Thoughts on the Left and Libya

I don't have a firm position on US and Western intervention in Libya. I'm leaning towards supporting it, and I endorse virtually everything coalition forces are doing and have done so far, but I can't predict the future and I'm not an expert on Libya. (An honest question: can I support was has happened in the past without in some sense supporting what will happen in the future? After all, invasion is the supreme war crime according to Nuremberg Tribunal because all other war crimes are considered to flow from it...)

So I won't pretend to have a stance at the moment. Besides the fact that I live in a congressional democracy and should take some position on the affairs of my country, I'm not a pundit and am under no obligation to offer an opinion.

That said, I've been following the debate on the left between pro-intervention and anti-intervention advocates, the former including Juan Cole and British anarchist Ian Bone and the latter including Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn. One reason that I'm remain uncertain is that each of them, who I often trust to offer me guidance, have written accounts of the intervention that have left me unsatisfied (although Cole's is the best).

I'll start with Chomsky's account. While trying not to succumb to crude utilitarianism, I have to note that Chomsky never offers an opinion about whether or not the Libyan rebels, the Libyans as a whole, or the region will be better off with or without Western intervention- whether the lives of actual human beings will be saved or improved. He posits that a new Libyan government will likely be heavily dependent on Western powers, but his main issues are 1) the illegality of some of the measures taken by the allies and 2) the ulterior motives of the United States.

In regards to 1), Chomsky may be objectively right that the allies violated international law by aiding the rebels rather than simply instrumenting a no-fly zone. But it's a curious argument to make, given that he goes on to say in the same interview that categorically abiding by UN resolutions is to consider "that states are sacrosanct in the form that has been established in the modern world" and accepting that "states are assigned the status of virtually holy entities." Given that Chomsky has sharply disagreed with the UN in the past (on the establishment of a Jewish state, on the invasion of Afghanistan, and presumably on the overthrow of Aristride in Haiti), it feels pedantic even in accordance with even his own views to condemn "participation on the side of the rebels" for violating international law in the face of impending massacres and rebel defeats. Of course a no-fly zone was implemented "on the side of the rebels" (seeing as they lack an air force), and it likely was a tacit go-ahead to the powers involved to begin a more aggressive campaign.

Frankly, I don't really care what realpolitik considerations lead to the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which is positioning itself as a partial rival to the US, to reject UN 1973. Unless we accept that "states are sacrosanct," then we have to make decisions not solely on the basis of legal and political abstractions but on the basis on concrete realities. In this case, we have to address how our decisions affect real Libyans and the people of the region. Chomsky hardly goes into this, but the actual rebels are asking for our support and the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt are threatened by a Qaddafi victory. We shouldn't become sentimental and lose sight of principles, but these are concrete realities.

As for 2), Chomsky carries out the rather simple exercise of showing that US motives are not altruistic based on his principle that states, as power centers, can only act on their self-interest. Yes, this is about oil and installing a reliable client. But states have often done good things out of their own self-interest; the USSR defeated Nazism, for example. As for the US, we gave relative autonomy to Western Europe and halted North Korean aggression. It's not impossible or inherently contradictory that we could again reconcile self-interest and positive utility. Chomsky, again, addresses the latter but not the former, leaving his account unsatisfactory.

A categorical distrust of Western power also motivates Cockburn. "As always," he writes, "many on the left yearn for an intervention they can finally support and many of them have been murmuring ecstatically, 'This is the one.' Of course the sensible position (mine) simply states that nothing good ever came out of a Western intervention by the major powers, whether humanitarian in proclaimed purpose or not." I'm not sure that even Cockburn accepts this- I imagine he's in favor of the US intervention in Europe to help defeat Nazi Germany- and he certainly hasn't minded intervention by another "major power": the Soviet Union. As he writes in The Golden Age is in Us:

"The Soviet Union defeated Hitler and fascism. Without it, the Cuban Revolution would never have survived, nor the Vietnamese. In the postwar years it was the counterweight to US imperialism and the terminal savageries of the old European colonial powers. It gave support to any country trying to follow an independent line. Without it, just such a relatively independent country as India could instead have taken a far more rightward course. Despite Stalin's suggestion to Mao that he and his comrades settle for only have a country, the Chinese Revolution probably would not have survived either."

