Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

 "This book is about an idea, one that seems simple but has far reaching consequences. The idea is that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology.” [p1]

Helen Joyce’s skill as a journalist is to find excellent ways to articulate difficult matters. Her book has rightly been welcomed by a huge number of readers because it captures their current concerns about gender ideology and will enable readers to get up to speed with the “gender critical” perspective. It has also been greeted with howls of outrage from those activists who reject any such criticism on principle, and also with some sharp complaints by people who resent the way Helen Joyce has presented her material. There is a risk of losing sight of the book’s merits in addressing these protests from friend and foe but it is best not to ignore them.

The book is not primarily about the experiences or lives of transgender people, but rather about a set of ideas which the general population as a whole are being asked to accept, and the radical impact this has on the lives of people who are not transgender in any way. ”The other belief systems accommodated in modern democracies are, by and large, held privately. You can subscribe to the doctrine of reincarnation or resurrection alongside other believers, or on your own. Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others.” [p4]

Once the irrational premise that “transwomen are women” is transformed into a legal principle, extraordinary consequences follow. ”Men who raped and murdered women are gaining transfers to women’s prisons. Women have lost their jobs for saying that male and female are objective, socially significant categories. I think it is deeply unkind to force female athletes to compete against males, and a scandal to sterilize children….” [p8] ”Ideas have consequences.” [p10]

Joyce gives a history of sex reassignment surgery and medicine from the start of the 20th Century, and of early attempts to accommodate the resulting changes legally in the US and the UK. She then turns to a landmark study in the US by Richard Green, who studied the development of a group of boys considered very feminine and a control group of more masculine seeming boys. In this and a number of other studies, every “sissy” boy outgrew their dysphoria and most turned out to be gay as adults. She considered also research by Paul Vasey comparing gender nonconforming boys in Samoa, Mexico and Canada, concluding that children classed as transgender in Canada were clearly accepted as and identified with their biological sex in other countries and cultures without any support for the concept of a third sex. She looks at length into the work of Ray Blanchard in Canada, including his classification of male transsexuals as autogynephilic or as gay men, and she discusses some of the conflict around this work.

Joyce uses The Matrix as a model to explain the main claims of gender ideology which she identifies as follows: that binary sex is an artefact of western colonialism, that clownfish demonstrate the possibility of switching from one sex to the other, that people with intersex conditions prove sex is not binary and that sex – not gender – is socially constructed. The last idea is associated especially with the writing of Judith Butler. None of these claims survive critical scrutiny.

Joyce looks at the fairly recent innovation of treating children as transgender, and discusses the spurious evidence deployed to justify the increasingly early use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones. She makes particular note of the quite weird arguments used by Diane Ehrenshaft, at the University of California, to promote transing children as young as 3 years old. Her next chapter examines the evidence of social contagion driving teenage girls to transition in growing numbers. She then reviews the way gender ideology is packaged for education and media aimed at children. This is a complete inversion of equal opportunities teaching in the past, when children were encouraged to widen their understanding of what girls or boys may do and think, since it entails convincing children that they must select a gender identity from a set of rigid sex stereotypes, in which there is a defined way that boys think and a way that girls think. Gender ideology is also acting to destroy all of the safeguarding built up over many years to protect children from predatory males. “The history of institutional child-abuse has shown how predators can ‘groom’ people and organisations to accept behaviour that should have raised red flags.” [p127]

In her next chapter, Joyce points out that this leads to dire consequences for feminism. “They define womanhood as stereotypes enacted by people of different body types, rather than a body type that need not in any way limit the behaviour of the people who possess it.” [p135] The ideology acts to erase the very category of woman; it also erases the basis for same sex attraction and homosexuality, with especially serious consequences for lesbians exposed to harassment and intimidation.

Historically, when women have been excluded from male spaces and the opportunities associated with them, whether schools, jobs, sports, or political institutions, there has been no difficulty discriminating between men and women. Today there is a widespread attempt to deny sex differences as men who identify as women demand and are granted access to women’s spaces and Joyce pays particular attention to the increasing admission of males, including violent sex offenders, to women’s prisons, before devoting a whole chapter to the issue of men competing in women’s sports. A long discussion of so called “bathroom wars” in the United States describes a decade of legal and political battles which Americans have interpreted in party political terms, with the incongruous result of establishing Obama and the Left as enemies of women’s rights and Donald Trump as their defender. “Many of the country’s culture wars have become ‘frozen conflicts’ where the combatants have dug in and a peace deal seems out of reach.” [p221]

In other countries, though, the pattern is more typically one of progress by stealthy lobbying and backdoor influence, with major legal changes affecting the entire population introduced and implemented with a complete absence of public consultation or debate and a total refusal to balance the demands of trans activists against the rights of other parts of society, especially of women. Joyce makes an especially powerful comparison of the huge public debate through which abortion rights and gay marriage were introduced in Ireland, with immense popular support as a result, with the secretive methods used to pass and implement radical gender recognition legislation whose effects are only slowly becoming apparent and starting to be reported. She also refers to the behind the scenes influence used to insert important language into Britain’s Gender Recognition Act without proper scrutiny. There has been no attempt to win hearts and minds in support of these changes, only silencing of debate and attacks on critics. No less striking has been the adoption of trans ideology by non governmental organisations. “…it has led organisations right across civil society not only to abandon their core principles but to actively work against them. This is further evidence – if any were needed – that the campaign for self-ID is the opposite of a civil rights movement.” [p248]

This is the difficult context to the emergence in the UK of an effective and growing gender critical movement, including the birth of new feminist groupings, parents organisations and of the LGB Alliance. Joyce described some of the factors that worked in their favour in a critical period of time and predicts that they will succeed in challenging the transgender lobbies, exposing their tactics and forcing this debate into the open, which is where any authentic civil rights movement belongs in a democracy.

This book covers a lot of ground but it is not an academic book and does not offer footnotes or identify sources for most of its comments. Perhaps Joyce was rushing to get the book published. Perhaps (pure speculation) she assumes a general readership would find such academic diligence tedious; I can’t say as I’m not a general. This annoyed me as a reader – I find original sources comforting - but for the most part (with exceptions) it would not be terribly difficult to track down the original from the information given and most of the material is already well known. Her task is not original research but popular presentation of the issues. There is also a strong suggestion online that it annoys people whose work Joyce relies on without giving proper credit; of course careful acknowledgement of other’s work is a standard practice which Joyce and her publisher are surely aware of. I can only speculate that Joyce does not think she ever claims credit for other people’s work – it is pretty obvious that she is summarising material from many different sources.

Maybe, too, she is trying to keep away from controversies that are not about her and not worth the energy of joining. That won’t work in this environment. Already at least one Goodreads review pronounces that Joyce is a fascist on the grounds that a page or two in her 300 page book relies on information which is likely to originate from the work of Jennifer Bilek, an extremely credible feminist who has researched this topic extensively and who, in the course of active public engagement over many years, did, on one occasion, retweet a link to a YouTube video made by someone whom all agree is indeed a fascist. For added virtue, accusations of antisemitism can be made on the specious grounds that the book refers to some billionaires who happen to be Jewish. It is a short step from this to allegations of genocidal intent. If you find that kind of guilt by tenuous association convincing, then you can become a social justice warrior and have many internet friends.

