"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." - Samuel Johnson, April 7, 1775.
"In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first." - Ambrose Bierce, 1911
Obama's sudden lunge to the right has many facets to it. For one thing, as Arianna Huffington argued, it was supremely stupid politically, going against everything that had previously distinguished him-which only intensified the question of why he did it. This short diary series is an attempt to answer that question in terms of the larger history of American politics that shaped this political moment-a larger history that has shaped Obama in ways he seems quite ignorant of.
It also draws on concepts of cultural hegemony and culture war as originally conceived by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, particularly a concept of "culture war" much deeper and more penetrating than is generally connoted by the term.. Although Gramsci was clearly a man of the left, his formulations have been widely embraced. No less a figure on the right than Rush Limbaugh wrote about him in his 1992 book, See, I Told You So. And Limbaugh, unlike Obama, actually understood what the term "culture war" means-it is a struggle for control over the cultural institutions whose influence determines what is taken for granted in talking about political reality.
The rightwing control of talk radio is a perfect example of such control, an example that crucially depended on Reagan's FCC overturning the decades-old "Fairness Doctrine." Using the public airwaves to repeatedly demonize large segments of the American people without opportunity for a reply is the sort of fundamental abuse of the public trust on which conservative power is based. This single example alone should suffice to show that the idea Obama promulgates, that we can simply put the culture wars behind us by an act of political will, is both enormously appealing and utterly deluded.
Thirty-seven years ago, Vietnam Veterans Against The War held the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit, Michigan, during which US servicemembers testified about war crimes they had witnessed or participated in. Anti-war soldiers were the most powerful rebuke to the American war machine, and everything possible was done to suppress them. The media did not cover them, outside of the counter-cultural underground press (the "alternative" label was not yet in vogue)-- including dozens of GI newspapers and Pacifica Radio.
What gave them legs was the subsequent congressional testimony of John Kerry. And that made it necessary to suppress them all over again. The rightwing has invested a good deal of time and energy into promoting the myth that the Winter Soldier testimony was all lies, impostors sliming our nobel troops will false tales of war crimes.
Unfortunately for them, another war, another deluge of war crimes. War, you see, is itself a crime. And the point of Winter Soldier was never to indict the individual grunts on the ground. It was exactly the opposite--the grunts on the ground revolting against their own brutalization, and taking a stand to begin reclaiming their humanity.
Which is why it makes sense to talk about this on Easter, and to take note of how the Winter Soldier spirit has been reborn--only to be ignored and suppressed once again. Here is an excerpt of testimony from Camillo Mejia, who was court-martialed and served nearly a year in prison, because he refused to go back to do more of what he describes below:
Another time, we were again at the traffic control point, and we were attacked. And we were in the middle of a firefight, and then they stopped shooting at us. And we began to assess damage and to, you know, collect our wounded. And there were a lot of Iraqi civilians who were killed. And from this car came a voice that was calling me: "Mister! Mister!" And I approached the car. And again, we had this Intel report saying that at traffic control points, you know, people will call you and say, you know, "Help me!" Help me!" and then they'll shoot you or they'll-the vehicle will blow up. So when I'm approaching this car right after this firefight-and then after this happened, then they began shooting at us again. But as I approached this car, I saw that there was this man, this young man at the driver's seat, and that there were two older gentlemen who were also wounded, one pretty badly, and who were saying, you know, "Help me! Help me!" And at the time, I could-all I could think about was that Intel report saying, you know, these people are trying to kill you. So I basically had my rifle aimed at them and was about to shoot them until somebody came and said, "Sergeant, Sergeant, you know, they're wounded. Don't shoot at them."
But I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's really-it's almost impossible to act upon your morality in a situation like that when you have been fed all this information that, you know, these people are out there to kill you. And what you do is you basically remove the humanity from them to make it easier to oppress them, to brutalize them, to beat them. And in doing so, you remove the humanity from yourself, because you cannot act as a human being and do all of these things.
Had Mejia not stopped, had he killed those three injured Iraqis, nothing would have happened to him. But because he refused to return to that situation, and the constant risk of doing something similar, he was put in prison for nearly a year. That simple fact tells you everything you need to know about who is responsible for war crimes, and who is struggling to resist. That is how we honor and respect our troops. And the media doesn't even turn away. It wasn't looking in the first place.
STATE BLOGS
