Along the Color Line October 2001
Terrorism and the Struggle for Peace By Manning Marable
Part I
It is still mourning time here in New York City. It has been weeks since the terrorist attack destroying the World Trade Center towers, but the real tragedy remains brutally fresh and terribly real to millions of residents in this over-crowded metropolis. The horrific sights of thousands of human beings incinerated in less than one hundred minutes, of screaming people free falling more than one thousand feet plummeting to their deaths, is nearly impossible for anyone to comprehend or even to explain.
The criminals who obliterated the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon attempted to make a symbolic political statement about the links between transnational capitalism and U.S. militarism. But by initiating acts of mass murder, any shred of political credibility that those who plotted and carried out these crimes was totally destroyed. There can be no justification, excuse or rationale for the deliberate use of deadly force and unprovoked violence against any civilian population. This was not essentially an act of war, but a criminal act, a crime against not only the American people, but all of humanity. Those who committed these crimes must be apprehended and brought to justice under international law and courts.
In the immediate days following the terrorist attacks, some elements of the American left, including a few black activists, took the sectarian position that those who carried out these crimes were somehow "freedom fighters." These "left" critics implied that these vicious, indiscriminate actions must be interpreted within the political context of the oppression that gave rise to those actions. In short, the brutal reality of U.S. imperialism, including America's frequent military occupation of Third World countries, to some degree justifies the use of political terrorism as a legitimate avenue for expressing their political resistance.
It is certainly true that the American Left must vigorously and uncompromisingly oppose the Bush administration's militaristic response to this crisis because the unleashing of massive armed retaliation will inevitably escalate the cycle of terror. However, progressives must also affirm their support for justice -- first and foremost, by expressing our deepest sympathies and heartfelt solidarity with the thousands of families who lost loved ones in this tragedy. We should emphasize the fact that among the victims, over one thousand labor union members were killed in the World Trade Center attack; that more than fifteen hundred children in metropolitan New York were left without a parent; that hundreds of undocumented immigrants undoubtedly perished in the flames of September 11th, but their families are unable to step forward to governmental authorities, due to their illegal residence in the U.S.
Although there was a generous outpouring of charitable donations to the victims' families after September 11, less attention has been given to the most disadvantaged workers whose lives or livelihoods were destroyed. Kitchen workers, for example, at the World Trade Center's Windows on the World, have only $15,000 life insurance policies. Over 100,000 jobs were destroyed, along with hundreds of small businesses in the area.
However, our criticisms of the Al Qaeda group should not support their "demonization," and description as "cowards" or "evil doers," in the incoherent denunciations of President Bush. We can denounce their actions as criminal, while also resisting the Bush administration's and media's racist characterizations of their political beliefs as "pathological" and "insane." Bush's demagogical rhetoric only feeds racist attacks against Middle Eastern people and other Muslims here in the U.S.
Perhaps one of the most effective criticisms would be to highlight the important differences between the sectarianism of Islamic fundamentalism, versus the rich humanism that is central to the Islamic faith. In the eloquent words of the late Muslim intellectual Eqbal Ahmad, Islamic fundamentalism promulgates "an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." It manipulates the politics of resentment and fear, rather than "sharing and alleviating" the oppression of the masses in the Third World.
We must also make a clear distinction between "guilt" and "responsibility." The Al Qaeda group is indeed guilty of committing mass murder. But the United States government is largely responsible for creating the conditions for reactionary Islamic fundamentalism to flourish. During Reagan's administration, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) provided over three billion dollars to finance the mujahadeen's guerilla war against the Soviet Union's military presence in Afghanistan. The CIA used Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence or secret police, to equip and train tens of thousands of Islamic fundamentalists in the tactics of guerilla warfare.
According to one 1997 study, the CIA's financing was directly responsible for an explosion of the heroin trade in both mujahadeen-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan. By 1985, the region had become, states researcher Alfred McCoy, "the world's top heroin producer," supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. Heroin addicts in Pakistan subsequently rose "from near zero in 1979 . to 1.2 million by 1985." Our Pakistani "allies" operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. The Taliban regime consolidated its authoritarian rule in the mid-1990s in close partnership with Pakistan's secret police and ruling political dictatorship. And the Clinton administration was virtually silent when the draconian suppression of women's rights, public executions and mass terror became commonplace across Afghanistan.