Since the problems cannot be avoided, and activists will transform the slightest hint of a disparaging red herring into the basis for an all-out attack, maybe it would have been better if the book was a bit more loyal towards others working in this area who have been vilified. Apart from Bilek, who was offended by omission, I was struck by the inclusion of a sideswipe at Graham Linehan on page 254 that was gratuitous and undeserved; saying he became “a target for mass reporting (assisted, it must be said, by the ease with which he could be goaded).” This implies he was partly responsible for his own harassment. We really will need another writer to give a proper account of the personal sacrifices made by people willing to take a stand against gender ideology, but also of the clever ways they found to bring this issue to wider attention. Examples include the PR genius of Posey Parker (she is mentioned) and the cross party political work of Emma Nicholson in Parliament (she is not mentioned). But I’m not sure how Joyce might have fitted this into her already lengthy book. There is always room for more writing and more research in this topic.

I don’t agree with the more excited commentators who see this as the full and definitive statement of the gender critical position regarding gender ideology but I do agree that it is a successful book in its own terms; it announces its intentions on page one and it achieves what it set out to do. This is a terrific introduction to the topic and it will surely will help to force the gender ideology lobbies into a public explanation and testing of their demands for such a radical legal and social transformation.

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Material Girls: Why Reality Matters

Kathleen Stock teaches philosophy at an English university and brings to bear both her academic discipline and her evident competence as a teacher and mentor in this very accessible, readable account of gender identity theory in this country. She strives, courageously, to build a bridge between opponents and advocates of gender identity theory. Where possible, she aims to give a charitable reading of the beliefs that she is trying to understand and evaluate. When specific arguments turn out to be demonstrably unsupportable, her inclination is to make a distinction between the defective ideas, opinions or indeed political tactics on the one hand and the genuine interests and concerns of trans-people on the other. She is impatient with what she perceives as tribal mantras and has sharp words for radical or gender critical feminists, claiming to believe only in “evidence based feminism,” a new category to my mind. If she fails to impress those with strong views on either side of this debate, she may prove very helpful to civilians wishing to be informed without being pressured to take sides. I personally find it hard to imagine how being informed and being neutral can be reconciled and so I find Stock’s stance unconvincing, even rather arrogant, but this remains an excellent discussion of the subject, it included some great material that I value and it is well worth reading.

Ultimately, she argues that there is a large scale political lobby promoting ideas and positions that do not, in reality, serve the interests of transgender people themselves and that it would be desirable if her criticisms were seen as an opportunity for transgender people themselves to demand better and less self-defeating kinds of support. It does not help transgender people of any description to promote bad science or irrational concepts. It certainly does not help them to permit let alone submit themselves to medical malpractice or protect professional service providers from scrutiny. But none of this can be subjected to the types of scientific or philosophical scrutiny required so long as the supposed defenders of transgender people, the professional lobbies, the well-funded charities and the trans rights activists, pursue a vendetta against proper investigation. Cancel culture, which is demonstrably rampant and growing, is harmful to the interests of transgender people themselves; it is certainly not compatible with academic, scientific or clinical standards in a democratic society.

Stock’s selection of topics to review reflects her status as a philosopher. She continually asks what it is that we mean when we use or refuse to use important concepts. She explores and refutes very succinctly and effectively the suggestions that sex is not binary and that biological sex can reasonably be disregarded. She sets out a variety of areas of life in which a proper understanding of sex is indispensable. She evaluates critically the notion of sex being a social construct, puts to rest mistaken readings of Simone de Beauvoir’s iconic remark that women are not born but made, and dissects the ill constructed theory that every human individual has a gender identity.

She also illustrates the way trans lobbies have successfully imposed their objectives in the public domain while pushing aside and silencing alternative voices. Whether the Women and Equalities Committee of Parliament reviewing the Gender Recognition Act in 2016 or the capture of Stonewall as a charity founded to support gays and lesbians by people who directly attack same sex attraction and have used Stonewall funds to promote teaching about the “cotton ceiling,” somehow society has allowed trans activists to set aside the needs of women, children, gays, lesbians and promote instead an ideology that not only lacks proper academic foundations, but lacks political legitimacy and fails to serve the interests even of the transgender people who are supposed to benefit. Her few examples could have been multiplied but perhaps at the expense of her purpose.

Stock works to devise a constructive path forward for transgender people while demanding at the same time respect for the methods of scientific evidence and critical reasoning. She relies especially on the notion of “immersion,” which I think is intended to mean a psychological method of acting as though things were other than they really are. She gives the analogy of immersion in a computer game environment. I think she could usefully have invoked Coleridge’s well known concept of “suspending disbelief” to describe a scenario in which we can accept an invented reality without losing our ability to return to realistic thinking as required. In general, it is feasible and even common to hold two conflicting views of reality in mind when that is socially useful or psychologically comforting. What she argues, though, with vocal support from some older trans people, is that we may not sacrifice the self-evident truth that sex is immutable and we may not set aside our awareness that women, children, gays and lesbians continue to suffer serious disadvantages for which they need protection or remedies.

There is nothing new about the idea that we each construct for ourselves a “self” that depends on narratives and beliefs given to us in our particular culture. I think for instance of Mary Midgely’s book, “The Myths We Live By”. This is a fascinating strand in philosophy, in religion and more recently in psychology that can be traced back for example to the earliest Buddhist teachings, is often speculated upon by psychotherapists and in the psychoanalytic tradition, or examined by experimental psychology in the context of child development, including long term research into attachment theory and other work underpinning educational psychology. The use of a computer game analogy is entirely appropriate to a culture that is increasingly allowing children and young adults to take their guiding myths from social media and the internet, permitting direct influence from the most unexpected and least responsible sources. What I think, and Stock does not pursue, is that there are vulnerable people who can be extremely susceptible to persuasion and that there are people sufficiently malevolent to use the power of persuasion for harmful ends. I don’t think one need read terribly far into Queer Theory to identify a well-funded and influential movement seeking to destabilize conventional notions about sex and gender in ways that are not benign and not properly challenged (see “Queering Schools”). I don’t think it is hard to recognise the impact of the trans industry and the influence of names like the Arcus Foundation drumming up demand for their products in a way that Plato himself would have recognized (and what philosophy book is complete without Plato?):-

My trial will be like that of a doctor prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children. Just consider what kind of defense such a man could offer... children of the jury, this fellow has done all of you abundant harm, ... giving you bitter draughts and compelling you to hunger and thirst, whereas I used to feast you with plenty of sweetmeats of every kind. What do you think a doctor could find to say in such a desperate situation? If he spoke the truth and said, All this I did, children, in the interests of health, what a shout do you think such a jury would utter? Would it not be a loud one?

There is a view that writers who appeal to logic / reason as some higher level platform from which to survey our mortal ponderings are in reality using a rhetorical strategy to silence critical thought; effectively they rely on an appeal to authority which is, of course, a type of fallacy. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I think that Stock’s attempt to be dispassionate is unconvincing and her sharp attacks on radical or gender critical feminists are unacceptable. My concern with gender identity theory is not only that it lacks empirical grounding (which ought to be fatal in itself for pity’s sake) but also that it rests on crass and sexist gender stereotypes and offers young people an impoverished and unhealthy framework on which to construct a meaningful sense of self. It is destructive of all the work invested by feminists and educators generally in raising the aspirations and enriching the imaginations of children and young people, but especially of girls and women, producing [some] boys who write poetry or cook and [some] girls who enjoy maths or football and both treating the other and themselves as unique individuals rather than objects or members of a category. This conflict between the attempt to press us into socially prescribed categories or drawing out the complexity of individual difference, including sex difference, is a theme which feminist philosophers have, again, traced back to the roots of Western philosophy and the values embedded in our culture. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

As long ago as 1979 Janice Raymond explained in detail the sheer sexism of the gender identity concept, anticipated most of the major issues that remain central to today’s debate [including those discussed by Stock in this book] and recognised that the people driving this movement were not acting in good faith and could not be deterred by reasonableness. “Medicalized transsexualism represents only one more aspect of patriarchal hegemony. The best response women can make to this is to see clearly just what is at stake for us with respect to transsexualism and to assert our own power of naming who we are.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Up the Republic

