Discontented Soul

Alberto Gonzales: The Torture Guy
by Maureen Dowd
Published on Thursday, November 11, 2004 by the International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON - During the U.S. presidential campaign, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney gave the ominous impression that there was a dire threat that terrorists could incinerate Americans at any time if that powder puff John Kerry got anywhere near the Oval Office.
We Americans felt the hot breath of the wolf pack bearing down on us. But only a week later, the alarums have dimmed.
The administration lowered the terror threat in New York and Washington on Wednesday, and the Capitol Hill police were dismantling the elaborate security checkpoints they had put on streets around the Capitol to thwart would-be bombers...

Win or Lose, Kerry Voters Are Smarter Than Bush Voters
by Ted Rall
Published on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 by Ted Rall

Democratic hand wringing is surrealy out of hand. No one is criticizing the morally incongruous Kerry for running against a war he voted for while insisting that he would have voted for it again. Party leaders have yet to consider that NAFTA, signed into law under Clinton, may have cost them high-unemployment Ohio. No, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, darling of the "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council, blames something else: the perception "in the heartland" that Democrats are a "bicoastal cultural elite that is condescending at best and contemptuous at worst to the values that Americans hold in their daily lives."
Firstly, living in the sticks doesn't make you more American. Rural, urban or suburban--they're irrelevant. San Francisco's predominantly gay Castro district is every bit as red, white and blue as the Texas panhandle. But if militant Christianist Republicans from inland backwaters believe that secular liberal Democrats from the big coastal cities look upon them with disdain, there's a reason. We do, and all the more so after this election...

Squeezing Jello in Iraq
by Scott Ritter
Published on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 by Aljazeera.net

The much-anticipated US-led offensive to seize the Iraqi city of Falluja from anti-American Iraqi fighters has begun. Meeting resistance that, while stiff at times, was much less than had been anticipated, US Marines and soldiers, accompanied by Iraqi forces loyal to the interim government of Iyad Allawi, have moved into the heart of Falluja.
Fighting is expected to continue for a few more days, but US commanders are confident that Falluja will soon be under US control, paving the way for the establishment of order necessary for nation-wide elections currently scheduled for January 2005.
But will it? American military planners expected to face thousands of Iraqi resistance fighters in the streets of Falluja, not the hundreds they are currently fighting. They expected to roll up the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his foreign Islamic militants, and yet to date have found no top-tier leaders from that organization. As American forces surge into Falluja, Iraqi fighters are mounting extensive attacks throughout the rest of Iraq...

Crushing Fallujah Won't End War
by Patrick Cockburn
Published on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The belligerent trumpetings of the U.S. Marines bode ill for Fallujah. Sgt. Maj. Carlton Kent, the senior enlisted marine in Iraq, told troops that the battle would be no different from Iwo Jima. In an analogy the Pentagon may not relish, he recalled the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968 and added: "This is another Hue city."
American voters last week never seemed to take on board the extent of the U.S. military failure in Iraq. The rebel control of Fallujah, half an hour's drive from Baghdad, was the most evident symbol of this. It was as if a British government in London had been forced to watch as an enemy force occupied Reading for six months...

Rocket the Vote: Election Weapons
by Naomi Klein
Published on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 by NoLogo.org

P. Diddy announced on the weekend that his “Vote or Die” campaign will live on. The hip-hop mogul's voter-registration drive during the U.S. presidential elections was, he said, merely “phase one, step one for us to get people engaged.”
Fantastic. I have a suggestion for phase two: P. Diddy, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and the rest of the self-described “Coalition of the Willing” should take their chartered jet and fly to Fallujah, where their efforts are desperately needed. But first they are going to need to flip the slogan from “Vote or Die!” to “Die, Then Vote!”
Because that is what is happening there. Escape routes have been sealed off,homes are being demolished, and an emergency health clinic has been razed — all in the name of preparing the city for January elections. In a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, U.S.-appointed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi explained that the all-out attack was required “to safeguard lives, elections and democracy in Iraq.”...

