It’s time to recognize an unpleasant truth. Your government isn’t spying on you. It doesn’t want to influence you. It isn’t lying to you. It’s declared war on you.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/03/25/80/
After I read Jim Dwyer’s article in the New York Times about the massive campaign of spying on and harassment against United for Peace and Justice and the anti-war movement in the months leading up to the Republican National Convention, a part of me wanted to believe that it was all one big mistake. Some government bureaucrat had taken the dossier labeled “Plans To Isolate and Dismantle Munitions Dumps in Post Saddam Iraq” and the dossier labeled “Plans to Spy on People Who Carry Giant Puppets at Anti-War Rallies “and simply put them in the wrong envelopes.
From August 28th to September 3rd of 2004, the New York City Police Department, along with the Secret Service, the FBI, and various private security contractors waged one of the most elaborate and well-executed military operations in American history. 900,000 protesters, a city twice the size of Seattle or Boston, were effectively managed without firing a shot. Close to 2000 people were corralled and locked up in a mass detention center with a minimum of violence. Neither the Bloomberg administration nor New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly wound up paying any significant political price. Not only was Bloomberg reelected by a huge majority the following year, Kelly was being groomed by the New York City media and corporate elites to become their next mayor, even scoring a fawning profile in the left liberal magazine The New Yorker.
Major combat operations on the home front were over, and it had been a cakewalk.
Two years later, thousands of miles away in Southern Lebanon, they learned a different lesson. Riding high off of the expulsion of Syria during the “Cedar Revolution” and the successful redeployment of its radical settlers in 2005 from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, the United States ruling class and its proxies in the Israeli government decided to stage a dry run for an invasion of Iran. Taking advantage of the abduction of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah in July of 2006, a routine occurrence that usually led to prisoner exchanges, the Israeli military took out its pliers and its blowtorch and went medieval on the Lebanese people, destroying power plants and lighthouses, sending bridges crashing down into the water, turning huge sections of Tyre and even Christian North Beirut into rubble, and transforming most of southern Lebanon into a landscape reminiscent of Chechnya or the face of Mars. We know the ending. The IDF left southern Lebanon with its tail between its legs, its reputation for invincibility shattered beyond repair, and the image of Israeli brutality scattered over the world along with photos of blasted Merkevas and IDF gunboats transformed into floating lumps of melted steel.
Hezbollah is the first Arab military organization after 1948 built from the ground up inside the Muslim world without Soviet aid. They’re also the first Arab military organization to beat the IDF. From 1948 to 1991, no Soviet built conscript army under a secular Arab dictator had ever defeated an Israeli, British or American army. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no British, Israeli or American army has ever beaten an Arab military organization in a protracted guerilla struggle. Let that sink in for a while. From 1948 to 1991, no Soviet built conscript army under a secular Arab dictator had ever defeated an Israeli, British or American army. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no British, Israeli or American army has ever beaten an Arab military organization in a protracted guerilla struggle. Far from being the racial and cultural inferiors most Israeli right wingers and American neoconservatives think they are, Arabs and Muslims learned how to beat western armies only after they no longer had the help of the great white Russian empire to the North.
Osama Bin Laden and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah might not be the kind of guys you’d want to have a beer with, but you can’t deny that they’re both brilliant an innovative military commanders. Unlike Saddam, they both realized from very early on that Soviet military culture had never really worked for anybody except the Soviets, or, to be more specific, the Soviets in 1943. As good as they looked rumbling through Prague in 1968 or slaughtering Shiite rebels in Southern Iraq after the first Gulf War, when they face the vastly superior military technology of the Americans or of the American built IDF, T62s and T64s or even T72s (when you’re lucky enough to get them) become nothing but rolling toaster ovens. Any tinhorn dictator like Saddam, Nasser or Sadat can raise a big army (the ability to torture your own citizens and throw them in jail without charges tends to limit resistance to the draft) but the question of actually making them fight once they came into contact with the enemy was a little more problematic, especially in the pre Abu Ghraib days when surrendering to Americans (or even Israelis) seemed a lot more appealing than being turned into a halal pot roast inside some Russian made hunk of pig iron.
The fundamental insight born of necessity that fourth generation Arab commanders have learned is that 3000 smart, hardcore volunteers who can think creatively and, more importantly, who are willing to die for their cause can be a lot more effective than a conventional army made up of draftees. Well planned out asymmetric attacks on key civilian targets or a lighting fast maneuverable division of light infantry broken down into small units of 3 or 4 men can knock a clumsy superpower off its feet like a smart lightweight wrestler taking down a clumsy musclehead.
As horrific as they were, the terrorist attacks on September 11 were actually a precision strike, and they accomplished everything Bin Laden wanted and more. At the cost of less than 3000 American civilians and 18 volunteers, he was able to bluff the American ruling class into dismantling its bases in Saudi Arabia, starting a suicidal war in Iraq, and completely gutting not only the US Constitution but the entire Anglo Saxon tradition of civil liberties that went back to 1215. By maneuvering the American ruling class into gutting its own Constitution, Bin Laden effectively removed the threat that American democracy posed to his Islamist vision for the Middle East by the elegant and breathtakingly simple solution of eliminating American democracy.
And what have 3200 American military personnel and anywhere between 50,000 and 500,000 Iraqis bought for George Bush? That’s right, another Iranian hostage crisis.
Ever since 9/11, on the other hand, the American anti-war movement has gone in the opposite direction, right into the arms of retrograde authoritarian Marxist Leninism.
With the final capitulation of American liberalism to the authoritarianism and militarism of Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush — a process that was begun in 1987 with the refusal of the Democratic Party to impeach Reagan for Iran Contra and which was hilariously personified in the famous photo of Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis sticking his head out of the turret of an M1 Abrams tank but which reached its culmination only in the Fall of 2002 with the Democratic Party’s surrender of the power of Congress to declare war to the White House — Communists inside the anti-war movement and the broader left finally decided to make themselves useful. Those irritating people who used to do little but sell newspapers, Ramsey Clark and the Trotskyite Workers World Party, Bob Avakian and the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, and Leslie Cagan and the traditional Stalinist Communist Party USA, were now the ones organizing the large anti-war demonstrations, not just using them to build up their membership lists.
Of course it makes perfect sense. The Bush administration’s propaganda offensive in the Fall of 2002 and the Winter of 2003 was so relentless and so overpowering that only people who had a very solid, dogmatic core of belief were able to stand up to it. Where the typical liberal found himself struck with self-doubt (maybe Saddam had those weapons of mass destruction after all), Marxist Leninists saw everything moving according to plan, a neocolonialist President using the horrors of 9/11 to justify an imperial agenda it had been planning all along.
And good for them. Any liberal who attacked the huge, largely communist organized anti-war demonstrations in the Fall of 2002 and Winter of 2003 was being a crude sectarian, and probably even has some of the blood of those 600,000 Iraqi civilians on his hands.
But, and this is a very big but, the same solid, dogmatic core of beliefs that allowed the leaders of International Answer, Not in Our Name, and United for Peace and Justice to resist the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign around Iraq also made it inevitable that they would organize anti-war protests that would be as vulnerable to a sophisticated domestic counterinsurgency campaign in 2003 and 2004 as Saddam’s poor draftees were to the might of the US military in 1991. Large, fixed permitted anti-war demonstrations planned in cooperation with the local police are worse than useless. They become security-theater. They demonstrate to the world the ability of big city police departments to control mass numbers of people. They don’t weaken the resolve of the ruling class to go to war. They strengthen it.
What’s more, their cumbersome, top-down, authoritarian organization also prevents them from reacting quickly to changing conditions during the course of the demonstrations they organize. Bob Herbert of the New York Times calls the mass arrests of over 2000 protesters during the RNC one of the great, untold stories of our time. When the NYPD locked 2000 non-violent American citizens up inside a filthy pier on the west side of Manhattan that should have immediately become the focus of the protest movement’s leadership. Instead of depending solely on legal observers and pro-bono lawyers from the Center for Constitution Rights, Leslie Cagan should have called up the media and announced that United for Peace and Justice was marching on the detention center and intended to keep marching on the detention center until all 2000 people were either let out of jail or charged with a crime. But she did nothing of the sort. In fact, if anybody had tried, the leadership of United for Peace and Justice would have probably told them not to.
There have been some signs of progress. Some of the more radical and innovative anti-war groups like World Can’t Wait or the Occupation Project (which has conducted a very successful series of sit ins at the offices of Democratic Party congress people) are calling for smaller, more focused and creative demonstrations (as well as the need to move from “protest to resistance”), but they don’t go far enough. It’s not enough to call for more innovative anti-war actions or even to call for moving from protest to resistance. It’s time to recognize an unpleasant truth. Your government isn’t spying on you. It doesn’t want to influence you. It isn’t lying to you.
It’s declared war on you.
Let that sink in for a while. If you’re poor, black and live in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, you’ll probably respond with something like “well no shit”. But for most of us, it’s a difficult concept to grasp. We may not believe that the government’s always on our side and many of us may even think that they’re irredeemably corrupt scum who should be washed out of office with a firehouse and a 20-gallon drum of Lysol. But the idea that our government is conducting a highly sophisticated counterinsurgency plan against its own people seems remote, even when there’s proof of it on the front page of the New York Times. That’s what happens in those other countries we invade.
Most of us, even the most radical, even the neo Stalinists who run International Answer and United for Peace and Justice believe that if we put enough pressure on Congress or bring enough people into the streets or write enough letters to the editor, someone in Washington will get the message. We think in terms of protest and petition, political organizing and getting out the vote, not in terms of war, but, guess what, that’s how they think of you. You’re the enemy. You’re the obstacle in their way. And more than that, they’ve not only declared war against you, they hate you. They would have won that war in Iraq a long time ago if it hadn’t been for you. You’re the ones making them go through this silly farce of having elections. You’re the ones who keep whining about health care and the economy. And what exactly will they do with you when they’ve replaced you with Chinese and Mexican slave labor anyway?
Go to the Internet (well you’re already here) and open up any right wing website, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Instapundit, any one will do. They’re all the same. Do you think these people came up with all that stuff all by themselves? No, they’re just lowbrow noisemakers for the ruling class. When they label you traitors for not being totally onboard with George Bush’s program, that’s what people a lot more powerful and a lot wealthier than they are really think about you. When they say that anti-war protesters should be put up against the wall and shot, that means that there are people at the very top of the economic and political food chain who at some point, maybe not often, maybe not publicly, maybe not seriously, but who at some time have at least thought about it.
And it’s time to start fighting back, not violently. That would just be playing into their hands. That’s what they want you to do. But it’s time to start thinking of the campaign to end the war in Iraq not as a protest movement or a political organization but in the same way they do, as a military operation. How do you learn more about the NYPD than the NYPD knows about you? How do you find enough people willing to get arrested and get slapped with the kinds of serious charges that are used to intimidate people out of doing civil disobedience? How do you find enough people willing to lose their jobs, their credit, their families and their futures in order to clog up the system to the point where the war machine screeches to a halt? It’s time to start learning from Hezbollah. It’s time to start thinking about the non-violent equivalent of fourth generation warfare.