Up the Republic! 
by 

Fintan O'Toole (Editor)

I have never questioned  being "a republican" nor really enquired into what that means, beyond making HRH redundant,  on doubtless reasonable terms.   After reading this book I am suddenly an enthusiast. <i>Crudely, in a republic, nobody gets to dominate anybody else, nobody gets unaccountable power and citizens have a duty to be obstreperous.</i>

These eight essays by different authors are written with an Irish audience in mind and some of the material is specific to Ireland, but it deserves wider circulation, as a critique of neoliberal notions of “freedom” and liberal democracy in the USA [<i>"that embodied oxymoron, the US Republican Party, currently at war with every single principle of classical republican democracy"</i>] , the UK and Australia, inter alia, and a powerful argument in favour of a richer and more actively democratic system.   Among its surprises I was especially struck with an  excellent essay by Tom Hickey, exploring the challenges of designing an education system that prepares and equips students to participate in politics actively and effectively and to produce the “obstreperous “citizens required to call to account all those with power, and not only those in government; in the UK this would entail throwing away all of the self-styled “education reforms” implemented since 1987 and starting again from radically different premises.   The essay is also interesting on the role of religious education, in ways that will be topical far beyond Ireland.

Several of the writers are rightly enraged by the loss of sovereignty arising in Ireland from the totally avoidable and morally plain wrong decision to bail out the private Irish banks which collapsed in the 2008 crash; their discussion of sovereignty seem to me not only authentic but also an interesting contrast with the dubious misuse of language about “sovereignty” during the UK’s debate on Brexit; the clue is that Brexit is entirely in the interests of the same financial sector which in Ireland has been the source of its crisis. This book thus makes an interesting bridge between Finton O’Toole’s brilliant books on the 2008  crash (Ship of Fools) and on Brexit (Heroic Failure).    One day in the distant future, after lots more superb writing, when he needs an epitaph, it could well be simply “I told you so.” 

Quotes

Fintan O'Toole

One of the things that makes ‘the republic’ a slippery concept is the existence of two quite separate traditions of republicanism. ... The first is the one that emerged from classical Roman thought (‘what affects all must be decided by all’), by way of the Italian Renaissance. It took shape in Florence and the other city states, and went on to underpin the overthrow of monarchs in Poland, Holland and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It enormously influenced the American Revolution and partly (but only partly) shaped the French. This stream of thought had three basic elements. First, freedom should be understood as the condition of ...non domination. The state’s job is not merely to uphold this freedom but – crucially – to uphold it equally for all citizens. This makes the idea of republican freedom very different from liberal and neoliberal definitions of ‘freedom’, which include the freedom to exploit and control others. ... The second principle holds that government should be ‘mixed’, its various powers and functions broken up among different and independent bodies to ensure that no one should exercise unaccountable power. Third, it is up to citizens, individually and collectively, to keep the republic on its toes... Crudely, in a republic, nobody gets to dominate anybody else, nobody gets unaccountable power and citizens have a duty to be obstreperous. [pp18-20]

As Maurizio Viroli puts it: Liberal liberty aims to protect individuals only from interferences, from actions interfering with their freedom of choice; republican liberty aims to emancipate them from the conditions of dependence. [p19]

Instead of the idea that power should be deliberately divided, the Rousseau tradition argues for the notion of a single, sovereign popular will : ‘the People’ effectively taking the place of the king in a monarchy... There is no room in the general will for different parts of government holding each other in check. .. it also follows that there is no room for obstreperous citizens. Once the general will has been expressed by the assembly, it must be accepted an obeyed – otherwise it would not be general... Once decisions have been made, the entire force of the state and of the citizens collectively is assumed to be behind them.  [p21]

John Philpot Curran, on his election as Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1790, said that the ‘condition on which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance’ (subsequently quoted as ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance’ and widely misattributed to Thomas Jefferson). [p27]

A republic is not something people are given but something they choose to become. [p30]

‘Civic virtue is not a martial, heroic and austere virtue, but a civilised, ordinary tolerant one.  It is not even at odds with the idea that is often counterpoised against it: self-interest. It simply asks that self-interest be enlightened. It suggests that the ‘self’ in which we are interested is not an isolated, robotic machine for calculating immediate advantage, but a nexus of connections to family, to place and nature, to community, to society, to the imaginary but potent entity we call a nation. It entails a belief that human beings take personal pleasure in trust and decency and collective achievement. It imagines that self to include a moral sense that finds satisfaction in justice and an aesthetic sense that is repelled by the chaos, disorder and obscenity that pits all against all and is gratified by balance and decency. [pp32,33]

Membership of  a nation is accidental and passive; citizenship in a republic has to be conscious and active. [p36]

...between 1995 and 2008.  Three huge things happened... Ireland became a ‘modern’economy of urbanised, industrial or service production. The power of the institutional Catholic Church was broken.  And Nationalism, in the shape of the quest for a united Ireland, ... was literally and intellectually disarmed  by the peace process and the Belfast Agreement of 1998. [p38]

The problem for Ireland was that, just as it was reaching a point where it had its best opportunity to construct a republic; all of these ideas were being systematically dismantled. Beginning with a specific strain in mathematical economics in the United States, the idea took hold that human beings are actually isolated, coldly rational creatures who are programmed to seek only their own advantage... This notion is literally paranoid: it was formulated by John Nash while he was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that everyone was plotting against him. But it became mainstream economic and political wisdom. [p40] 

... The idea that worked well enough for thirty five years – that people might acquire pleasure, satisfaction and self-worth from doing something that could benefit the community as a whole – was scrapped. [p41]

...the emotion that destroyed the power of both institutional Catholicism and of warped ‘republicanism’ was not heroic or triumphal. It was disgust. ... For an Irish person of a Catholic background to look squarely at some of the atrocities committed by ‘republicans’ in his or her name, or to read the Ryan or Murphy reports on child abuse by religious orders and priests, was to look into the vilest, darkest, most abysmally nightmarish aspects of one’s own culture.... [p42, 43]

The founding of republics requires a certain concrete illusion, a utopian spirit in which everything seems possible.  Republics will settle down into something more sober and qualified, but they need that initial energy of hope. This simply wasn’t the way Ireland was in those years of glorious opportunity. [p43]

The Irish republic didn’t collapse by accident – it imploded because it was Gerry built... It was philosophically incoherent, wide open to corruption and riven by contradictions. It lacks the mortar that holds republics together: the active, conscious consent and commitment of its citizens. [p46]

It has to be admitted that, in general, the Irish people do not know what a republic means. .. It calls to mind either the kleptocracy of Fianna Fail The Republican Party or the viciousness of a self-appointed ethnic militia.  Put the word into the search engine of an archive such as that of the Irish Times and 99 percent of the results will refer either to that embodied oxymoron, the US Republican Party, currently at war with every single principle of classical republican democracy, or to some deranged zealot who continues to believe that the only problem with the Irish republic is that not enough people have yet been killed in its name. [p48]

...What is the point of trying to give meaning to a word that has become so thoroughly debased? The point, in fact, is twofold.  There is... a deep and resonant republican tradition that stretches back over thousands of years and that represents a strain of tolerance, decency and respect for genuine freedom that is remarkably resistant to the pressures of power, cruelty and imperiousness. Irish people are, after all, human, and humanity is not so overflowing with sources of hope that it can afford to give up on the few that it has. ... What is the alternative to this tough hope? Nothing but a surrender to the bleak belief that human beings are isolated, atomised, paranoid machines, programmed by their genes to kick each other in the face.  It is society as a system of organised begrudgery. [p49]

Ireland has been plunged into an existential crisis, not by the stupidities of public policy whose name is legion, but by an utterly incomprehensible and obviously demented decision to assume all private banking debt as a public responsibility... In a republic, the instinctive common sense of citizens would have bridled at the notion that each one of them should work part of his or her day for every day of the foreseeable future to pay off the liabilities of, for example, a German bank that lent money to a private Irish bank that lent it on to an English investor to speculate on an office block in Manhattan. [p52]

Iseult Honohan

There have been many different kinds of republics, and republican ideals have been interpreted in many different ways. But we can identify three principal themes that distinguish republicanism from mainstream liberalism, nationalism and other political traditions. 

