are but by what we are not.

This is a recurring theme.  In our first century or so, we were not those corrupt, rotten Old World aristocrats.  During the Cold War our alliance with the Soviets against the Axis was forgotten as we proclaimed to the world that we were most certainly nothing like those godless commies.  Today, we are not those Muslims who hate our freedom, but this is a topic for another time.

Back to the dialectic between a free, virtuous America and a totalitarian, evil Soviet Union.  If you were with us, your country was a “democracy” and part of the “Free World.”  If you were not, your country was either enslaved or untrustworthy.  This fiction ignored two things.  First, many of the regimes in the so-called Free World countries were in fact corrupt and repressive.  Secondly, whenever the people of one of these countries dared assert their right to self-determination the U.S. and its allies would step in to stymie the attempt—witness the examples of Guatemala, Iran, Chile, East Timor, and Nicaragua.

All this sidesteps the question of the merits of the Soviet experiment, however.  Putting aside the chaos of the Civil War and the totalitarian excesses of the Stalin years, there were aspects of it which compare favorably with the capitalist West.  Many of the ills of capitalist economies were less manifest, such as fluctuating business cycles and unemployment.  The regime at least made the effort to attend to its people’s essential economic and social needs.  The state ideology encouraged the collective welfare over narrow self-interest. 

That last item probably doomed the system in the end.  The citizens of the Eastern Bloc were less interested in political freedom than in Levi’s and rock music.  During the so-called Era of Stagnation between the mid-1960s and the advent of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s economic planners struggled to meet popular demand for consumer goods.  Appeals to the collective good fell on deaf ears when people stood on line for soap and razor blades.  Some Soviet clients, most notably Hungary, managed to satiate consumer demand.  Others, like Romania, were economically inept and politically crooked.

Watching from afar, the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath did seem breathtaking at the time.  The West was vindicated.  It wasn’t long before the downside became apparent, however.  Ethnic conflict in Russia and other former Soviet republics.  Terrorism.  Economic turmoil.  Organized crime.  Vladimir Putin.

The Soviet Union did not fall for the reasons we use to congratulate ourselves.  It wasn’t the absence of freedom or because of the Reagan administration’s military build-up.   It was that our comparatively free market was more efficient than their planned economy.  What was portrayed as a clash of ideologies ended on a disappointingly prosaic note.  Then again, it doesn’t matter as we’ve long since moved along to newer, suitably evil enemies.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

Outrage, Conservative Virtue Signaling, and The Vet

Fox News traffics in populist outrage.  It is its forte, its stock in trade so to speak.

It’s not hard to see why.  For one thing, it’s great for ratings.  It stokes the need of its core audience to perpetually seethe with resentment.  One of its specialties is bringing to light the opinions of obscure dissenters no one would ever have heard of had Fox not pointed them out as proof positive that good old fashioned American values are in dire peril of extinction.

This week, the Fox affiliate in Philadelphia aired a story about a Drexel University professor who Tweeted that he wanted to vomit after seeing a first-class passenger on his plane gave up his seat for a service member in uniform.  The network picked up the story, which is now on all the major news nets.

The professor, one George Ciccariello-Maher, had drawn right wing ire a few months back for another Tweet calling for the abolition of the white race.  Ciccariello-Maher claimed his remark was sardonic, but the story of the plane incident began by describing him as an “anti-white Drexel professor.” 

The good professor’s nausea stemmed from the botched coalition airstrike on Mosul last week, which is reported to have taken a couple hundred civilian lives while doing nothing to break Islamic State’s hold on the Iraqi city.  Didn’t the other passengers who thanked the man for yielding his seat know that the uniformed soldier was complicit in this tragedy just by being in the military?

The newsreaders displayed the expected level of disgust at Ciccariello-Maher’s words while reporting the story.  The trolls crawled out of the woodwork in force to leave comments condemning Ciccariello-Maher’s message, with the predictable profanity and malice.  One poster wrote ominously of the “enemies within.”

