The recent U.S. election results, combined with the clear uglification
of U.S. policy, require all of us dedicated to social justice to
radically rethink what we do and how we do it.
Albert Einstein once defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and
over, expecting different results.” This is exactly what we progressive
activists usually do. We’ve been losing a great deal lately; winning
will require different tactics and different thinking.
Let’s not overstress the importance of thinking differently. We could
do everything just “right” and still lose. But, in order even to have a
chance to win– frankly, to have a chance of holding our own against the
tsunami of right-wing reaction and quasifascist authoritarianism about
to come our way – we must think differently.
We on the left are just as likely as the next person to stick to
thoughts that are comfortable for us. Our comfort zone is rather
different from that of others, but whatever it is we like to stay in
it. And so I’ll be doing a series of commentaries on Thinking Beyond
the Comfort Zone.
Email me at
rahul@empirenotes.org
with your reactions – feedback from our target audience is something
the whole left needs more of.
Let’s start with Fallujah. We must confront a painful reality. The
assault was remarkably brutal; the United States harked back to its
near-genocidal policies of the Vietnam era by declaring parts of the
city a “free-fire zone” and designating all “military age males” in the
city as enemies to be shown no mercy. Simultaneously, thuggish measures
to control the story ranged from occupying the main hospital that
collects casualty reports to having the Allawi regime issue orders for
media covering the assault that would not have been out of place in
Saddam’s Iraq. Thousands were killed, including at least 800 civilians,
according to one estimate.
Yet international outcry has been minimal. Whatever powerful countries
think about the invasion of Iraq, most seem to side with the United
States in its ongoing counterinsurgency war.
Most remarkable, internal opposition has been muted. Consider the
contrast with the siege of April. Around the country, there were
spontaneous gestures of Shi’a-Sunni solidarity. Half the
collaborationist Governing Council threatened to resign unless the
assault was called off. Thousands mobilized to gather aid and, somehow,
to get it past the U.S. security cordon. In Iraq at the time, I could
find basically no Iraqi Arabs who supported the assault.
This time, granted that Western reporters are making an extraordinary
effort to conform to ideological requirements, still we can read of
many Iraqis who weren’t happy about the assault but did not condemn it
fully and even of Iraqis who are relieved that the resistance groups
were forced out of power. There are many who are appalled by the attack
– you need only read Iraqi bloggers or Dahr Jamail’s reports to see
that. But the reaction is mixed.
In the larger political sphere, an assortment of smaller independent
parties has condemned the assault and said the upcoming elections are a
sham that should be boycotted. But the near unity in opposition to the
Fallujah assault that we saw in April has disintegrated.
I’ll go into the reasons another time. For now: This was a major
victory for the United States, militarily and, I think, politically.
We like to tell ourselves that violence never works, it always
boomerangs. Sometimes this reasoning is correct. With regard to the
larger so-called “war on terrorism,” U.S. measures have intensified the
problem. The April assault on Fallujah intensified the problem – partly
because the assault was a military failure. But the November assault
was a success.
If it were always true that the violence of dominant nation-states,
master races, and elites backfired on those same groups, it’s not
likely they would keep using similar methods. They’re not always
rational and they do make mistakes. But they’re not idiots who keep on
blindly doing exactly the wrong thing.
It is often difficult or uncomfortable for us to question the goals of
U.S. violence, so we content ourselves with saying that violence won’t
achieve those goals. But those difficulties are no excuse for fuzzy
thinking. In the long run, easy truisms – especially when they’re not
true -- get us nowhere, analytically or politically.