Toward a Self-Interested U.S. Policy on Palestine
by Lawrence Pintak
Published on Tuesday, November 9, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

The death of the father of Palestinian nationalism. The re-election of a U.S. president widely reviled in the Middle East. A confluence of events that would seem to portend disaster for the Palestinian cause and a new wave of antipathy for the U.S.
But in a strangely twisted way, the demise of Yasser Arafat and the victory George W. Bush might - just might - open the door wide enough to generate a very dim ray of light at the end of a pair of very long and dark tunnels. But only if this administration demonstrates an understanding of Muslim perceptions and a style of pragmatic global leadership absent to date.
The current situation is grim. The wellspring of goodwill toward the U.S. among Arabs and Muslims immediately after 9/11 has been transformed into a cesspool of anger and hate. Americans knowledgeable about the Muslim world can only shake their heads in despair at the prospect of four more years of the same policies that brought us to this place. Talk of "public diplomacy" efforts to "win hearts and minds" seems a joke...

There is a precedent for the Bush Project, but it’s not fascism
by George Monbiot
Published on Tuesday, November 9, 2004 by Monbiot.com

"If Bush wins," the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, "fascism is possible in the United States."(1) Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.
She's wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush's security state as "soft fascism" in the Guardian last month.(2) So is the endless traffic on the internet. In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it as "... a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity".(3) It is hard to read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.
But this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don't understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.

Puritanism is perhaps the least-understood of any political movement in European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption of Republican America. But Puritanism was the product of an economic transformation.
In England in the first half of the 17th Century, the remnants of the feudal state performed a role analagous to that of social democracy in the second half of the 20th. It was run, of course, in the interests of the monarchy and clergy. But it also regulated the economic exploitation of the lower orders. As RH Tawney observed in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Charles 1st sought to nationalise industries, control foreign exchange and prosecute lords who evicted peasants from the land, employers who refused to pay the full wage, and magistrates who failed to give relief to the poor.(4)
But this model was no longer viable. Over the preceding 150 years, "the rise of commercial companies, no longer local, but international" led in Europe to "a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before" and "the subjection of the collegiate industrial organization of the Middle Ages to a new money-power". The economy was “swept forward by an immense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry". The kings and princes of Europe had become "puppets dancing on wires" held by the financiers.(5)
In England, the dissolution of the monasteries had catalysed a massive seizure of wealth by a new commercial class. They began by grabbing ("enclosing") the land and shaking out its inhabitants. This generated a mania for land speculation, which in turn led to the creation of sophisticated financial markets, experimenting in futures, arbitrage and almost all the vices we now associate with the Age of Enron.
All this was furiously denounced by the early theologists of the English Reformation. The first Puritans preached that men should be charitable, encourage justice and punish exploitation. This character persisted through the 17th Century among the settlers of New England. But in the old country it didn't stand a chance.
Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God. From his doctrine of individual purification, the late Puritans forged a new theology.
At its heart was an "idealization of personal responsibility" before God. This rapidly turned into “a theory of individual rights” in which "the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed". By the mid-17th Century, most English Puritans saw in poverty "not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion" but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will.”(6)
It wasn't hard for them to make this leap. If the Christian life, as idealised by both Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of the individual soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and protected by the medieval Church, becomes redundant. “Individualism in religion led "to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric".(7)
To this the late Puritans added another concept. They conflated their religious calling with their commercial one. "Next to the saving of his soul," the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman's "care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go."(8) Success in business became a sign of spiritual grace: providing proof to the entrepreneur, in Steele’s words, that “God has blessed his trade”. The next step follows automatically. The Puritan minister Joseph Lee anticipated Adam Smith’s invisible hand by more than a century, when he claimed that “the advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public”.(9) By private persons, of course, he meant the men of property, who were busily destroying the advancement of everyone else.
Tawney describes the Puritans as early converts to “administrative nihilism”: the doctrine we now call the minimal state. "Business affairs," they believed, "should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality".(10) They owed nothing to anyone. Indeed, they formulated a radical new theory of social obligation, which maintained that helping the poor created idleness and spiritual dissolution, divorcing them from God.
Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush’s people in that they worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as people who believed that “the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian.”
There were some, such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who remained true to the original spirit of the Reformation, but they were violently suppressed. The pursuit of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal distraction for the increasingly impoverished lower classes.
Ronan Bennett's excellent new novel, Havoc in Its Third Year, about a Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable.(11) An obsession with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush’s America.
So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the United States this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush’s government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it’s up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.
References:
1. Quoted by Quico Alsedo, 27th October 2004. “El Fascismo Es Posible Si Gana Bush” Dice Probst Salomon(sic). El Mundo.
2. Richard Sennett, 23rd October 2004. The Age of Anxiety. The Guardian.
3. Robert O. Paxton, 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
4. RH Tawney, 1998 edition. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Transaction publishers, New Brunswick.
5. ibid.
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
8. Richard Steele, 1684. The Tradesman’s Calling. Cited in Tawney (ibid).
9. Joseph Lee, cited in Tawney, ibid.
10. Tawney, ibid.
11. Ronan Bennett, 2004. Havoc in its Third Year. Bloomsbury, London.
George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of Britain; as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.

