In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and with it Warsaw Pact and eventually the Soviet Union. It caught almost everyone in the West by surprise. The CIA didn't have a clue--in part because of Robert Gates, who had dutifully politicized the intelligence throughout the 1980s. But he was just a cog in a much larger machine. More fundamentally, it happend because the CIA had been ambushed by neocons in 1976, with the help of then-CIA director George Herbert Walker Bush, producing the infamous "Team B" report, which falsely imagined a massive Soviet arms build-up. When Reagan was elected in 1980, this became the foundation of US military policy and intelligence analysis--but it was completely and utterly wrong. The Soviet Union was declining even as the Team B report was being written, and a case can be made that the aggressive posture the US assumed under its misguidance actually prolonged the Cold War by strengthening the hands of Soviet hardliners.
A succinct account of this, "Team B: The trillion-dollar experiment" by Anne Hessing Cahn, was published in the April 1993 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Cahn published a book-length account five years later, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA. I mention this for three reasons. First, because the neocon's were essentially spinning a fantasy out of whole cloth, openly disdaining facts:
Team B accused the CIA of consistently underestimating the "intensity, scope, and implicit threat" posed by the Soviet Union by relying on technical or "hard" data rather than "contemplat[ing] Soviet strategic objectives in terms of the Soviet conception of 'strategy' as well as in light of Soviet history, the structure of Soviet society, and the pronouncements of Soviet leaders."
This was directly parallel to how the neocons spun 9/11, not as a lucky shot by a marginal group of criminal terrorists who got lucky in large part due to Bush Jr.'s ineptitude and knee-jerk antipathy to anything associated with Bill Clinton, but as a signal of a new existential threat to the security of America.
Second, just as the "Team B" neocon fantasy deeply exacerbated what was actually an increasingly manageable threat, so, too, the "Great War on Terror" neocon fantasy did exactly the same thing with Al Qaeda.
Third, just as the "Team B" neocon fantasy collapsed roughly a decade later with a completely unexpected and unforseen wave of democratic revolution from below, something remarkably similar is happening in the Arab world today. The two cycles of historical folly differ in many respects that should not be overlooked or forced into pre-conceived forms to make for a neater narrative/theory. The similarities that do exist are striking enough on their own not to need any gussying up.
But my point here is not to delve deep into comparative narrative. Rather, I want to use it as a backdrop for better grasping what is unfolding right before us in Egypt today....
In the past fifty years, the Civil Rights movement has changed America more than any other social movement. The efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King and others profoundly altered America's treatment of its minorities, in a way which represents one of its most powerful domestic accomplishments over the past century.
Yet one aspect of the Civil Rights movement has always been neglected in the conventional history of the movement. This was its connection to the Cold War. For America to win the Cold War, Civil Rights was a necessity. Continuing domestic discrimination against non-white minorities would make it impossible to win over the newly-free Third World.
Brad DeLong writes of how our perception of history has changed in the wake of the Great Recession. We used to pity our grandfathers, who lacked both the knowledge and the compassion to fight the Great Depression effectively; now we see ourselves repeating all the old mistakes. I share his sentiments.
But watching the failure of policy over the past three years, I find myself believing, more and more, that this failure has deep roots - that we were in some sense doomed to go through this. Specifically, I now suspect that the kind of moderate economic policy regime Brad and I both support - a regime that by and large lets markets work, but in which the government is ready both to rein in excesses and fight slumps - is inherently unstable. It's something that can last for a generation or so, but not much longer.
By "unstable" I don't just mean Minsky-type financial instability, although that's part of it. Equally crucial are the regime's intellectual and political instability.
I was already mulling over related thoughts, and I've been mulling more intently ever since. In one sense, Daniel's diary title is quite apt. What we're seeing now is a wholesale attack on the welfare state, which in America means the New Deal, and the fact that it can be attacked so ferociously, and perhaps be destroyed is most certainly a failure of sorts, even if it does manage to survive in some form. But Krugman's focus was actually more narrow, it was on the reformist aftermath of the New Deal. In writing about " the regime's intellectual and political instability", he began with "Paul Samuelson back in 1948, when he published the first edition of his classic textbook." To put it bluntly, Krugman was writing about the Cold War era and its aftermath. The fact that the New Deal legacy was severly distorted, if not ultimately undermined by the Cold War looms behind Krugman's diary like the ghost of Hamlet's father.
This is the third part of a series on Communism in Western Europe; this section focuses on Italy in particular. The previous parts can be found here.
The Italian Communist Party (PCI) formed in 1921, as a break-away faction of the socialist party. In many respects, its early years were similar to those of the PCF. Like the French Communists, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) fared poorly in national elections, winning less than five percent of the popular vote. Its time to grow, moreover, was cut short by Benito Mussolini's dictatorship; he outlawed the party in 1926.
In another parallel to their French colleagues, the Italian Communists (PCI) fought fiercely against the Nazis during WWII and won major acclaim for their efforts. After the war, the PCI took part in the new government, playing a major role in writing the new Italian constitution. As in France, however, America's Marshall Plan curbed their influence; to gain access to U.S. aid, the Italian government kicked out the Communists. They would never again hold power in Italy.
This is the second part of a series on Communism in Western Europe; this section focuses on France in particular. The last part can be found here.
In France, the Communist Party was founded in 1920 by revolting members of its socialist party, then called the French Section of the Workers' International (Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière, SFIO). Their new party initially did fairly poorly, only one of the numerous parties out there. In 1928, for instance, the Communists (PCF) won 11.26% of the vote.
Nevertheless, by 1936 - the depths of the Great Depression - the Communists (PCF) were making gains. Then came WWII - the best thing that ever happened to the PCF. Out of all the parties in occupied France, the Communists fought the Nazis hardest and suffered the most for it. They earned the nickname le parti des 75 000 fusillés - the party of the 75,000 executed people - and immense popularity.
This is the first part of a series on western communism. The second part can be found here.
A mentor once told me not to study communism, because it was a dead system, and studying something dead is worthless.
In defiance of this sensible advice, I will be presenting two dead communist movements: the communists in Italy and the communists in France.
Most Americans have never heard about these two parties. For good reason: France and Italy were staunch allies of the United States in the Cold War; it does not seem as if they were remotely communist.
But, for decades, the communists in Italy and France commanded millions of votes and a powerful political machine. Their strength remains a fascinating, little-noticed part of history.
Here are how the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français: PCF) and the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) performed:
There are several patterns here that apply to both parties, and several patterns unique to each country. (Note: The French line after 1956 indicates Communist performance in the first round of legislative elections, whereas the Italian line indicates Communist performance in elections to the Italian Chamber of Deputies. France has a two-round election system; Italy has two chambers in its Parliament. All statistics cited afterwards relate to these specific criteria.)
I will be exploring French patterns in the next post.
When all the talk is said and done, one thing remains perfectly clear: Obama may have changed the name of the war on terrorism, but he hasn't changed anything else. It's still the fundamental framework for US foreign policy, and because it is, it's important for us to understand just how utterly foolish and self-destructive that framework is. Not to mention how that framework is related to the elite plan to destroy America's middle class, and return us to the Dark Ages, when human life for all but the elite was indeed, "nasty, brutish, and short".
Self & Other
To do so, I'd like to start by taking not one, but two steps back to take in the big picture. One of the widespread themes of 20th Century social science is that the self is constituted or created in tandem with the not-self, or the other. In psychology, Freud gave us the Oedipal conflict and Jung gave us the shadow, and every level of analysis up from their-social psychology, small group psychology, small group sociology, mass sociology, cultural anthropology, you name it, has developed its own versions, its own ways of describing and/or analyzing this phenomena. At every level of analysis, the social scientists tell us some version of the same truth: we are who we are at least partially by virtue of who we are not-and this is a process that will magnify small differences or even manufacture them if real ones cannot be found. Because we define ourselves primarily in contrast to others close at hand, we also often blind ourselves to how much we have in common, as well.
So that's the picture two steps back. What does that mean for us? It means we need to look at ourselves as a nation, and realize that the need for self-definition creates the need for others who are "other".
Torture is neither new nor peripheral to American foreign policy, historian Alfred McCoy reminds us.
In 1972, fledgling historian Alfred McCoy published one of the most shocking exposés of an exposé-filled decade, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which documented decades of cooperative relationships between the CIA and drug dealers, beginning with deals that allowed the almost-dead heroin trade to revive after WWII, and culminating in the role of the CIA in the drug trade surrounding the Vietnam War, which lead to the addiction of tens of thousands of US troops. The CIA tried-and failed-to have the book suppressed. A revised, updated and expanded version, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade was published in 2003.
One thing, at least, could be said in the CIA's defense: McCoy never claimed that the CIA set out to promote the global drug trade. It was simply a byproduct of how it chose to "fight Communism." But this could not be said about his subsequent investigation into the CIA's role in developing torture techniques, the subject of his 2006 book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror . The CIA's development of novel torture techniques was intentional, deliberate, and took place over more than a decade at enormous cost, after which its methods were shared with authoritarian allies around the world.
McCoy previewed his findings in a 2004 article for TomDispatch, "The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib", an excerpt of which I'll present on the flip. It's safe to say that no critic has thought harder and studied more intently the hidden role and hidden costs of torture in modern American history.
Last Sunday, TomDispatch published a new article by McCoy, "Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze: America's Political Paralysis Over Torture" that throws a chilling historical light on Obama's ongoing efforts to magically make torture disappear. Real change, of course, would mean putting an end to this nearly 60-year history of US involvement in modern torture. Instead, McCoy explains how Obama is simply preparing us for more of the same sordid history.
I have often wondered why America is more right-wing than some other wealthy nations. In particular, among the original G7 nations, Canada, France and Germany have all operated decisively to America's left over the past three decades. America's ideological status compared to Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom is much more debatable.
The question is only relevant as a recent historic development, too. Until Nixon took office, it is possible that America was the most consistently progressive nation on Earth for its entire history. Sure, we were far from perfect, but we were less imperialist than European nations, we were a republic far earlier, we were a relative haven of religious freedom, our social safety net was comparable or superior to just about all other wealthy nations, we were moving toward universal suffrage quite quickly, the death penalty was illegal, we were at the forefront of the early environmental movement, we founded the U.N., and we were, by far, the number one destination of people around the world who were seeking freedom and opportunity.
What happened over the last forty years? In most of the categories I listed above, we have now fallen behind other nations. How did our rate of progressive development slow to a relative crawl compared to many other wealthy nations? I can think of three reasons, one of which can be done away with, possibly permanently, if Obama wins the Presidential campaign. I explain in the extended entry.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (cont) Wallace Stevens4
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
This is my second installment in this series, exploring six different ways of looking at John McCain's recent meddling in the Georgian/Russian conflict-as well as their affairs leading up to it. For reference, all six ways are presented in Part 1.
This part deals with The Republican's "October Surprise". Named for a long-suspected, and now virtually certain clandestine plot by the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign to prevent the release of American hostages by Iran prior to the 1980 election, thus ensuring Jimmy Carter's defeat.
A similar effort by Richard Nixon, to sabotage the 1968 Paris Peace Talks, and prevent the election of Hubert Humphrey, has been solidly confirmed. Thus, deliberate interference in foreign affairs by the McCain campaign would be part of an established pattern of GOP lawlessness in manipulating the outcome of presidential elections, and there is increasing reason to think that McCain's campaign--or at least individuals associated with it--played a role in precipitating this crisis. They have certainly involving themselves in trying to keep it alive, and even escalate it. Details on the flip.
In the last few days--as the confrontation between Georgia and Russia has flared-the McCain campaign has visibly slipped into wildly dangerous territory. The "McSame" label clearly no longer applies-McCain would not be like Bush's third term, he'd be much more like Cheney, completely unleashed.
Over at TPM, the temperamentally restrained Josh Marshall has been writing about this quite alot. For example:
Dangerous and Unstable
I know I've made this point in various ways in several posts over the last day or so. But watching John McCain speak about the Georgian crisis in the video below should deeply worry anyone interested in a sane US foreign policy -- or the safety of their children....
The people that are pulling McCain's strings are the people who want to push us into a new Cold War with the Russians -- and ironically and a bit improbably with the Chinese too....
McCain is going out of his way to cast this as a replay of 1938 and 1939. Is it really in our interest to get into a renewed Cold War with Russia right now? ....
It's sort of funny when he's just an unhinged senator. But think for a moment where we'd be if this man were president right now, as he may well be in six months. This man takes the counsel of the people who got us into the Iraq War. On foreign policy, he is in league with the people who were so extreme they've now largely been kicked out of the Bush administration. People like John Bolton and others like him.
It's beyond Obama or political strategy or dinging McCain on this or that policy.
This man is simply too dangerous and unstable to be president. People need to wake up and get a look of the preview he's giving us of a McCain presidency. [Emphasis added]
In order to fully grasp what he's up too, there are five analytical frameworks that are particularly helpful to employ. I'm going to write about them more extensively this weekend. But this is unfolding now and it deserves a lot sharper attention than it's been getting so far. So a brief summary of the five frameworks is on the flip.
This diary combines two streams of thought. One comes from Chris's diary yesterday, "The Mutual Distrust Of Insider and Outside Rebellions", dealing with Obama's support among the foreign policy rank and file, the other comes from my ongoing series, "The Political Duality of Rep v. Dem" and its current sub-series "Questioning vs. Reinforcing Conventional Wisdom." I've already posted a diary ("The Elite/DFH Progressive Foreign Policy Split") more directly oriented to following up on Chris's discussion. This one seeks to draw on both streams.
I'm in basic agreement with Chris's view:
for the rank and file of professional, progressive foreign policy types who were opposed to the Iraq war from the start, the Obama campaign is the equivalent of the 2002 Nancy Pelosi leadership, 2003 Howard Dean presidential, and 2006 Ned Lamont Senate campaigns were for much of the activist rank and file. However, while this rebellion is analogous to those earlier rebellions of an anti-war rank and file against a pro-leadership, the cultural gap between wonks and hacks, between insiders and outsiders, and between professionals and the grassroots have prevented it from gaining the same traction as those earlier campaigns.
There is, however, something more that's missing. Quite simply, Obama is missing a counter-hegemonic position that challenges the "war on terror" narrative. He is not the leader here. Edwards was the leader in challenging the narrative frame, and Richardson was the leader in making a decisive commitment to withdraw from Iraq. This is not a minor matter. While the "war on terror" is a disastrous policy, one that does much more to help our enemies than ourselves, Democrats cannot run successfully against it without have an alternative vision-which they do not yet have. They have alternative strategies, but this is not the same thing.
On the flip, I go through a rapid-fire review of some examples in recent history of missed opportunities for challenging foreign policy hegemony at the level of vision, in order to give a better sense of what the missing elements might look like, and thus, what is needed.
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