1. It expresses a commitment to realising freedom in the context of interdependence among those who are subject to a common power or government.

2. ...A republic is a polity of self governing citizens... citizens are regarded as people who have become interdependent, through a common history, and by virtue of being subject to, and potentially dominated by, the same government – a much broader conception than the nationalist idea of citizenship being defined simply by membership of the same national group.

3. .. the idea that a primary goal of politics is the common good shared among citizens. ... Because there is a natural tension between individual private and common public interests, this too is a fragile achievement. The inherent tendency for individuals to put private interests first is one aspect oc corruption.  Countering it requires education in awareness of the common nature of common interests.

Tom Hickey

 Machiavelli lamented what he deemed the rotten factionalism among the political classes in late Middle Ages / earl Renaissance Florence. The different factions sought dominating control of the levers of political power, but were motivated by their own interests, and the interests of their supporters. In  the Roman republic of over a millennium earlier, on Machiavelli’s reckoning, different groups understood the political institutions as institutions of their own shared liberty,... The threat of being dominated by a given faction that might win power for a particular cycle led each group to secure equal liberty through good, un-dominating, non-factional laws and institutions. The idea is that citizens ought to be capable of abstracting away from their immediate whims and short-term interests, and to see the ways in which they share more valuable long-term interests in common with all citizens. [p96]

This means that citizens must not only seek political power for more noble reasons that naked self-interest, but, even more burdensomely perhaps, they must engage in the common deliberative process of politics by means of arguments that they can reasonably expect their fellow citizens to accept. They cannot expect other citizens to be moved in political debate by arguments based on factional perspectives that others necessarily do not share, or by virtue of sheer political power. Rather, citizens owe one another reciprocal reasons: reasons that they can reasonably expect others not merely to understand, but to accept as legitimate. [p99]

This capacity for undominating democratic deliberation requires, at the very least, that young citizens be exposed to and be acquainted with other ethical perspectives, and must learn to appreciate that these other perspectives express conceptions of value that are sincerely held by other reasonable people. [p100]

A helpful illustration... is provided by a famous case that came before the US Sixth Circuit Federal Appeals Court in 1987: Mozert v Hawkins Co. Board of Education. It concerned a group of Protestant religious fundamentalist parents who objected to a compulsory reading programme being taught at the public school at which their children were students... The parents’ argument ultimately was that the reading programme exposed their children to a diverse range of ethical perspectives and encouraged ‘critical reasoning’, rendering it more difficult for them to pass on their particular religious beliefs to their children... Judge Lively argued that the purpose of the public school was to teach fundamental values ‘essential to a democratic society’ including ‘tolerance of divergent political and religious views’ and the ability to ‘consider ... the sensibilities of others’. He rejected the claim that there was a violation of religious liberty on the ground that ‘exposure to something does not constitute teaching, indoctrination, opposition or promotion to the things exposed.’ [pp101, 102]

Republicans need not be shy in insisting on programmes and strategies that develop independence from the will of others, including independence from the will of kindly and well-meaning parents in respect of something as sacred as their children’s ethical commitments. Needless to say, the moral rights of parents to develop their children’s ethical commitments must always be respected by any state committed to liberty.  It is just that such rights are not absolute. And the burden is on proponents of religious schools to demonstrate that such schools are capable of educating citizens towards virtue. [pp113, 114]

Turning the Tide

Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (Chomsky Perspectives) 
by 

Noam Chomsky

 

Domhnall O hAodha's review 

Feb 02, 2019  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: history-of-america, politics

This 1985 book remains fully topical in 2019, with helpful insights into the subversive US role in current developments in Brazil and Venezuela as well as the so called migration crisis in Central America, useful explanations of the socially and environmentally devastating practices of US backed corporate capitalism and a refutation of the alleged “shift to the right” in US politics. It is painful to read but it is hard to see how one can hold out hope for a democratic and sustainable future without confronting the evidence Chomsky assembles so comprehensively and convincingly.

Three large chapters and over 200 pages are devoted to an account of US sponsored and organized terrorism against the people of Central America with the objective of creating and supporting brutal dictatorships, under whose protection major corporations consume and destroy local resources in ways that are environmentally and socially rapacious, for the benefit of US investors. The bestiality and utter viciousness of US behaviour makes this material very difficult to read.

The way in which corporate interests emerged and seized control of American politics from the end of the Nineteenth Century is referred to, but Chomsky mainly addresses the period following World War Two, when the US enjoyed the prospect of global domination and basked in the confidence that comes with victory, assured that war is a highly profitable enterprise. The Elite in the US also learned that the methods of torture and mass murder of the Nazi system can be built upon in ways that serve their interests. In one section of the fourth chapter, Chomsky provides details of a range of Nazi criminals and sympathizers who were recruited by the CIA from Germany and other fascist states at the end of WW2 and redeployed to Third World countries, notably in Latin America, where their vile skills and experience were deployed to enable the US to develop and implement a system of state security based on terror, torture and murder which would secure fascist dictatorships in the majority of Latin American states and a self sustaining system for international collaboration between fascist states (including Israel in its roles as dealer in arms and subversive terrorism) to prevent popular, democratic or other anti-fascist movements from taking hold, or otherwise to subvert and wreck their achievements to ensure that no alternative to the security state was tolerated, even in a harmless pin prick in the middle of the sea like the tiny island of Granada.

Military budgets inevitably represent a vast burden on US taxpayers, in a country that declines to commit public resources to a decent welfare or healthcare system for its population. Chomsky’s review of the Cold War and of the nuclear arms race establishes the case that this has and had no defensive justification whatsoever; it is not only entirely aggressive but also frequently utterly wasteful and futile. One benefit it does offer is to permit a form of “military Keynesianism” by pumping unproductive expenditure into the economy at times when this is required not for any military reason, but purely for economic ones – made essential not least because corporate capitalism is inherently unstable and systematically harmful. The other function is to establish and maintain the level of fear required to stupify domestic political opposition – a benefit enjoyed as much in the Soviet system as the American one.

Naturally, the corporate elite is able to call upon and deploy the resources of the US state in pursuit of fascist goals abroad only to the extent that domestic democratic forces are effectively subordinated to the same corporate interests. Kennedy could attack South Vietnam to impose a corrupt and unpopular regime without a murmer of domestic opposition in the USA, but by the end of the sixties the US faced a Crisis of Democracy owing to the growth of a domestic political movement which questioned official propaganda, opposed the war and threatened the power of corporate interests: this called for vigorous counter measures. The book therefore explores the means by which democracy is subverted in the USA itself, and the interlocking of corporate and military interests, with reference primarily to the period of the Reagan administration, while emphasizing the extent to which Reagan simply took over existing policies and practices of the Carter administration in order to remove any illusion that the major parties differ in any important way in regard to their general ideology or their subordination to corporate power. Chomsky reviews the well aired opinion that the US experienced a shift to the right in the Reagan years, and he demonstrates that this is only true for the political and economic elites of both the main parties; educated Americans were far more vulnerable to indoctrination than the less educated, while ordinary US citizens strongly favoured the kind of health and welfare support that was being dismantled under this shift to the right. They did not vote for the right on grounds of political issues – they were never offered the option of policies they could support and were obliged to focus, if they were to vote at all, on tangential issues and distractions, not least on religious tribalism. Writing in 1985, Chomsky has anticipated and refuted the already questionable justification behind Clinton’s so called Third Way – a disaster in store for US working people and migrants alike.