Bin Laden Sought Bush Victory
by Antonia Zerbisias
Published on Tuesday, November 9, 2004 by the Toronto Star

Remember him, the guy in the picture on the right ?
He has barely been mentioned since Tuesday when the U.S. media began framing the election results around "morality" - a genteel way of saying middle America hates homos - instead of the fear factor that drove most of the campaign.
Behold Osama bin Laden, star of the most effective ad all year for the Bush-Cheney ticket. It debuted two Fridays ago, on the eve of the vote, in time to mute talk of the missing explosives at Al Qaaqa and to wipe out coverage of the impending collapse of the necessary overhaul of American intelligence agencies. Its appearance could not have been better managed if George W's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, had planned it.

[In John Howard's Australia, some of us too share Mr Crabtree-Ireland's fears.]

The Bullies Win
by John Crabtree-Ireland
Published on Tuesday, November 9, 2004 by the Baltimore Sun

The playground can be a dangerous place when you are different. Over the past four years, our nation has taken on many of the same characteristics of an unsupervised schoolyard, where the majority rules and that group often is controlled by a bully. As a gay American, I have been waiting and praying for the bell to ring.
George W. Bush has used the politics of division to solidify his control over this country. With a charismatic smile and gentle delivery, he has appealed to his base and laid down a plan to separate the different.
The instructions are clear: In order to be safe, Americans must report any suspicious people to the authorities, authorize wide-scale surveillance as permitted by the Patriot Act and permanently disenfranchise gays by amending the Constitution.
All of the pundits agree that his re-election hinged on issues of security and morality. Clearly, this was his strategy...

[A salutary note for Aussies too]

D is for Democracy...T is for?
by Kavita N. Ramdas
Published on Tuesday, November 9, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Democracy is premised on a few fundamental assumptions and one of them is the existence of a robust and vital opposition. For power to be exercised with responsibility in a democracy – it is critical that checks and balances provide accountability. This was a provision built in to the United States constitution by its founders. With the re-election of President Bush, an administration beholden to an evangelical Christian base, Republican party control of the Senate and House, and the ability to shape the future character of the Supreme court – these checks and balances appear to have all but disappeared. In this new reality, the role of conscience, skeptic and guardians of core constitutional values must now lie with the party in opposition - yes, I am talking about the Democrats!
For many observers of American democracy, including myself, one of the most sobering and disappointing experiences of the last four years have not been the excesses, lies, and blatant disregard for world opinion demonstrated by the Bush administration. Rather it has been the meek, cowed, and silent role chosen by Democrats in the House and Senate during this time. With the exception of extraordinary individuals like Barbara Lee, many Democrats seem to have forgotten that they too, are representatives of the people of this nation. The effectiveness of a great democracy is not measured by how well it panders to the desires of a powerful and vocal majority, but how genuinely they protect the rights and aspirations of the minority.
And, for too long in the US, the word minority has come to mean the “other.” It has referred to people who look different, who speak different languages, who wear different clothes, and profess a different religion. Let us think about a new definition of that word – it represents merely a collective group of citizens whose choices did not prevail in a majority decision system. Today is time for the Democratic party to find its backbone and speak for the 48% of American voters (and maybe more of its non-voting public) who believe that faith is an important but private matter. It is time for Democrats to speak clearly the tenets of our constitution that preserves each individual’s freedom to believe and practice their own faith while ensuring that the state may not impose any particular interpretation or practice on its diverse citizenry. It is time for them to truly represent those of us who do not believe that science should be relegated to historical archives while the Bible is preached in schools. They must keep their promise to us of a stronger America by having to speak for that different vision – even if their candidate for President did not win this election. They must protect and defend the hard won rights to women’s equality and civil rights and liberties instead of watering down their message and bemoaning the loss of middle America.

