If George Bush was British…

 

In there, she compares the Declaration of Independence to teh wrong-doings of Bush's gang.

He has done everything that those who signed the declaration were against.

 

Wonder how many people actually read the declaration lately?

You've never read Unorthodox Marxism.

Paul and Everyone:

You know, I keep wondering about what the most fundamental species-wide characteristics of us humans must be, that keeps generation after generation locked into exactly the same structures of error as the previous ones.  It's as if, in some categories relevant to the evolution and spread of our species on this planet, and in particular relevant to the cumulative part we know as history, although we most certainly can discern some learning curves over time, there are other categories wherein something quite the opposite is the rule, and the ignorance of every preceding generation is more or less equaled in the present.  Thus to take your second paragraph:

I've seen it again and again in journalism, academia, politics, and the non-profit sector: stay in the dominant ideological and political institutions and lose your soul or get out and lose economic security and status. So many potential good Left thinkers and activists have been crushed by this vicious damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma. I have more respect for those who get crushed by poverty and marginalization than those who get destroyed by upward mobility and cooptation.

Question: Of all of the parents you've ever encountered, what percentage of them possessed the wisdom to raise their children so as not to plug-into this monstrous structure of error?  (Better yet: What percentage of them foreswore reproduction, on account of they couldn't see how to avoid adding yet another generation to the previous one's structure of error?)

And, to speak ecumenically: "What does a woman gain by winning the whole world at the cost of her true self?"

I, too, have always had immensely more respect for those truly courageous souls willing to face the worst for themselves rather than accept any form of compromise.

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

 

Here's a petition protesting Oprah's solidarity visit: http://www.petitiononline.com/104707/petition.html

Now you people understand why I get pissed seeing my wife Watching Oprah.. I also saw the article oon Oprah going to visit the Terrorist andOccupaying Army State of Israel. I cancelled Rogers cable Tv.

Thank you David Peterson for finding the passage I could barely remember from leading New Age Racism (Elaine Brown's phrase) symbol and agent Oprah. I used to interact a fair amount with "mainstream" journalists and was always struck by how unnecessary censorship must have been on the part of their editors. Reflecting strong academic and cultural indoctrinations within and beyond their papers, they were self-censoring out of the gate, down to the very questions they dared to ask. There were some exceptions who had to be very careful what they said. I knew two who couldn't swallow the corporate-imperial totalitarianism anymore and quit.

I've seen it again and again in journalism, academia, politics, and the non-profit sector: stay in the dominant ideological and poltiical institutions and lose your soul or get out and lose econmic security and status. So many potential good Left thinkers and activists have been crushed by this vicious damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma. I have more respect for those who get crushed by poverty and marginalization than those who get destroyed by upward mobility and cooptation. Either way its sad.

Actually, Oprah has a lot of sympathy for suffering people and victims of terrorism: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3403333,00.html

Friends:

Quick note about The Oprah Winfrey Show and its role in hardening the bunkers around the captive American mind in favor of the already-planned U.S. aggression against Iraq: The particular episode that Bill Moyers chose to highlight (see Buying the War, PBS, April 25, 2007) was in fact the very first one in a series of counter-critiques hosted by Oprah that totaled seven in all.  The exchange Moyers excerpted went as follows (note that I'm reproducing more than Moyers did, as the Judith Miller scare that the producers inserted was invaluable to the pro-war lobby):

WINFREY: All right, ma'am, you in the blue, what did you say? Yes. Yeah.

Unidentified Woman #7: I'm pretty much on the fence. I don't know where to stand. I don't want people to suffer. I don't want people to be hurt. I don't want those atrocities to happen, but I--I'm confused. Because with the old President Bush, his dad, he had all of these problems. Then there was Clinton in office. I don't remember having all these problems. And now Bush is in office again, and then there are more problems. So I--I don't know what's going on.

WINFREY: So you're thinking it's a Bush thing?

Unidentified Woman #7: I think if there is--it--it could be.

WINFREY: You're not thinking that the problems were s--there all along, that the atrocities have been there all along...

Unidentified Woman #7: I think that those things were going on.

WINFREY: ...and we turned and looked the other way?

Unidentified Woman #7: N--well, that's true. And that's why I don't know. Because I do believe that there is a lot of propaganda also, that they show us specific certain kinds of pictures. I--I hope that doesn't offend you. I don't...

Mr. QANBAR: That don't offend me.

Unidentified Woman #7: ...I don't think it doesn't happen. I just don't know what to believe with the media and..

WINFREY: Oh, we're not trying to propaganda--show you propaganda.

Unidentified Woman #7: I...

WINFREY: We're just showing you what is.

Unidentified Woman #7: I understand that. I understand that.

WINFREY: OK. But--OK. You have a right to your opinion.

Unidentified Woman #7: That's right.

WINFREY: You know I believe that.

Unidentified Woman #7: That's right.

WINFREY: OK. Take a look at this as Judith Miller explains what she knows about Saddam's weapons and his ability to hold us hostage. Look at this.

(Excerpt from videotape)

Ms. MILLER: Saddam Hussein's regime is really a master of state terrorism. I don't think and the inspectors that I've talked to really don't think that they would stand much chance of finding what he has hidden. The inspectors were not able to go to many, many presidential sites. These were vast complexes, eight of them that covered about 15 percent of the country. And these were totally off-limits to inspectors.

The US intelligence community believes that Saddam Hussein has deadly stocks of anthrax, of botulinum toxin, which is one of the most virulent poisons known to man. The commission which succeeded the old inspectors unit estimates now, informally, that Iraq may be hiding as much as 10,000 liquid liters of anthrax. Now when you think that the anthrax attacks that we had in October, the letters that were sent out contained an amount that's the equivalent of two little pats of butter, think of what 10,000 liquid liters or about 2,500 gallons of liquid anthrax would do. We believe that he has transformed some crop dusters to actually deliver biological agent.

So when the president talks about regime change, what he's saying is you can't depend on total verification. We will never know if he's really hiding biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. And, therefore, the only way of solving the threat to us is actually by going in and getting rid of him. That, I think, is the thrust of the argument.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Thank you, Judith Miller. Her book is called "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War." We'll be right back.

(Announcements) [####]

("Where are we now? Guests discuss their views on whether the United States should go to war with Iraq or not,” The Oprah Winfrey Show, October 9, 2002.  Executive Producer Dianne Atkinson Hudson.)

By the way: Of the people interviewed by Moyers for his critique, Eric Boehlert (Lapdogs) has a right to be heard.  But a lot of the others can shove it.  Anybody who cares about the historical record should turn the calendar back another five years to the former Yugoslavia and the regime that preceded the current one.  Then and there, how many of those currently dissatisfied with the level of resistance to American Power on the ground in Iraq had no problem whatsoever conduiting Clinton regime lies about "genocide" and the like in connection with a southern province of Serbia?  It appears that the profession of journalism in the States is larded with dupes who serve one or the other of a maximum of two simple dogmas about state power.  No wonder The Whole is false.  Their job is to keep it that way.

David Peterson
Chicago, USA 

Fundamentalism, be it religious or governmental (and such appears to me often going side by side with insincere hucksters—the faux faithful and flag waving forefather fanatics) appeals too often to large groups of people who, imo, must be a bit insecure, and unable to cope with the concept of change: as if the ground below us, firm as it is, were not truly zipping through space. In many ways, the Declaration of Independence, and even more, The Constitution, are like machines; machines that were constructed for certain purposes, by fallible engineers. The bicycle, works fine for certain tasks, but we wouldn't use one to fly to the moon. Paul's correct, imo, that we should study the founders of the US—not only to appreciate the wisdom that went into the crafting of a national bureaucracy, but to recognize that they were “mere” human beings—arguing amongst themselves, sometimes having asinine attitudes (by present standards), and in the end, again, being fallible. “By present standards” is an important qualification, imo—it respects that people, as well as nations, are not born of a “blank slate,” or nobly innocent with people necessarily knowing what is “ultimately” right or wrong from the gut: There seems to me to be an interplay between the heart and the moral culture one grows up in (the old nature/nurture debate taken to ethics and politics (and in newer language, one might note the interplay between Chomsky's cognitive innateness and Dawkins' evolving “memes”) ). As a youth, I had a gut feeling that there was really something wrong with the Senate and House of Lords. Why wasn't it all Representatives/Commons—what did property (landed, or land) have to do with the political? And then, look at the UN—just a house of lords, with little popular representation? Such a respect for property, with regard to political power, seemed to me a hangover from Kings. Throwing out the Mon/arhcy/opoly of power for an oligarchy. How far should power be decentralized? This fundamental principle (political power decentralization) could be extrapolated to: one person one vote—on every issue. Although I believe the “group think” (in a good sense) is often on the moral mark—I do have serious doubts about democratic respect for minority rights, and the ability of experts to persuade people towards their “educated” guesses on policy. Chomsky has mentioned public opinion polls over a longer time frame (Polls, “Free Markets” & Vietnam) as being more “credible” than short term opinion shifts. It is with this in mind, that I think something like a “slow to change” document like the Constitution, might be a better idea than “real time, go were the wind flows, absolute direct democracy.” And unless there is something like the unfair-by-merit: one person one dollar, there may be monetary swaying of politics, regardless of the implementation of the voting process. The word(s) “cluster-f*ck” comes to mind when I imagine a fully participatory economy and polity. Change? Yes, but a modicum of hesitancy, on the way to the “revolution” please. I'm of the persuasion that we can never start from scratch— and that our ideals will always evolve—and hence we must continually salvage the floating shipwreck we're in.

In Bill Moyers' recent documentary on how dominant U.S. media disseminated the Bush administration's Iraq WMD lies he shows a clip of Oprah browbeating and shutting up a black (if I recall correctly but could be wrong) female audience member who arose to question a "conservative" (war-mongering) Oprah guest's  mendacious call for attacking Iraq.  It was late 2002 or early 2003 - a critical time.  I can't remember who the white male chickenhawk guest was but it may have been Kenneth Pollack. It's a remarkable scene and exactly what I would have expected from O.  Oprah and Obama (good Chicago friends) maybe be technically black and Democratic and therefore automatically assumed to be progressive by many guilty white liberals, but they are really (figuratively speaking of course) part of the same race of colonizing corporate extra-terrestials that John Carpenter portrayed in his campy, brilliant and classic (and must-see) Left science fiction movie "They Live."  

Great essay on Oprah!!! I always knew there was something about that woman that didn't sit right with me. Now I know why...

On July 4th as a "hollow, hypocritical mockery," please see Frederick Douglass's remarkable 1852 address "What to the Slave. is the Fourth of July?" I agree on Olbermann's commentary but would add accusations regarding Iraqi casualties (700, 000 deaths and perhaps higher) and of course the role of the Democrats and Congress in the invasion of Iraq...but I guess I sound like a broken record on the limits of acceptable debate. The notion of mentioning Clinton and King in the same favorable sentence is revolting of course.  On Oprah, see my essay "The Full Blown Oprah Effect: Reflections on Class, Color and New Age Racism." 

Friends:

The last 900 words of this commentary are quite good (i.e., from the very first "I accuse" onward).

"Bush, Cheney should resign," Keith Olbermann, Countdown (MSNBC), July 3, 2007

Just to add one note of my own: An even better imperative than the John Wayne bit would be to call for our disobedience towards the regime, while calling for the arrest of its principals.

 

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

 

without any comments, simply because i didn't feel like burning with fury today. But someone (a Canadian, my friend's boyfriend) made a comment on facebook to the effect of "giving it up to the land of the free and the home of the brave today". I, of course, couldn't resist and took the bait. I immediately pointed out to him that there was nothing free or brave to celebrate about this day, and that Americans should take the time to reflect on their country's blood-soaked history. Below is the message he sent to my inbox (in italics), and below that is my reply:

Hello Asil, thanks for writing back. America is a such a fascinating idea, it's complicated and heavy. It's a big picture place with big picture ideas, and is run by human beings who make the same mistakes there that they do in every other country all over the world. I think they're more far reaching and have larger repercussion because of the largeness of the nation. America is a powerful idea, one that I happen to believe, any of her citizens can take on. Look at the poor who have become beacons of hope to the world; Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King, Oprah Winfrey, Bob Dylan, Tupac, Rosa Parks, look at the ideas, look at the art, look at the schools.

I agree with you, the foreign policy is frustrating and hurting many people right now, but I think that the minute we resign ourselves to accepting that as “the American way”, we forget about the power of change, about the power of democracy, and about the power of hope. I hope that America can be a better country. I hope that Canada can be as well, and I hope that every other country can continually learn how to be a better player in the international community, for humanity, and for our world.

July 4th is a rebellious day. It says that we're not listening to the king anymore. We know we can be better, if we want to be, if we try. Hope is the first step to making things better, which is why today, in hope, I celebrate the good. 

My reply:

I really hope that you don't believe the things that you just wrote. The people who run this "big, complicated" country, who run the system do not simply make mistakes. I don't call a million dead in an imperialist, illegitimate, mass-murderous oil invasion in Iraq a mistake, not to mention the 10 years of bombings and sanctions in Iraq that resulted in 1.5 million dead (this was announced to the American public as "worth the price" by Madeline Albright, secretary of state to Bill Clinton- one of those poor people u so admire who rose to power in order to inflict pain and suffering during his administration on other poor people in Sudan, Kosovo and Iraq), among many other atrocities in the Muslim world and throughout the entire Third world. I don't call that a mistake, I call it premeditated murder and mayhem on a massive, blatant, unprecedented scale.

The only "beacons of hope" who deserve my respect on that list are Martin Luther King who, in his time, recognized the evil that was America and called it the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today", Tupac (who was too outspoken for his own good, and never lost an opportunity to lay the blame for the impoverishment of his community where it belongs- on the shoulders of a government that deliberately introduced cocaine into the African-American community, destroyed its truly militant leaders such as the black panthers and Malcolm X, and now incarcerates more blacks and Latinos than any other group in the country), and Rosa Parks. As for Oprah Winfrey, I'm ambivalent. She likes to believe that she really affects change in her community but she's careful not to probe too deeply into the historical problems of that community. And anyways, black people are just as capable of becoming co-opted by this system. Look at war criminals: Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell.

As for ideas, art and school. If America's idea of democracy is to throw billions of dollars a day to wage a criminal war instead of providing free health care for its people - half of them living under the poverty line, then i'll pass. Furthermore, if America is the poster child for democracy, why is it mounting a slanderous campaign against Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected leader of Venezulea (who at one point it attempted to depose), and who's actually affecting real positive change in his country and throughout Latin America? Why did it lead the free world, espousing democracy, ad nauseum, in boycotting the only democratically elected government in the Middle East, Hamas (Palestine)? Canada is also complicit in this criminal move. In fact, America has a history of subverting democracy in countries around the world, when democracy means that a country wants to control its own natural resources, and not have it be in the hands of American corporations, and de facto, the american government.

I won't even start on the education/indoctrination system of the United States, which still teaches that Christopher Columbus was a visionary, instead of what he truly was- a genocidal, mass murderous colonial agent who set off a 400 year extermination of the the only true inhabitants of the Americas, a Holocaust from which their descendants across Latin America, and especially in "democratic" and rich countires like the U.S and Canada are suffering.

As for art, the only truly original American artform that I can think of is Jazz- which again belongs to the African-Americans and which was borrowed from slaves from the African continent.

Their foreign policy is not just frustrating. And it is wrong to compare America with the other nations of the (non-Western) world. Because I don't see other nations causing even one-tenth of the mayhem that America has caused in the world, and endagering global peace and security by running roughshod over other people's soverienty and international laws. Unless u mean, Israel.

The power of change, the power of democracy has been demonstrated by Third World people who have fought and are bravely fighting against oppression, showing that there is an alternative, like Venezuela, Cuba, South Africa, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, etc....

July 4th is a hollow, hypocritical mockery (for that matter, so is Canada Day) celebrating a country and a system of government that has always ruled through force, exploitation, falsehoods and isolating its own people from their own history. It is an insult to all the people of the world who have suffered at the hands of the Empire and continue to suffer...

 

Kelvin:

Great to see you. -- Where have you been hanging around?

There is no doubt about it: Elites (i.e., the positions occupied by people within hierarchical societies, not inherent characteristics of the people described as such) regard the rest of us like livestock, to be cattle-prodded whenever a particular vote is desired for one party or another, or to squander money in the retail and housing sectors.  Now expanded to speculation via retirement plans and "capital appreciation" pyramids.

As for the felling of Injuns, the seizure of their territory, and the reliance on war and holy terror to carry it out, these enterprises are as American as apple pie.  And ought to be celebrated every Fourth of July.  Right out in the open. -- Why be shy about it?

Not sure what the term 'bourgeois' means, and am leery of using it (because I've known people who'd dismiss anything they don't like as "bourgeois").  But this aside, let's agree that the Declaration of Independence was the product of some of the aristocrats and businessmen of the day, and drafted, lest we forget, in the middle of the largest and longest-running imperial turf-war then known to the world, between France, England, and Spain, but with lots of sideshows, one of which coalesced around some Atlantic coast gents who sided with France for strategic reasons, and made a spectacle of asserting their rights 231 years ago.

The document in question certainly contains its howlers; also a lot of irrelevant minutia.

But I doubt whether any rebellious person or revolutionary movement can surpass the basic principle that a government derives its "just powers from the consent of the governed," and that when a government becomes "destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...."

The point is that these are principles that we ought to believe and uphold in practice, rather than merely mouth them.  

In a letter nearly 50 years later to inform some people in Washington D.C. that he was too old to make the trip to attend Fourth of July celebrations, Jefferson wrote (Letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826):           

May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal to arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.  That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.  All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.  The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.  These are grounds of hope for others.

Personally, I think we have very few grounds for hope where the United States is concerned.  It plagues the planet with waste and war on a scale never known to history.  But it's so big and complex, and has cut-in so many people on this way of life (a.k.a. "globalization"), that I cannot imagine how the United States can ever be reformed short of causing massive crises, and dragging the rest of the planet with it.  

It's already very late, in other words.  And we'd better start paying close attention to the voices of the Jeremiahs. 

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

Contrary to the first commenter's suggestion of ignorance regarding The Federalist Papers and the democracy-republic conflict, I have researched and written about those topics at some length: Paul Street, “By All Means, Study the Founders: Notes From the Democratic Left,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies [volume 24, no.4, October-December 2003]: 281-302.  See  the ninth issue of my semi-weekly Empire and Inequality Report, titled "What is a Democracy?" and an earlier piece titled "A Dark Independence Day for American Historians"  for attempts to relate the Left critique of the Founders and their American Revolution (and Thermidorian Constitution) to current events.  

I believe that Jefferson (late in life perhaps) once said that sincere belief in popular governance meant following majority decisions even if such decisions were mistaken; he therefore rejected (at least in theory, on some writing paper) the right of the "elite" to correct the citizenry.

In any event the bloody colonial Iraq "war" (imperial invasion) does not speak very well to the supposed superior intelligence of the "representative" elites that Hamilton et al. felt to be excluisively qualified to lead the U.S. at home and abroad. It is rejected by most of the citizenry and just continues on nonetheless. Millions site mute waiting for mendacious mush-mouthed masters like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to sweep in and supposedly make it all okay in a year and a half, by which time Iraqi deaths will hit, what, a million, and US GI boy count will have reached, what 5000? More? And this is not factoring in terrorist attacks incited by the illegal invasion.... 

 

Which of the "Federalist Papers" did you have in mind? 

How about from among the "Anti-Federalist Papers"?

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

Surely you know the country was founded as a republic not a democracy.  This was so there would be reasonable checks on majority rule.  Leftists like to believe in "the people" (majority rule) but the people are often foolish and require more intelligent, educated and superior representatives to provide reasonable checks on their ignorance and fickleness. You claim to be a historian; why don't take a look at the Federalist Papers?