Bill Ayers

President Assad of Syria announced yesterday that he had authorized limited missile strikes against the United States of America. “The United States has consistently violated international law and civilized standards of behavior,” he said. “It has gathered the greatest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction ever assembled, and it is in fact the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons. It has unleashed drone strikes against at least seven other nations, murdering thousands—it has even used drones to kill its own people. And the US has routinely employed torture, a practice that has been condemned and outlawed for decades—it has even tortured its own citizens.”

He explained that Syria had no territorial ambitions, that there would be no Syrian boots on the ground, and that his goals did not include regime change.

“There comes a time when the international community must stand up and send a message that some things will not be tolerated. If we fail to send that message today we can be sure the US will be emboldened to use drones and torture in the future. We encourage our allies—anyone there? Anyone at all?—to join us, but if Syria is the only country with the moral clarity to act, we will act alone.”

When reminded that the UN Charter and international law forbade any nation from attacking any other sovereign nation without UN approval or “an imminent attack on its territory” he offered a one word response in English: “Duh!”

Rule Number Three:

Settle disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
Refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.

War and the treat of violence cannot be—but has obviously become—the default position for the US in global affairs.

Ethan and Joel Cohen’s masterful film “Miller’s Crossing” opens with the two-bit gangster Johnny Casper struggling to explain to the big crime boss, Leo, how he’s been wronged by an associate mobster, Bernie Bernbaum. 

“I’m talkin’ about friendship,” Johnny says, and the camera lingers on the frothy saliva forming in the creases of his thin, menacing smile.  “I’m talkin’ about character,” he continues structuring and shaping his argument.  “I’m talkin’ about—hell, Leo, I ain’t embarrassed to use the word—I’m talkin’ about etics.”

Johnny is, indeed, talking about ethics: “When I fix a fight,” Johnny proceeds indignantly, “say I play a three to one favorite to throw a goddam fight.  I got a right to expect the fight to go off at three to one.” Then Bernie Bernbaum, the “scheeney shmata boy,” the lying cheat, hears of the deal, manipulates the situation, and the “odds go straight to hell.”

“It’s gettin’ so a businessman can’t expect no return from a fixed fight,” complains Johnny.  “Now, if you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust?”  Without ethics, he concludes, “we’re back into anarchy, right back in the jungle… That’s why etics are important.  It’s what separates us from the animals, from beasts of burden, beasts of prey.  Etics!”

“Do you want to kill him?” asks Leo, coolly.

“For starters,” Johnny replies earnestly and without a hint of irony.

Listening to John Kerry preach about the moral obligation to kill—for starters—brings us face to face with Johnny and Leo. It’s all about ethics.

Quagmire
Tinderbox
Bad neighborhood
Schoolyard bully

Each is ill-informed, simple-minded, catchy and entirely inaccurate. Take “quagmire:” Re-purposed during the American invasion of Viet Nam, “quagmire” was the perfect metaphor for an imperial army and enterprise in defeat. “Quagmire” rolls so easily off the lips of prime time commentators—“We don’t want to get stuck in a quagmire”—because it carries all the comfortable American  assumptions that allow us to sleep the deep, deep American sleep of denial: American intentions are always good and pure, the US always comes in peace promoting democracy and human rights, American foreign policy is guided by high moral standards. When things go bad and the lies are exposed and apparent (Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq)  the masters of war do a quick makeover, transforming themselves from aggressors to victims, claiming that the innocent first step into a swamp not of our making has tripped us up and trapped us.