The book is disturbing and often painful to read, made more challenging by Chomsky’s tendency to start in the middle of a story and end halfway through, while working through immense detail and many parenthetical asides that leave lesser mortals dizzy. [I speak on behalf of LMs everywhere. It would really be helpful for example to produce a simple, chronological account which spells out the mundane details, if only in the form of an occasional time chart.] I get the sense that Chomsky is burdened with so much that must be said that he can only endure it by writing in this manner.

Chomsky does acknowledge the risk that his work will overwhelm the reader and induce a sense of helplessness in the face of impossible odds. In his last chapter he sets out a constructive agenda for democratic action, and offers hope that this can be effective – while quietly mentioning that in that event, the elite will retaliate with all the resources they hold. We live in interesting times, to quote an old curse. However, he has already pointed out that the alternative is to “live in a world of lies and fantasies under the Orwellian principle that Ignorance is Strength.” [p237]

Some Quotes:

“If we had the honesty and the moral courage, we would not let a day pass without hearing the cries of the victims. ... We would listen to the extensive and detailed record of terror and torture compiled by Amnesty International, American Watch, Survival international and other human rights organizations. But we successfully insulate ourselves from the grim reality. By so doing, we sink to a level of moral depravity that has few counterparts in the modern world, and we may be laying the basis for our own eventual destruction as well.” [p238]
--------------
The revolutionary pacifist A. J. Muste once quoted this remark, thinking no doubt of World War II: The problem with war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson? [p63]

The pattern was set in the first area liberated by US forces, North [Africa], where in 1942 the US placed in power Admiral Jean Darlan, a leading Nazi collaborator who was the author of the Vichy regime’s anti-semitic laws... the American army next drove up the Italian peninsula, restoring the rule of fascist collaborators while dispersing the Italian resistance, which ahd fought courageously against up to six German divisions, after it had liberated much of Northern Italy.... From 1948, the CIA undertook large-scale clandestine intervention in Italian politics, labor and social life ... part of a more general European program... In Greece, the British army took over after the Nazis had withdrawn, displacing the Greek guerrillas and imposing a brutal and corrupt regime ... The US stepped into the breach under the Truman Doctrine in 1947, launching a murderous counterinsurgency war, complete with the full panoply of devices soon to be used elsewhere: massacre, torture, expulsion, re-education camps and so on. The US-organized war was in support of such figures as King Paul and Queen Frederika, whose background was in the fascist movements, along with outright Nazi collaborators... Twenty years later the US backed the first fascist restoration in Europe (also the first government headed by a CIA agent, Colonel Papadopoulos...)... [pp272-274]

General Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front: in 1949, Gehlen’s team became the official espionage and counter-espionage service of the new West German state, under close CIA supervision. One aspect of the postwar project was the recruitment and protection of Nazi war criminals in the service of the war against the anti-fascist resistance and the Soviet bloc. In Asia, collaborators with Japanese fascism were often favoured, as in Korea, where even the Japanese police were used as the US “liberated” the southern part of the peninsula from its own population with violence, bloodshed and destruction of the indigenous socio-political system that sprang into existence as the brutal Japanese occupation was terminated....[p276]
The US showed little concern when pro-Franco, pro-German elements overturned Columbian democracy in 1949, creating what the New York Times described as ‘a totalitarian state, directly instigated by the government of Spain...” [p275] German funds were transferred to Latin America, which became the centre of a “Black International,” particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, as the US supported National Security States on the Nazi model throughout the region, using Italian fascists as well as Nazi war criminals who had been spirited out of Europe by US intelligence with the assistance of the Vatican and a network of fascist priests... [p276] Among those eagerly snapped up by US intelligence were Franz Six and his subordinate, Emil Augsburg ... Horst Mahnke ... Stanislaw Stankievich ... all of them prominent Nazi gangsters who had been involved in horrifying massacres of Jews and others on the Eastern front.[p277] Perhaps the best known of the Nazi war criminals incorporated into US operations in Europe was Klaus Barbie, ‘The Butcher of Lyon,” ... When he could no longer be protected in Europe, he was sent by the US to Bolivia, where he became a central figure in the fascist network there... The ‘Black International’ in Latin America included Dutch Nazi Alfons Sasson.. in Ecuador, Friedrich Schwend... in Peru, Wim Saussen ... in Argentina and Walter Rauff (the inventor of the first gas chambers) in Chile.. [pp278,9] The postwar project of crushing the anti-fascist resistance with Nazi assistance establishes a direct link between Nazi germany and the killing fields in Central America... El Salvador recruited “the men and the expertise for its death squads among those who had learnt their trade” from their Nazi tutors in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. [p281]

In 1951, in a “historic turn”, Congress passed the Military Defense Assistance Act “that created new ties between Washington and Latin American armed forces”, and the US undertook training of Latin American officers at the school of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone. “By the end of 1954”, not merely coincidentally, “military dictators ruled thirteen of the twenty Latin American nations,” a new high for the twentieth century, including all Central American nations except Costa Rica. The Kennedy administration changed the emphasis of the military assistance program from “hemisphere defense” to “internal security” – meaning war against their own populations. ... This decision ... represented a change from toleration of “the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes, to US support of “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” The consequences, as we have seen, were horrendous, as much of Latin America was turned into a torture chamber under a rash of National Security States as a result, in a significant measure, of US policy initiatives. [p303]

In the technical sense of information theory, the claim that we are defending ourselves from some Great Satan conveys no information, ...[it] tells us no more than that we are listening to the spokesperson for some state. Thus , Hitler took the Sudetenland, invaded Poland and conducted the Holocaust for defensive reasons: Czechoslovakia was a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany, terrorists were killing innocent Germans, the Poles stubbornly refused to make peace, Germany had to defend itself against the Jews conspiring with the Bolsheviks and Western capitalism, and so on. There is virtually nothing that has not been rationalised in the name of security and defense. [p265]
Here we see the first real reason for the vast and constantly expanding military system: to permit free exercise of our Cold War policies of intervention and subversion, in accord with the overriding geopolitical conception. There is also a second good reason. The Pentagon has become our system of state intervention in the economy. The state quite naturally turns to this method when it is necessary to “get the country moving again”, to “reindustrialize” in Kennedy – Reagan rhetoric. In each of the three periods of major military expansion just reviewed, there was concern over domestic economic stagnation.” [p292]

It is a rare political leader who can face the public with the news that it is necessary for the poor to bribe the rich, who control investment, for the ultimate benefit of the economy. The citizen can, however, be mobilized to this effort in fear of the great enemy about to destroy us. ... As the American satirist H. L. Mencken once observed, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” [p299]

In the absence of any realistic alternative system of state capitalist industrial management, the nuclear freeze cannot arise as a serious issue within the political system, whatever popular attitudes may be. As Seymour Melman has emphasized for many years, the disarmament movement must assign the issue of economic conversion a central place on its agenda, or it will achieve very little. And this is no simple matter, because it bears on the institutional structure of power and privilege as the owners and managers of the society are well aware. Adopting the point of view of the dominant elites, one can see why ‘peace’ has become a dirty word, some kind of Russian plot: ...[p302]