No Carrots, All StickBlinkered Bush Set to Blunder Again in Iraq - and Iran
by Dilip Hiro
Published on Monday, November 8, 2004 by TomDispatch.com

With Vice-President Dick Cheney describing the presidential election result as "a broad, nationwide victory," secured on the platform of an unapologetically hard-line foreign policy, the world should expect more of the same from President George W. Bush and his administration in the "war on terror" he declared on September 12, 2001.
Specifically, this means Bush, Cheney, and their coterie of neoconservative ideologues will continue to visualize the ill-defined war on terrorism in purely military terms, and deploy the Pentagon as their primary instrument to win it. What that undoubtedly translates into is: an immediate assault on Falluja in Iraq to destroy a bastion of insurgents resisting the occupation of their country, and ratcheting up pressure on Iran under the rubric of "countering Tehran's nuclear arms ambitions."

Jim Wallace (CT Letters, November 4) says that the Australian Christian Lobby is non-partisan and encourages Christians to vote for the candidate with the best Christian values.
I looked up the ACL site to ascertain those values. They seem concerned with opposing homosexual marriage, euthanasia, abortion and R-rated video games. I typed in poverty and social justice into their search index and got no response.
Given that Christ said that Loving thy neighbour as thyself was one of the two greatest commandments, and gave the story of the Good Samaritan as an example, I wonder how Christian is the ACL if they can find no place for it in their values.
Their site rated parties by their replies to ACL questionnaires but rating them by the Good Samaritan values, it would seem that the Greens, Labor and the Democrats rank best.
That is not the ACL conclusion.
The ACL need to get a better sense of proportion about Christian values if they want to claim to speak for the 68 per cent of the population claiming to be Christian rather than the 2 per cent who voted Christian Democrat.
David

Jim Wallace takes me to task for my earlier thoughts (CT Letters, November 1) on the political Christian movement in Australia. The Australian variety, he argues, is not at all like the US groups: My problem, he has diagnosed, is that I have spent too long in the US, and therefore have somehow missed perceiving the genuinely innocent, absolutely non-partisan Christian nature of the movement here in Australia.
I would be glad to be convinced of this, I can assure him.
However, one outcome of staying so long in the US is that one can remember what groups like the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family and all the others were saying about themselves, before they coalesced into this monolithic ultra-right-wing monster we see today.
And, I recall, what they were saying is more or less word-for-word what Mr Wallace is asserting now.
Why did they change? Because they knew that their message of stern moral stricture for all was not selling, and they needed an alliance with a real political player.
Enter Mephistopheles, in the form of the Republican Party, which said, in effect "We believe in you; your issues are our issues - bring us your bloc of votes".
What the Republicans neglected to mention, when doing this deal, is what anyone with common sense already knows: no President - not even this one - is going to deliver on a constitutional amendment against gay marriage; a petition to the Supreme Court to ban all abortions; prayer in schools; universal teaching of Creationism as a valid alternative to the theory of Evolution, and all the rest of it.
All the Christian Coalition have achieved is to empower the very worst and nastiest elements of the Republican Party, who have brought us pre-emptive war, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and a death rate for Iraqi citizens in excess of anything the dreadful Saddam ever managed - and that is just to mention the elements that, one might have thought, would have given genuine Christians most pause. So, I'm sorry Mr Wallace; I don't believe you.
Jim

