[Admin Note: all 3 parts of Dr. Marable's article are
included in this message, so keep scrolling downward.]
Along the Color Line
October 2001
Terrorism and the Struggle for Peace
By Manning Marable <mm2470>
Part I of a Three-Part Series
It is still mourning time here in New York City. It
has been weeks since the terrorist attack destroying the
World Trade Center towers, but the real tragedy remains
brutally fresh and terribly real to millions of residents in
this over-crowded metropolis. The horrific sights of
thousands of human beings incinerated in less than one
hundred minutes, of screaming people free falling more than
one thousand feet plummeting to their deaths, is nearly
impossible for anyone to comprehend or even to explain.
The criminals who obliterated the World Trade Center
and part of the Pentagon attempted to make a symbolic
political statement about the links between transnational
capitalism and U.S. militarism. But by initiating acts of
mass murder, any shred of political credibility that those
who plotted and carried out these crimes was totally
destroyed. There can be no justification, excuse or
rationale for the deliberate use of deadly force and
unprovoked violence against any civilian population. This
was not essentially an act of war, but a criminal act, a
crime against not only the American people, but all of
humanity. Those who committed these crimes must be
apprehended and brought to justice under international law
and courts.
In the immediate days following the terrorist
attacks, some elements of the American left, including a few
black activists, took the sectarian position that those who
carried out these crimes were somehow "freedom fighters."
These "left" critics implied that these vicious,
indiscriminate actions must be interpreted within the
political context of the oppression that gave rise to those
actions. In short, the brutal reality of U.S. imperialism,
including America's frequent military occupation of Third
World countries, to some degree justifies the use of
political terrorism as a legitimate avenue for expressing
their political resistance.
It is certainly true that the American Left must
vigorously and uncompromisingly oppose the Bush
administration's militaristic response to this crisis
because the unleashing of massive armed retaliation will
inevitably escalate the cycle of terror. However,
progressives must also affirm their support for justice --
first and foremost, by expressing our deepest sympathies and
heartfelt solidarity with the thousands of families who lost
loved ones in this tragedy. We should emphasize the fact
that among the victims, over one thousand labor union
members were killed in the World Trade Center attack; that
more than fifteen hundred children in metropolitan New York
were left without a parent; that hundreds of undocumented
immigrants undoubtedly perished in the flames of September
11th, but their families are unable to step forward to
governmental authorities, due to their illegal residence in
the U.S.
Although there was a generous outpouring of
charitable donations to the victims' families after
September 11, less attention has been given to the most
disadvantaged workers whose lives or livelihoods were
destroyed. Kitchen workers, for example, at the World Trade
Center's Windows on the World, have only $15,000 life
insurance policies. Over 100,000 jobs were destroyed, along
with hundreds of small businesses in the area.
However, our criticisms of the Al Qaeda group should
not support their "demonization," and description as
"cowards" or "evil doers," in the incoherent denunciations
of President Bush. We can denounce their actions as
criminal, while also resisting the Bush administration's and
media's racist characterizations of their political beliefs
as "pathological" and "insane." Bush's demagogical rhetoric
only feeds racist attacks against Middle Eastern people and
other Muslims here in the U.S.
Perhaps one of the most effective criticisms would
be to highlight the important differences between the
sectarianism of Islamic fundamentalism, versus the rich
humanism that is central to the Islamic faith. In the
eloquent words of the late Muslim intellectual Eqbal Ahmad,
Islamic fundamentalism promulgates "an Islamic order reduced
to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics,
intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." It manipulates
the politics of resentment and fear, rather than "sharing
and alleviating" the oppression of the masses in the Third
World.
We must also make a clear distinction between
"guilt" and "responsibility." The Al Qaeda group is indeed
guilty of committing mass murder. But the United States
government is largely responsible for creating the
conditions for reactionary Islamic fundamentalism to
flourish. During Reagan's administration, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) provided over three billion
dollars to finance the mujahadeen's guerilla war against the
Soviet Union's military presence in Afghanistan. The CIA
used Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence or secret
police, to equip and train tens of thousands of Islamic
fundamentalists in the tactics of guerilla warfare.