For me, the report dredged up the usual mixed emotions whenever I read about encounters between progressive academia and the rest of society.  You see, I’m that overeducated, godless, lefty professor your conservative, God-fearing parents warned you against.  But I’m also a veteran.  I understand the passenger’s gesture.  I accepted a number of small kindnesses from people while traveling in uniform over the years which helped make the stresses of being far from home bearable.  As a civilian, I’ve anonymously bought a drink or paid a restaurant check for service members from time to time, particularly if one was traveling through an airport alone.

So, I’m not about to knock the guy who gave up his seat.  The soldier could have been traveling for a number of reasons.  Perhaps there was a family emergency such as a sick relative.  Maybe he was rushing home for the birth of a child.  It could be that he was beginning or coming back from midtour leave or returning from a long overseas deployment.  Regardless of the reason, it was a gracious gesture which I’m sure was graciously accepted.

But let’s take a clear-eyed look at that gesture in the context of how the public views the military.  “Thank you for your service” has become the obligatory affirmation during any encounter with a service member or veteran, however trivial.  Just this afternoon, I was on the phone with my insurance company.  This particular insurer is a well-known company whose clientele consists exclusively of current and former military personnel and their immediate families.  The customer service rep was pleasant and was able to assist me with the issue I’d called her about.  The call ended like this:

“Thank you for your membership with -------, Mr. Scholar, and thank you for your service to our country.”

“Um, thanks…thank you for…for your help.”   

I never know how to respond.  I’ve come to see gestures such as thanking veterans and giving up seats on planes for soldiers as a form of conservative virtue signaling, a little like wearing American flag lapel pins or attaching Christian symbols to the backs of cars.  Membership in the U.S. military has become politicized, a phenomenon which would certainly horrify the founders of this country if they ever found out.

I blame our collective guilt over how we initially rejected the Vietnam vets. Prior to the Cold War, we never had a large peacetime military.  Soldiering was a refuge for petty crooks and ne’er-do-wells in times of peace and a noble calling for citizens in times of war.  The Second World War was the apogee of the citizen-as-soldier ethos, and rare was the family without someone in the services.  The inequities of the postwar draft were impossible to ignore, however.  During the Vietnam era, the poor were shipped overseas by the thousands while their middle class contemporaries hid behind student deferments and exaggerated minor ailments.

I’m agnostic concerning tales of returning Vietnam vets being assaulted and spat upon by “hippies” at airports.  Some I’ve known claim vehemently that this happened to them.   On the other hand, I’m familiar with historical investigations which were unable to identify a single substantiated incident. 

America was split down the middle over vets in the years following the withdrawal from Vietnam.  I recall the repatriation of the prisoners of war in 1973.  My small town put up banners in celebration, though none of the returnees were from there.  (“Mommy, what’s a ‘pow’?” I asked in confusion.)  That was my small town in the rural West.  Out in the world beyond its limits, people thought and believed differently.

The prevailing attitude toward the military and veterans in the 1970s was roundly negative.  The mass media have left an indelible record of the time.  It’s common knowledge that the TV show M*A*S*H was really about Vietnam despite being set in Korea.  The antihero protagonists of Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver were Vietnam vets.  In Black Sunday, a disgraced former POW is goaded into attacking the Super Bowl with an explosive laden Goodyear blimp.  The disaster movie Earthquake featured a psycho National Guardsman who tries to rape a woman he’s obsessed with and a cowardly Army colonel who flees a tunnel in panic at the first sign of collapse.  Even movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter which were praised for their compassionate portrayal of men and families damaged by Vietnam contained a hint of superciliousness.  During my first year or two of high school, visiting recruiters were greeted with smirks, smartass remarks, and the occasional taunt.

