Red-baiting, used to smear individuals and organizations, remains the unofficial religion in capitalist America. Yet little is said about the role socialism played in building a strong labor movement and creating an unshakable anti-war movement.
Not only is this part of U.S. history whitewashed, so is the repression of dissidents before and after McCarthy. Between 1919 and 1920 some 10,000 people were rounded up and thrown in jail during the Palmer raids, notorious for their exceptional brutality.
During the 1920’s, local police departments formed official “Red Squads”, where police intelligence units working with business elites would conduct extensive surveillance; raid meetings, ransack offices and instill fear in workers attempting to unionize. The message was clear: anyone who considered joining a socialist group would be met with unyielding violence.
The war on this idea intensified in 1947, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities began targeting high profile public officials and members of the entertainment industry who were alleged to be Red. Anti-communism in the 1940’s and 1950’s reached such a degree of terror that 5,000 communists were forced to flee the country, and more than 1,000 went to prison.
In this edition of The Empire Files Abby Martin exposes not only the oft-ignored history of the American Left, but examines how the Empire remains just as vociferous in its attempts to snuff out any and all socialist traditions.
America’s Unofficial Religion — The War On An Idea
Chris Hedges, New York Times best selling author, activist, and host of the new show on TeleSUR English Days of Revolt, joins Abby Martin to talk about war, propaganda, and the suppression of radical voices.
Hedges discusses US expansion of power by way of military force and the cultivation of indigenous elites, including supporting the rise of dictatorships—Mabutu Seke in the Congo, Somoza in Nicaragua, and the Shah in Iran. The protection of Western interests led to what Hedges calls the “heavy intrusion of Empire” which included things like the Reagan administration supporting military juntas and orchestrating a counter-revolutionary movement in order to combat Communist advances.
US interventionism hasn’t always been strictly undercover operations but has included unashamedly public use of lethal force, blatant surveillance, the destruction of the most basic of civil liberties, as well as the destruction of democracy – both at home and abroad. Hedges argues that since World War II, the US has masked how much has been spent on military bloc budgets, and that a massive amount of resources are being diverted towards maintaining imperial war, and the military establishment—the expansion of military power leads to catastrophic results for the world socially, economically, environmentally, and politically. And we are already seeing these consequences unfold.
War, Propaganda & the Enemy Within
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Chris Hedges Destroys “New Atheist” Religious Fundamentalism
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ABBY MARTIN: Chris, Eugene Debs, the famous socialist candidate back during WWI was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his opposition to the Sedition Act. It made it illegal for anyone to speak out in opposition to the war at that time. What does that say about the myth of democracy from that early on?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, it says that if you challenge the structures of power, and particularly military power, you are at best marginalized, if not imprisoned. Those kinds of few radical voices that held fast–Randolph Bourne, Jane Adams, Eugene Debs–were excoriated in the press. Emma Goldman was eventually deported along with Alexander Berkman and others. Randolph Bourne said war is the health of the state. What you saw in WWI was the rise of the military corporate machine, which made war against these radicals through the Sedition Act, the Espionage Act and more importantly the Committee for Public Information Commission, or the Creel Commission, which created the system of modern mass propaganda, employing the understanding of crowd psychology pioneered by figures like Le Bon, Trotter and Sigmund Freud, that people were not moved by fact or reason. They were moved by the very skillful manipulation of emotion. And it worked, so Hollywood was making films like “Kaiser: the Butcher of Berlin.” The Creel Commission had its own news division.
You couldn’t even write anti-war editorials. It was against the law. It had speakers’ bureaus and you only had to use the Sedition Act and espionage on those kind of few figures who held fast to an anti-war stance, of which there were not many, and when you read people like Jane Adams, part of what they are most depressed about is how easily the intellectual class, even the reportedly left intellectual class, was seduced in the war effort. Then after the war the dreaded Hun becomes the dreaded Red and we enter what Dwight MacDonald calls this “psychosis of permanent war in the name of anti-communism”–the fusion of war and the war profiteers, the militarists and the war profiteers, which after WWII created a situation of total war.
After WWI, factories re-converted to produce domestic products. After WWII, they kept producing weapons, even though we had peace, so that we could obliterate every Soviet city ten times over with nuclear weapons. It was nuts, but with guaranteed cost overruns and guaranteed profits, that fusion of the militarists and the corporatists hijacked the country, disemboweled the country economically, and made war on all of those advances that had come under the New Deal. So it had both in an economic impact and a political impact. The USA is undoubtedly the world’s biggest, strongest empire in history, but it operates in a different way than empires past.
AM:How has the notion of empire changed over the last century?