As The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt recently observed, under the Taliban dictatorship, women "can't work, they can't go to school, they have virtually no healthcare, (and) they can't leave their houses without a male escort." The Bush administration's current allies in Afghanistan, the so-called Northern Alliance, are no better. As Pollitt notes, both fundamentalist groups are equally "violent, lawless, misogynistic (and) anti-democratic."
One standard definition of "terrorism" is the use of extremist, extralegal violence and coercion against a civilian, or noncombatant population. Terrorist acts may be employed to instill fear and mass intimidation, to achieve a political objective. By any criteria, Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization. Most Americans have rarely experienced terrorism, but we have unleashed terrorism against others throughout our history. The mass lynchings, public executions and burnings at the stake of thousands of African Americans in the early twentieth century was home-grown, domestic terrorism.
The genocide of millions of American Indians was objectively a calculated plan of mass terrorism. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities during World War II, and the fiery incineration of several hundred thousand civilians, was certainly a crime against humanity. The U.S.-sponsored coup against the democratically elected government of Chile in 1973, culminating in the mass tortures, rapes and executions of thousands of people, was nothing less than state- financed terrorism. There is a common political immorality that links former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Osama Bin Laden, and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: they all believe that the political ends justified the means.
Moral relativism has no place in progressive politics. For oppressed people to triumph over political evil, we must not become that which we have struggled against for so long. The wages of sectarian hatred and indiscriminate violence cannot purchase our freedom.
Part II
A consensus now exists across the American political spectrum, left to right, that everything fundamentally changed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. To be sure, there was an upsurgence of patriotism and national chauvinism, a desire to "avenge" the innocent victims of the Al Qaeda network's terrorism.
I would suggest, however, that the events of recent weeks are not a radical departure into some new, uncharted political territory, but rather the culmination of deeper political and economic forces set into motion more than two decades ago.
The core ideology of Reaganism -- free markets, unregulated corporations, the vast buildup of nuclear and conventional weapons, aggressive militarism abroad and the suppression of civil liberties and civil rights at home, and demagogical campaigns against both "terrorism" and Soviet Communism -- is central to the Bush administration's initiatives today. Former President Reagan sought to create a "national security state," where the legitimate functions of government were narrowly restricted to matters of national defense, public safety, and providing tax subsidies to the wealthy. Reagan pursued a policy of what many economists term "military Keynesianism," the deficit spending of hundreds of billions of dollars on military hardware and speculative weapons schemes such as "Star Wars." This massive deficit federal spending was largely responsible for the U.S. economic expansion of the 1980s. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was pressured into an expensive arms race that it could not afford. The fall of Soviet Communism transformed the global political economy into a unipolar world, characterized by U.S. hegemony, both economically and militarily.
The result was a deeply authoritarian version of American state power, with increasing restrictions on democratic rights of all kinds, from the orchestrated dismantling of trade unions, to the mass incarceration of racialized minorities and the poor. By the end of the 1990s, two million Americans were behind bars, and over four million former prisoners had lost the right to vote for life. "Welfare as we know it," in the words of former President Clinton, was radically restructured, with hundreds of thousands of women householders and their children pushed down into poverty.
Behind much of this vicious conservative offensive was the ugly politics of race. The political assault against affirmative action and minority economic set- asides was transformed by the Right into a moral crusade against "racial preferences" and "reverse discrimination." Black and Latino young people across the country were routinely "racially profiled" by law enforcement officers. DWB, "Driving While Black," became a familiar euphemism for such police practices. As the liberal welfare state of the 1960s mutated into the prison industrial complex state of the 1990s, the white public was given the unambiguous message that the goal of racial justice had to be sacrificed for the general security and public safety of all. It was, in short, a permanent war against the black, brown, and the poor.