Then, as if somebody had thrown a switch, the zeitgeist turned on its head.  Reagan’s cocksure swagger and anticommunism had something to do with it.  Frustration over the Iran hostage crisis and other foreign policy reverses probably did as well.  For whatever reason the Eighties were the Decade of the Heroic Vietnam Vet in American pop culture.  There was First Blood and its sequel Rambo, of course, not to mention any number of Chuck Norris movies.  Platoon played in theaters to rave reviews.  One or more of the main characters in Magnum P.I., Riptide, Miami Vice, and The A-Team were Vietnam vets.  A Rumor of War, Platoon Leader, and The Things We Carried told the grunts’ story to a mainstream which would have scornfully rejected it a couple of years earlier.  Pop songs such “Goodnight Saigon,” “Still in Saigon,” “Born in the USA,” and “Walking on a Thin Line” extolled the travails of the discharged vet in an uncaring world.

This new awareness not only inspired guilt-ridden feelings about vets, but over the military generally.  The Iran crisis made Americans realize that despite decades of propaganda to the contrary there was a lot of pent up anger over U.S. policies abroad.  It also made them aware that future military actions abroad might be necessary and that the burden of these would fall on the shoulders of recruited volunteers.  Americans love the troops because they don’t have to be the troops.  The specter of the draft lurks in the background, particularly during rough patches such as the Iraq War prior to the 2007 surge.  There’s a kind of desperate cheerleading from the mainstream which I trace back to the 1991 Gulf War.  It’s born of remorse over one’s affluence, comfort, and safety when others are facing danger even though few would ever, ever entertain the thought of volunteering or allowing their sons and daughters to do the same. 

There are other symptoms of our collective embracing of veterans.  The sudden anointing of the-vet-as-hero has had its seamy underside.  Rambo gave credibility to the Vietnam Dolchstoẞ myth of the left behind POW.  Despite the black POW/MIA flags flying from the flagstaffs of numerous public buildings and burly biker types too young to have served wearing “You Are Not Forgotten” vest patches, no evidence has emerged proving Vietnam is still holding American prisoners.  What could they gain?  It defies common sense.  Vietnam has had diplomatic relations with the U.S. for over twenty years and the U.S. is an important trading partner.  Why not come clean up front and avoid future friction? 

Another unfortunate side to our hero worship is the rise of the imposter.  Lots of guys have their war stories with a detail or two exaggerated here and there.  That’s one thing.  Telling everyone you were GI Joe with a kung-fu grip when you were really a cook, claiming you received the Medal of Honor or even a Purple Heart when you never heard a shot fired in anger, or accepting veterans benefits when you never served is another matter.   

Why doesn’t anyone call foul on these antics?  Why do they go so long without being caught?  It’s because the public has become intimidated.  Criticizing anyone linked to the military is seen by some people as tantamount to treason.  Hence the uproar over the yielded airplane seat.  The soldier who drew Ciccariello-Maher’s opprobrium in all likelihood had nothing at all to do personally with the tragedy in Mosul.  He is neither villain nor hero.  He’s not responsible for decisions made by the Pentagon or CENTCOM.  He was just a traveler trying to get to where he was going. 

By the same token the hubbub on Fox and elsewhere over the professor’s infelicitous Tweet has a further chilling effect on any legitimate critique of our foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Question our policies or tactics, and you’re disloyal and un-American.  I think that this incident is one of countless symptoms of misplaced guilt masquerading as Americanism.  Perhaps if we had done right by Vietnam veterans in the first place we might have avoided this unpleasantness.  But in light of the heavy doses of propaganda ladled out to us by government and media alike over the past century, I am inclined to doubt it.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

End of an Era

The passing of Fidel Castro has evoked mixed feelings for me.  Initially I felt a sense of disbelief, as if he might last forever as a living, breathing museum piece legacy of the Cold War.  Fidel was a presence on the world stage for my whole life, and so his death struck me in the manner that, say, the demise of Queen Elizabeth undoubtedly will when that time comes. 