CH: America’s unique in the sense that it colonized itself. European countries colonized India and Africa. The Spanish… the Americans… we destroyed through acts of genocide on our indigenous communities, and plundered their resources, so you had especially with the westward expansion, the US cavalry acting on behalf of the mining concerns, the railroad companies, the timber merchants. And once westward expansion was complete by the end of the 19th century, you began expansion beyond US borders. That’s when you had the Cuban-American war with the seizure of Cuba and the Philippines.
You began to see all sorts of gunboat diplomacy throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, in particular Central America. America expanded its power certainly through military force, and the threat of military force, but more by cultivating indigenous elites that would do our bidding, so you saw the rise of all sorts of dictatorships, whether it was Mobutu in the Congo or Somoza in Nicaragua, or the Shah in Iran. And of course we overthrew the Shah’s father then carried out a coup d’état to replace Mossadegh, the Prime Minister who was going to nationalize British Oil. That form of colonial power protected Western interests.
That’s why Allende was overthrown in 1973 and Pinochet was put in power to protect the copper industry from being nationalized. These elites were given tremendous resources. We saw the same thing in 1954 in Guatemala with Arbenz who wanted to challenge United Fruit’s huge acquisition of Guatemalan land to give landless peasants an ability to carry out subsistence farming, and when that happened the CIA raised a kind of black army. A huge propaganda effort run by Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, would come out of the Creel commission. Of course, Arbenz becomes a communist in the eyes of the press which they, through the manipulation of the press, are able to justify. So it’s a different kind of empire in the sense that, for instance, British troops actually occupied India (although many of those troops were Sikhs). We find venal elites who will do our bidding and when people rise up against those elites we provide those elites with the resources by which they can crush any form of rebellion.
AM: I wanted to talk about El Salvador in particular because you’ve seen and obviously covered extensively the horrors of US wars all over the region. What did this conflict in particular reveal about the length the empire will go to maintain economic hegemony?
CH: So its 1979 and the Sandinistas win in Nicaragua and this sets off all kinds of alarm bells because the Sandinistas–unlike Samoza who was the dictator of Nicaragua and was overthrown and later assassinated in Paraguay–were not going to protect US business interests and they did not want to see this spread throughout the region. And so I covered the war there from 1983 to 1988 and we saw the Reagan administration pump tremendous military, economic and intelligence resources into defeating the rebel group known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). When I first got to El Salvador in 1983 the FMLN was winning the war.
They created–the Reagan administration–they brought in a huge helicopter fleet–70 Hughes helicopters that they put up in the air which made it hard for these guerrilla groups to mass in any kind of large formation. In 1983 I was able to go out with up to 700 or 800 rebels at a clip. That didn’t happen anymore. They created whole black armies that were recruited from Venezuela, Chile, Honduras and other places, that didn’t exist officially–they were ghosts armies. They called them cazador or “hunter battalions”–about 350 soldiers, very well trained, very well equipped. We would go up into Morazan and come upon the aftermath of tremendous fire, and yet there was no record of the Salvadoran army ever being there. They brought in all sorts of CIA, mostly ex-Cuban operatives, including Felix Rodriguez, who had been part of the effort to hunt down Che Guevara. Indeed he would show us Che Guevara’s wrist watch that he was wearing, taken off Che’s body. So there’s a kind of classic example of the heavy intrusion of empire to thwart… half of the population in El Salvador at the time was landless and most of the land was owned by these coffee barons–roughly ten families. They call them the Big Ten families. It was worse than serfdom. People living in tremendous poverty and deprivation and when they tried to organize peacefully in terms of building labor unions, they were literally gunned down in the streets. They put machine guns up on the rooves of buildings in the capital and then when people began to resist, the death squads, when I got to the country, were killing between 700 and 1,000 people a month. It was butchery which we funded and largely orchestrated.
You saw the same thing in Iraq, by the way. When things broke down in Iraq, they took James Steele–who I knew, a colonel, he had been the head of the military group in El Salvador who had worked with the death squads–they moved him to Iraq and he organized the Shiite death squads which carried out a reign of terror to break the Sunni resistance, and really, if you really want to look at it, create groups like ISIS. That’s how empire works and when you’re up close, as I was for twenty years, and you see the inner workings of empire, you understand how vicious and ruthless and brutal it is. But it’s very hard to penetrate within the heart of empire that reality, so that reporters such as myself who would report on these things were under constant attack, not only from the state department and from the government, but… eventually I was working for The Dallas Morning News on Central America and later for the New York Times… but from our own Washington bureaus that we’re being spun a fictitious narrative, and we were kind of demonized as being the fifth front of the rebel movement. And of course 22 reporters were killed in El Salvador, some of them assassinated by the death squads. The pressure that empire will put on those few reporters who attempt to go out and actually report is fierce and can even involve the loss of life.
AM: In reference to the Iraq war in 2003 and war as a force that gives us meaning, you said that the notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. Isn’t that the antithesis of what journalism should be: wanting to be used?
