(Note: ok, this is kind of long, sorry)
In response to my 'ladder of force' post, which began:
>>On this list there seems to be a relatively high proportion of people
>>whom,
>>in relation to this war, I would classify as belonging to the "ladder of
>>force left".
Doug responds:
>A bunch of people that have demonstrated themselves capable of
>stunning acts of violence have resolved to kill lots of Americans.
>That would include you, Yoshie, Carrol, even Lou Proyect. There's no
>class warrior exemption (actually they don't like Communists very
>much, so American Communists are doubly doomed).
So far I have no quarrel with this characterization of the situation (as far as it goes), although I think they would rather go after the powerful anti-Communists than us very weak Communists in this situation, but as the events of September 11 shows, their tactics are rather indiscriminate.
>Does this bother you
>at all?
Doug, I work two blocks from the Sears Tower, which, now that the WTC has left the scene, sort of stands out as an enticing high place. In fact, our Chicago WWP branch has a post office box IN the Sears Tower. That means I have to go over there, present a photo ID, and have my bags checked in order to get into the building and access the box.
But I must confess that the expectation that many other people in Chicago or New York or elsewhere in the U.S. may get killed before "this is over" "bothers" me, if possible, even more than the possibility that a gob of burning jet fuel may fall on me personally while I all unsuspecting go to pick up my party's mail. One of WW's writers actually worked in the WTC. But he was late that day. So was the niece of another comrade. A personal friend of mine worked elsewhere in the plaza and watched people jumping out of windows in the WTC. You don't think we have ties to these people? More to the point even, you think it MATTERS if we have personal ties to these people? Do you think that the thought of human beings getting incinerated and killed in other horrible ways leaves us unmoved, even if we don't know them personally??? Do you think we didn't cry about this shit? You really don't understand us very well if you think this. We are at a rather bizarre point in this discourse when, before we go on and discuss what to do about things, I have to give a few introductory paragraphs to try and convince you that, yes, I am a normal human being who is "bothered" by innocent people being horrifically killed, and not somebody with Antisocial Personality Disorder. But things ARE bizarre these days, so I won't make a big deal about it.
[I have counted only 3 people in the off-ladder left (in the U.S.) who said they were NOT bothered by it: 2 on Proyect's list, and now Ward Churchill. But even they seemed to be doing it as part of a process of "denial" - they all convinced themselves somehow that the WTC victims were all part of the class enemy, as with Churchill's reference to "Eichmanns".]
>Or are you willing to take a spore for the anti-empire?
It is the furthest thing from my intention. (Note by the way that nobody has at this writing presented any credible link between the spores and the anti-empire.)
No, I don't want to get killed by al-Qaeda! No, my off-ladder stance does not stem from unconcern as to whether I and other people do get killed by al-Qaeda (or by other radical Islamists)! You also, I presume, do not want to get killed by al-Qaeda, and I rather suspect that the other people on this list, and in my party, and in the entire left, on-ladder and off, would also subscribe to the statement that we would like to reduce our chances of our and anyone else's getting killed by al-Qaeda, if that is indeed possible. And speaking politically, I hereby declare that my party is interested in preserving the lives of the workers of the U.S., from deaths in war and also from deaths in occupational accidents, environmental disaster, inadequate medical care, deaths from homelessness, lack of heat, lack of air conditioning, preventable fires, etc., which actually are really more dangerous than al-Qaeda is when you add them all up, but we would like to preserve our lives from al-Qaeda as well.
OK, but now what?
Why is this particular set of rhetorical questions supposed to be an effective challenge to my anti-ladder of force position?
I can only presume that you believe that a ladder-of-force position is -actually- somehow good for us here in the U.S., when we have added things up. "Yes," you may be saying, "it will take some innocent lives, and it has some morally objectionable features, and I do feel sorry for those people who got killed at Khoram, but darn it - we want to live. We want to save our lives, so we have to neutralize al-Qaeda, and the U.S. government is the only one who is going to do it for us, so although it's nasty and sickening to beg Rumsfeld (or Powell or Ashcroft) to protect our lives, we really have no option."
However, I think this analysis is completely erroneous, Doug.
In the first place, -IF- I believed that as you do that force of some kind by the U.S. government against al-Qaeda was 'necessary' to protect our lives, I hope I would not fool myself into believing that it makes sense to advocate moving to one or another 'rung' of the ladder, when you know very well, or should know, that you can have NO CONTROL over the strategy or tactics of this war. I have no control. You have no control. Congress has abdicated its control. It is completely up to whatever temporary cabal among the various conspirators of the Bush administration happen to have the ascendancy on a given day. You cannot force them to use fewer bombs, or more diplomacy, or bring in the U.N., or stop murdering civilians. They are murderers by nature, and you are not going to mollify them or put a leash on them.
Suppose that someone from another left tendency went absolutely nuts and began pursuing me down the street with a gun, clearly intending to kill me. Ordinarily my party's whole line is against reliance on the forces of the state for protection. However, I don't believe that the rules of the class struggle necessarily apply at the fine-gauge individual level, and I might, as a last resort, consider waving down a cop in the hope that, unaware of what an enemy of the state I am, the cop might stop the attacker. However, if I were forced to this, I wouldn't have any illusion about being able to restrain the cop. I wouldn't yell out to the cop, "Diplomatically persuade that man not to kill me, please!" "Officer! Implement conflict resolution!" When you call a cop, you have committed yourself to the cop's tactics. You have called on the services of the racist and murderous state, and you have gambled that you won't regret it afterwards. There is always the chance that the cop will kill 25 innocent people in trying to protect you, and it will be your responsibility, and you can't get out of that responsibility by saying, "but I only wanted him to use minimally forceful measures."
It is the same thing in a war, only a million times more so. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is never so tangible and obvious as during a war. It makes very little sense to say, "Yes, I would like war, but only SOME war, please," as if you were ordering in a Thai restaurant and asking for them to go easy on the hot peppers. "SOME war" is not on the menu. There is only one kind of war on the menu. THEIR kind. So it comes down to whether you think that THEIR war is better for the survival of the workers than NO war.
To be honest, Doug, I think that -some- of the ladder positioning of -some- elements of the less radical left is sort of a hypocritical attempt to have the war, while sort of shrinking away from the bloody reality of the war and primly distancing themselves from it by pointing to more pacific sounding demands. Such people are conflicted; on the one hand they really don't like to see miserable poor Afghans on the news whose relatives have been exterminated, but on the other hand, the war has to go on, and they really hope the gunships do wipe out Osama and the terror threat (how likely that is, is another matter - see below); so it is important to them that the war effort should not REALLY be impeded, but it is also important that THEY should not be associated with the war, so they stand aside and say, "This is not really my sort of war; something had to be done, but I would have preferred something less depressing."
Now, I and the rest of the off-ladder left come along and are trying to subvert their war and impede them from conducting it. IF you REALLY believe that THEIR war is better than NO war, and this is a life and death issue, AND if our anti-war movement starts to get strong and start to have some effect, THEN you will be driven by the logic of the situation to join up with Hitchens and the VFW, and slander us, and form gangs to beat us up, and turn us in to the FBI as enemies of the workers. Anything else would be silly sentimentalism on your part. After all, you think the workers' lives are at stake.
I also think the workers' lives are at stake, but in a different sense.
We live in an oppressor nation (to be precise, under the rule of the state of an oppressor nation). By and large it is no fun being in the working class wherever you are, but being in the working class of the oppressor nation is not nearly so unpleasant as being in the working class of the oppressed nation. However, it is not entirely risk-free. One of those risks is that, as your ruling class pursues war and plunder, some people from the target nation may come along and kill you. They may come where you live and work and kill you; or your ruling class may draft you and send you to the oppressed nation (or rival imperialist nation) and you may get killed there. This has ALWAYS been part of the toll that capitalist exploitation takes on us.
During the Viet Nam war, for example, some 50,000 members of the U.S. working class were killed by forces under the ultimate control of the Viet Nam Workers' Party. At the time I was very much concerned with whether I was going to be one of those people (I was in a draft lottery year). But even though, as it turned out, I was not, I knew people who were.
It's true that those 50,000 were mostly "uniformed", whereas the people who died on September 11 were mostly "civilian", but this is actually a rather minor distinction in my view, a distinction that people often make too much of. After all, soldiers and sailors are overwhelmingly members of the working class, our brothers and sisters and friends, people whom we care for. Certainly the fact that one has been drafted or recruited into the army is not a reason why one "deserves to die", in and of itself.
Now, throughout the Viet Nam War, the state consistently and continually tried to tell us that it was impossible to simultaneously care for the lives of the US servicepeople in Viet Nam, on the one hand, and to be opposed to the continuation of the war (let alone favor a Vietnamese victory) on the other hand. In fact, at any given time, the chief argument for military action was to protect the military personnel who were already there. There they were; they were liable at any time to be attacked by Vietnamese forces; obviously they had to defend themselves; obviously they had to seek out and neutralize, today, the Vietnamese guerrillas who had killed some of them yesterday and who would try to kill more of them tomorrow. That meant that obviously they needed guns and reinforcements and political support from the home front.