According to one 1997 study, the CIA's financing was
directly responsible for an explosion of the heroin trade in
both mujahadeen-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan. By
1985, the region had become, states researcher Alfred McCoy,
"the world's top heroin producer," supplying 60 percent of
U.S. demand. Heroin addicts in Pakistan subsequently rose
"from near zero in 1979 . to 1.2 million by 1985." Our
Pakistani "allies" operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.
The Taliban regime consolidated its authoritarian rule in
the mid-1990s in close partnership with Pakistan's secret
police and ruling political dictatorship. And the Clinton
administration was virtually silent when the draconian
suppression of women's rights, public executions and mass
terror became commonplace across Afghanistan.
As The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt recently
observed, under the Taliban dictatorship, women "can't work,
they can't go to school, they have virtually no healthcare,
(and) they can't leave their houses without a male escort."
The Bush administration's current allies in Afghanistan, the
so-called Northern Alliance, are no better. As Pollitt
notes, both fundamentalist groups are equally "violent,
lawless, misogynistic (and) anti-democratic."
One standard definition of "terrorism" is the use of
extremist, extralegal violence and coercion against a
civilian, or noncombatant population. Terrorist acts may be
employed to instill fear and mass intimidation, to achieve a
political objective. By any criteria, Al Qaeda is a
terrorist organization. Most Americans have rarely
experienced terrorism, but we have unleashed terrorism
against others throughout our history. The mass lynchings,
public executions and burnings at the stake of thousands of
African Americans in the early twentieth century was
home-grown, domestic terrorism.
The genocide of millions of American Indians was
objectively a calculated plan of mass terrorism. The
dropping of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities during World
War II, and the fiery incineration of several hundred
thousand civilians, was certainly a crime against humanity.
The U.S.-sponsored coup against the democratically elected
government of Chile in 1973, culminating in the mass
tortures, rapes and executions of thousands of people, was
nothing less than state-financed terrorism. There is a
common political immorality that links former Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet, Osama Bin Laden, and former U.S.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: they all believe that
the political ends justified the means.
Moral relativism has no place in progressive
politics. For oppressed people to triumph over political
evil, we must not become that which we have struggled
against for so long. The wages of sectarian hatred and
indiscriminate violence cannot purchase our freedom.
Copyright (c) 2001 Manning Marable. All Rights Reserved.
--
Along the Color Line
October 2001
Terrorism and the Struggle for Peace
By Manning Marable <mm2470>
Part II of a Three-Part Series
A consensus now exists across the American political
spectrum, left to right, that everything fundamentally
changed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. To
be sure, there was an upsurgence of patriotism and national
chauvinism, a desire to "avenge" the innocent victims of the
Al Qaeda network's terrorism.
I would suggest, however, that the events of recent
weeks are not a radical departure into some new, uncharted
political territory, but rather the culmination of deeper
political and economic forces set into motion more than two
decades ago.
The core ideology of Reaganism -- free markets,
unregulated corporations, the vast buildup of nuclear and
conventional weapons, aggressive militarism abroad and the
suppression of civil liberties and civil rights at home, and
demagogical campaigns against both "terrorism" and Soviet
Communism -- is central to the Bush administration's
initiatives today. Former President Reagan sought to create
a "national security state," where the legitimate functions
of government were narrowly restricted to matters of
national defense, public safety, and providing tax subsidies
to the wealthy. Reagan pursued a policy of what many
economists term "military Keynesianism," the deficit
spending of hundreds of billions of dollars on military
hardware and speculative weapons schemes such as "Star
Wars." This massive deficit federal spending was largely
responsible for the U.S. economic expansion of the 1980s.
Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was pressured into an
expensive arms race that it could not afford. The fall of
Soviet Communism transformed the global political economy
into a unipolar world, characterized by U.S. hegemony, both
economically and militarily.