CH: Yeah, but you know journalists are careerists like anyone else and they know how to advance within the system. So let’s take for instance the first Gulf War which I covered with a very draconian press restriction. You could only be in a pool. I mean, I didn’t do it. I could speak Arabic, so I was out in the desert, then Cheney drew up a list of ten journalists he wanted expelled and I was top of the list, but they couldn’t find me because I was sleeping in a tent. You wouldn’t think I would be that hard to find in Saudi Arabia. No, the press goes limp in front of the military.
First of all, real war correspondents, people who really know the culture of war and have covered it… you’re talking a couple dozen. Most of them get sent over from their Washington bureau and I would literally watch them dress up in military uniforms and go sit in a five star hotel in Dhahran to hear Schwarzkopf, and sit in the front row, and they weren’t anywhere near a war, nor did they want to go near a war, and that’s true with every war I covered: only about ten or fifteen percent want to go near one. Photographers are a little more honest because they have to get out. They don’t really want to cover the war there, and covering war is a kind of insanity. I have a kind of even empathy for that, but then you shouldn’t be there. And the people who create these kinds of heroic narratives around their soldiers or their leaders and tell the story the way expected… They’re rewarded for it. They’re awarded for it by the institution. They’re rewarded by the military itself. In the first Gulf War, that whole pool system was not actually administered by the military. It was administered by fellow journalists. I used to call them Judenrat. It’s insane, but it coupled with the fact that they didn’t really want to get anywhere near the fighting, and that’s the truth of it. And secondly that they understood what was good for their career, and their career took precedence over the truth, and that’s not uncommon unfortunately.
AM: In 2003 you were booed at Rockford College and you were shamed offstage. I mean it’s just ironic because…
CH: I wasn’t shamed. I was forced offstage. I was willing to keep going. They cut my mic, and then campus security suggested that it was time for me to leave.
AM: The symbolism of that is so ironic because, of course, of the woman you were speaking of earlier, and her opposition to WWI and then we go to the New York Times’ response to this which is just hysterical because they’re saying you’re damaging the paper’s impartiality, meanwhile lauding people like Judith Miller at the time who just became literal stenographers. What was your reaction to that? Did you know at that time it had just become a complete farce? Or were you slighted?
CH: I’d been at the paper for fifteen years, so I knew the consequences for a news reporter. A columnist can say it, but of course columnists are selected by the establishment. I would never be selected as a columnist. You would select Thomas Friedman, or whoever who is not going to make those kind of statements. No, I was conscious of the game I was playing and the danger in terms of where I was going, but I had spent seven years the Middle East. I understood the folly of what we were doing. I felt that as an Arabist, I had a platform and a duty to speak because people I cared about would be and finally were killed in Iraq. Of course it deep-sixed my career, but on the other hand I really couldn’t have lived with myself, given the consequences of what has been done in Iraq: over a million dead, Iraq as a unified country is never coming back. What is it? Four million refugees and displaced, it had one of the most modern infrastructures in the Middle East. It’s been destroyed, and out of these failed states that we created or these failed enclaves we’ve seen the rise of groups like Al-Qaida in Iraq which has finally morphed into ISIS. I was aware of what I was doing, but nobody likes to lose their job, but I don’t think I could have looked back and done anything differently.
AM: Especially since you’re covering already the devastation of the Gulf War targeting of just crucial infrastructure at that point, and then followed by these harsh sanctions that took the lives of half a million children. How the hell can anyone support this continued military adventure over there?
CH: Well, because so much of it’s about natural resources. They always justify their intervention based on “bringing democracy” and “fighting barbarism” while everybody sort of turns their back on the Congo where atrocities are far worse.
AM: Cobalt.
CH: Yeah, I had written a column in which I said you can’t be a socialist unless you’re an anti-imperialist and anti-militarist because it’s really those forces, and we have to remember that the arms industry is a for-profit industry. We sell 40% of the world’s weapons. We have to break the back of empire, not only for what empire is doing to what Frantz Fanon calls “the wretched of the earth,” but for what it’s doing at home because as it disembowels the country, the harsh forms of control that empire uses on the outer reaches of empire migrate back to the homeland, so you get wholesale surveillance, militarized police, indiscriminate use of lethal force on our city streets. We’re in Baltimore where you don’t have to go very far to see that, and destruction of our most basic civil liberties.
This is the disease of empire. It goes all the way back to Thucydides who saw that as Athens expanded it destroyed its own democracy. Thucydides wrote, “The tyranny that Athens imposed on others it had finally imposed on itself.” We’re no exception and that’s what’s happening. We should be cognizant of the suffering of the Palestinians, and the Iraqis, the Afghanis, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis. We should be cognizant of the power of the industrial weapons, the missiles, the thousand-pound iron fragmentation bombs that we’re dropping. We are not. I think only those of us who’ve been near the receiving ends of these weapons understand how widespread this lethal force is–the power of these weapons, but it ultimately has reverberations for us which are already very, very extensive. The forms of power that empire uses to control subject populations abroad are now visible within America itself.
