Defensive Voting?

Tony Soprano for President?

Chances are, if we have friends who consistently lie to us, we tend to wall off that relationship, finding minimal space for remnants of friendship that won't lead to danger or disappointment. A friend who steals things from us is soon to be disinvited from visiting, and one who openly commits violence against others is soon apt to be held at arm's distance lest their gaze and physicality be turned to us. We like to surround ourselves with people who make us laugh, who share the bounties of open hearts or engaged minds. We respect people who make achievement seem easy, and are glad for useful advice that is the fruit of sagely earned or learned wisdom and experience.

Isn't it amazing that so many people cast aside these logical behaviors when deciding whom to listen to in the public square? How we tell ourselves that it's okay to put time-honored strategies for self-preservation out of our heads? That we must submit to betraying our every instinct to choose not what we want but what we dislike less? And truthfully this is only half the story. For a great many people, a political system based on poisonous exploitation and oppression transforms the values that we would recognize as normal, empathetic and humane into a corrupt sociopathology dominated by heartlessness, selfishness, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and rationalization.

Last year at the White House correspondents' Association dinner, President Obama joked about teen idols the Jonas Brothers: "Sasha and Malia are huge fans but, boys, don't be getting any ideas. I have two words for you: predator drones." A friend pointed me to this cartoon from vastleft.com:



This refers to a story mentioned on the OpEd Page of the NY Times about a community meeting in Pakistan: "During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.... When it was my turn to speak, I mentioned the official American position: that these were precision strikes and no innocent civilian had been killed in 15 months. My comment was met with snorts of derision. ...At the end of the day, Tariq stepped forward. He volunteered to gather proof if it would help to protect his family from future harm. ... [But on] Monday, he was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile."

Obama's joke isn't so funny now, is it? I voted for him: I advocated voting for him, and I thought I was keeping my eyes open. And sadly, there was never any chance that the 2008 election would lead to a less horrible moral conundrum than the one it lead to. It is probable that the election of John McCain and Sarah Palin would have been even worse. Not that it mattered so much to Tariq.

Consider Herman Cain, the right-wing Republican businessman with the unlikely honor of being somewhere near the top of the heap of the Republican presidential primary. It's been revealed that he was repeatedly accused of sexual harassment, that is, of being a sexual predator using his power as a rich businessman to make life uncomfortable for women working under him. While all the facts of this story have not yet been aired, the evidence strongly suggests not the story of a philandering politician consensually consorting with someone randomly extracurricular to the embarrassment of his spouse, but a man engaged in non-consensual harassment of his employees. Cheating on your spouse is not against the law. But sexual harassment is. And yet a portion of the Republican electorate is not shunning Cain like normal people would do, but actually rallying around him.

Or there's the Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, also running in the primary. A couple months ago he accused his fellow candidates of being heartless for his policy of offering some social benefits to the children of undocumented immigrants. "If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they've been brought there by no fault of their own, I don't think you have a heart." This small modicum of human decency was too much for the Republican electorate, and Perry was forced to apologize. "I was probably a bit over-passionate by using that word and it was inappropriate."

There's pseudo-intellectual Newt Gingrich who, as we've discussed before, has twice ditched ailing wives for healthier mistresses and told outrageous racist lies about Obama. There's Michele Bachmann who has told nothing but fantastic lies in her entire political career and makes government money off the discredited fake-therapy of trying to convert unhappy gay men to heterosexuality. There's Rick Santorum and his unhealthy obsession that the small percentage of gay people in society are at the cause of everything "wrong" with it. And there's poor pathetic Mitt Romney who Republicans are desperate to avoid voting for because even they can see his utter moral emptiness and total vacuity of principle.

These are people I would not invite across the threshold of my front door. Why are we in the position of thinking our only choice is to vote for one of them? Even the ones we convince ourselves are the "good guys" are narcissistic sociopaths. Earlier this year I wrote a defense of lesser-evil voting. I wrestle with this constantly. At this moment I still imagine myself voting for Obama again next year...if only because I fear how much more damage the Republicans could do to civil rights laws. This, knowing that his second term is as likely to be as full of betrayals and disappointments, and of lost children named Tariq, as his first was. Knowing it was a mistake to trust him to be different than his predecessors at the helm of the American state.

But it's why I feel such hope in #OWS: finally here is a flicker that it doesn't have to be that way. Politics isn't all about elections, and elections don't always have to be the way they are today. What if people stopped being willing to vote for sociopaths? Or for would-be child murderers or aspiring rapists? Or valued smart people instead of bigoted morons and village idiots? Or together organized and took for ourselves what is rightfully, morally, our own. The elections — the choice between evil and more evil — become less important, when we create alternatives, when we're actively engaged in changing the fundamental problems and social relations not just hoping they'll get better in time.