The result was a deeply authoritarian version of
American state power, with increasing restrictions on
democratic rights of all kinds, from the orchestrated
dismantling of trade unions, to the mass incarceration of
racialized minorities and the poor. By the end of the 1990s,
two million Americans were behind bars, and over four
million former prisoners had lost the right to vote for
life. "Welfare as we know it," in the words of former
President Clinton, was radically restructured, with hundreds
of thousands of women householders and their children pushed
down into poverty.
Behind much of this vicious conservative offensive
was the ugly politics of race. The political assault against
affirmative action and minority economic set- asides was
transformed by the Right into a moral crusade against
"racial preferences" and "reverse discrimination." Black and
Latino young people across the country were routinely
"racially profiled" by law enforcement officers. DWB,
"Driving While Black," became a familiar euphemism for such
police practices. As the liberal welfare state of the 1960s
mutated into the prison industrial complex state of the
1990s, the white public was given the unambiguous message
that the goal of racial justice had to be sacrificed for the
general security and public safety of all. It was, in short,
a permanent war against the black, brown, and the poor.
The fall of Communism transformed a bipolar
political conflict into a unipolar, hegemonic "New World
Order," as the first President Bush termed it. The chief
institutions for regulating the flow of capital investment
and labor across international boundaries were no longer
governments. The International Monetary Fund, the World
Trade Organization, and transnational treaties such as NAFTA
exercised significantly greater influence over the lives of
workers in most countries than their own governments. By the
year 2000, fifty-one of the world's one hundred wealthiest
and largest economies were actually corporations, and only
forty-nine were countries. The political philosophy of
globalization was termed "neoliberalism," the demand to
privatize government services and programs, to eliminate
unions, and to apply the aggressive rules of capitalist
markets to the running of all public institutions, such as
schools, hospitals, and even postal services. The social
contract between U.S. citizens and the liberal democratic
state was being redefined to exclude the concepts of social
welfare and social responsibility to the truly
disadvantaged.
A new, more openly authoritarian philosophy of
governance was required, to explain to citizens why their
longstanding democratic freedoms were being taken away from
them. A leading apologist for neo-authoritarian politics was
New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In 1994, soon after his
election as mayor, Giuliani declared in a speech: "Freedom
is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of
every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great
deal of indiscretion about what you do and how you do it."
As we all know, the Giuliani administration won national
praise for reducing New York City's murder rates from two
thousand a year down to 650 a year, and violent crime rates
plummeted. But the social cost to New York's black, brown
and poor communities was far more destructive than anything
they had known previously. The ACLU estimates that between
50,000 to 100,000 New Yorkers were subjected annually to
"stop-and-frisk" harassment by the police under Giuliani.
The city's notorious Street Crimes Unit functioned not
unlike El Salvador's "Death Squads," unleashing
indiscriminate terror and armed intimidation against
"racially profiled" victims.
Many white liberals in New York City passively
capitulated to this new state authoritarianism. It is even
more chilling that in the wake of the September 11 attacks,
New York Times journalist Clyde Haberman immediately drew
connections between "the emotional rubble of the World Trade
Center nightmare" and Amadou Diallo, the unarmed West
African immigrant gunned down in 1999, with forty-one shots
fired by four Street Crimes Unit police officers. "It is
quite possible that America will have to decide, and fairly
soon, how much license it wants to give law enforcement
agencies to stop ordinary people at airports and border
crossings, to question them at length about where they have
been, where they are heading, and what they intend to do
once they get where they're going," Haberman predicted. "It
would probably surprise no one if ethnic profiling enters
the equation, to some degree." Haberman reluctantly
acknowledged that Giuliani may be "at heart an
authoritarian." But he added that "as a wounded New York
mourns its unburied dead, and turns to its mayor for
solace," public concerns about civil rights and civil
liberties violations would recede. Haberman seems to be
implying that the rights of people like Amadou Diallo are
less important than the personal safety of white Americans.