Before Americans were taught by their leaders to fear and hate Muslims, they feared and hated Communists.  Cuba, so close to the United States, was a particular source of unease.  Our mainstream news media played up the Castro regime’s repressiveness, enthusiastically echoed by politicians and the exile community.  That Fidel did not go the way of the leaders of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, that it was not until after he stepped aside in favor of brother Raul that Cuba began the first tentative steps on the road toward capitalism already trod by China and Vietnam, caused consternation among American leaders.

On the other hand, Fidel’s death has elicited laudatory retrospectives of his life, thought, and work among progressives.  I tend to view him in terms of his whole record.  By his own admission he was a dictator, albeit a “sui generis dictator.” His regime had an abysmal record on civil liberties.  It repressed and persecuted the LGBT community.  Castro was perfectly willing to foment nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union.  His emptying the jails of Cuba’s worst criminals during the Mariel boatlift was hardly a laudable gesture, either.

Notwithstanding all this, the Cuban Revolution was a net gain for Cuba.  For the first time, Cuba was a fully sovereign nation.  The revolution broke the grip of American corporations and American organized crime on the economy.  It brought about a fair distribution of wealth.  It placed agriculture in the hands of the people who worked the land.  It led to Cuba having the highest literacy rate in the Caribbean as well as having its best educated populace.  Most importantly, it made quality healthcare universally available, an endeavor at which the United States has failed miserably.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing “Special Period” did result in some dents in the revolution’s edifice.  Raul Castro’s willingness to make concessions to the neoliberal order is worrisome though inevitable.  As the country reopens to American investment and tourism one sees the specter of pre-1959 Cuba slowly rising like a miasma.  (Ironically, during the era when the CIA toyed with a number of novel ways to assassinate Fidel, he shrugged off the threat by saying that if he were to die the United States would then have to contend with Raul and “he’s even more radical than I am!”)  I wonder what Fidel may have thought of the first signs of his work being undone.  Did he acquiesce to this process?  This seems unthinkable to the point of cognitive dissonance.

And so, Fidel’s death represents a further loss of hope of preserving the gains of the Cuban Revolution.   I suppose all there’s left is the prospect of playing roulette and blackjack at the Havana Hilton for the first time in generations.  Bring on the Yanqui tourists!

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Deshielo Cubano

After 54 years, the end of an exercise in futility:  The U.S. and Cuba have restored full diplomatic ties.

And what was accomplished by the half-century rift?  Families split apart, the isolation of a people trying only to build a better society, and a near brush with nuclear holocaust.  Yet soon an American ambassador will present his credentials to Raúl Castro.  Quite ironic when you think about it; Fidel used to half-jokingly warn his enemies that if anything ever happened to him they would only wind up having to deal with his even more radical brother. 

But Castro the Younger has proven not to be immune from the global neoliberal tide, permitting a limited growth of private enterprise in recent years.  It’s not as if Cuba’s leadership has much choice.  Having survived on its own for nearly 25 years since the demise of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s economy is in straitened circumstances to say the least.  Once Cuba becomes more fully integrated into the global economy, it will likely become still another haven for offshoring with its finances firmly under the whip hand of the World Bank and the IMF.

All the same, the current thaw is a win-win for both sides.  The U.S. will have entrée to Cuban markets.  Cuba still has the Castros.  I only wonder if the Cuban people will be better off in the end for it.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

I Am the Law, So I Won

Even as the news arrived that former Argentinian dictator Jorge Rafael Videla had died in prison, we learn that his contemporary counterpart in Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, may go free after that country’s Supreme Court overturned his genocide conviction and ordered a partial retrial.[1]

Ríos Montt, one may recall, ruled Guatemala during the most vicious period of its long-running civil war during the early 1980s.  His staunchest ally was the United States; President Reagan praised him as a “man of integrity” committed to “social justice.”

The kind of social justice Ríos Montt promoted in Guatemala was, shall we say, very selective.  Even the CIA expressed concern over the mounting death toll as US- and Israeli-supplied and trained troops took the lives of numerous civilians in such atrocities as the Plan de Sanchez Massacre.  Although the campaign against URNG guerrillas took center stage and was used to justify excesses in the name of establishing “democracy,” Ríos Montt’s administration pressured poor farmers and indigenous Mayans to give up their support for the guerrillas and pledge their loyalty to the state.