But as the war went on, even among the troops in the field, the "obviousness" of this proposition deteriorated. Even among the troops themselves, it became "obvious" that their main enemy was not the Vietnamese guerrilla who was defending his or her homeland. No, the main enemy was the government that sent them to Viet Nam to get killed by the guerrilla, and the immediate main enemy was the officer who ordered them up the dangerous road or into the dangerous section of the forest.
When the state said that we socialists had to choose between our loyalty to our Vietnamese comrades and our love for our G.I. brothers and sisters, they were lying. We expressed our love for our G.I. brothers and sisters by trying to get them the hell out of harm's way and back to the U.S. where they could be safe. We expressed our love by trying to stop the war and bring the troops home. And a great many of those soldiers and sailors came to realize that that was the only kind of love that made any sense.
Now, how is it different today? We of the "far left" get accused of having failed to take into account the "difference" between the Viet Nam war then and the war today, but what IS the difference really? So far as I can tell, the main difference is that the danger of getting killed has been somewhat democratized. Today, it is not only those workers who have been sent, as troops, into Afghanistan or Iraq or Arabia or Somalia or Yemen or Lebanon or Pakistan (etc.) who might get killed. In fact, any of us might get killed now. But how does that really change anything? Why would anyone who was anti-war then be pro-war now? What is the logic? If you didn't want to go after al-Qaeda after the attack on the Cole, why would you want to do it today? Why does war become an attractive option, or a necessary evil, just because our own civilian hides are in danger?
What should we think of someone who would say: "When U.S. soldiers abroad are under attack, it doesn't bother me, and it doesn't make me want to make war on the attackers. Once you go in the army, you are a 'designated scapegoat.' We of the left will try to get you withdrawn from your duties of occupation, but it's a long and difficult process. I understand that you will be in danger until we achieve a troop withdrawal from the country where you are stationed. But if, before we manage to do it, you get killed for the sins of the imperialists, that's your tough luck. HOWEVER, when I myself come under attack in New York City, that's entirely different!! I demand a global manhunt for anyone who might kill me! It's just impractical to talk about making me safe by ending occupation somewhere else! I refuse to be in danger for one more minute than I have to be! Go, Rumsfeld, Powell, Ashcroft, do whatever you must to protect me!!"
This idea that the forces of the oppressed might actually kill us might be new to some of us, but, I assure you, it has long been on the minds of any of our class who were actually in the armed forces, or whose relatives or loved ones were in the armed forces. Of course, the armed forces are recruited from working-class and poor communities, and communities of color. More than once over the years I have been somewhat worried about how people in those communities felt when they saw white civilian leftists cheer on the liberation forces who might actually kill their loved ones. Would they understand that we are really on their side as well? Frankly, Doug, if anything, the fact that you and I are in danger ourselves now puts us in a better agitational position, because now nobody can claim that the only reason we are against military adventures is that we ourselves are happy and safe.
Why, in fact, are we unsafe? We are unsafe because the U.S. bourgeoisie persists in a policy of war, occupation, dictatorship, and plunder which arouses violent resistance and thus makes us unsafe. (We are also continually unsafe because of their own exploitation and oppression here at home. Some of us more than others, of course.) Now, if that is the problem, how can it possibly make us MORE safe if the U.S. bourgeoisie engages in MORE war, MORE occupation, MORE dictatorship, and MORE plunder? We are traveling in a runaway steam train whose boiler is about to explode, and we are being told that the way to safety is to shovel more coal onto the fire and to close the safety valve so that no steam gets out. THIS IS STUPID.
To prove how stupid it is, just look at what this 'war on terrorism' has accomplished so far, just, for the moment, from the point of view of a sensible person who knows nothing about politics or history or imperialism at all but whose thought processes have not utterly ceased to work. What happened on September 11? Some people armed with small-bladed tools hijacked planes and flew them into buildings. OK, what would make us safer from something like that happening again? Better doors on cockpits; a rule against bringing small-bladed tools on planes; better-trained personnel at the security stations in airports; and more willingness by passengers to overpower people who get up and start waving small-bladed tools around. You can get that far without even bringing in any political considerations at all. Similarly, what about this anthrax? Someone has apparently been mailing it out from West Trenton, New Jersey. What might make us safer from anthrax? The allocation of more funds for better tests for the presence of bacilli or spores; a safe vaccine; some better treatments for pulmonary and intestinal anthrax.