The fall of Communism transformed a bipolar political conflict into a unipolar, hegemonic "New World Order," as the first President Bush termed it. The chief institutions for regulating the flow of capital investment and labor across international boundaries were no longer governments. The International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and transnational treaties such as NAFTA exercised significantly greater influence over the lives of workers in most countries than their own governments. By the year 2000, fifty-one of the world's one hundred wealthiest and largest economies were actually corporations, and only forty- nine were countries. The political philosophy of globalization was termed "neoliberalism," the demand to privatize government services and programs, to eliminate unions, and to apply the aggressive rules of capitalist markets to the running of all public institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and even postal services. The social contract between U.S. citizens and the liberal democratic state was being redefined to exclude the concepts of social welfare and social responsibility to the truly disadvantaged.
A new, more openly authoritarian philosophy of governance was required, to explain to citizens why their longstanding democratic freedoms were being taken away from them. A leading apologist for neo- authoritarian politics was New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In 1994, soon after his election as mayor, Giuliani declared in a speech: "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of indiscretion about what you do and how you do it." As we all know, the Giuliani administration won national praise for reducing New York City's murder rates from two thousand a year down to 650 a year, and violent crime rates plummeted. But the social cost to New York's black, brown and poor communities was far more destructive than anything they had known previously. The ACLU estimates that between 50,000 to 100,000 New Yorkers were subjected annually to "stop- and-frisk" harassment by the police under Giuliani. The city's notorious Street Crimes Unit functioned not unlike El Salvador's "Death Squads," unleashing indiscriminate terror and armed intimidation against "racially profiled" victims.
Many white liberals in New York City passively capitulated to this new state authoritarianism. It is even more chilling that in the wake of the September 11 attacks, New York Times journalist Clyde Haberman immediately drew connections between "the emotional rubble of the World Trade Center nightmare" and Amadou Diallo, the unarmed West African immigrant gunned down in 1999, with forty-one shots fired by four Street Crimes Unit police officers. "It is quite possible that America will have to decide, and fairly soon, how much license it wants to give law enforcement agencies to stop ordinary people at airports and border crossings, to question them at length about where they have been, where they are heading, and what they intend to do once they get where they're going," Haberman predicted. "It would probably surprise no one if ethnic profiling enters the equation, to some degree." Haberman reluctantly acknowledged that Giuliani may be "at heart an authoritarian." But he added that "as a wounded New York mourns its unburied dead, and turns to its mayor for solace," public concerns about civil rights and civil liberties violations would recede. Haberman seems to be implying that the rights of people like Amadou Diallo are less important than the personal safety of white Americans.
As the national media enthusiastically picked up the Bush administration's mantra about the "War On Terrorism," a series of repressive federal and state laws were swiftly passed. New York State's legislature, in the span of one week, created a new crime -- "terrorism" -- with a maximum penalty of life in prison. Anyone convicted of giving more than one thousand dollars to any organization defined by state authorities as "terrorist" will face up to 15 years in a state prison. When one reflects that, not too many years ago, that the U.S. considered the African National Congress as a "terrorist organization," and that the Palestinian Liberation Organization is still widely described as "terrorist," the danger of suppressing any activities by U.S. citizens that support any Third World social justice movements now becomes very real.
At all levels of government, any expression of restraint or caution about the dangerous erosion of our civil liberties was equated with treason. The anti- terrorism bills in the New York State Assembly were passed with no debate, by a margin of 135 to five. The U.S. Senate on October 12, passed the Bush administration's anti-terrorism legislation by 96 to one. In the House of Representatives, when the administration demanded authorization to use military force in Afghanistan, only California Democratic Representative Barbara Lee had the courage to vote no. She immediately was subjected to death threats, and in her own words, was "called a traitor, a coward, (and) a communist." But as Congresswoman Lee alone had the integrity to declare, "As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore." To resist the reactionary mobilization towards war, we must have the principled courage of Barbara Lee.
Part III
The militarism and political intolerance displayed in the Bush administration's response to the September 11th attacks created a natural breeding ground for bigotry and racial harassment. For the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the recent tragedy was God's condemnation of a secularist, atheistic America. The attacks were attributed to "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists and the lesbians," according to Falwell, "the ACLU (and) People for the American Way." Less well-publicized were the hate-filled commentaries of journalist Ann Coulter, who declared: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."