The result was a swath of destruction which put Billy Sherman’s March to the Sea to shame, with hundreds of villages razed.  The population escaping death in the attacks was left homeless and bereft of means of subsistence.   Now, more than thirty years later, Ríos Montt faces at least the possibility of being held accountable for his actions.  As his case returns to trial, we (and his thousands of victims) should be cautiously hopeful for a just outcome.  But, while times have changed for the better throughout Central and South America, we must also remember that having been the law for so long, these aging military rulers expect, and too often receive, a large measure of deference from their civilian successors.   

Don’t be surprised when Ríos Montt goes free.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] Apparently, the Supreme Court upheld the conduct of and the evidence submitted at the trial through April 21^st, but quashed subsequent proceedings.

Blowback

On what was predicted to have been a quiet 9/11 anniversary, rioters in several Libyan and Egyptian cities attacked U.S. diplomatic missions, resulting in several deaths. 

The worst of these was on the Benghazi consulate, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.  The protests have spread to Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, and India over the past two days, and these are just the major incidents.  There have also been demonstrations reported in Europe and North America. The cause of all the commotion: An online trailer for a poorly made web film titled The Innocence of Muslims, which purports to depict the life of the Prophet Mohammed in a manner deemed blasphemous by Muslims. 

For several days, the filmmaker’s identity was a mystery.  At first claimed to be one “Sam Bacile,” a man for whom no information could be found, it turns out the auteur was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Egyptian immigrant.  Nakoula is something of a colorful fellow, with convictions for bank fraud and drug dealing.  Apparently bitter over the treatment of his people by Egypt’s Muslim majority, and knowing he could capitalize on America’s kneejerk Islamophobia, Nakoula produced a crude work of religious slander. 

There are two tightly interwoven reasons for the reaction The Innocence of Muslims provoked.   The first is the West’s century-long economic exploitation of the Middle East and its support of corrupt and repressive regimes.  The second is a Western animus toward Muslims, regardless of ethnicity, that ranges from casually dismissive contempt to open hatred. 

In the United States, anti-Muslim prejudice is bound up with the belief that the American people and the American way of life are indisputably superior to all others, anxiety over America’s perceived decline as a world power, and our dependence on imported oil.  As a child in the 1970s, I remember the adults around me railing against the goddamn Arabs who were driving up gas prices.  The Iran hostage crisis—a backlash against Western abuses that should have sent a clear message that a change of attitude was in order—merely fueled the aggrieved anger.  The patriotic fervor surrounding the 1991 Gulf War reflected frustrations over decades of Middle Eastern unrest.  The popular reaction to 9/11 needs no explanation.

It’s a cheap shot to chalk this xenophobia up to the facile observation that Americans are just dumb.  Given the breadth and depth of information available to them, as well as the affluence that would enable travel, this assertion nonetheless contains a sliver of truth.  Less than a third of U.S. citizens hold a passport.  When we do travel, it’s usually to countries with amenities similar to home.  If we vacation in poorer countries, it’s to visit lavish resorts that tell little about how the locals actually live.  Even in those instances where Americans have contact with non-Western cultures that knowledge is clouded by distinct cognitive filters, the travels of evangelical youth groups and Mormon missionaries for example.  It is unlikely that many Americans who have travelled in Muslim countries have come away with a positive impression due to their insular worldview.

The democratization of media ushered in by the digital age has burdened us with ideological blinders.  One result is that in our desire to be told what we want to hear, we often confuse opinion with fact.  The conservative blogosphere is rife with the libel that the Prophet Mohammed was a pedophile because he took a child bride.  It doesn’t matter that child marriage was a common practice in many cultures, including those of medieval Christendom, and were normally contracted to cement alliances and not necessarily as sexual unions; nevertheless, the insinuation of deviance alone is enough to condemn a whole swath of humanity.  (The histories of each of the Abrahamic religions contain numerous episodes at odds with modern mores.  It’s probably just as well not to dwell too much on the idea of God impregnating an adolescent Virgin Mary, for instance.)    

