Discontented Soul

The New McCarthyism

by Juan Cole

A member of the U.S. Congress calls for an assistant professor at a major university to be summarily fired. The right-wing tabloid press runs a series of vicious attacks on him, often misquoting him and perpetuating previous misquotes. Opinion pieces attacking "tenured radicals" and questioning professors' patriotism use him as their centerpiece. All of these attacks are spurred by a propaganda film made by an advocacy group, in which anonymous accusations are made and the professor is not given an opportunity to respond to the allegations.
It is not 1953, the Congress member is not Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and the professor is not being accused of being a communist. No, it is 2005, the Congress member is Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and the professor is being accused of being anti-Israel.
The lesson for academics, and American society as a whole: McCarthyism is unacceptable except when criticism of Israel is involved...

New Boys in Town
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Published on Friday, April 22, 2005 by TomDispatch.com

In our own time -- and especially since the ascendancy of George W. Bush to the presidency -- "neoconservative" has become a term of opprobrium, frequently accompanied by ad hominem attacks and charges of arrogance and hubris. But the heat generated by the term also stands as a backhanded tribute, an acknowledgment that the neoconservative impact has been substantial. It is today too soon to offer a comprehensive assessment of that impact. The discussion of neoconservatism offered here has a more modest objective, namely, to suggest that one aspect of the neoconservative legacy has been to foster the intellectual climate necessary for the emergence of the new American militarism...

© 2005 Andrew J. Bacevich

Let a Thousand Militias Bloom
by A.K. Gupta
Published on Friday, April 22, 2005 by NYC Indymedia Center

In trying to defeat the Iraqi insurgency, the Pentagon has turned to Saddam Hussein's former henchmen. Under former Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, U.S. officials has installed many of the hated Baathists who tormented Iraq in high-level posts in the interior and defense ministries. But the new Iraqi government, overwhelmingly composed of Shiites and Kurds who suffered the most under Hussein, have announced that they are going to purge the ex-Baathists, putting them on a collision course with the United States.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made one of his surprise visits to Baghdad last week, warning the new government not to "come in and clean house" in the security forces. The official line is that the U.S. is worried about losing the "most competent" security forces. But there is a deeper concern that purging the security forces could feed into sectarian tensions and explode in civil war...

The New Pope and Journalism's Crisis of Faith
by Norman Solomon
Published on Thursday, April 21, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

The papacy of Benedict XVI confronts journalists with a key question: How much critical scrutiny is appropriate when a religious leader gains enormous power?...
For right-wing religious activists, Ratzinger has been a Godsend. And now that he's running a church with 1.l billion members, the odds are excellent that he will proceed to gladden the hearts of misogynists, homophobes, and anti-left crusaders around the world. Contrary to the predictable media spin since Tuesday about the uncertainty of his papal course (reminiscent of the claims in early 2001 that George W. Bush might turn out to be some kind of moderate president), everything we know about Ratzinger's extensive record during the last quarter-century tells us that he is a reactionary zealot who is determined to shove much of the world's history of progressive social change into reverse. He is a true believer whose ideological theology accepts scant diversity and no dissent.
The new papacy is a huge gift to the minority of conservatives in the United States who are trying to impose their version of morality on the country and the world.
Soon after the 2000 election, an astute analyst of far-right religious movements, Frederick Clarkson, wrote that "both the evangelical and Catholic Right are developing and promoting a long-term, fundamental approach to the practice of faith that links political involvement with faith itself. In this case, the Catholic Church is building on its own history and also benefiting from the Christian Right's recent efforts to create wider space for public expressions of religiosity in civil discourse." Clarkson added that "a shift in the political culture suggests that personal and unedited expressions of religious belief for political purposes are no longer considered unseemly. Indeed, the suggestion is that they are beyond reproach."...