No matter how things change, the song remains the same. I've come to the sad conclusion that no matter how honorable, righteous or right-minded our positions are, fighting the good fight is doomed to yield at best incremental change. At worst it will be absorbed by the two party system and electoral realities. Historically progressive movements are assimilated and rendered impotent. I choose to fight anyway.
Join me below the fold for a few poignant quotes from America's illustrious imperialist past. Quotes from progressive forefathers(mothers) who in their time faced much the same systemic obstacles as do we but nevertheless continued to fight. Eerily familiar words and ideas not so hoary as to be irrelevant but hoary enough to be shocking in their capacity to reflect little if any substantive change in our "American way of life."
This "open door" idea became the dominant theme of American foreign policy in the twentieth century.
This national argument is usually interpreted as a battle between imperialists and anti-imperialists. It is far more accurate and illuminiating, to view it as a three-cornered fight. The third group is a coalition of businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians who oppose traditional colonialism and instead advocate a policy of "open door" through which America's preponderant economic strength would enter and dominate all underdeveloped areas of the world. --historian William Appleman Williams commenting on the run-up to the Spanish (Cuban) American War.
Not much need to elaborate. 120 years later and absolutely nothing has changed. Substitute the centrist/DLCers and the entire GOP of today for the "third group" and the shoe fits quite nicely. Once foreign markets are seen as important for prosperity, expansionist policies become necessary. When "open door" imperialism sputters, doesn't swing wide quickly enough or is impossible, military "intervention" becomes the "indespensible lever" of trade.
War opponents of late 19th and early 20th century America saw through this transparent sham.
If there is war, you will furnish the corpses and the taxes . . . speculators will make money out of it, that is out of you . . . and you will have to pay the bill, and the only satisfaction you will get is the privilege of hating your fellow-workmen who are really your brothers. --Bolton Hall in "A Peace Appeal to Labor"
The United States didn't annex Cuba after "liberating" it. We told the Cuban Constitutional Convention that the American Army would not leave until the Platt Amendment was incorporated into the new Cuban Constitution giving the US the "right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty
. . . (and of course provide the US with coaling or naval stations at specified points of their choosing)."
Only problem was those pesky Cubans pushing for a little self-determination asserting their "inalienable rights." They were forced by military occupation to acquiesce in the end. Frightening in its congruence with our current "conflict of choice."
For the United States to reserve to itself the power to determine when this independence was threatened, and when, therefore, it should intervene to preserve it, is equivalent to handling over the keys to our house so that they can enter it at any time, whenever the desire seizes them, day or night, whether with good or evil design
. . . the only governments that would live would be those which count on the support and benevolence of the United States, and the clearest result of this situation would be that we would only have feeble and miserable governements condemned to live more attentive to obtaining the blessings of the United States than to serving and defending [their own] interests . . . A people occupied militarily is being told that before consulting their own government, before being free in their own territory, they should grant the military occupants who came as friends and allies, rights and powers which would annul the sovereignty of these very people. This is the situation created for us by the method which the United States has just adopted. It could not be more obnoxious. -- committee report from a Santiago delegate to the Cuban Constitutional Convention.
Skipping on over to the Phillipines to spread our unique brand of "brotherly love" and "freedom to pursue life, liberty, and property" we catch this distorted reflection of the American imperialist soul.
The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners of people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one . . . as examples. --Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger
Rummy was really a rip-off artist when it came to "waterboarding." Who knew? If only he could have resurrected the "comfy chair" maybe our reputation wouldn't be in the tank.
Mark Twain in his own inimitable way had this to say:
We have pacified thousands . . . and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orpahns out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to dozens of disagreeable patriots subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property; . . .
And so, by these Providences of God--(the phrase is the government's, not [Twain's]--we are a World Power.
But when the smoke was over, the dead buried, and the cost of the war came back to the people in an increase in the price of commodities and rent--that is, when we sobered up from our patriotic spree--it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the war was the price of [oil] . . . that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of the American capitalists. --Emma Goldman, anarchist and feminist post Spanish-American War.
We're living out our very own Greek tragedy. Do you think the laboring peoples of the world comprising the various empires of antiquity saw their ultimate downfall coming? Did they feel just as powerless to divert the juggarnaut of stupidity and inhumanity that is perpetrated against the peoples of the world by cowardly monied elites whose sociopathic lust for power and wealth ultimately doom even them?
If [this period in our history] has taught the workingmen any lesson worthy of heed, it is that the capitalist class, like a devilfish, had grasped them with its tentacles and was dragging them down to fathomless depths of degradation. To escape the prehensile clutch of these monsters, constitutes a standing challenge to organized labor . . . It seems to me that if it were not for resistance to degrading conditions, the tendency of our whole civilization would be downward; after a while we would reach the point where there would be no resistance, and slavery would come . . . the issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity . . . money constitutes no proper basis of civilization . . . the time has come to regenerate society--we are on the eve of a universal change. --Eugene Debs
What to do? Can anything be done? Part of the problem is the lure of electoral politics and working for change from "within the system." We never seem to perceive or understand that the "system" is the problem. Progressive/populism, under pressure for electoral victories, makes deals or fuses, disintegrates or is absorbed by the leadership among the political brokers of power. We achieve minor victories but the conditions that give rise to the unrestained concentration of wealth remains undisturbed. Perceiving even the slightest inkling of a broad based progressive movement in this country, the "big guns of the establishment" (the corporations and press) mobilize with message and money to to make sure it is squashed, divided, or distracted from its one threatening purpose--to upset the capitalist economic status quo.
A dash of patriotism, a pinch of fear of "the other" (preferably brown or black) and the next thing you know the wagons of nationalism are being circled. It would be laughable if it weren't tragic how easily people fall for the same cons over and over again.
But still people struggle. They agitate. They resist in ways big and small. The lift up their voices. Only W.E.B DuBois seemed to understand that true power lies not in violent supression of the working man, but in the workingman's capacity to not participate in the system.
The [people] have enormous power in their hands. Simply by stopping work, they threaten the [system] with starvation.
I'm "striking" on November 6th. I hope others will too. I know at first it will be just a few, but I hope it will grow. I hope it will grow into a movement not to pay taxes. I think I'm just deluded and dumb enough to believe it could work over time if it gets just enough publicity to transform spark to flame.
I hold that I am a member of this body [politic]. Therefore, I shall neither fawn or cringe before any party, nor stoop to beg them for my rights . . . I am here to demand my rights, and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my (wo)manhood . . . The Anglo-Saxon race, sir, is a most surprising one . . . I was not aware that there was in the character of that race so much cowardice, or so much pusillanimity . . . we are told that if (wo)men want to speak, they must speak through [the trumpets of the powerful], if we want our sentiments expressed, they must be adulterated and sent through messangers [of the powerful], who will quibble, and equivocate, and evade, as rapidly as the pendulum of a clock . . . We have pioneered civilization here; we have built up this country; we have worked in the fields, and garnered your harvests, for hundreds of years! And what do we ask in return? Do we ask you for compensation for the sweat our [mothers and fathers] bore for you--for the tears you have caused, and the hearts you have broken, and the lives curtailed, and the blood spilled? Do we ask retaliation? We ask it not. We are willing to let the dead past bury its dead; but WE ASK YOU FOR OUR RIGHTS NOW! --Henry MacNeal Turner
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. --Henry David Thoreau printed as an essay Civil Disobedience
I'll finish with this. If you've never read A People's History Of The United States by Howard Zinn your "education" is incomplete. Most of the above quotes I poached and slightly altered from an old tattered copy I take with me everywhere. When I get down, it both inspires and humbles. I believe we fight because those who came before us risked infinitely more than we ever could. We fight as progressives because it is the right thing to do. We fight because the fight isn't over and it's how we pay our respects to those who came before and sacrificed to give us a chance for a better more decent world. A world where people share instead of take. A world not just of legal equality but one of true equality of opportunity.
We can easily defeat armies, slaughter others by thousands, and pursue them to their capitals; we can conquer and "annex" their territory; but what then? Have the histories of the ruin of Greek and Roman liberty consequent on such extensions of empire by the sword no lesson for us? Who believes that a score of victories, the "annexationn" of provinces, will give us more Liberty, a purer Morality, a more prosperous Industry, than we now have? . . . Is not Life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous enginery of War? --Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune, May 12, 1846.
When will our "political leaders" become us? Will they ever actually lead? Will they become something more than "first-rate, second-rate human beings?" When will Americans stop believing the lie that "war is inevitable and part and parcel of the human condition?' When will we start identifying ourselves as human beings first and all other things second? When will we become so aggrieved, our souls so diminished, that we eventually rise up together to say ENOUGH! Where will we find those rare few with the rhetorical skill capable of inspiring us to rise up and demand better? Where is our 21st century Frederick Douglass?
To him your celebration is sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, immpiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour . . . lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting baarbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival . . . those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
A "nation of savages" indeed. Sometimes it makes me wonder. Is our nation so vacuous, impotent, and distracted by "the newest pretty shiny things" that we no longer care what atrocity is committed in our names? For a nation of "price sensitive shoppers" we seem disturbingly disconnected from the price of our way of life. I don't think the good folks on this site could be so described, but I'm not so sure about the vast majority. American Exceptionalism--the hollow "brand" brought to you by the "the points of the sword" on Wall Street, K-street, and Madison Avenue (oh yeah, I almost forgot the geniuses at the Pentagon who think playing both sides is strategically sound). Funny in a perverted sort of way when you really stop and think about it. Maybe disgusting would be more apt. I'm not really sure what to think anymore.