Because we really are all in this together. We don't have to pretend Democrats or Republicans represent us, because they obviously don't. We can find our own voice.

We know how a fairytale marriage to Kim Kardashian ends. We know what happens when you place your trust in Tony Soprano. So how come here, back in the real world, we don't know how to change the channel?

Graveyard of Empires: Time to Get Out of Afghanistan

Sunday the independent Wikileaks site released tens of thousands of classified American documents from its war in Afghanistan, dating from the early years of the war under President Bush through the first year of the war under President Obama. The documents were released in advance to three major news organizations, including the New York Times, which published some of them along with an analysis on Monday. The leaked documents show a war failing to meet the stated objectives of its masters. They show a history of attacks on civilians in Afghanistan and in the border regions of Pakistan, and document an insurgency strengthened in response to these attacks. They also show the collusion of Pakistan's secret police with the Taliban, despite the stated U.S. alliance with the governments of Pakistan, both with the military dictatorship of Musharraf favored by President Bush and the civilian government that followed favored by Mr. Obama.

Also on Monday, news of an alleged attack, not yet confirmed by the American military, in which a NATO attack in southern Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of over 50 civilians, including at least half women and children.

The United States attacked Afghanistan in retribution for the 9/11 attacks: Al Qaeda was based there, guests of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the regime so-called The Taliban that had unified the country in 1996 after smashing the rule of the warlords. A few years earlier those mujahedeen warlords, financed and aided by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Iran, had defeated the pro-Communist government that had ruled since 1978; that government was backed by Soviet troops for a decade.

In 2001 the U.S. smashed the Taliban government, and greatly reduced Al Qaeda's presence in the region. Though it assassinated, killed in battle, or captured much of Al Qaeda's leadership, it failed to capture -- or prove that it had killed -- the top two Al Qaeda leaders including Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban government was dispersed and replaced with a corrupt puppet regime under Hamid Karzai that controls only a fraction of Afghan geography and relies heavily on so-called "Coalition" military forces (aka U.S. and tiny contingents of allies) and factions of the Mujahedeen warlords to keep a fading semblance of order in the country. Claiming he would finish the task set aside by George Bush when he decided to attack Iraq instead, Obama was elected pledging to deepen the war in Afghanistan by refocusing on the nation-building and terrorist-elimination that was clearly floundering two years ago. But the war has continued to flounder, despite changes in tactical facades, and support for the Taliban insurgency has risen along with the Afghan civilian casualties. Karzai has been revealed to be embarrassingly corrupt and unpopular. Obama has been further embarrassed by the spectacle of the crazy head of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, calling for an unwinnable war to end.

The above Soviet solidarity poster from the 1980s lauds the secular Afghan state it was then engaged in propping up. When Afghan Communists seized power in the late 1970s, they changed the national flag to a red banner and instituted land reforms and women's equality laws that provoked an insurgency. The first of several coups d'etat to rock the Communist government changed that red flag to the modified Afghan tricolor shown in the poster. (Today's flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Karzai's government, is the same tricolor with a different crest.)

The video below is a fascinating bit of documentary evidence filmed toward the end of the Soviet occupation. The secular bureaucrats interviewed are fascinating to me: their commitment to their progressive revolution is clearly expressed. But they seem somehow isolated from the country rising up around them, and the windswept desolation around them seems more than a little metaphorical.



The Soviets withdrew as the Soviet Union itself was collapsing upon itself. The war that the Soviets were unable to win proved some kind of last straw. No matter how much the Afghan Communists and the Soviets tried to build some kind of national unity compromise in Afghanistan, reaching out to conservative and tribal elements, the military forces of Islamic insurgents aided and financed by the CIA and Saudi Arabia were closing their grip.

Like the domino theory in reverse, the Soviet "empire" collapsed, with only a few world holdouts against the restoration of market capitalism. These were countries like Cuba and Vietnam who had fought their way to their versions of socialism through the crucible of conflict with the United States.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many opponents of the war in Vietnam argued that not only should the U.S. get out of the war and bring its troops home, but that the Vietnamese Communists deserved to win; deserved to transform their country. Not only was the U.S. war inflicted on the Vietnamese people immoral, but the cause of America's enemy was just in and of itself.