Similar voices of racist intolerance are also being heard in Europe. For example, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi recently stated that "Western civilization" was clearly "superior to Islamic culture." Berlusconi warmly praised "imperialism," predicting that "the West will continue to conquer peoples, just as it has Communism." Falwell, Berlusconi and others illustrate the direct linkage between racism and war, between militarism and political reaction.
Even on college campuses, there have been numerous instances of the suppression of free speech and democratic dissent. When City University of New York faculty held an academic forum which examined the responsibility of U.S. foreign policies for creating the context for the terrorist attacks, the university's chief administrator publicly denounced them. "Let there be no doubt whatsoever," warned CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, "I have no sympathy for the voices of those who make lame excuses for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon based on ideological or historical circumstances." Conservative trustees of CUNY sought to censure or even fire the faculty involved. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, hundreds of Middle Eastern college students have been forced to return home from the U.S., due to widespread ethnic and religious harassment.
At UCLA, library assistant Jonnie Hargis was suspended without pay from his job when he sent an email on the university's computers, which criticized U.S. support for Israel. When University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian appeared on television talking about his relationships to two suspected terrorists, he was placed on indefinite paid leave and ordered to leave the campus "for his (own) safety," university officials later explained. The First Amendment right of free speech, the Constitutional right of any citizen to criticize policies of our government, is now at risk.
Perhaps the most dangerous element of the Bush administration's current campaign against democratic rights has been the deliberate manipulation of mass public hysteria. Millions of Americans who witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center are still experiencing post-traumatic anxiety and depression. According to the Wall Street Journal, during the last two weeks of September, pharmacies filled 1.9 million new prescriptions for Zoloft, Prozac, and other anti- depressants, a 16 percent increase over the same period in 2000. Prescriptions for sleeping pills and short- term anxiety drugs like Xanax and Valium also rose 7 percent. The American public has been bombarded daily by a series of media-orchestrated panic attacks, focusing on everything from the potential threats from crop dusting airplanes being used for "bio-terrorism," to anthrax contaminated packages delivered through the U.S. postal service. People are constantly warned to carefully watch their mail, their neighbors, and each other. Intense levels of police security at sports stadiums, and armed National Guard troops at airports, have begun to be accepted as "necessary" for the welfare of society.
We will inevitably see "dissident profiling": the proliferation of electronic surveillance, roving wiretapping, harassment at the workplace, the infiltration and disruption of anti-war groups, and the stigmatization of any critics of U.S. militarism as disloyal and subversive. As historian Eric Foner has recently noted, "let us recall the F.B.I.'s persistent harassment of individuals like Martin Luther King, Jr., and its efforts to disrupt the civil rights and anti- war movements, and the C.I.A.'s history of cooperation with some of the world's most egregious violators of human rights. The principle that no group of Americans should be stigmatized as disloyal or criminal because of race or national origin is too recent and too fragile an achievement to be abandoned now." You cannot preserve democracy by restricting and eliminating democratic rights. To publicly oppose a government's policies, which one believes to be morally and politically wrong, is expressing the strongest belief in the principles of democracy.
We must clearly explain to the American people that the missile strikes and indiscriminate carpet bombings we have unleashed against Afghanistan peasants will not make us safer. The policies of the Bush administration actually put our lives in greater danger, because the use of government-sponsored terror will not halt brutal retaliations by the terrorists. The national security state apparatus we are constructing today is being designed primarily to suppress domestic dissent and racially-profiled minorities, rather than to halt foreign-born terrorists at our borders.
Last year alone, there were 489 million people who passed through our border inspection systems. Over 120 million cars are driven across U.S. borders every year, and it's impossible to thoroughly check even a small fraction of them. Restricting civil liberties, hiring thousands more police and security guards, and incarcerating innocent Muslims and people of Arab descent, only foster the false illusion of security. The "War on Terrorism" is being used as an excuse to eliminate civil liberties and democratic rights here at home.
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Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University. "Along the Color Line" is distributed free of charge to over 350 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable's column is also available on the Internet at <http://www.manningmarable.net>.