As the national media enthusiastically picked up the
Bush administration's mantra about the "War On Terrorism," a
series of repressive federal and state laws were swiftly
passed. New York State's legislature, in the span of one
week, created a new crime -- "terrorism" -- with a maximum
penalty of life in prison. Anyone convicted of giving more
than one thousand dollars to any organization defined by
state authorities as "terrorist" will face up to 15 years in
a state prison. When one reflects that, not too many years
ago, that the U.S. considered the African National Congress
as a "terrorist organization," and that the Palestinian
Liberation Organization is still widely described as
"terrorist," the danger of suppressing any activities by
U.S. citizens that support any Third World social justice
movements now becomes very real.
At all levels of government, any expression of
restraint or caution about the dangerous erosion of our
civil liberties was equated with treason. The anti-
terrorism bills in the New York State Assembly were passed
with no debate, by a margin of 135 to five. The U.S. Senate
on October 12, passed the Bush administration's
anti-terrorism legislation by 96 to one. In the House of
Representatives, when the administration demanded
authorization to use military force in Afghanistan, only
California Democratic Representative Barbara Lee had the
courage to vote no. She immediately was subjected to death
threats, and in her own words, was "called a traitor, a
coward, (and) a communist." But as Congresswoman Lee alone
had the integrity to declare, "As we act, let us not become
the evil that we deplore." To resist the reactionary
mobilization towards war, we must have the principled
courage of Barbara Lee.
Copyright (c) 2001 Manning Marable. All Rights Reserved.
--
Along the Color Line
October 2001
Terrorism and the Struggle for Peace
By Manning Marable <mm2470>
Part III of a Three-Part Series
The militarism and political intolerance displayed
in the Bush administration's response to the September 11th
attacks created a natural breeding ground for bigotry and
racial harassment. For the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the
recent tragedy was God's condemnation of a secularist,
atheistic America. The attacks were attributed to "the
pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists and the
lesbians," according to Falwell, "the ACLU (and) People for
the American Way." Less well-publicized were the hate-filled
commentaries of journalist Ann Coulter, who declared: "We
should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and
convert them to Christianity."
Similar voices of racist intolerance are also being
heard in Europe. For example, Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi recently stated that "Western civilization" was
clearly "superior to Islamic culture." Berlusconi warmly
praised "imperialism," predicting that "the West will
continue to conquer peoples, just as it has Communism."
Falwell, Berlusconi and others illustrate the direct linkage
between racism and war, between militarism and political
reaction.
Even on college campuses, there have been numerous
instances of the suppression of free speech and democratic
dissent. When City University of New York faculty held an
academic forum which examined the responsibility of U.S.
foreign policies for creating the context for the terrorist
attacks, the university's chief administrator publicly
denounced them. "Let there be no doubt whatsoever," warned
CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, "I have no sympathy for
the voices of those who make lame excuses for the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon based on ideological
or historical circumstances." Conservative trustees of CUNY
sought to censure or even fire the faculty involved.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, hundreds of
Middle Eastern college students have been forced to return
home from the U.S., due to widespread ethnic and religious
harassment.
At UCLA, library assistant Jonnie Hargis was
suspended without pay from his job when he sent an email on
the university's computers, which criticized U.S. support
for Israel. When University of South Florida professor Sami
Al-Arian appeared on television talking about his
relationships to two suspected terrorists, he was placed on
indefinite paid leave and ordered to leave the campus "for
his (own) safety," university officials later explained. The
First Amendment right of free speech, the Constitutional
right of any citizen to criticize policies of our
government, is now at risk.
Perhaps the most dangerous element of the Bush
administration's current campaign against democratic rights
has been the deliberate manipulation of mass public
hysteria. Millions of Americans who witnessed the
destruction of the World Trade Center are still experiencing
post-traumatic anxiety and depression. According to the Wall
Street Journal, during the last two weeks of September,
pharmacies filled 1.9 million new prescriptions for Zoloft,
Prozac, and other anti-depressants, a 16 percent increase
over the same period in 2000. Prescriptions for sleeping
pills and short-term anxiety drugs like Xanax and Valium
also rose 7 percent. The American public has been bombarded
daily by a series of media-orchestrated panic attacks,
focusing on everything from the potential threats from crop
dusting airplanes being used for "bio-terrorism," to anthrax
contaminated packages delivered through the U.S. postal
service. People are constantly warned to carefully watch
their mail, their neighbors, and each other. Intense levels
of police security at sports stadiums, and armed National
Guard troops at airports, have begun to be accepted as
"necessary" for the welfare of society.
We will inevitably see "dissident profiling": the
proliferation of electronic surveillance, roving
wiretapping, harassment at the workplace, the infiltration
and disruption of anti-war groups, and the stigmatization of
any critics of U.S. militarism as disloyal and subversive.
As historian Eric Foner has recently noted, "let us recall
the F.B.I.'s persistent harassment of individuals like
Martin Luther King, Jr., and its efforts to disrupt the
civil rights and anti-war movements, and the C.I.A.'s
history of cooperation with some of the world's most
egregious violators of human rights. The principle that no
group of Americans should be stigmatized as disloyal or
criminal because of race or national origin is too recent
and too fragile an achievement to be abandoned now." You
cannot preserve democracy by restricting and eliminating
democratic rights. To publicly oppose a government's
policies, which one believes to be morally and politically
wrong, is expressing the strongest belief in the principles
of democracy.
We must clearly explain to the American people that
the missile strikes and indiscriminate carpet bombings we
have unleashed against Afghanistan peasants will not make us
safer. The policies of the Bush administration actually put
our lives in greater danger, because the use of
government-sponsored terror will not halt brutal
retaliations by the terrorists. The national security state
apparatus we are constructing today is being designed
primarily to suppress domestic dissent and racially-profiled
minorities, rather than to halt foreign-born terrorists at
our borders.
Last year alone, there were 489 million people who
passed through our border inspection systems. Over 120
million cars are driven across U.S. borders every year, and
it's impossible to thoroughly check even a small fraction of
them. Restricting civil liberties, hiring thousands more
police and security guards, and incarcerating innocent
Muslims and people of Arab descent, only foster the false
illusion of security. The "War on Terrorism" is being used
as an excuse to eliminate civil liberties and democratic
rights here at home.
--
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political
Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in
African-American Studies, Columbia University. "Along the
Color Line" is distributed free of charge to over 350
publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr.
Marable's column is also available on the Internet at
<http://www.manningmarable.net>.
Copyright (c) 2001 Manning Marable. All Rights Reserved.
[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases,
action alerts, and announcements are distributed exclusively
via the BRC-PRESS list. As a subscriber to this list, you
have been added to the BRC-PRESS list automatically.]
[Articles on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and posted on other
mailing lists, as long as the wording/attribution is not altered
in any way. In particular, if there is a reference to a web site
where an article was originally located, do *not* remove that.
Unless stated otherwise, do *not* publish or post the entire
text of any articles on web sites or in print, without getting
*explicit* permission from the article author or copyright holder.
Check the fair use provisions of the copyright law in your country
for details on what you can and can't do.
As a courtesy, we'd appreciate it if you let folks know how to
subscribe to BRC-NEWS, by leaving in the first seven lines of the
signature below.]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
BRC-NEWS: Black Radical Congress - General News Articles/Reports
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe: <mailto:majordomo0?body=unsubscribe%20brc-news>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe: <mailto:majordomo0?body=subscribe%20brc-news>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Digest: <mailto:majordomo0?body=subscribe%20brc-news-digest>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Help: <mailto:worker-brc-news0?subject=brc-news>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/brc-news0>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive: <http://groups.yahoo.com/messages/brc-news>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive: <http://www.escribe.com/politics/brc-news>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post: <mailto:brc-news0>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
<www.blackradicalcongress.org> | BRC | <blackradicalcongress0>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------