And here's a problem for many progressives today. No matter how unjust the American occupation with all its civilian casualties seem to be, many argue there is that matter of Al Qaeda and the brutally repressive Islamic fundamentalist Taliban. Here's the sad truth: the seeds of disaster that is today's Afghanistan were sowed by British colonialism in the 19th century. They have been nourished by thirty years of foreign intervention in thirty years of civil war. They've been nourished by India and Pakistan using Afghanistan as a covert battlefield for the unfinished wars between them. They've been nourished by conservative Islamic fundamentalist evangelists. None of these outside forces -- British, Russians, Americans, Saudis, Indians, Pakistanis, or Arab Salafists -- can fix the broken nation they've created. The Afghan people must have self-determination, even if it means a government that seems backward and repressive by outside standards. It can only be Afghan people themselves who liberate their country from fundamentalism, from tribalism, from poverty, from dependence on the drug trade. An earlier generation of Afghan secularists sought military solutions to advance their cause, to ultimately tragic effect. But perhaps there is a new generation of Afghans who will find a way to temper any resurgent Taliban government from repeating its tragic excesses.

This month an analyst for the American Enterprise Institute thinktank made this statement: "We don't need more troops, we need more time to let our strategy work," he said. "Afghan troops and security forces are not ready to take over. A premature withdrawal would be disastrous. President Obama should renounce the July 2011 withdrawal date." But American troops have been at it for nine years, longer than any other war in U.S. history. Things will not get "better" in a few more months or a few more years. Things will only get worse.

Almost 3,000 innocent American civilians died in an unprovoked attack on 9/11. If, as reported above, yesterday 50 innocent Afghan civilians died in an unprovoked American attack, and the week before that a handful died in a predator attack, and the month before that a few more were killed, and as revealed by Wikileaks many many more in the years before that, how many of these attacks add up to 3,000? Is the goal of the U.S. to equal Al Qaeda in its savagery against innocent civilians? The U.S. has already proved its brutality with the entire Iraq adventure. Setting aside for our argument about the Afghan conflict the unknown thousands (millions?) of Iraqis who have lost their lives since 2003, how many Afghan (and Pakistani) civilians must pay the price for 9/11? And if Americans care only about American lives and not the lives of other human beings, how many American soldiers must be sacrificed to avenge those 3,000 civilians? How deeply must the American economy be ruined by unlimited military spending to make up for the crushed steel of 9/11?

What the Wikileaks documents represent is the handwriting on the wall. Osama bin Laden on the loose or not, the U.S. must get out of Afghanistan. It must end a war and occupation that is only prolonging human misery, not ending it. Barack Obama was elected in part because of his pledge to end the Iraqi occupation, even if only gradually. He has attempted to assuage his critics with vague mutterings about beginning to draw down U.S. presence in Afghanistan next year, at the same time as other members of his government like Hillary Clinton talk about needing years more to achieve American goals. But Obama is wrong: American troops need to come home now, just like in Iraq. Here is the ugly truth: resurgent Taliban rule cannot be worse than what is happening now, because the U.S. is already party to terrorism against the Afghan people. There is no Afghan N.L.F. to transform social relations in Afghanistan, but an optimistic reading of history shows that human beings have a great ability to liberate themselves when left to their own devices. Freedom will come to the common people of Afghanistan, but it will never arrive in crates of guns from abroad.

U.S. Out of Afghanistan Now!

George Bush, J'Accuse

Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan, was assassinated today. A complex figure, she was a populist hero in a culture where most heroes are men. She was an aristocrat, a child of Pakistan's history, and a leader of debatable integrity. But she was undeniably courageous, and, seizing control of the wheels of history, she returned to her country from exile at a key moment to provoke George Bush's pet dictator Musharraf in a time of vulnerability.

While she was hardly an anti-imperialist, it's increasingly clear that Pakistan's dictatorship--fully supported by the Bush regime--is among the puppet masters of so-called Islamic terrorism in the region. The complicated conflict in Afghanistan is perpetuated by the Pakistani military, and nurtured by the corruption of Bush.

Thus while Bhutto and Bush toyed with alliance, her triumphant return to Pakistan and its cinematic welcome parade (which also ended in violent tragedy) pushed her to a position of confrontation with Musharraf and Bush. Her death now at the hands of unknown assassins must be laid at the feet of Musharraf and Bush and their cold alliance of power and brutality.

The world has lost a great woman. J'accuse George Bush: you did this.

Dictatorship's biggest fan...

...is apparently George Bush. In a story I cannot believe is not the lead of every news program and paper in the country, George Bush told ABC News, today, three weeks into emergency rule--read, martial law--in Pakistan, that Pakistani dictator Musharraf, "hasn't crossed the line" and "truly is somebody who believes in democracy."

Is the world gone mad? Dictator General Musharraf has just thrown his country's Supreme Court in jail! His forces have arrested thousands... merely for opposing him. This is democracy? President Bush must be arrested and charged with treason immediately. Our democracy is in mortal peril.