For the past several years, I have spent virtually all my working hours writing about or speaking about the immorality, cruelty, racism, and insanity of our nation’s latest caste system: mass incarceration. On this Facebook page I have written and posted about little else. But as I pause today to reflect on the meaning and significance of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington , I realize that my focus has been too narrow. Five years after the March, Dr. King was speaking out against the Vietnam War, condemning America ’s militarism and imperialism – famously stating that our nation was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” He saw the connections between the wars we wage abroad, and the utter indifference we have for poor people, and people of color at home. He saw the necessity of openly critiquing an economic system that will fund war and will reward greed, hand over fist, but will not pay workers a living wage. Five years after the March on Washington , Dr. King was ignoring all those who told him to just stay in his lane, just stick to talking about civil rights. Yet here I am decades later, staying in my lane. I have not been speaking publicly about the relationship between drones abroad and the War on Drugs at home. I have not been talking about the connections between the corrupt capitalism that bails out Wall Street bankers, moves jobs overseas, and forecloses on homes with zeal, all while private prisons yield high returns and expand operations into a new market: caging immigrants. I have not been connecting the dots between the NSA spying on millions of Americans, the labeling of mosques as “terrorist organizations,” and the spy programs of the 1960s and 70s – specifically the FBI and COINTELPRO programs that placed civil rights advocates under constant surveillance, infiltrated civil rights organizations, and assassinated racial justice leaders. I have been staying in my lane. But no more. In my view, the most important lesson we can learn from Dr. King is not what he said at the March on Washington , but what he said and did after. In the years that followed, he did not play politics to see what crumbs a fundamentally corrupt system might toss to the beggars of justice. Instead he connected the dots and committed himself to building a movement that would shake the foundations of our economic and social order, so that the dream he preached in 1963 might one day be a reality for all. He said that nothing less than “a radical restructuring of society” could possibly ensure justice and dignity for all. He was right. I am still committed to building a movement to end mass incarceration, but I will not do it with blinders on. If all we do is end mass incarceration, this movement will not have gone nearly far enough. A new system of racial and social control will be born again, all because we did not do what King demanded we do: connect the dots between poverty, racism, militarism and materialism. I’m getting out of my lane. I hope you’re already out of yours.

NPR has long been home base for the Chicken-Hawks and the Liberal-Hawks, featuring sweet narratives about the lives of soldiers and their families, heart-warming tales of heroism and loss, soft-ball interviews with generals and military commanders, and cloying conversations with members of the administration about war and foreign affairs. There is never a probing line of questioning for the war makers, never a pressing question or a follow-up for a military man, never an investigation of who is making the big money in this state of permanent war, never a serious report from the victims of US military action, never a series on why the US (constituting less than 5% of the world’s people) has a trillion dollar war machine—larger then all other countries on earth combined. The current moment has allowed NPR to reach a new low. For them the issue about the US bombing Syria is not human life or human rights; it’s not a serious look at the various proxy wars (the US and Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Israel/the US and Iran, etc) being fought with Syrian lives; it’s not the growing isolation and decline of US power. No for NPR the issue is framed in terms of honor and commitment and credibility: the president drew a red line, they point out again and again, and Congress must now muster the courage to break the gridlock and support the president.
Dishonest and despicable.

Rule Number Two: John McCain should be appointed official barometer regarding the use of US military force—read the McCain Barometer every morning; if he supports invasion, occupation, intervention, air strikes, or bombings in a given situation, oppose it and you will be on the right side.

Senator McCain has been wrong on every major US foreign policy initiative for half a century. Check the public record; then try to figure out why McCain is the designated Deep Thinker on foreign policy, the number one invited guest on the Sunday morning talk shows. He’s better suited to be the Official Barometer.

Rule Number One: The US is forbidden to bomb any country that a majority of Americans can’t find on a blank world map.

This proposal, if enacted, is guaranteed to dramatically reduce the level of global violence overnight. At this moment 80% of Americans age 18-25 cannot find Israel/Palestine on a map; 80% cannot find Iraq; 40% can’t find England; and 10% can’t find the US.

So much of what happens next is up to us: speak up, write your senators and reps in Congress, submit an op-ed to your local paper, rally your friends and alert your networks.

Say NO to WAR!

Dumb and Dumber

“I don’t oppose all wars,” said State Senator Barack Obama from the speaker’s platform at an antiwar rally in downtown Chicago in October 2002. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”

Dumb and rash—that pretty much sums up the threatened US bombing of Syria.

In this age of permanent war we’re once again treated to selective images of war’s brutality and the tragic human suffering war imposes (a reporter for NPR, betraying incredible ignorance of the proper role of a free journalist, said, “I’ve seen the gas attack videos from the Defense Department, and it seems the US must do something.”); once again we’re asked to forget the consequences of US interventions in Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and more; and once again we’re told to ignore the “ignorant foreigners” who oppose US military aggression from the UN, the Arab League, and the Parliament of Great Britain (!!!)—all of whom oppose US “strikes”.

Despite majority opposition to US military intervention in Syria among the US population, the runaway US military machine cranks up their proxie front-group “NATO” and assembles an ever-shrinking “coalition of the willing” (France?). Once again a group of Dr. Strangeloves from the Pentagon’s military intelligence (oxymoron) make smiling and extravagant claims about the evolution of our creepy new war technology (“You can see these surgical strikes on YouTube!”) that guarantee success without harming a single innocent human person.

But “we must do something!” US leaders, who can’t think beyond military terms and violent responses, have badly damaged imaginations. What we, the people, must do is to deploy our social imaginations in the service of “doing something” in response to the horrible likelihood of gas attacks, and to human rights violations wherever and whenever they occur, not just those certified by empire in order to justify its own crimes; and again in steady mobilization and fierce opposition  to the despicable and predictable US military attack.

Dumb war.  Illegal war.

Quick, bring in an “intellectual!”=erce

Richard Fontaine, the president of the Center for a New American Security, a self-described centrist research group, said, “The kind of attack the administration appears to be planning will demonstrate to Syria and to others that there is a cost the United States is willing to impose for crossing clearly established American red lines and violating widely held international norms.”

It sounds like a playground bully making a dare. “Don’t cross those clearly established American red lines…or else.” Or else what?

Fontaine, again: “It probably will do very little to alter the fundamental balance of forces on the ground or hasten the end of the conflict.”

Are we Sparta? Can we stand up to the impulse for greater war and demand ethical and political responses to the terrible Syrian conflict? Can we do at least as surprisingly well as England? Can we teach ourselves about the genius of Syrian civilization and the beautiful Syrian people? Can we beat swords into bicycles? After Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Mali, can we simply say NO MORE WAR?

Dumb war.

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, analyzes a novel kind of disciplinary power that was implemented in the 17th century to combat the plague, a new threat that was lethal, invisible, and highly contagious. The innovative approach not only isolated a town or village in which an outbreak had occurred, it also brought a group of people under intense scrutiny and segmentation, confining residents to their homes, placing sentinels at the corners of streets and intersections, and requiring regular review and registration of the position, condition, and identity of each individual under quarantine. For Foucault the model of the quarantine was a new “technology of power” that he called “discipline.”

A “mechanism of discipline” can be thought of as any “enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised,  in which all events are recorded, in which uninterrupted links exist between the center and periphery.” The “architectural figure” of this disciplinary power is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a model prison built upon a simple concept with echoing and accelerating implications: a tower surrounded by a ring of cells. A sentinel stands in the central tower; the guard can observe each of the prisoners, but they can neither see the sentry nor one another; prisoners never know when or how they are being observed, but recognize at all times their own visibility and vulnerability: “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”

What began as an effort to regulate and command certain “marginal” or “dangerous” segments of the population—victims of the plague, prisoners, the “insane”—becomes a technology used to normalize the population as a whole, adopted by all institutions with any interest whatsoever in management and control. “Is it surprising,” asks Foucault rhetorically, “that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” The Panopticon is the basic technology of power in our schools and our society.

Efforts to implement surveillance techniques and disciplinary power in schools have been going on for years, of course, but the process was dramatically accelerated in this country by two events:  first, the shootings  at Columbine High School in 1999, which provoked  widespread worry over a supposed trend of school violence, and second, the attacks of 9/11, which sparked a similar nationwide panic over “terrorism” and a drive, not just in schools but in every facet of American life, toward “security” of the “home-land.” Foucault’s emphasis on the origins of discipline during the plague is instructive because school violence, not to mention “terrorism,” is often figured as a metaphorical plague, something “contagious,” “invisible,” and “lethal.” Foucault reminds us that “Behind the disciplinary mechanism can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague . . . of people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.”

The prisoner in Foucault’s Panopticon is always “the object of information, never the subject of communication.” Most teachers challenge that: we want our students to become the subjects of communication, actors in their own dramas and writers of their own scripts, even as we ourselves resist being transformed into objects by the mechanisms of surveillance that so profoundly define modern educational institutions.