Something is happening that raises my spirits: ultra-respectable liberal commentators — folks no one can reasonably dismiss as wild-eyed radicals (such as Elizabeth Drew, whom I wrote about on July 5th) — are standing up and speaking truth to power in a forthright fashion that knocks me off my feet.
Latest case in point is Tony Judt’s essay “The New World Order” in the July 14th \New York Review of Books\. Judt chooses four publications to focus his observations: David Rieff’s latest book about humanitarian interventions and their blowback; the report of the UN Secretary-General’s “High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change,” which includes such luminaries as four prime ministers and General Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President Bush the first; Amnesty International’s report on Guant?mo and other US human rights transgressions; and a sober book on American militarism by Andrew Bacevich, a conservative Catholic West Point grad and Vietnam vet who heads the international relations program at Boston University. The extremity of our political polarization is such that no one is entirely immune from attempts to discredit critics, but it will be hard to smear these folks with anything that sticks.
Please make time to read this essay. It makes so many important points, I find it almost impossible to resist quoting the entire thing. Please pass the link on to anyone you know who is beginning to understand that things are not right in our government, beginning to question the conventional wisdom. Judt’s concise and elegant recitation of the relevant travesties will supercharge their questions with a double dose of reality.
To me, the most chilling thing is the clear way Judt outlines the shameful suicide of our core institutions. Here he is on the press:
“Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this grim story is the undisguised contempt with which the Bush administration responds to criticism. In part this is because criticism itself has become so uncommon. With rare exceptions — notably the admirable Seymour Hersh in \The New Yorker\ — the American press has signally failed to understand, much less confront, the threat posed by this administration. Bullied into acquiescence, newspapers and television in the US have allowed the executive power to ignore the law and abuse human rights free of scrutiny or challenge. Far from defying an over-mighty government, investigative journalists were actively complicit before the Iraq war in spreading reports of weapons of mass destruction. Pundits and commentators bayed for war and sneered — as they continue to sneer — at foreign critics or dissenting allies. Amnesty International and other foreign human rights groups are now doing the work of domestic media grown supine and subservient.”
And on Congress:
“Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially — brutally, contemptuously, illegally — abroad while preserving republican values at home. For it is a mistake to suppose that institutions alone will save a republic from the abuses of power to which empire inevitably leads. It is not institutions that make or break republics, it is men. And in the United States today, the men (and women) of the country’s political class have failed. Congress appears helpless to impede the concentration of power in the executive branch; indeed, with few exceptions it has contributed actively and even enthusiastically to the process.”
It is deeply disappointing to contemplate the way we have betrayed the democratic values the United States once symbolized:
“At the outer edges of the US imperium, in Bratislava or Tiflis, the dream of republican America still lives on, like the fading light from a distant, dying star. But even there the shadows of doubt are growing. Amnesty International cites several cases of detainees who ‘just could not believe Americans could act this way.’ Those are exactly the words said to me by an Albanian friend in Macedonia — and Macedonian Albanians have good reason to count themselves among this country’s best friends and unconditional admirers. In Madrid a very senior and rather conservative Spanish diplomat recently put it thus:
“‘We grew up under Franco with a dream of America. That dream encouraged us to imagine and later to build a different, better Spain. All dreams must fade — but not all dreams must become nightmares. We Spanish know a little about political nightmares. What is happening to America? How do you explain Guant?mo?’
“The American people have a touching faith in the invulnerability of their republic. It would not occur to most of them even to contemplate the possibility that their country might fall into the hands of a meretricious oligarchy; that, as Andrew Bacevich puts it, their political ‘system is fundamentally corrupt and functions in ways inconsistent with the spirit of genuine democracy.’ But the twentieth century has taught most other peoples in the world to be less cocksure. And when foreigners look across the oceans at the US today, what they see is far from reassuring.
“For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national ‘values’; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not ‘democracy.'”
The forms of democracy are still available to us, vessels ready to receive our hearts and hopes and wisdom before it is too late. I am so grateful that people like Elizabeth Drew and Tony Judt are speaking out. If freedom is to ring, our voices are the only bells that count.
This Bob Marley-Peter Tosh tune is Amnesty International’s anthem. Join me in a chorus now:
Get Up, Stand Up, stand up for your right
Get Up, Stand Up, don’t give up the fight
Preacher man don’t tell me heaven is under the earth
I know you don’t know what life is really worth
Is not all that glitters in gold and
Half the story has never been told
So now you see the light, say
Stand up for your right. Come on
Get Up, Stand Up, stand up for your right
Get Up, Stand Up, don’t give up the fight