So why is it that the US and the West are apparently structurally incapable of providing assistance to a force who wants it, while another superpower, who perpetrated horrors in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, was able to do so even though it was clearly acting out of its self-interest? (That the USSR "gave support to any country trying to follow an independent line" is appalling bullshit, btw- ask the Czechs or Afghans.) I have to say that this as well as his attempt, along with George Galloway, to paint the mostly working class rebels as Al Qaeda supporters (a claim discredited by Cole) suggests residual Trotskyism of the kind that infects the Anglo-Irish left as well as his inherited yet watered down Stalinism. His citation of a former CIA officer who suggests that support for the revolt would be opposed to American interests seems part and parcel of Cockburn's affiliation with libertarian isolationists. Along with Chomsky, he never makes an argument that intervention would be bad for the rebellion beyond his claim that "that nothing good ever came out of a Western intervention by the major powers," a categorical statement which reeks of his characteristic glibness that recently had him arguing in favor of the hate and conspiracy-mongering Glenn Beck.

Now for the pro-interventionists. Cole and Bone both compare the left's behavior in this situation unfavorably to it's support for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. As my friend Kevin put it, "the left used to fight." While Cole's comparison to the left's support for bigoted imperialist Winston Churchill during WWII is more tenable, the comparison to the left's support for the Republicans isn't entirely convincing. Their support was restricted to individually volunteering to fight under Republican leadership, not encouraging a superpower with ulterior motives and an ugly foreign policy record to invade and bomb the place from the sky. Bone's rhetoric in favor of the invasion also suggests too much of his historical hostility to pacifist leftism and not enough serious analysis.

Cole's analysis is more thorough, but it's still flawed. His argument that UN humanitarian intervention wouldn't create a negative precedent is unconvincing in light of the Iraq war (see the last paragraph of the linked article); his contention that this can't be about oil because Western companies already have access to Libyan oil fields under Qaddafi is unsophisticated and repudiated by Chomsky. His contentions that anti-intervention arguments "have the implication that it was all right with the world community if Qaddafi deployed tanks against innocent civilian crowds" and that "if we just don't care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren't people of the left" is moral blackmail and reminds me of the "with us or with them" mentality of the Andrew Sullivan-types from the Bush era. One could be appalled at the treatment of Iraqi Shiites and oppose the Iraq war just as surely as one can be furious with the gunning down of protestors with aircraft while disagreeing with military force for a variety of complex reasons.

Perhaps the main reason that each of these accounts leaves me unsatisfied is that they don't satisfactorily deal with the real consequences Western intervention has for the future of the Libyan people. Cockburn denigrates them by linking many of them to Al Qaeda, Chomsky glosses over them in favor of more abstract principles and political truisms, and Bone and Cole cite concrete benefits of the intervention in the present but ignore the West's spurious record of liberation (see Cuba, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) that might give clues as to the future.

But I'm leaning towards supporting the intervention because the rebellion- a progressive and largely working class movement- has called for it. I respect their decision. We can't predict the future. Perhaps all we can do is trust the people involved and grant them the ability to direct the future as best they can.

Knowing Thy Enemy and Not Yourself: Why American History Should Be Taught Like Soviet History

"There's a good reason why nobody studies history; it just teaches you too much."- Noam Chomsky

Why don't American schools teach 20th century American history like they teach Soviet history? It's an honest question, based on two propositions: 1) We should, obviously, assess our conduct according to the same standards with which we assess our enemies, if not more harshly, and 2) There are enough similarities between the trajectories of Soviet and 20th century American history that they sometimes seem to even mirror each other (both were societies defined by social engineering projects on an unprecedented scale, both were dominant world powers presiding over the post-war period, both fought the Cold War through the maintenance of regional spheres of influence, etc.). And don't give me any of that "moral equivalency" crap. Soviet domestic conduct may have been far worse than ours, but we topped the Soviets in foreign policy horrors, if only because we had more power than them.

I’m inspired to ask this question based on my public school history education as well as two Oberlin classes, one on Russian history and the other on US foreign policy focusing largely on the Cold War. The first class was solid; the second was bullshit tantamount to indoctrination. The Russian history professor taught with affection for her subject, but she was also sober and unsentimental. The other professor, on the other hand, somehow forgot to mention things like the United States’ control over geographical spheres of influence that encompassed entire subcontinents, continents, and almost the entire Western hemisphere. We somehow avoided or barely discussed Israel, East Timor, Nicaragua, Haiti, Indonesia and Suharto, the IMF, the military-industrial complex, the fake-missile gap, etc. But we did get an entire class devoted largely to the influence of Western culture on the Eastern Europe, how East German kids went batshit for American blue jeans, etc. Otherwise, it was mostly top-down history, reverse Kremlinology, court stenography describing in tedious detail how The Best and the Brightest dueled with the Soviets amidst the fog of war.

I'll tell a revealing anecdote: during a class discussion comparing Soviet and American conduct during the Cold War, I said that I saw no substantial moral difference in the way that Americans treated their clients (Guatemala) and the way that the Soviet Union treated theirs (North Korea). To which the professor responded as a challenge: would I rather live in Western or Eastern Europe during the Cold War? Unprepared, I fumbled my answer and embarrassed myself, but the retort should have been immediate and obvious: would I rather live in Eastern Europe or Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, etc.? The idea that Our policies were comparable to Theirs was just not even entertained by him. And as Norman Finkelstein pointed out, when history is not subject to comparison, it becomes a totem to be worshipped at rather than understood.

If we taught American history like we teach Soviet history- that is, if we gave similar weight to issues in American history that we do to similar issues in Soviet history - we would actually confront major issues such as the termination of Arab nationalism, the destruction of Indochina (our class only discussed Vietnam and possibly Cambodia, amazingly, even though those invasions were only part of a war on the entirety of Southeast Asia), and general attempts by the US to prevent third world countries across the world from fully realizing the decolonization granted to them by World War II.

And that's just foreign policy. Below are other issues common to both Soviet history and 20th century American history. We discuss these issues as a matter of course when studying Soviet history, but we don't even know that these are issues in American history. The following list is almost certainly incomplete:

Soviet propaganda vs. American propaganda: American corporate and state propaganda was much more prevalent than Soviet propaganda and the propaganda of any other nation, as Alex Carey discusses. (This is partly a credit to the United States; it was a free enough country that the government could not use force to control people except under more extreme circumstances and had to resort to propaganda instead.) This includes corporate propaganda against unions and big society programs, war propaganda, Democrat and Republican campaign management by public relations firms, media propaganda produced in accordance with Chomsky's "propaganda model," and advertising- the latter openly referred to before World War II as propaganda.

Yet while Soviet propaganda is reflexively and correctly described as such, American propaganda is euphemistically referred to as advertising, campaign rhetoric, PR, talking points, or is simply normalized and thus dismissed as being a natural part of politics. A Soviet-approach to American history would've exposed Obama's "Hope" and "Change" slogans as propaganda and would allow us to be more critical of the commercial advertising that permeates our society- initially designed quite consciously to control mass behavior (see Adam Curtis's excellent documentary The Century of the Self).

The Soviet Gulag vs. The Golden Gulag: The Soviet gulags might beat out American prisons in terms of horror and brutality (despite consistent rape and torture in American prisons), but America wins this contest in terms of scale. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes in Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, the prison construction program America embarked on in the 80s was the largest of its kind in history, built not for existing criminals, but in anticipation of the criminals that would emerge as a predictable byproduct of draconian drug laws and Reagan’s neoliberal order. None of my history classes taught this. They never told us that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. But we were assigned Solzhenitsyn in a high school English class and read about their prisons. I suppose that was supposed to be more edifying then learning about our own.

The KGB vs. the FBI and COINTELPRO: No contest here: the KGB was, of course, worse than the FBI. Nevertheless, while it's household knowledge that the KGB disappeared innumerable Russians, operations like COINTELPRO, an FBI program of surveillance and disruption that included political assassination, is virtually unheard of in this country. As Chomsky points out in this interview, we were all made well aware of Watergate but not of COINTELPRO, in spite of the fact that the latter was overwhelmingly more significant for having actual consequences (sometimes fatal) for those who were under surveillance. We're also unaware of the FBI's use of RICO against groups like the Black Panthers, as described by Christian Parenti. We know that the KGB was the USSR's political police; we don't even know that we have a political police, or that it waged a covert campaign against members of its own population.

Students can’t be taught this. They would be confronted with the demoralizing rapidity and totality with which rebellions, even minor ones such as the Black Panther revolts, are crushed in American history; they would suspect that even American political power ultimately rests on violence; and they would define the 60s not by the patronizing version of Martin Luther King that’s spoon-fed to them but by the milieu of communist, black nationalist, militant, and radical student groups that represented an almost wholesale revolt against society as it was.

Soviet social engineering projects vs. American social engineering projects: Besides their foreign policies, this is the most significant similarity between the US and the USSR. Their social engineering projects include the dissemination of propaganda and the mass building of prisons described above. For America, they also include projects such as the National Highway Act (far and away the largest social engineering project in human history), suburbanization, the G.I. bill, military infiltration into American higher education, the New Deal and the Great Society (which are discussed, but not as social engineering projects), NAFTA, etc. Not to mention Pentagon spending, which, as Alexander Cockburn described it, is "the fundamental ballast" to the American economy. (I also doubt that American economics courses teach this.) Many of these programs are larger in scale than anything in Stalin's Five Year Plan- yet we don't even know that there were social engineering projects in this country, much less their details.

As I wrote earlier: "Imagine being a Russian student and never learning about the Five Year Plan or a Chinese student never learning about The Great Leap Forward (and the parallels of the US to these massive state-controlled behemoths are frequent and often unflattering), and you're beginning to get a sense at how fucking stupid American education is." But imagine if we were taught about these things: we would see that our common destiny does not unfold according to deterministic market logic that exists over and above human control as something holy, but is to a great extent shaped by an identifiable elite who can be targeted and then challenged. And- this might be the best part- knowledge of how much of America's progress is due to social engineering (including slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans) would hopefully dispel that obnoxious trope that "free market capitalism is what made this country great" and other Tea Party bullshit.

Afghanistan vs. Vietnam: Both conflicts are discussed- Americans did die in Vietnam, making it worthy of attention in American history classes in the way that East Timor is not- but they’re discussed differently. The Russian history professor never once took seriously the official Soviet claim that the invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken to defend the Afghan people from “agents of western reaction.” Rather, our primary text dealing with Afghanistan and the USSR’s resulting collapse was written by a New Republic liberal who spoke in the refreshing language of realpolitik (as we always do when discussing enemy nations): the Soviets invaded to crush an uprising and thereby send a warning to its other constitutive territories not to attempt secession and disintegrate the union.

Official propaganda, on the other hand, was taken at face value in our discussions of Vietnam: we invaded- sorry, we intervened- in South Vietnam to contain communist expansion and win the Cold War. Never mind that the NLF was a purely nationalist group at it’s outset and only became Stalinist and aligned with the Soviet Union when western forces made such an alliance necessary for self-defense. But the official explanation justifies what I think most students intuitively understand was an evil as a defense against a greater evil. Teaching that American policy by its nature always acts in accordance with some objective moral standard is a form of religious initiation, not education.

My Russian and American history courses did share flaws: many American academics seem too hesitant to intimately examine societal dynamics and the power bases of dominant groups- to approach education as sociology, as Theodor Adorno put it- out of fear that such analysis would be pigeonholed as “Marxist.” For example, we didn’t assess class in either course beyond discussion of the Kulaks and Russian peasants. But when scholars of Russia note a major event or overarching historical theme in their studies, they actually talk about it with their students, if sometimes superficially. Given that so many of the major events and overarching themes in American history are so similar to those of Soviet history (and should be much more important, give that we’re Americans), the only plausible explanation for the unique academic silence concerning them must be ideological. Underneath all the academic prestige, this is ultimately nothing more complicated than rooting for the team.

About That Lull...

I know that I don't have a lot of readers, but I'd figure I'd explain to you all why I haven't posted in so long.

In a nutshell, I've been doing a bit of rethinking, and a lot of my opinions, especially those about Oberlin and the higher education system in general, no longer seen entirely tenable. I still think that there are a lot of truth in my posts dealing with those issues, but they ignore or minimize what should be central facts: that colleges like Oberlin are some of the few places in the US where there is a real civil society- that is to say, a society in people spontaneously and constructively interact with each other more or less as equals - and that I'm very privileged to have attended one of them on my parents' dime rather then being forced to get a crappy job like most people in the world. I wrote these posts when I was in a bad state, and I think that some amount of projection was involved in writing them. Not to mention that the "We Are Oberlin" piece was self-pitying, humorless, and lacked self-reflection- a deadly combination. Again, there are certainly real cultural and structural problems with Oberlin and higher education, but they have to be balanced against the real benefits they provide.

I'm reconsidering all this due primarily to a recent post-graduation visit to Oberlin to see my girlfriend. I stayed in her dorm, called Harkness, which works as a sort of hippie-ish commune: the people there live, eat, cook, and clean together. It was the best argument for socialism or communism that I've encountered, better that any of the learned but abstract arguments I've read from Chomsky. It existed within a capitalist framework (although as I've noted earlier, colleges have pre-capitalist roots that survive despite their corporatization), but it worked communistically. It functioned. And quite unlike most capitalist institutions, it not only functioned but functioned joyously. The times that I fulfilled my obligation to help cook and clean were one of the few times that I actually felt like doing any work in my life. And the Hark hippies (to the extent that I can broadly label them as such) weren't the complacent hippies that the punks rebelled against, but were often active in a number of causes, like resisting mountaintop removal. They're not just lifestyle socialists. Not to mention that they were fun, intelligent, and interesting people. They weren't humorless leftie cliches.

I'm gushing with this point in mind: that Oberlin allows this place and other similar places to exist. The above qualities are not confined to Harkness: Oberlin allows students to explore different identities, lifestyles, and ideas (though it doesn't necessarily allow them to fully act on their implications) before the pressure of the working world smothers their creativity. Harkness was idyllic to me. Forget that it exists due to the patronage of a capitalist society which is it's backdrop, that it functions in a somewhat carceral manner like all college dorms and colleges as a whole, and that it's occasional tweeness and preciousness implicates it in the general insularity and decadence of the greater liberal class. Forget the context that Harkness exists in, in other words, just for a minute, and you can deeply appreciate it for the intimate, loving community that it is.

I have to thank Harkness first and foremost for the great time that I had, but I also have to thank Oberlin for allowing Harkness to exist, even if too much of Oberlin is embarrassed and resentful of it. My shift in this particular opinion has made me uncertain of others; hence I've been hesitant to commit any viewpoints for publication.

So, that's out of the way. This isn't a complete renunciation of past views, but some credit was due. Back to more bile, hopefully soon.