Recourse to state violence being limited, particularly against people who have a share in wealth and privilege, those who wield private and state power must turn to other means. It becomes crucially important to follow the advice of the U.S. Operations Mission in Vietnam...”The ultimate target is the human mind. It may be changed, it may be rendered impotent for expression or it may be extinguished, but it still remains the critical target.” In such places as South Vietnam and El Salvador, the human mind may simple be extinguished, but at home it must be rendered impotent in other ways. ... The Vietnam syndrome, along with the incipient attempts of large parts of the population to enter the political system, to organize, to act to achieve social goals – these were the various forms of insubordination that constituted the Crisis of Democracy. [p313]

During the 1970s, the political wing of the nation’s corporate sector staged one of the most remarkable campaigns in the pursuit of political power in recent history, establishing a network of over 150,000 professionals in Washington who are engaged not only in securing defeat or passage of bills that concern them, but also “in a much more complex process, the shaping of the precise language of legislation and of the committee reports that accompany legislation. Business also established an elaborate system of private institutions engaged in research, scholarship and ideological pronouncements, dwarfing in scale anything that had existed before, with the aim of altering the terms of the policy debate by sheer mass to a new “conservative” consensus. [p315]

Edsall observes that “In advanced western democracies both on this continent and in Europe there is a direct and demonstrable correlation between government commitment to domestic social spending and the strength of the trade union movement. There exists in no Western democracy any other major organization that can defend progressive distributional policies of both taxation nd spending. Without a strong labor movement there is no broad-based institution equipped to represent the interests of those in the working and lower-middle classes in the formulation of economic policy.” [p316]

One expression of the current phase of the attack on democracy is a form of Newspeak devised for the 1980 and 1984 elections, the use of the term ‘special interests” with reference to working people, women, the aged, the handicapped, ethnic groups, etc: in short, the population at large. Only one group does not achieve the rank of “special interests”: the corporate elite. [p319]

It has been commonly argued that there has been a great “shift to the right” from the Kennedy to the Reagan years. ... But this is most misleading. In the first place, there was no Reagan landslide. In his 1980 victory, ... the turnout was the third lowest in American history, ...Reagan ... got little more than a bare majority of the popular vote and only 28 percent of the potential electorate. .. exit polls found that voters backed Reagan less because they shared his outlook than because they wanted an alternative to Carter. ... The reasons why voters paid little attention to issues as they voted, or did not even take the trouble to show up at the polls, are not obscure. It took a discerning eye to perceive a difference between the candidates, and history offers few reasons to believe campaign promises in any event. [p336 - 340]

What is needed is clear headed analysis and action over a broad range, often with quite specific and limited goals, not the paralysis that results from contemplation of awesome visions of destruction. [p350]

Whether one sees oneself as dedicated to reform or revolution, the first steps are education of oneself and others. There will be little hope for further progress unless the means to carry out these first steps are preserved and enhanced: networks of local organisations, media and publishers who do not bend to state and private power, and so on... To the extent that such a basis exists, a range of possible actions become available: political pressure within the system, community organising, civil disobedience, constructive efforts to create wholly new institutions such as worker-managed industry, and much else. As activity undertaken in such domains, including conventional political ation, extends in scale, effectiveness and popular engagement, it may well evoke state violence, one sign that it is becoming effective. [p355]

After the Cataclysm

After the Cataclysm (Political Economy of Human Rights) 
by 

Noam Chomsky,

 

Edward S. Herman

 

In this detailed exposure of what would now be called “fake news,” Chomsky and Herman are not motivated by a desire to induce cynicism or nihilism in their readers, nor to induce despair in the face of terrifying odds. Instead, they display a passionate conviction that the search for Truth can be sustained and that the power of lies will turn to dust in the light of serious investigation. 

There is no single cause for the misery and oppression we find in every part of the world. But there are some major causes, and some of these are close at hand and subject to our influence and, ultimately, our control. These factors and the social matrix in which they are embedded will engage the concern and efforts of people who are honestly committed to alleviate human suffering and to contribute to freedom and justice. [p344]

This particular volume deals with Indochina in the years following America’s wars there, but it is concerned less with an account of the way those countries dealt with the aftermath of the wars and more with an analysis of the way Western media described the situation to their American and other Western audiences. 

We have not developed or expressed our views here on the nature of the Indochinese regimes. To assess the contemporary situation in Indochina and the programs of the current ruling groups is a worthwhile endeavour, but it has not been our objective. [p344] 

Our primary concern here is not to establish the facts with regards to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task. We will consider the kinds of evidence used by the media and those naive enough to place their faith in them, and the selection of evidence from what is available. [p160]

One amusing comment often repeated on social media is that if the USA had lost the War of Independence against the tyranny of the British empire, they might instead have ended up resembling Canada; the implication is usually that this outcome might have been preferable. For Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, the alternative option which the USA deployed such astonishing firepower to enforce on their peasant populations was the violently oppressive “sub-fascism” of America’s client regimes in Thailand, Indonesia or the Phillipines, or those of Latin America. Since these options would be appalling to any objective observer, it was important to the Americans to convince the world that the people of Indochina were suffering dreadfully under their “communist” postwar regimes, while diverting attemtion entirely from the grim record of their own supposedly capitalist (actually fascist) clients. 

Now that the countries of Indochina have been pounded to dust, Western ideologists are less fearful of the demonstration effect of successful communism and exults in the current willingness of the Western satellites of ASEAN to cooperate in “peaceful competition”. In the London Observer Gavin Young reports on ASEAN’s program of obliterating Communism “not with bombs but with prosperity”, under the leadership of the smiling humanitarian Marcos, Lee Kuan Yew, Suharto, Hussein Onn of Malaysis and General Kriangsak of Thailand (with his “dark, puckish face, at once warm-hearted and mischievous”) and are now firmly set to eradicate the ills of their societies, as Young discovered when he interviewed them on their gold courses. ... Imagine what the reaction would be in the West to a featured article in the press explaining how wondrous Asian communism is becoming, based exclusively on interviews with Kim Il-Sung, Pol Pot, etc. [p13]

So then, this books offers an intensive review of the way Western media [mis]reported on post war Indochina, supported with comprehensive evidence, and indeed the technical footnotes comprise a good quarter of the book’s volume. While this is not unreadable it is probably better described as a reference source than a popular history. I read through all the same because I have yet to find a comparable account in more accessible form.

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: Volume I The Political Economy of Human Rights 

by 

Noam Chomsky,

 

Edward S. Herman

 Chomsky has a remarkable and enviable ability to describe foul behaviour in a way that remains both factual – with ample supporting evidence – and calm. It is possible to read this without being overwhelmed by the sheer evil and cynicism of the behaviour described but it is not easy. 

Post-War history is very strange and often makes no sense, because so much of it is not true. Most of us assume that World War II was fought to put a stop to fascism, but in Asia and Latin America especially, the fact is that fascism won. What the U.S. has done with its immense military and economic power since the conclusion of World War II has been to wage a continuous military and economic war against peasants across the globe, on behalf of unrepresentative, fascistic tyrannies and ruthless corporations extracting resources and wealth from Third World economies. 

How was it possible, for example, for the U.S. to be defeated in the Vietnam War? The answer rather depends on what you imagine this war was about and who were the enemy. No it was not a war against the Communists of North Vietnam, nor even a proxy war against Chinese Communism. It was a war against the peasants of South Vietnam, and its objective was to impose and maintain a puppet regime that was grotesquely corrupt, depressingly incompetent, horribly vicious, and utterly lacking in political roots. The more the U.S. protected its fascistic puppets the more the people hated them and the more they were punished for failing to submit to their own destruction. As the Americans faced defeat, the level of punishment inflicted on the people escalated obscenely. It is a foul and unacceptable model of behaviour that the U.S. has replicated many times, with variations on a theme. 