An overlooked dimension to right wing anti-Muslim hostility is the memory of the Nation of Islam’s militancy during the Civil Rights Movement.  This experience surely informed subsequent popular anger over Middle Eastern anti-Americanism.  The thought of dark skinned people professing a strange faith that gives them the courage to stand up is enough to strike fear and loathing into heart of any redneck, whether “those people” (sarcasm intended) are at home or ten thousand miles away.  

This is the heart of the matter.  Americans can be frustratingly small minded and paranoid.  And yet it has much in common with its proclaimed enemy.  How is spending every Sunday morning in a cavernous Wal-Mart-style megachurch listening to the ravings of some bucktoothed ignoramus any different from the devout Muslim who faithfully goes to mosque to receive the dicta of the imam?  Is the person in Jackson, Mississippi who wishes death on Islamist militants all that dissimilar from the Afghan villager who wishes the same on American soldiers?  How much moral space really exists between the Palestinians who publicly celebrated upon learning of the 9/11 attacks and the red-blooded American patriot who takes satisfaction from the bombing of innocent civilians?  There is ugliness to spare on both sides.

Perhaps it’s somewhat simplistic, but the ugliness on this side has an easily identifiable cause: The quotidian American’s lack of worldliness and cultural sensitivity.  The American’s responsibility in this respect is greater than that of other peoples because we came to the Muslim world, not the other way around.  It is incumbent upon us to understand the problems and popular attitudes of the Muslim peoples because our country has meddled in, manipulated, and distorted their sociopolitical lives for over six decades.  Our history with the Muslim world did not begin on September 11^th, 2001.  It began much, much earlier, and the sooner we truthfully confront the United States’ role as an imperial power the sooner we can move toward some semblance of reconciliation.

Ignorance is never bliss, even if you are an American.

                 

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Under Every Bed

I made a faux pas in class the other night. 

Discussing how news coverage affects perceptions of events, I compared headlines describing a Baghdad bombing attack.  One described the incident as Shiite on Sunni violence.  The other (from Fox News, naturally) merely said that terrorists had killed a number of people.  My point was that the American media tend to throw the T-word around indiscriminately, and that this inhibits our issue knowledge.

After class a group of students came up to me, a couple of them Iraq war veterans.  They took exception to what I had said.   Didn’t I know Iraq was the frontline of the war on terror?  Without waiting for an answer they walked off, muttering bitterly among themselves.

I suppose I should have explained myself better, but I don’t know how I could have.  Things have calmed down considerably from the collective paranoia immediately following 9/11, but I still can smell a whiff of latter day McCarthyism in the air.  One thing that hasn’t changed in our national debate over the war on terror is its proponents’ preference for mutually exclusive, either/or arguments, encapsulated in George W. Bush’s dictum, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”    

Deep down, I’ve always feared that Saul Bellow moment that would get me fired.  I don’t kid myself about where I stand with my students.  To them I’m just another service worker, a Starbucks barista minus espresso machine and tip jar.  That’s why they’re sometimes upset when I tell them things they don’t want to hear.  I’ve made a few genuine gaffes I’ve regretted, but I believe what I teach.  It is my responsibility to ensure my students at least know there are alternatives to the conventional wisdom, even if they choose not to accept them.

I’ve alluded before to our propensity to embrace policies wrapped in the flag.  We love freedom, which we define as sharing the same beliefs as everyone else and deferring to authority.  It’s hardly a surprise, then, that we have no problem with practices such as extraordinary rendition, drone killings, and the denial of habeas corpus and due process rights even when the suspects are U.S. citizens.  Because, you see, they’re terrorists, and we will never be safe as long as even one is left.  No real American would question the necessity of fighting them or the means.  Our leaders always know what’s right and it’s not your place to question them.