Oh dear, David and Jim, you have misread the psychology of the Australian Christian Lobby and their ilk. Such people see themselves not merely as Christians, but as Christian Soldiers, the Waffen-SS of the Church Militant.
While every army has psychopaths who will slit their mothers’ throats if they are told to do so by someone in authority or someone who shows “firmness,” “strength,” “resolution” and “consistency” (a la Bush and Howard), or sociopaths who will do such things out of pure bastardry, the average person needs to be motivated to achieve the purpose which his or her leaders have in mind.
Now, as we all know, it is impossible to motivate a conquering army by talking of “peace,” “love” or “brotherhood,” much less “tolerance,” in the abstract. First, one must pick one’s enemy and thoroughly demonize him or her, while painting oneself as pure and holy. Only when one has delineated the world in terms of black-and-white can one begin to talk of “love” and “justice” — but one must be careful to restrict the application of such words to those who are already of, or potentially of, one’s own “party.” The next step is to convince one’s cohorts that they are acting against the enemy out of love for that enemy. Finally one only need claim that one is acting at the behest of a “higher power” (a deity, “the race”) and one truly has a force capable of domination.
And, if one’s troops falter, one gees them up with Nuremburg-style rallies in which rational and individual thought is submerged in collective emotion.

The Optimism of Uncertainty
by Howard Zinn
Published on Monday, November 8, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

From an excerpt of Paul Rogat Loeb's book "The Impossible Will Take a Little While":

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the post-war world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, which Stalin himself had given little chance. And then the break with the Soviet Union, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone. No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda.
Spain became an astonishment. A million died in the civil war, which ended in victory for the Fascist Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone. In other places too, deeply entrenched dictatorships seemed suddenly to disintegrate-in Portugal, Argentina, the Philippines, Iran.
The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. The United States and the Soviet Union soon each had enough thermonuclear bombs to devastate the Earth several times over. The international scene was dominated by their rivalry, and it was supposed that all affairs, in every nation, were affected by their looming presence. Yet the most striking fact about these superpowers was that, despite their size, their wealth, their overwhelming accumulation of nuclear weapons, they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population.
The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducted the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In Latin America, after a long history of U.S. military intervention having its way again and again, this superpower, with all its wealth and weapons, found itself frustrated. It was unable to prevent a revolution in Cuba, and the Latin American dictatorships that the United States supported from Chile to Argentina to El Salvador have fallen. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.
Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself.
No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just. I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of each other's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain.
I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement. It is this change in consciousness that encourages me. Granted, racial hatred and sex discrimination are still with us, war and violence still poison our culture, we have a large underclass of poor, desperate people, and there is a hard core of the population content with the way things are, afraid of change. But if we see only that, we have lost historical perspective, and then it is as if we were born yesterday and we know only the depressing stories in this morning's newspapers, this evening's television reports.
Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people's consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness. It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act. Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society.
We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

2007 election might be quite different

By Andrew Wear and Rachael Patterson
Wednesday, 10 November 2004

THE RULE of law is a beautiful thing. Central to it is the principle that rulers ought to be subject to the law. In other words, those in power should not consider themselves as being 'above the law'.
When rulers change the way things are done in order to maintain their positions, it is possible they will act in a way that is contrary to this principle. Whether this is the case is often simply a matter of degree...

AMERICANS are fond of saying that democracy is not about electing George III. This goes back to their colonial origins but it also indicates a deep-seated concern about "winner takes all" politics and the corrupting and debilitating impact of unchecked power. At the centre of the American system is the notion of "checks and balances".

