Anis Shivani
As long as progressives continue to grant the basic premises of the "war on terrorism--that it is a "war" and that we're fighting "terror" - it will wage a losing struggle. If voices who question the basic reality of events remain isolated--voices like those of the ousted Cynthia McKinney--we are doomed to an era of complete silence. The dictators in Washington are in a great hurry to do away with this country's freedoms and numb us to a new American militarism. If progressives treat them as political actors who will go along with the normal rules of liberal contest, it'll continue to be blindsided by the next shocks in the works.
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Since the apocalyptic night of election 2000, when Bush sat huddled with his creepy mother and father, and later told Gore that Bush's little brother Jeb had assured him that the state of Florida was his, perhaps nothing has felt as calamitous as Representative McKinney's engineered removal. She had the audacity to question the reality of the enabling event, Bush's foreknowledge of 9/11, and his friends' economic gain from it. So they pumped in money from outside the state, created a viable "Democratic" candidate, accused McKinney of taking money from terrorists (if anyone receives money from Arab-Americans, they're done!), and a popular five-time incumbent from a black district is gone!
How do you combat something like that with the normal rules of politics? This is a new era, and people are fooling themselves if they think that playing according to their rules is going to get this gang out. If they have to, they'll simply steal elections.
Progressives advocate that the war on Iraq can still be stopped; our voices need only be heard. Corporate fraud is bound to lead to a rewriting of the fundamental rules of business. Robert Reich can lead a progressive campaign to victory in Massachusetts, setting a model for the rest of the country. Green Party opposition will keep that term-limit promise-breaker Paul Wellstone honest. The truth is that once progressives vigorously endorses a candidate--Villaraigosa in Los Angeles or Green in New York - that might as well be the kiss of death!
It's so easy to split black and Jewish and Hispanic voters. Progressive have not come up with a way to deal with this racial manipulation. Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers assured us a couple of years ago that the new progressivism was bound to win out--without taking positions that offend anyone.
But what have progressives in congress delivered? Paul Wellstone voted for the Patriot Act, along with 97 others. (Does anyone outside Minnesota remember what he looks like? Of course, if he had been visible on the national scene lately, that would mean he was surely a goner, like McKinney.) Russ Feingold, the lone Senate holdout against the Patriot Act, recommended confirmation of Ashcroft-Himmler because he wanted to extend an "olive branch" to the president. Feingold deferred to the tradition that cabinet members ought not to be rejected on ideological grounds, arguing that "we should not start now." He thought that the judiciary committee could keep Ashcroft in check--not when you're dealing with this gang.
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The left is in tatters. Christopher Hitchens picked a fight with Chomsky and others who he felt "rationalized" terror and were soft on "Islamic fascism." Denouncing the "fascist sympathies of the soft left" Hitchens wrote that "at least the missiles launched by Clinton were not full of passengers." He bought into the administration's ridiculous rationale that there is inherent rage against Western freedoms: "What they [Islamic fascists] abominate about 'the west' . . .is . . .its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state."
Hitchens forgot about the real fascists at home. He grants the basic presuppositions of the war on terrorism. How are cause and effect, "us" and "them," to be separated when we created, to a large extent, political Islam because we didn't like Arab nationalism or Arab socialism or even Arab liberalism?
Richard Falk wrote after 9/11 that "The war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies . . .as the first truly just war since World War II." As late as December 24, Falk was writing the following naïve words: "The Bush presidency has . . .recognized the challenge with clarity and mobilized society for a necessary and prolonged struggle. It . . .defined the mission in relation to terrorism rather than Islam and it made a serious effort to reassure the Muslim minority in America that their rights would be protected."
Does he still feel that way, now that we are on perpetual war footing to remake the world? A caller recently asked Ralph Nader on C-Span if he thought that 9/11 would have happened had Gore been president. Acting astounded, Nader wondered if the caller was implying that Bush had anything to do with 9/11.
The left is massively intimidated; it cowers under the grief trap, not wanting to be outdone in shedding tears. Once progressives accept that we need to do something in response to "terror" (even if only proportional and justifiable), the game is effectively over. To say that 9/11 was the greatest spectacle ever put on would be offensive to the choir, used to hearing soothing multicultural clichés and the constant drumbeat of hope--a progressive reordering of priorities is just around the corner.
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Do you challenge a fascist dictator with rallies and demonstrations (that is, if people are not afraid of being put in jail)? Will the left continue to underestimate Bush's shrewdness? It wasn't just the accident of hanging chads and butterfly ballots that let the Bush brothers manipulate the result in their favor. The left doesn't want to throw the legitimacy of the political process into question, and so it treads softly.
The mostly identity-politics driven left, with its few cautious moves toward including suburban progressives in an economic strategy that doesn't alienate anyone, is at a loss to deal with the fascist upsurge. Do you contest fascism with mild, middle-of-the-road alternatives? For too long the left has encouraged the culture of fear to promote its social agenda. Now this vocabulary is easily being appropriated by the fascists.
full piece at: http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20020904&fname=anis&sid=1 Anis Shivani studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels, The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist.