Appalling

As part of NASPIR, I've signed a letter defending free speech in the case of Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado. Churchill wrote what he called "a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack" in the immediate aftermath of said event. The rediscovery of this sloppy polemic has led to raging denunciation, with death threats, the governor of Colorado calling for Churchill's resignation and so on.

The issue of most interest to corporate media has not been the rising tide against academia in the US, of which this is the latest wave, but instead attention has been focused on sustaining moral hysteria over Churchill's remarks. In particular, Churchill writes that the victims in the World Trade Center were not all innocent because they "formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire" and that killing them was the only way of "visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns". Churchill has in later commentary and interviews clarified (and, in my view, changed) his remarks. But taken at face value, I find Churchill's essay appalling.

So do a lot mainstream commentators. Let's put aside the idea that people would have the right to say appalling things, and assume that there is a category of ideas which one is not allowed to publicly express. (As commonly accepted all over Europe, where laws routinely restrict the freedom of speech with regard to racist, fascist and blasphemous sentiments. In the US, the freedom of speech is better enshrined in law.) So, what is the category of thought which is being publicly exorcised?

A quick comparison to writings which bring no disapproval in the mainstream is enough to dispel the possibility that seeing justice in the killing of innocents and advocacy of terrorism would be taboo. Right-wing publications such as National Review Online routinely feature columns along the lines of criticising the use of cruise missiles as opposed to mass bombing of cities in revenge for terrorist strikes. But one does not have to go to such sources. A look at a chief ideologue of the leading liberal newspaper, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, will also yield the sentiment "We need to go into the heart of their world and beat their brains out, in order to burst this [terrorism] bubble", usually expressed in a more refined form. (See for example the overview by Edward Herman.)

Friedman's and Churchill's writings are not analogous, of course; for example, Churchill has clarified he does not advocate terrorism. Also, the reactions to the work of celebrated journalists tell more about the cultural climate than the hysteria over an obscure essay by a Native American academic activist. In Friedman's case, his advocacy of terrorism and aggression worse than the atrocities of September 2001 has brought such calamities as three Pulitzer Prizes upon him.

The distinguishing feature of Churchill's writing (the angry style aside) is not that he says appalling things, but that he says them about the wrong people. The case is an exemplary refutation of the idea that a "balanced debate" exists with a wide and reasonable mainstream, and some extremes left and right. If you took the positions advocated by National Review Online or the New York Times and reversed the cast, Churchill's essay would seem moderate.

The hysteria over Churchill would be farcical were it not for the problems it causes him, and the climate of fear it is helping to build. This is not the first targeting of academics (Joseph Massad is another prominent example), and I fear that the scope of accepted expression is becoming ever more narrow. This is bound to also affect Europe, particularly US-oriented countries such as Britain and Finland.

48 hours

"Any Arab who doesn't leave here voluntarily should be killed," she says in reply to a question with a pleasant smile, without batting an eyelash.

The quote is from a member of the Kahane youth, an Israeli extremist movement, interviewed in Haaretz. Not all members are as strong in their views. Some want to give the Palestinians a chance:

"[I]f we don't deal with the Arabs now, they will liquidate us and take over our country democratically. They will change our flag and our national anthem." He adds that he is not in favor of killing; he espouses expulsion of the enemy. They have to be given a 48-hour ultimatum to leave the country, "and whoever refuses, we will shoot him".

I find it helpful to mentally substitute "Jew" for "Arab" to better appreciate this sort of talk. Actually, it takes little effort to find historical counterparts for these kind of nationalist-racist groups of which Kahane Youth is but one (and not even the most extreme), with their emphasis on the sacred connection of the People and the Land, pornographical propaganda about "cannibalism in Gaza", adoption of ancient Jewish heroes as the movement's precursors, and so on. Members of the Kahane Youth evidently believe their views to be widely shared:

"I think my parents also think this way - it is pretty clear that they think like this - and in fact almost the whole people of Israel thinks like this."

[...]

"Mom knows I am a Kahanist and she doesn't want it, she's afraid I'll be arrested, but she's happy that I am saying what I think out loud. Everyone has the same opinions. In their hearts every Jew knows that one Jew is worth more than five million Arabs and Jewish blood is sacred, it says so in the Torah."

In fact, such genocidal views are not part of the Israeli mainstream. Anti-Arab racism, demonisation of Palestinians, calls for massacres and ethnic cleansing are common fare (some parties in the government openly advocate ethnic cleansing), but explicit demands for the physical extermination of all Palestinians are some way beyond mainstream sentiments.

However, such extremism could not thrive if it didn't reflect something in the popular consciousness. Indeed, in Israeli mainstream discourse it is perfectly respectable to consider Palestinian children to be a threat by virtue of being born. (Here's a typical example of a reasoned view on the "demographic problem". Again, it is an interesting exercise to mentally substitute "Jew" for "Arab" while reading.)

The perception of the Kahane Youth that they're just saying out loud what everyone silently believes reminds me of skinheads in Finland. The basis of skinhead ideology is also not that different from prevalent prejudices, and their views also say something about Finland. Why would the young be ashamed to say in public what the parents are thinking in private?

The many millions

Holocaust memorial day. The Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated 60 years ago today. In Finland, the day is held to remember not only the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but all victims of ethnic persecution, past and present.

The simple popular picture of the reasons for the Holocaust has two essential elements: an insane leadership that whipped up antisemitism to gain power, and fanatically loyal followers who were indoctrinated into totalitarian mentality, ready to obey any and all orders.

The idea that Nazis came into power by promoting hatred of Jews which then inexorably led to the Holocaust is somewhat mistaken. To the contrary, during the phase when the party expanded into the mainstream and took part in elections, Nazis played down rather than highlighted their antisemitism. Work, bread, peace and safety from communism were their selling points. After the Nazis consolidated their grip on Germany, the persecution of Jews was stepped up again. The Holocaust was not a necessary consequence of the Nazi strategy for obtaining power, but an expression of the personal aberrations of the Nazi leadership, to which they could give free rein in the extreme circumstances of war.

It should be immediately added that the personal ideas of the Nazi leaders reflected deep-seated tendencies in the population. The image of the Nazi leaders -Hitler in particular- as mad and totally off the scale in their ideology is quite mistaken. The Nazi leaders took a number of common prejudices to the extreme, but invented few of their own. The essential elements of their worldview were shared by a large part of the population, and are not difficult to locate today: monoethnic nationalism, anti-bolshevism and racism (in particular anti-Jewish and anti-Russian racism) were combined with an admiration of organised violence and belief in a cosmic struggle of good versus evil, where all means are not only legitimate but imperative to avoid utter annihilation.

The popular image of the genocide being committed by brainwashed Nazi fanatics is also somewhat misleading. A segment of the German population indeed embraced the most extreme elements of Nazi ideology and was ready to massacre Jews, gypsies, communists, liberals and other enemies. However, carrying out a wholesale extermination program would have been impossible without the involvement of a much larger number of people who just did their duty and accepted their defined responsibilities without dissent.

Still, it's not incorrect to say that they were brainwashed, if the practice is defined as "making people accept forms of behaviour that they would otherwise find morally or socially objectionable" (following Jeff Schmidt's definition in Disciplined Minds). The main point of the indoctrination involved is that it is a virtue to surrender personal moral judgement to totalitarian institutions, such as a military hierarchy. This was of course quite true for all civilised nations at the time, and again, this brand of thought is not difficult to locate today.

Of the other factors that made the Holocaust possible, among the most relevant today is extensive, passive racism. The majority of Germans would not have approved if they had been told that all Jews are to be massacred, as is clear from the secrecy surrounding the genocide. However, passive racism which allows ever more extreme sentiments to go unchallenged combined with indoctrination to act "honourably" and obey even when disagreeing leaves nothing to stop the descent into the abyss.

As one, by no means the most alarming, example I would like to mention anti-Arab racism and the British National Party. The BNP leader makes public statements such as Islam being spread by the rape of non-Muslim women, the party advocates bringing British troops back from Iraq to deal with the Muslim population in Britain, and so on. They also gathered 800 000 votes in the EU elections last June. Indeed, in Europe and the US, the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim variants are the last socially acceptable forms of racism, and it is not rare to come across things that would be right in place in 1930s Germany if one substituted "Jew" for "Arab" and/or "Muslim".

On the conceivable

UPI reports that "Israel is embarking upon a more aggressive approach to the war on terror that will include staging targeted killings in the United States and other friendly countries".

The Israeli government routinely assassinates people with methods ranging from poison injection to the ear to missile strikes from US-supplied military helicopters. More interesting than the extension of this policy from the Occupied Territories, Jordan, Belgium and so on to the US, is the reaction of the people interviewed by UPI:

A congressional staff member with deep knowledge of intelligence matters said, "I don't know on what basis we would be able to protest Israel's actions." He referred to the recent killing of Qaed Salim Sinan al Harethi, a top al Qaida leader, in Yemen by a remotely controlled CIA drone.

Note that the staffer does not exactly approve of the idea of assassinating people on US soil: rather, he evidently cannot think of a reason to disapprove. Let's imagine that Hamas declared that it will now murder Israelis also on US soil. That comparison is not quite fair, for a number of reasons, one of them being that Hamas is not a state agent. So let's compare with another state - say, what if the pre-invasion Iraqi government had declared it would start assassinating people in the US thought to be responsible for terrorism in Iraq (such as Iyad Allawi, the current prime minister of Iraq)? Could UPI have found any congressional staffers who would have been able to come up with any basis for disapproving? Is it even sane to ask this question?

Returning to reality, the comparison to US assassinations is quite reasonable. If one accepts the principle of murdering at will, the only problems left are precisely those discussed in the UPI report: sometimes you kill the wrong person, sometimes you fail to kill anyone altogether.

Decapitated heads placed gracefully

Newsweek reports that the US government is debating the "Salvador option" in Iraq: creating death squads in the style of El Salvador and other US client states in Latin America.

This would be a logical development. The occupation is failing ever more rapidly, and at this point it seems unlikely that conventional military force can defeat the Iraqi resistance. The great foreign policy successes of the US have not been in colonial war as in Vietnam, but in neo-colonial state terror as in Latin America. Death squads, paramilitary units formed from the local population, are an ideal tool for state terrorism as they can target the entire population much more effectively than conventional military forces. In El Salvador in the 1980s, the death squads were a great success, managing to terrorise the people into submission and the business climate favourable to US corporations, by killing something like 75 000 people.

Newsweek, like other US corporate media, presents the death squads (in defiance of all evidence) as targeting guerrillas, though the very reason for their use is to target the non-combatant population. That they would be deployed for such state terrorism in Iraq is clear even from the Newsweek report:

[M]ost Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won't turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

To give some idea of what sort of "costs" would be raised to "change the equation", recall that in Latin America, the death squads killed 75 000 in El Salvador alone, committed multiple genocides, tortured tens of thousands. But this is so abstract. To make a little more concrete what the "Saldavor option" involves, let's turn to Rev. Santiago's account (quoted by Noam Chomsky):

He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head".

The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.

[...]

"People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador - they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch."

Just as it's misleading to concentrate on the low-level perpetrators of policies of torture and murder at the expense of those at the top, it's misleading to concentrate on the specific persons at the top at the expense of the institutions involved and their long-standing policies. The horrors the US government has brought to Iraq and those it is preparing to unleash are not new, and not specific to the Bush regime. Since John F. Kennedy, US has been the major exporter of torture, terrorism and genocide. Indeed, such paramilitary operations were first called in the US Special Forces manuals simply "terror operations", then glossed to "counterterror" and now to "counterinsurgency".

All these things about death squads are true, tried and quintessentially American. However, I think there is a new moral low involved: the merits of death squads and "mistakes" in their use are now discussed calmly and openly in the US mainstream media (under the apologetic pretense that death squads do not intentionally target civilians, but discussed nonetheless). During the 1980s, the corporate media simply kept the US population in ignorance that their government was controlling death squads.

Might be soiled with feces

In the trial of one of the torturers at Abu Ghraib, the lawyer for the defense has responded to the famous photo of the leashed, crawling prisoner by saying that a "tether" is a valid method of controlling detainees, "especially those who might be soiled with feces". (For some unspecified reason: who knows, maybe Iraqi detainees just like rolling around in shit?) He also compared the leash to the "tethers [parents place] on their toddlers while walking in shopping malls", and noted that "In Texas we'd lasso them and drag them out of there."

I'm not sure whether the last statement refers to babies or detainees, but in the latter case the remark may well be fair. After all, prisoners are also tortured, humiliated and killed in US prisons, at times by the same people as at Abu Ghraib.

The defence opening statement also compared pyramids of naked prisoners to football entertainment: "Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?" A novel defense strategy, I must say. If I was a prosecutor, I would certainly be stunned.

It's actually unfair to single out the defense arguments of a single low-level case. A much better gauge of the atmosphere involved is given by a look at high-level people, their views and their treatment. Indeed, Alberto Gonzales, who played a central role at the top has also undergone hearings - to be confirmed as the US attorney general.

A model city

The US occupation forces are not insensitive to the plight of the around 300 000 people they have driven from Fallujah. In fact, once the refugees are allowed to return, the ruins of their city are to be a model for the rest of Iraq. Dahr Jamail reports:

Another example of the winning of hearts and minds of Iraqis is being formulated for the residents of Fallujah. The military has announced the plans it is considering to use for allowing Fallujans back into their city.

They will set up "processing centers" on the outskirts of the city and compile a database of peoples' identities by using DNA testing and retina scans. Residents will then receive a badge which identifies them with their home address, which they must wear at all times.

Buses will ferry them into their city, as cars will be banned since the military fears the use of them by suicide bombers.

Another idea being kicked around is to require the men to work for pay in military-style battalions where these "work brigades" will reconstruct buildings and the water system, depending on the men's skills.

As with a number of other plans of the occupying forces, I am not sure which is more amazing: the plans themselves, or the expectation that they could really be implemented.

Who would monitor and enforce the wearing of badges, for example? The local collaborators cannot stand up to the resistance, and the US doesn't have enough troops to control the whole country. Now that US troops are caught up in Fallujah, the resistance has moved elsewhere. Dahr Jamail writes from Baghdad:

The goal of crushing the resistance and creating stability by destroying Fallujah has gone so well that resistance fighters here roamed freely about Haifa street today hunting for Iraqis collaborating with US forces.

They executed a man they suspected as being a collaborator in Tahrir Square, and then they moved on to Mathaf Square, just 3 blocks from the "Green Zone" where the interim government and US embassy are located.

When the US troops leave Fallujah, more members of the armed resistance (who are still fighting the US troops in the city) will return. Somehow, I don't see the collaborators who are executed three blocks from the Green Zone overseeing a system of ID badges and labor gangs in Fallujah.