The executive branch of government is quite separate from the Congress. The Congress has two chambers: the executive and the Congress are constrained by a written Constitution; and oversighting all of this is the Supreme Court. All appointments by the President to senior positions in the government including appointments to the Supreme Court and senior appointments to the public service have to be approved by the US Senate. Importantly the "checks and balances" are hard-wired into the system and are beyond the control of any individual or group.

Over the last two centuries, Americans have successfully melded together a population that has come from all over the globe and established the most successful and powerful political and economic culture that this planet has ever seen.

We too have melded together a diverse population but our system has now delivered unparalleled power to the Australian Prime Minister and his office that would be totally unacceptable if transposed to the US. The changes to our system have been underway for 30 years but under the present Prime Minister they have accelerated...

By Jonathan Raban

MOST people I know are sick with anxiety about the outcome of Tuesday's presidential election. They have the look of patients awaiting the result of hospital "tests", steeling themselves for the worst, hardly daring to hope for the best.

It's not as if the prospect of a Kerry presidency betokens the dawn of a new age of sweetness and light: the best that can be said of Kerry's stated positions on the war on Iraq and the "war on terror" is that at least he treats them as two different wars.

It is that the prospect of a second Bush administration inspires, among urban liberals, something close to the fear of death itself - the death of America as a civilised and civilising presence in the world.

It is that heartfelt.

More than any other election in recent history, this one has become a referendum on what it means to be American, and half of the country detests the idea of living in the other half's America...

...[A] recent report from Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland ... concluded that some 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died between March 2003 (when the Bush administration with its British allies invaded Iraq) and September 2004; that the largest number of these deaths were caused by the unleashed air power of the invading and then occupying armies; and that women and children had suffered most ... In other words, the invaders may have managed to kill up to a third as many Iraqis in a year-and-a-half as President Saddam Hussein did in his 24-year dictatorial rule - Dilip Hiro, No Carrots, All Stick, TomDispatch, 8 Nov

[Good advice for Aussies too]

...We'll need to build a much stronger antiwar movement that insists on swift and complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. While politicians and mainstream pundits offer their double talk, we have a clear message: This war, based on lies, is totally unacceptable. We support the troops; we want them to stop killing and being killed. We want them to come home. The presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is a major cause of instability and violence - especially since most Iraqi people believe the goal of the US invasion was occupation and control over oil, not liberation. - Norman Solomon, Transforming Four More Years, Common Dreams, 8 Nov

Ostensible Narratives – 2004
by Bill C. Davis
Published on Monday November 8, 2004 by Common Dreams.org

We are compelled to accept ostensible narratives.
The ostensible narrative this week is that gay marriage ruined the Democrat's chance to defeat Bush. Statistics and polls are being fired at us like buckshot on a goose hunt. But beneath it all is the steady rumbling that the exit polls, as in Florida 2000, were right and that the machines and the vote count were rigged. This would replace the ostensible narrative with a more troubling story. That story would be that they – the occupants; the current force majeur – refuse to lose and they orchestrate their wins on a mechanical, technical level to secure the presidency of an essentially amoral man and then say he was elected because of moral values.
It would play something like a secret internal meeting directed by Stanley Kubrick. The planners do not think because they almost got caught in election 2000 that they had better not try that again in 2004. Rather they resolve and plot to do it better. If the rumblings and the “fringe” Internet accusations gain traction it would be the scandal to end all scandals in American democracy where, we are told by historians, that this is not a new scandal. (The Watergate break in had the same motivation but less finesse and organization.)
If the count was corrupt on a significant scale, the main opposition party or candidate would have to make the accusation, but did anyone think they would?...