The rest is just a few quotes. 

...the U.S. leadership knew from its earliest involvement that the Communists in Vietnam were the only political movement with mass popular support and that the faction it supported was a foreign implant. (Diem, in fact, was imported from the United States.) Joseph Buttinger, an early advisor to Diem and one of his most outspoken advocates in the 1950s, contends that the designation “fascist” is inappropriate for Diem because, although his regime had most of the vicious characteristics of fascism, he lacked the mass base that a Hitler or Mussolini could muster. ...Henceforth in this book we will use the term “subfascist” as an appropriate designation for the members of the system of U.S.- sponsored client fascist states. [p33,34]

The U.S. assault on the Indochinese was quite consciously undertaken to smash them into submission to minority, subfascist agents chosen by the U.S. government. By a reasonable use of familiar terms this was plain aggression. If the facts were faced and international law and elementary morality were operational, thousands of U.S. politicians and military planners would be regarded as candidates for Nuremberg type trials. And the United States would be paying reparations proportionate to the vast destruction it caused. [p34]

The words “terror” and “terrorism” have become semantic tools of the powerful in the Western world. In their dictionary meaning, these words refer to “intimidation” by the “systematic use of violence” as a means of both governing and opposing existing governments. But current Western usage has restricted the sense, on purely ideological grounds, to the retail violence of those who oppose the established order. Throughout the Vietnam War these words were restricted to the use of violence in resistance to regimes so lacking in indigenous support that Joseph Buttinger rejects General Lansdale’s own designation “fascistic” as too complimentary. The essence of U.S. policy in South Vietnam, and elsewhere in Indochina, was intimidation by virtually unrestrained violence against the peasant population. [p97]

Wholesale violence by fascist client states is not terrorism. [p108]

Bernard Fall, writing in the early 1960s, raised the same question and provided a partial answer: “Why is it that we must use top-notch elite forces, the cream of the crop of American, British, French or Australian commando and special warfare schools, armed with the very best that advanced technology can provide, to defeat Viet-Minh, Algerians or Malay ‘C.T.s’ (Chinese terrorists), almost none of whom can lay claim to similar expert training, and only in the rarest of cases to equality in firepower? / The answer is very simple. It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up.” [p118]

Since the generals sponsoring the National Security Doctrine have been nurtured by and dependent on the U.S. military – intelligence establishment, and look to the United States as the heartland of anti-Communism and Freedom, it is little wonder that the economic doctrinal counterpart to the NSD is quite congenial to the interests of multinational business. The military juntas have adopted a “free enterprise – bind growth” model, on the alleged geopolitical rationale that growth means power, disregarding the fact the dependent growth means foreign power... in the economics of client fascism, that is, National Security Economics, the welfare of the masses is no longer a system objective – the masses become a cost of goods sold, something to be minimised – so that although the military juntas sometimes speak of long run benefits trickling down to the lower orders, ths is really an after-thought and not to be taken seriously. [pp287, 288] 

... since the world is one of good and evil, with “no room for comfortable neutralism” (Pinochet, echoing a familiar refrain of his U.S. mentor), and since free enterprise-growth-profits-USA are good, anybody challenging these concepts or their consequences is ipso facto a Communist-subversive-enemy. ... It also means that any resistance to business power and privilege in the interests of equity, or on the basis of an alternative view of desirable social ends or means, is a National Security and police problem. This applies to such organisations as peasant leagues, unions, student organizations or community or political groupings that might afford protection to the weak or threaten to become a political counterforce to elite domination.[p288]

...the definition of a “terrorist” offered by President Videla: “a terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilizations.” (London Times, 4 January 1978.) The general deserves full marks for honesty at least. [p303]

Summarizing his investigation of U.S. police operations in Latin America, Langguth writes: “...the main exporter of cold war ideas, the principal source of the belief that dissent must be crushed by every means and any means, has been the United States. Our indoctrination of foreign troops provided a justification for torture in the jail cells of Latin America. First in the Inter-American Police Academy in Panama, then at the more ambitious International Police Academy in Washington, foreign policemen were taught that in the war against international communism they were “the first line of defence.” ... The U.S. training turned already conservative men into political reactionaries.” ... After the students have graduated they can still benefit from the assistance of U.S. advisors and international coordination that becomes useful when, for example, Uruguayan dissidents are to be assassinated by “death squads” that operate with impunity in Argentina. [p309]

Nicaragua ... sends the entire annual graduating class of its military academy for a full year of training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, ... the Nicaraguan military has wiped out whole districts on the convenient pretext of guerrilla collaboration. [pp325, 326]

Robert (‘Blowtorch’) Komer who was in charge of the “other war,” cheerfully reported in early 1967 that ‘we are grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass’ in what he correctly perceived as a “revolutionary, largely political conflict,” though he never drew the obvious conclusions that follow from these conjoined observations. Komer went on to recommend, rationally enough from the point of view of a major war criminal, that the United States must ‘step up refugee programs deliberately aimed at depriving the VC of a recruiting base” (his emphasis). Thus , the United States could deprive the enemy of what the Combined Campaign Plan 1967 identifies as its “greatest asset”, namely, “the people.”[p352]

By the standards applied at the trials of Axis war criminals after World War II, the entire U.S. command and the civilian leadership would have been hanged for the execution of this policy of discriminating use of firepower. My Lai was indeed an aberration, but primarily in the matter of disclosure.

JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture

Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture (Chomsky Perspectives) 
by 

Noam Chomsky

 

This is one of a series of Chomsky paperbacks republished in 2015 which collectively offer a truly radical and transformative review of America's role in world affairs. It is surely essential reading for anyone seeking a rational explanation for seemingly crazy situations. After the virtual insurrection of American youth in the Sixties and early Seventies, in opposition to the very crimes of aggression described with such clarity here, it would seem that a counter revolution has conspired to close the public's mind - perhaps its heart. The extent to which we have been deceived is made more graphic with the realisation that Chomsky's voice has been so lonely and so untypical for all these years. It is not that the evidence is not there in plain sight, so one must assume that we have chosen not to know. Chomsky has laid it out for us with such clarity that it is now difficult to justify ignoring it any longer. The truth as he tells it is painful and upsetting - it hurts - but it must be faced. 

The first part of this book provides an overview of the Cold War, dating this from 1917, not 1945. I have placed a selection of quotes on this topic below. The second part focuses on America’s interference in Indochina from 1945 to the 1970s and beyond, and is especially concerned to expose the way historians of the Vietnam war have changed their tune periodically, in order to paint a retrospective picture at odds with contemporary records, including flatly contradicting their own earlier publications as though nobody would have the imagination to cross-check. Chomsky provides detailed rebuttals and ensures that JFK is accorded his proper place in the sequence of war criminals that have held the presidency. In the last section of the book, Chomsky notes that Kennedy secured escalating military spending which amounted to a Keynesian boost for the economy and a massive growth in nuclear and conventional weaponry on the basis of a supposed gap compared with the USSR, at a time when he knew very well that Kruschev was actually reducing the size of the USSR’s forces and reaching out for opportunities to reduce the risk of nuclear war. He also describes Kennedy’s personal role in moving Latin American policy beyond support for fascist regimes towards direct American leadership of a grotesquely oppressive security state system across the continent, as well as his aggressive and illegal efforts to subvert and destroy Castro’s regime in Cuba. This provides the basis for interesting comparisons between JFK’s “Camelot”and Ronald Reagan’s administration. 

The quotes that follow help to outline Chomsky’s account of the Cold War, which is the essential context for any understanding of the USA’s criminal role in the Third World, its intolerance of democracy, destruction of human rights, rejection of international law and consistent promotion of fascism. 