Many post-9/11 policies have been more symbolic than substantive.  A case in point: Driving to the airport where I live, approaching the passenger terminal there used to be a sign on a light post announcing the current “security advisory” level.  I never fully understood what this was supposed to mean.  Yes, I’d looked up the definitions of the various security advisory levels on the Department of Homeland Security website and understood what they meant in principle.  But really, what did level Yellow, or Red, or Mauve, mean to me or anyone else reading the sign driving by?   The truth is that someone in charge was trying to convince us that they were doing something so we would feel more secure.   

Are we more secure?  Maybe, maybe not.   There hasn’t been an attack on American soil since 2001, and you can make a case that this has been due to increased security measures.  But is this cause or correlation?  Only time will tell.  This is one situation where I actually hope I’m wrong, and that the security obsession has made us safer.  Because we’ve been down this road a couple of times already.

I came of age during the Cold War.  I grew up believing Communism and the Russians and Chinese were bad.  This is because that’s what I learned from my family, my teachers, and from what I saw and heard in the media.  On the whole, though, it was a mild, watered-down anticommunism I was exposed to.  The worst excesses of anti-Red hysteria happened before I was born.  The Smith Act, HUAC, loyalty oaths, blacklisting, and summary firings of so-called security risks were among the excesses of the time, and there is no credible evidence that any of these measures made the country safer.  Decades before that, the Palmer Raids, mass deportations of immigrants, and the Schenck decision after the First World War set the stage for the Cold War national security state whose legacy we live with today. 

I do not dispute that the Soviet Union and “Red” China posed a military threat to the United States in those days.  Nor do I dispute that there are in fact individuals, organizations, and countries that seek to do us real harm today.  What I question is our malleable definition of “terrorism.”  While I accept the general meaning of terrorism as violence meant to create fear in furtherance of political goals, I also know governments are apt to apply the label only to that political violence which works against them. 

Let’s consider some past examples.  South Africa imprisoned Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.  (He remained on the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2006.)  Rhodesia’s army used the recruiting slogan, “Terrorism Stops Here!”  The Germans summarily executed captured partisans as terrorists during World War II.  And the military regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil imprisoned hundreds of their opponents on terrorism charges in the 1970s.

Let’s consider a few more examples, along with the oft-disparaged cliché, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”  The Zionist groups Irgun and Haganah waged a campaign of bombing, kidnapping, and murder against the British authorities and Palestinian Arabs prior to the formation of Israel.  Were they terrorists or freedom fighters?  Anti-Castro exile Luis Posada Carriles and his associates planted a bomb on a Cubana airliner, causing it to crash with no survivors.  Was he a terrorist or a freedom fighter?  The Nicaraguan Contras killed judges, doctors, and labor leaders in their insurgency against the Sandinistas.  Terrorists or…?  You get the idea.

I’m not necessarily arguing moral equivalency here.  But the distinctions can get pretty blurry.  I’ll stipulate once more the definition of terrorism I gave above.  It’s a threat we have faced for several decades from a variety of sources.  The main difference is that since the Berlin Wall came down the Islamic terrorist has supplanted the communist as national bogeyman and all-purpose enemy.  Where we once faced an ideological foe, we now face a poorly differentiated set of religious militants.  Confronted with that fact, it’s a short leap to conflate the relatively small number of militants with hundreds of millions of their coreligionists.  In fact, popular support for the war on terror is largely rooted in anti-Muslim, anti-Middle Eastern bigotry.  Why bother telling Sunnis apart from Shiites, or Arabs from Persians, Turks, Kurds, et al., when you can just hang a single label on them and leave it at that? 

As Americans we have internalized fear and suspicion as our default approach to the rest of the world.  Coupled with our penchant for reductionist thinking, I wonder if it will be our own undoing.   Until we can consider our national security challenges rationally, we will continue to look for monsters under every bed.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar  

   

Breaking Points

We now have a name to go with the deed. 