Exit polls [in the recent US elextions] recorded that the most important issue for voters was not the economy, and not terrorism, but "moral values" ... The term "moral issues" in the American context primarily means two things: abortion and homosexuality ... At the same time as the presidential ballot, 11 states included ballot measures to ban same-sex marriage. In all 11 states, those measures were carried by decisive majorities, going as high as 86 per cent in Mississippi ... The emphasis on "moral issues" is not a nostalgic return to the past ... When Americans talk of moral issues or values, they do so in a distinctively modern way ... Morality is defined in an extremely narrow sense ... The modernity of the American definition is exemplified in the fact that honesty does not figure as a moral value ... While it might be a desirable thing, especially in children, honesty is not highly valued by Moral Majority politicians nor is it valued by their constituents ... As Hannah Arendt noted around the time of the Pentagon Papers, "truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues" ... Some observers of the Australian elections have expressed fears about a possible "Americanisation" of Australian politics, by which they meant the appearance here of the moral agenda of the white Protestant right in America ... However, what is of more concern is the appearance of a typically American indifference to deception, lies and falsehood in politics ... Not same-sex marriage, but rather wilful political deception has the potential to destroy the moral community of a society ... No amount of trumpeting "moral issues", by Bush or by Howard, can repair that more fundamental damage. - Helen Pringle, What Matters Most in US now is Morals, Canberra Times, 5 Nov

We Don't Have to Abandon Our Beliefs Just Because a Few Million Extra God-Fearing Gay-Haters Voted for Bush

by Linda McQuaig
Published on Sunday, November 7, 2004 by the Toronto Star

To most Canadians, the prospect of four more years of George W.Bush is anticipated in much the same way that one looks forward to a kick in the teeth or perhaps colonoscopy. To a small group of Canadians, however, Bush's re-election is clearly an energizing tonic.
An influential group of neo-conservatives and business executives, whose spiritual headquarters is Toronto's CD Howe Institute, has long been lecturing us on the need to be more accommodating to Washington.
They harken back to the glory days when Brian Mulroney really showed us how to curry favour in Washington — long before things got off-track with Jean Chrétien's refusal to join the US invasion of Iraq and Paul Martin's dithering over missile defence.
Bush's re-election will no doubt be seen by this crowd as a helpful disciplinary tool to whip us into line and push forward plans for deeper Canada-US integration.
Canadians who hoped a John Kerry victory would spare us from pressure to participate in wacky missile schemes or future "wars of liberation" have been confronted with a harsh reality...

Bush Must Redeem His Name in World's Eyes

by Eric Margolis
Published on Sunday, November 7, 2004 by the Toronto Sun

George Bush's narrow victory over dull John Kerry was a well-deserved personal triumph. But it would not have happened without brilliant Republican strategist Karl Rove, who managed a win for Bush in spite of two failing wars abroad, a weak economy, and monster budget deficits.
From what New Yorkers call "fly-over country," rural Protestant fundamentalists voting for "moral issues" forgot Bush could not tell the truth about Iraq and provided him the margin of victory.
The president must resume dealing with Afghanistan and Iraq, and the real, if overstated, threat from violent anti-American groups, aka the "war on terrorism."
Bush again vows to "win" the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By which he means staging elections producing pliable pro-American regimes. Such as the recent Afghan elections, where the U.S.-installed figurehead, Hamid Karzai, to no surprise, won a landslide. But this election impressed only Americans...

Reclaiming Our Country

by Ruani Seneviratne Freeman
Published on Sunday, November 7, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake." -Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after the passage of the Sedition Act.

November 2, 2004 is finished. For the first time in the history of this country which prides itself as being the beacon of democracy, we had international monitors from Haiti to Sri Lanka overseeing the process. Now, in the aftermath, we are no longer sickened by election-related media coverage; we are sickened by the result. Millions of Kerry-volunteers who braved ridicule and ostracism, not to mention the long-arm of the Patriot Act, have gone home.
All around the streets of my city, I see American flags flying at half-mast to mourn the loss of democracy and the coronation of a tyrant in the grip of evangelical zeal. In Washington, Democratic Ranking Members on the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Congressman Robert Wexler of Florida, John Conyers, Jr, and Jerrold Nadler have submitted a petition to the Comptroller General calling for an investigation into the widespread fraud that took place last Tuesday...

German Student Sees U.S. Image Losing in Election

by Torsten Mueller

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune

Upon entering the room, I heard a "splish" and a "splash." I was at a fund-raiser for a middle school in Minneapolis, and the most popular activities were the dunk tank and the "sponge toss."
They're innocuous kids' games for some. For me, a German citizen watching the last week of a U.S. campaign full of mudslinging and character assassination, those games symbolized some of the worst character traits in American political and social discourse: humiliation and maliciousness from a position of power, exercised simply because one can...

I heard a prominent Australian social commentator, Hugh McKay, of the Australia Institute, tell us that when people feel frightened they turn their backs on “shades-of-grey” and seek black-and-white answers.
It’s funny how Trotsky’s analysis of why fascism was so attractive to an apprehensive middle-class seems to have been dressed up in “respectable” clothing — maybe the Old Bolshevik was on to something after all!

[Today (9 November, 2004), some US troops involved in the siege of Fallujah in Iraq were interviewed by a news service. The most notable quote — “The adrenalin rush was OSSUM (awesome), man!”]

In times past, men were horrified when they actually went to war and found that it was not like the romanticized games of their childhood. To the young men interviewed in Fallujah, the war is a video game — I doubt that, even if they had to stand next to their targets and get spattered with brains, these brave “spreaders of democracy” would feel any differently.
The computer industry has done yet another favour for the Military-Industrial Complex.

People who think see the greys of life, weight the ethical concerns, read the newspapers, and change their minds based on new concerns. Real intellectuals have never done well with the Australian people because they want clarity and unequivocal conviction. It's hard to be absolutely resolute if one doesn't wear blinders. Besides, it is not in the nature of people who don't believe in absolutes to be absolutist. Not to be tautological, but if your faith requires a belief in absolute authority and absolute morality, then your entire world view flows from point: Easy for a religious fundamentalist to do; it is not easy or desirable for the rest of us.

Seriously, though, didn't anyone else notice the inconsistencies in this video, shown in the week before the US election? No shabby room, much leass a cave in Afghanistan; Osama appearing in pristine white garments, as if he'd just returned from the Dry Cleaners? I smell a Fox (Studios) in the background!

Juct 'cos ye're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get ya!

Interestingly enough, those seeking political offie in ancient Rome would have their togas dyed pure white, the Latin for which is "candidus." It is this sense that gives the word "candidate." Note that, as in modern times, candour was not necessarily a trait shown by candidates.

The following, taken fron Alas, The People Have Spoken, by Christopher Brauchli, in The Daily Camera, on 6 November 6, 2004 is apposite for Australia too.

The American people have spoken and here is some of what they said. Lie to me all you want and if you do it often enough I'll not only believe you but I will be forever devoted to you. It's the classic story of the cocktail waitress and the millionaire's promise of marriage. All I care about is that you look sincere when you lie to me, as, for example, Dick Cheney and George Bush always do, and you'll have my undying devotion and enthusiastic support.
The American people have said give us a United States Supreme Court with more people like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Mr. Bush promises to do just that. He has held them up as his ideals of what a Supreme Court Justice should be which is not hard to understand since they got him to where he was until the American people elected him on Tuesday...
The American people said let's drill for more oil and let's do it in the Arctic. They'll get their wish. In election night comments, one Republican senator said that in addition to putting more right-wing judges on all the courts (my words, his sentiments) we would soon begin drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
[In 2002, the Alaska Science Center of the United States Geological Survey released a study that said drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska could harm caribou, snow geese, musk oxen and other wildlife. One of the consequences of drilling, said the report, would be reductions in the survival of caribou calves in June and a loss of weight in pregnant females and the weight of calves in late June. The study followed 12 years of research. The American people have said they don't care. There's oil in Alaska and we need to get it out. George Bush will help them do it. ]
The American people said they like tax cuts. Today only people who have more than $3 million pay any estate taxes. Voters feel sorry for people with more than $3 million and want to eliminate estate taxes. The reason for that is compassionate conservatism. Losing a loved one is always hard and it is even harder when the loss of the loved one is accompanied by a loss of a part of the loved one's fortune to the tax collector. Republicans can't grant eternal life. They can and will help people have eternal fortunes. These are just a few of the things for which the American public voted. Others can explain why.