----- Original Message ----- From: "Wojtek Sokolowski" <sokol at jhu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 22:21 Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] losers [ was: Lyndie England
> OK guys, let's settle this silly shouting match:
>
> 1. Every prisoner in the US is a political prisoner, victim of capitalist
> oppression.
>
> 2. Poor people can do no wrong, they all noble innocents savaged by
> capitalist oppression, and if they happen to do something that seem wrong
> to
> those who do not know any better, it is only because the system made them
> do
> it.
>
> 3. The above does not apply to those who chose, solely by their own
> malice,
> to be cops, who are racist pigs willingly and sadistically enforcing
> capitalist oppression and railroading the innocents named in item #2 above
>
> 4. Out justice system is a racket that selectively railroads hapless
> schmucks instead of punishing all guilty. Proof: last time I got a
> speeding
> ticket I told the judge that everyone was going over the limit. She did
> not
> buy it. I was railroaded.
>
> 5. The US system sucks big time because it oppresses "da people" - any
> other reason is not a valid reason, and anyone who brings up such reasons
> must be a misanthropic malcontent.
>
> 6. There are only rights and entitlements, responsibility is a ruse
> invented by capitalist oppressors to blame the victims of their
> oppression.
> Anyone who mentions the dreaded r-word is a right wing ditto head.
>
> 7. The above does not apply to capitalist pigs, corporate execs and
> yuppies
> who have no rights - only responsibilities for anything bad that happens
> on
> this world.
>
> Are you all happy now? Miles? Carrol? Dick? Jenny?
>
> Wojtek
>
You could have written this about the "ideas" of the American left some 35 years ago.
Where's the analysis, the theory that should clarify the issues? Instead of a serious discussion on what in fact is going on and on the practical response to the current situation, we read all sorts of sentimental crap punctuated by slogans and organized to present personal self-images of radicality.
Poor Lyndie England* is expendable, a private soldier, an otherwise irrelevant component of the US military, who's been awarded greatness by proving by example the sovereignty of US military justice. Could anyone sensibly consider an alternative. Her higher commanders, from her immediate commanders, the intelligence and military police officers of the abu Ghraib command, all the way up to the chiefs of staff, Rumsy, and El Supremo, citizen Bush, have other important jobs to do for the preservation and forwarding of the interests of the US government and of those it serves. To expose them to a court of military justice, to find them guilty of crimes against the uniform military code of justice, and then to punish them is to put it mildly, entire counterproductive to the needs of the state and of those whom the state represents (including most of the correspondents to this forum). This is not sarcasm, it's the reality of the England case.
Hasn't anyone on this forum read Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and the Wretched of the Earth?
Justice is not some abstract essence, but the product of real social relations; and as such it reflects the needs of the social body that produces the laws. Moreover, the production and implemation of law is also a highly social activity that reflects the state of social relations within the community. Contradictions between law and the production and implementation of law (injustice) simply (if anything of this order is truly simple) reflects the contradictions that arise as the organization of social life is transformed by objective conditions, most of which are the product of conditions introduced by that social life. Take, for example, the issue of equality before the law. Equality before the law as a guarantee of the equal rights of all citizens to the ownership of private property, to the right of all to participate in the essence of civil life, the production of one's own needs (however broadly these needs may be defined), is clearly an essential feature of the capitalist mode of production. True, equality before the law as a basic principle of bourgeois-democratic social life does not reflect the differential access of citizens to legal representation based on distinctions of wealth, power, or status nor does it include the necessary inequality of legal rights of individuals and groups that are regarded as a real, potential, or even imagined threat to the state that exists to protect through its laws, among other things,the principle of equality before the law.
Practical sense should make it preeminently clear that freedom, even in a state such as the US that legally guarantees freedom, is finally a function of power and not of morality or of law (though power becomes translated into both once demonstrated and assimilated into the organization of community). The power vacuum in the Black ghettos ( I will not go into the reasons here except to say that this vacuum is to no small degree a product of governmental interference in the development of grass-roots organization of black people, and to the helplessness of black leadership in the face of this intervention) certainly contributes to the weakness of black men and women before the law and, of course, to the widespread lawlessness found there. The relative susceptibility of American and European Muslim communities to legalized injustice also has its roots in the lack of unity and control of the community over determination of its social and political objectives. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- *I suspect that Miz England could have avoided serving at abu Ghraib without either playing the "Schweik" game or outright contesting of orders. I know of a number of cases (and I suspect there are many more) of soldiers who made a personal appeal to their commanders to be given alternative duty to disagreeable assignments (like guarding civilian prisoners. To my knowledge most of these appeals were accepted and few if any of these objectors were punished. In fact, in those cases known to me these objectors were either honorably discharged or even assigned more responsible duties elsewhere. The objecting soldiers who did go to jail were those who presented these objections as public or political contests with the authority of the state or of the army (an understandable response considering the imminent dangers of political fragmentation of military forces). I later was surprised to discover that the very same policy of military tolerance of personal objections to certain kinds of duty, such as the mass transport and execution of Jews and others, was practiced by the German Army during WW II.
It my feeling on the abu Ghraib situation that Miz England, tragically, got caught up in a process typical of poorly led military units in which isolation and the comradery of the unit combine to create a "subculture" that quickly evolves radically unsatisfactory practices that may, as appears to have happened in this case, become truly destructive to military discipline in the broader sense of tactical and strategic fitness. Had the situation in abu Ghraib come to the notice of higher commands and had the latter realized the destructive potential of the activities of England's unit, she probably would have never gone before a full-dress court martial. The more likely result would have been the transfer of her unit to other duties, a reprimand and transfer of the officers in charge to less sensitive duties, and a lot of paperwork. But, the case was publicized, the offending evidence was widely published, and something more drastic had to be done. So Miz England, an inconsequential reserve private soldier is transformed into an important public figure, a living demonstration of how the US Army maintains the law and protects the highest forms of military morality in all its actions.
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