Now go a litle further down the path, and suppose that you want to also look for people who are doing / might do such things and prevent them. As for the anthrax, we have no idea who the hell it is, except that I personally would bet a reasonable sum that it isn't al-Qaeda, because if they had a pot of anthrax I bet they wouldn't just be mailing it out in a handful of envelopes, here an envelope, there an envelope. I think there is a good chance that ordinary police work will find out who it is. As for the September 11 attacks, it seems from the stories they are telling that the Atta group functioned pretty much independently. Even if you believe they were funded by al-Qaeda, they didn't use more than maybe half a million dollars, It might be the case that there are other groups ready to do other similar things, but if so, they don't have ICBMs and thus they can't do it from Afghanistan. They can only do it from the US itself. In that case, even from the point of view of someone in the state trying to neutralize hostile operatives, the appropriate route would be better and more coordinated intelligence. The guy to get would be the next Mohammed Atta, wherever he is.
A sensible agent of the state, without an ulterior agenda of imperialism or repression, might come along and say: "We want a bigger budget for surveillance of immigrants. We want a better database for managing information about people entering and leaving the US, traveling around, acquiring pilots' licenses and so on." Speaking for myself I still wouldn't support such a program, but it would at least make a kind of sense.
But, INSTEAD, the U.S. is dropping bombs all over Afghanistan, which will have negative consequences for many people, not including, however, the person or persons who are mailing out anthrax from West Trenton, or the people in Cairo or Dubai or Chicago who are planning the next dramatic attack. If we are safer in the US than we were on September 10, it is entirely due to things that are being done within the US, because it is quite obvious that everything that the U.S. has done in and around Afghanistan has increased the number of people in the world who want us dead.
Even assuming the U.S. moved down the ladder of force and just "put Osama on trial" (which they absolutely will NOT do, because they have no intention of giving Osama a platform to speak from), doesn't this just amount to "cutting the head off the Hydra"? How much would it really impede the next Atta group? For your "cops and courts" strategy to bear fruit, Doug, how many people from how many countries would you have to arrest and try? Actually, let me rephrase that: at what RATE would you have to arrest, try, and convict people, in order to achieve a net decline in the amount of anti-US violence, considering the RATE at which the violence and plunder of US imperialism are bringing new Mohammed Attas into being? Your "cops and courts" strategy, even if it could be implemented (which it can't be, because of the nature of the US regime), and even if it could be implemented without violence at all (which is unrealistic), would, even so, bring more "terrorists" into existence in reaction to the imperial arrogance of yet again putting the oppressed of the world on trial in the oppressors' courts.
-Because- I care about whether I and other workers in the U.S. live or die, I reject all the rungs on the ladder of U.S. force, because all those choices, even if they could be implemented, would be -worse than nothing- in terms of their actual effect on the likelihood of our being killed by radical Islamists.
-----------------
As to what we should say when people ask us what we should do about September 11, I think that the craziness of the U.S war effort has by now made it possible to say some things straight out that were hard to say on September 12. If people ask us, "What should we do?", we should say, "The U.S. should get its military and its military aid out of the Middle East." If people say, "You want to surrender to terrorists then?", we should say, "We should have done it before Osama bin Laden demanded it, and we should do it now whatever the hell he says." If people say, "But what about al-Qaeda?", we should say, "If the U.S. government stops trying to rule the whole Middle East, al-Qaeda will have a lot harder time getting volunteers and funds and might even go out of business. As it is, every time we blow up some village they probably sign up a hundred people." And if people say, "You just want to let Osama bin Laden go free?" we should say, "The fact is, there are a lot of mass murderers walking around free here in the US. The US lets them go free, so why is it a big surprise when we don't get a lot of sympathy when we go over to Afghanistan and demand they give someone up?" And when people say, "So, basically you're saying the people in the WTC deserved it, you shit," we should say, "Of course they didn't deserve it. They didn't run this country. The people who really did deserve it unfortunately always seem to be somewhere else when the bomb goes off, or whatever." And when people say, "That's crazy. The U.S. isn't going to get out of the Middle East, so don't even waste my time with it," we should say, "Well, think what you like, but you're fooling yourself if you think that in the year 2001 the U.S. is going to send its armies all over the world stealing oil and getting everyone to hate us, and somehow we can ever live a happy safe life here with all that going on. And Bush is fooling you if he's convinced you that this damned war is making us safer, and if you can let an idiot like Bush fool you, you DO have a problem." See, we don't have to write academic treatises. All we have to do is talk sense.
All right, that's enough for now...
Lou Paulsen member, Workers World Party, Chicago www.workers.org