The inhabitants of Asia and the Western Hemisphere were “appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare,” military historian Geoffrey Parker observes. “It was thanks to their military superiority rather than any social, moral or natural advantage, that the white peoples of the world managed to create and control” their “global hegemony,” history’s first. “Europe’s incessant wars” were responsible for “stimulating military science and spirit to a point where Europe would be crushingly superior to the rest when they did meet,” historian V.G.Kiernan comments aptly. [p5,6]

These traditional features of European culture emerged with great clarity in the Indochina wars. There is a direct line of descent from the English colonists who carried out “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in the most populous parts of the union” by means “more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru” (Secretary of War Gen. Henry Knox, 1794) to the “ethnic cleansing” of the continent, to the murderous conquest of the Philippines and the rampages in the Caribbean region, to the onslaught against Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” [p6]

Every age of human history, Adam Smith argued with some justice, reveals the working of “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind”: “All for ourselves and nothing for other People.” The “masters of mankind” in the half millennium of the European conquest included Europe’s merchant warriors, the industrialists and financiers who followed in their paths, the supranational corporations and financial institutions that are creating what the business press now calls a “new imperial age,” ... as new governing forms coalesce to serve the needs of the masters in a “de-facto world government”: the IMF, World Bank, G-7, GATT and other executive agreements. [p11]

Our “excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence” in Vietnam is commonly attributed to the Cold War, the felt need ‘to resist every hint of Soviet expansion wherever it occurred, even in areas that were not vital to our interests.” The doctrine is not wholly false, but must be translated from Newspeak into English. The term “Soviet expansion” served throughout the Cold War as a cover for policy initiatives that could not be justified, whatever their actual grounds. The Indochina Wars provide a revealing illustration of the general practice.” [p16]

The actual reasons for terror and subversion, and finally aggression, derive from the basic logic of North – South relations, developed with unusual explicitness in the early postwar period. Recognizing that they held unprecedented power, US planners undertook to organize the world in the interests of the masters, “assum[ing] out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system, as the chief historian of the CIA, Gerald Haines, puts the matter in a highly regarded study of US policy in Latin America. Each region of the South was assigned its proper place. Latin America was to be taken over by the United States, its rivals Britain and France excluded. Policy there, as Haines explains, was designed “to develop larger and more efficient sources of supply for the American economy as well as create expanded markets for U.S. exports and expanded opportunities for investment of American capital,” a “neo-colonial neomercantilist policy that permitted local development only “as long as that did not interfere with American profits and dominance.” The Monroe Doctrine was also effectively extended to the Middle East, where the huge oil resources and crucially the enormous profits they generated were to be controlled by the US and its British client, operating behind an “Arab facade” of pliant family dictatorships. As explained by George Kennan and his State Department Policy Planning Staff, Africa was to be “exploited” for the reconstruction of Europe, while Southeast Asia would “fulfil its major function as a source of raw materials for Japan and Western Europe”, helping them to overcome the “dollar gap” so that they would be able to purchase US manufacturing exports and provide lucrative opportunities for US investors. [p16]

In short, the Third World was to be kept in its traditional service role, providing cheap labour and resources, markets investment opportunities and other amenities for the masters, with local elites permitted to share in the plunder as long as they cooperate. By the same logic, the major threat to US interests was always recognized to be “radical and nationalistic regimes” that are responsive to popular pressures for “immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses” and development for domestic needs. Such “ultranationalism” is unacceptable, regardless of its political coloration, because it conflicts with the demand for a “political and economic climate conducive to private investment”, with inadequate repatriation of profits and “protection of our raw materials.” [pp16,17]

Eastern Europe was the original “Third World,” diverging from the West along a fault line running through Germany even before the Columgian era, the West beginning to develop, the East ecoming its service area. By the early 20th Century, much ofthe region was a quasi-colonial dependency of the West. The Bolshevik takeover n 1917 was immediately recognized to be “ultranationalist,” hence unacceptable. Furthermore it was a “virus,” with substantial appeal in the Third World. / The Western invasion of the Soviet Union was therefore justified in defense against “the Revolution’s challenge ... to the very survival of the capitalist order,” the leading diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis comments today, reiterating the basic position of US diplomacy of the 1920s. “The fundamental obstacle” to recognition of the USSR, the chief od the Eastern European Division of teh State department held, “is the world revolutionary aims and practices of the rulers of that country.” These “practices” of course, did not involve literal aggression; rather, interfering with Western designs, which is tantamount to aggression. The Kremlin conspiracy to take over the world was therefore established, a record replayed in later years as other ultranationalists and viruses were assigned to the category of “Soviet expansion.” [p22]

The Bolsheviks sought to make “the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominant in the earth, “ Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned... force must be used to prevent “the leaders of Bolshevism and anarchy” from proceeding to “organize or preach against government in the United States.” The repression launched by the Wilson administration successfully undermined democratic politics, freedom of the press, and independent thought, safeguarding business interests and their control over state power. The story was re-enacted after World War II, again under the pretext of the Kremlin conspiracy. [p23]

According to the official version, it was Soviet crimes that aroused Westerrn indignation. In his scholarly history of Soviet American relations, George Kennan writes that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 created the breach... The idealistic Woodrow Wilson was particularly distraught, reflecting the “strong attachment to constitutionality” of the American public... A few months later, Wilson’s army dissolved the National Assembly in occupied Haiti “by genuinely Marine Corp methods,” ... The reason was that the Haitian legislature refused to ratify a constitution imposed by the invaders that gave them the right to buy up Haiti’s land. A Marine-run plebiscite remedied the problem... [p24] Following the same high principles, the US enthusiastically welcomed the “fine young revolution” carried out by Benito Mussolini in Italy in 1922, as the American ambassador described the imposition of Fascism... because they blocked the threat of a second Russia, the State Department explained. Hitler was supported as a “moderate” for the same reason. In 1937, the State Department saw fascism as compatible with American economic interests, and also the natural reaction of “the rich and middle classes, in self defence” when the “dissatisfied masses, with the example of Russia before them, swing to the Left.” ... Major US corporations were heavily involved in German war production, sometimes enriching themselves (notably the Ford motor company) by joining the plunder of Jewish assets under Hitler’s Aryanization program, “U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly after Hitler came to power”, Christopher Simpson writes, increasing “by some 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Euopre and barely holding steady in Britain.”... [pp 23-25]

As Gaddis and other serious historians recognize, the Cold War began in 1917, not 1945. Whatever one believes about the post-World War II period, no one regarded the USSR as a military threat in earlier years... It should be added that Stalin’s awesome crimes were of no concern to Truman and other high officials. Truman liked and admired Stalin, and felt he could deal with him as long as the US got its way 85 percent of the time. Other leading figures agreed. As with a host of other murderers and torturers of lesser scale, the unacceptable crime is disobedience; the same is true of priests who preach “the preferential option for the poor”, secular nationalists in the Arab world, Islamic Fundamentalists, democratic socialists, or independent elements of any variety. [pp26, 27]
The question of what Kennedy might have done or what was hidden in the secret recesses of his heart, we may leave to seers and mystics. We can, however, inspect what he did do and say, an inquiry facilitated by a rich documentary record. [p83]

Note that JFK and his advisers consistently regarded lack of popular support for the war and GVN initiatives towards political settlement not as an opportunity for withdrawal but rather as a threat to victory. [p97]

For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade. [p142]

The high level shift of policy after Tet called for a revision of the earlier record. Since everyone was now an “early opponent of the war,” the same must have been true of the grand leader. The enterprise had soured; the picture of John F. Kennedy must therefore be modified. [p143]