After several days of withholding his identity, the Pentagon has announced that the alleged perpetrator of last week’s massacre in Afghanistan is a soldier named Robert Bales.  We’re told that Bales, an Army staff sergeant with eleven years’ service, left his base camp without authorization on the night of March 11^th, went into the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, Panjwai, Kandahar Province, and murdered sixteen civilians in their homes.  Another five were reported wounded in the attack.    

Most of the news accounts I’ve read and watched this week have been concerned with the attack’s potential consequences for U.S.-Afghan relations and future NATO operations in Afghanistan.  Never mind the human rights of the victims; already they have become abstractions in our foreign policy calculus.  To be sure there are diplomatic causes for concern not least of which was the surreptitious spiriting of Bales first to Kuwait, then to the United States.   The Panjwai massacre may very well be the breaking point in our relations with Afghanistan.  The Taliban have already broken off negotiations with the Karzai administration over the incident, further setting back prospects for peace and the Obama Administration’s objective of withdrawing U.S. combat forces by 2014.   

But, back to Robert Bales.  News reports state that he had served three previous deployments, all of them in Iraq.  Assuming that the deployments were at least a year in length, Bales’ time in war zones nearly equals that of America’s involvement in the Second World War.  When you consider that the majority of our World War II service members never saw anything approaching that much time in combat, this fact takes on a certain significance.  Add to this the knowledge Bales had suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq and was diagnosed with PTSD, and he becomes an object example of the human toll of our post-9/11 wars.

None of this excuses his crimes.  But I can already see how this is going to play out in the arena of public opinion.  Our political and military leaders will do their best to minimize the incident as an aberration.  The mainstream media is already framing Bales’ acts as the tragic-but-inevitable consequence of a punishing operational tempo and inadequate military medical and mental health services.  There will inevitably be more than a few self-proclaimed “patriots” who will portray Bales as a wronged hero.  But I think the incident will quickly fade from our collective consciousness.  In the coming days and weeks, other news stories will claim our attention.  I doubt that the people of Afghanistan will forget quite as soon.    

We cannot simply write off the Panjwai killings as the deeds of a man pushed past his limits or as something out of character for us as a people.   Even though Bales’ acquaintances say he wasn’t prejudiced against Muslims, our culture reflected a strong anti-Muslim bias long before the September 11^th attacks.  When you consider our mindless propensity for conflating the words “Muslim” and “terrorist,” the spate of civilian murders by American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last few years was probably inevitable.  As it is, our faith in our national superiority causes us to take a dim view of other cultures.  When we are armed and among people we have been conditioned to hold in contempt, it takes little provocation to produce a tragedy.  

Considering the larger implications of Panjwai, it’s little use at this juncture to speak of our image in the Muslim world.  The United States, along with Britain and France, squandered its credibility there generations ago.  I suspect the most galling thing for people in the Middle East and in Central Asia is the glaring disconnect between Western democratic ideals and Western actions.  Americans like to claim they are bringing democracy to the oppressed.   Yes, Afghans were oppressed by the Taliban.  It’s true that the Taliban’s harboring of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda posed a threat both to the region and the rest of the world.  But a decade into our occupation of Afghanistan, can we really say its people are any better off?  Has anything fundamentally changed to make our conception of democracy a reality in Afghan society? Outside of Kabul, traditional ways continue as they have for centuries.  Pashtun culture is rooted in local custom and familial ties, rendering the kind of state-building pushed by the U.S. and its allies ineffective.  (The fate of the 1980s communist regime after the Soviet withdrawal is a grim example of what might befall Karzai’s after ISAF departs.)   Regardless of whether or not the Taliban ultimately return to power, there are timeless qualities in Afghan society which militate against exogenous change.  Perhaps it’s best that we finally learn the lesson the Afghans have been trying to teach the West since the “Great Game” of the nineteenth century and leave them at last to their own affairs.       

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar