[Mb-civic] Dear Europe

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-12/05peterson.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Dear Europe December 10, 2004
By David Peterson 

I'm growing a little weary of post-election European commentary about the
dangerous "stupidity" of the American masses. The reason for the
commentary is of course the, well, unwise election (the first one
actually) of the dangerous Bush, an action that was in fact based to no
small extent on mass ignorance. The overseas reaction is understandable
and predictable

I've been saying for some time that bringing back Dubya Bush would
significantly erode the welcome distinction that the rest of the world
tends to make between the American people ("we like you") and the 
American government and policy ("it's just your government's policies we 
don't like"). 

Still, Kerry was hardly a champion of noble human Enlightenment and was
thoroughly committed to the bloody racist imperial occupation of Iraq and
had worked quite hard to distance himself from domestic peace and justice
forces. Whatever mild efforts he would have made towards sanity and
decency in foreign and domestic policy --- the left tactical voting
argument on his behalf was always more about what he wouldn't do
(privatize Social Security, drill in Alaska, attack Syria and Iran and
wherever) than what he would do ---- would have been qualified by right
wing domination in Congress, judiciary, the state legislatures, and the
powerful daily media "noise machine." Not to mention his basic allegiance
to corporate Neoliberal capitalism.  

So we're all dangerous morons because we brought back Bush. But we 
would have been, what, benevolent, knowledgeable geniuses if we'd gone 2
percentage points differently and maybe tipped the "Winner-Take-All"
Electoral College to John "I am not a Redistribution Democrat" and "I
Participated in the Crucifixion of Southeast Asia" and "I Have a Plan to
More Effectively Subordinate Iraq" Kerry? 

Please. Basically the US electorate breaks down about one third
Republican, one third Democrat, and one third disengaged...that's what
we've seen in recent elections and it was still going on despite
relatively large turnout in the last 'wartime' election. And the rise of
the right 'backlash' forces, heavily weighted by Evangelicals, in the US,
simply isn't new. 

It gets a little tiring as a veteran observer of the American political
scene, to see it re-discovered again and again. The Liberal Consensus
cracked up in 1968 and Nixon and then Reagan relied to no small extent on
the same "paranoid-style" (Richard Hofstader) forces that have helped 
make the loathsome Dubya into a two-termer. Whether Bush II will last 
four more years depends on whether or not God tells him how to blow up 
the planet. 

One of the biggest differences between the citizenries of the United
States and Europe is that the second is much better informed about global
and domestic events. The European media, as Mike Albert recently told 
me, "is way more combative and knowledgeable than here," so that "the
[European] populace, around many matters is far less ignorant, and in 
some instances even pretty well informed." 

Albert also points out that the Italians and the Spanish have "elected
outright fascists," referring to openly neo-fascist elected officials in
the Popular Party (Spain) and in Berlusconi's "Forza Italia" (Italy). And
"while there is a much larger and more effective social democratic sector
in Europe - in some places ascendant and in other places not", Albert
adds, "there seems to less of a truly radical left and perhaps even of a
progressive but organized left outside labor. The anti-war movement
seemed, much to my surprise, less lively than here, as best as I could
find - even in Italy."  

Consistent with the good American people/bad American government
dichotomy, Americans, when polled on an issue-specific basis, don't
actually give anything like majority support to most of the imperial
policies that are being enacted in their name.

A critical mass of Americans was convinced to go along with the invasion
of Iraq not because they actually accept America's preventive war doctrine
(just 17 percent of Americans think that the US has the unilateral right
to go to war if the US "has strong evidence of that another country is
acquiring weapons of mass destruction [WMD] that could be used against 
the US at some point in the future") but because "their" government and 
media had convinced them of something that was factually incorrect: that 
the US was in imminent danger of being attacked by a significantly WMD-
armed Saddam. 

According to a recent comprehensive public opinion survey conducted by 
the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 72 percent of Americans think 
that that the US should remove its military presence from Iraq "if that's 
what a majority of Iraqis want." But few Americans are properly informed 
about the  significant extent to which Iraqis would like to see the 
Americans leave. 

In a similar vein, 76 percent of Americans think the US should participate
in the International Criminal Court and 71 percent think we should go
along with the Kyoto global warming accord, but relatively few Americans
know about the extent of America's official opposition to both of those
and other international programs that Americans actually like.  

Another problem that is quite different from mass "stupidity" is mass
hopelessness. Even for many relatively informed Americans, there's a
shocking disconnect between what many of them believe and what they 
think
can be accomplished and are willing or feel able to do. Their lives are
often bewildering, commodified, overworked and sickening chaos. They 
are living under the constant disabling shock therapy of savage inequality 
and brazen steep hierarchy, the natural and intended result of radical
domestic neoliberalism (note to Europeans: don't let this happen to you) 

The main obstacle to a really broad-based progressive movement for 
peace, democracy, and social justice in the U.S., I increasingly suspect, is 
not mass loyalty to dominant institutions and their rulers. It is instead
traceable to the neo-liberal, corporate-imposed erosion of the social
democratic public spaces that once served as the forums in which
communities and peoples debated, analyzed, and participated in political
life. 

We have witnessed in recent decades an unprecedented decline in popular
engagement, the process by which ordinary and non-affluent people assert
their interests and responsibility for their common destiny. The result:
privatization (consumerization and commodification) of American life, 
with its concomitant sense that social action and responsibility are futile
propositions, stillborn by their very nature - the triumph of capital over
hope. 

There is a broad, deep, skeptical, even cynical sense here that nothing
much can be done about existing social problems --- "The Wheel in the 
Sky Keeps on Turning" (one of the few Journey songs I can still listen to) -
-- and that the only reasonable solutions to societal difficulties are to be
found in the private realm, matters of purely personal correction. The
world has grown too complex --- too ossified --- to be subject to
meaningful collective agency. The resulting public vacuum is filled by a
new American imperial fascism, a right-handed plutocratic state that steps
in to pretend to provide the public service the social democracy would
provide in a civilized place. 

Another key point regarding Europeans is that they have their own
interrelated reckonings to make with both their own ruling-classes and
with the imperial US ruling-class and that they are in a curious strategic
position to act against the empire. And here I'd like to recommend perusal
of the Marxist, world-systemic ruminations of Joseph Halevi, Yanis
Varoufakis, and Samir Amin in a recent book from Monthly Review Press: 
Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (New York, NY: 2004). 

These writers point out that the Europeans have a pivotal choice to make
between 

(1) neo-liberal Atlanticist alliance with the in-fact declining United
States in the "collective imperialist" "core-state" subordination of the
rest of the world (what world systemic thinkers call the "periphery" and
"semi-periphery") and 

(2) a more independent and social-democratic path of developing their own
domestic and regional economies in ways that enhance social justice at
home and greater economic, political, and even military autonomy from 
the parasitic US. 

Basically, these and other authors note, Europe stays mired in relative
deflation largely because its neoliberal elites have been convinced that
they must invest amounts of European surplus capital in the propping up
the American economy, whose voracious appetite for foreign capital
reflects the nation's simply stunning trade and payments deficits. 

America is "the Global Minotaur," a mass consumer non-producer state 
that totals up foreign IOUs like a junkie gathers needles. Foreign loans and
capital infusions "protect the U.S. financial system from a crisis of
domestic debt brought about by the unprecedented levels household and
corporate net debt" (Halevi and Varoufakis). 

Europeans and others have tended to provide these infusions --- at great
cost to the development of their own societies and economies --- because
non-U.S. First World "elites" rely on the far flung US military empire to
keep the world safe for business and exploitation and because they do not
wish to be cut off from the massive US consumer market....or from vital
oil supplies the US controls through direct and indirect means. And
perhaps there is also here an intellectual problem....the significant
extent to which European intellectuals and business persons have been
infected by the US-hatched "neoliberal virus" (Amin), which provides
abstract justification for maximum capital mobility across post-regulatory
nation states. 

But now the empire has overstretched its bounds, using its preponderant
military force to gain "exclusive access to the world's second-largest oil
fields" in what is certainly a brazen attempt (among other things) to
control more productive and dynamic core states and regions (Europe and
East Asia especially) that have much greater capacity for solid economic
and social development than the declining, parasitic, debt-financed,
post-industrial, dumbed-down, and military-dependent/military-addicted 
US.


At the same time, Bushcons have tapped the "paranoid style" of fetus- and
bible-obsessed proto-fascist rebellion and used 9-11 (a Bushcon security
failure so great that many perhaps most people in the world think that the
Bush cabal actually carried the action out [and I do not completely
discount that possibility]) to fan a deep imperial bloodlust It has also
granted massive tax cuts to the already obscenely wealthy few. 

The proto-fascism, which curiously targets the French for special ridicule
but leaves the equally anti-war Germans out of the discussion (expressing
a certain racist affection for perceived blond-haired Nordics perhaps?),
bodes rather poorly for the civilized international cooperation that
Europeans naturally want. 

The tax cuts mean more U.S. debt and thus a deeper American insistence
upon European capital transfer, even while European economies struggle
with massive structural unemployment and chronic deflation. 

Europeans: rail all you want about Americans' "stupidity" but please also
consider that you need to "come to terms with your own bourgeoisie" (as
Canadian professor Sam Gindin puts it in the aforementioned Monthly 
Review book) if we are all going to meaningfully confront the Empire. 
You should press your elites to quit staving off the bankruptcy of 
American capitalism...to turn off the spigot of capital even as the Bushcons 
try to secure the last spigots of Persian Gulf oil. Push for a capital strike.
Tell your elites --- many of them already know --- that participation in
"collective imperialism" (Amin's term) under US hegemony no longer 
serves their interests and that everyone in Europe will benefit from a more
democratic and independent path. 

Please do not put it all on the crazy and "stupid" Americans. We are not
as dumb as some may think and of course we are not "one America" as 
George W. Bush and Barack Obama like to proclaim but two, three and 
indeed many Americas. On the other hand you can see the mess this nation 
is in, the profound disabling of democracy that savage corporate-imposed 
hierarchy and ruthless commodification has imposed. Take it from 
me...this is a dangerous society. 

Any limits that you and the heroic resistance fighters in Iraq and others
can impose upon our masters' empire will be greatly appreciated, for
empire is a profoundly regressive and repressive force in American
domestic life and the obsession with foreign enemies - both real and
perceived - and frontiers has long undercut the nation's ability to deal
with problems of peace and justice at home. The empire is the enemy of 
our domestic tranquility as well.

 Paul Street is a social policy researcher in Chicago, IL. He is the
 author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11
 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004). 



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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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