AM: Yet even the most “populist candidate today,” Bernie Sanders is widely popular among people who are so-called radical leftists. He has refused to confront the war industry and the crimes of empire, and continues to do so. You’ve pointed this out time and again. Why is this issue the most important thing to confront?
CH: Well, because what you had after WWII with the fusion of the so-called “defense industry” (the war machine, the arms industry, and the corporatists who profit off of war) is what John Ralston Saul correctly calls “a coup d’état in slow motion.” And you can’t challenge one weapon system. We used to, in the 1960s, Proxmire and others, challenge this weapon system, and that’s over. We mask how much we spend. Officially we spend a little more than 53 percent of discretionary spending on defense. Well, that’s just not true. It doesn’t count Veterans Affairs. It doesn’t count our nuclear weapons program, and it doesn’t count all of the black agendas, the black budgets that we’re not allowed to see. The best estimates are that we’re spending 1.6 to 1.7 trillion dollars a year, and you can’t talk about serious reform when you are diverting such massive amounts of your resources towards the war machine. That’s what Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech at Riverside Church understood: that we can’t build what Johnson called the new society, the great society and maintain imperial war. Bernie has voted for every military appropriations bill there is, to continue these wars. He doesn’t challenge the military establishment, either. Indeed he’s been quite welcoming of defense contractors into the state of Vermont because it provides jobs, and they try and divvy up ten billion dollars per state because they have the ability to do so. But if we don’t break the back of the war machine, if we don’t break the imperialist project, if we don’t terminate the for-profit arms industry, then any rhetoric about significant change is smoke in the wind.
AM: And interestingly enough that’s when Martin Luther King Jr. began to be obsolete. The mainstream media exiled him largely when he started talking about militarism.
CH: They took away his FBI protection, and both King and Johnson knew what that meant. Because of the number of death threats he received, it meant he was doomed.
AM: And you quoted Engels in one of your recent speeches on this point which said that it’s either barbarism or socialism.
CH: It’s often attributed to Luxembourg. She stole it, but it did come from Engels. It is really between barbarism or socialism. Either we reconfigure our relationship to each other and to the planet in a radical way or these forces, which in theological terms are forces of death, will extinguish what hope we have for life. It’s that dire. It’s that dramatic, as anyone who reads climate change reports understands. And this is the folly of empire. This is how empires destroy themselves and always have. It’s how the Roman Empire ended. You expand militarily beyond your capacity to sustain yourself and that’s precisely what we’re doing and what we’ve done, and the consequences of it politically, economically, socially, culturally and finally environmentally are catastrophic.
AM: We hear about revolution in the US like it’s some romanticized thing that can never happen here, something that only happens in other places. You’ve covered so many uprisings, some successful. What has it taught you about the potential for revolution here?
CH: Well, when a political system is seized by a tiny cabal, whatever it is–military, oligarchs–and the system seizes up and only serves the interests of that narrow elite, then there is always blowback. That blowback may not be good. If you go back to the 1930s, that blowback came in the form of fascism. In the 1930s, in the United States it came from an enlightened oligarchy led by Roosevelt, and Roosevelt writes about it quite openly, and in essence he says to his fellow oligarchs, “Either you give up some of your money or we really face the specter of revolution.” We still had the old communist party. We had movements, severely weakened after WWI, but they were still there–the Progressive Party and others–that were able to frighten the oligarchs into creating the New Deal: fifteen million jobs, public works, these kinds of things, many of which–the parks and the post offices (although they’re trying to sell off the post office as they did in Britain)–we still use today, but after WWII those forces set out to destroy the New Deal. Roosevelt used to say, “My greatest achievement is that I saved capitalism.”
AM: You just wrote a great essay that I encourage everyone to read titled “The Real Enemies Within,” in which you write, “The reality of empire is nearly impossible to see from the heart of empire. There can be no rational debate about empire with many desperate Americans who’ve ingested this as their creed. The distortion of neoliberalism has left them little else but the potent and dangerous force within the body politic, and it is growing.” Of course, those who point out the symptoms of a rotting empire are deemed heretics, traitors, just like they’ve been since WWI. What does this longstanding inability to counter this dominant narrative tell us about our society, where it is today, and how we can possibly combat this mythology?
CH: It’s a symptom of the sickness of the society itself, so as people are pushed… For instance, I was just not too long ago in the south and you have one Confederate memorial after another. I was walking through Montgomery with a great civil rights attorney, Brian Stevenson, who spent his life defending death row prisoners, most of whom were poor and black, of course, in Alabama, and he said all this stuff’s been put up in the last ten years. And I said to Brian, “This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia.” As people reached such a point of despair they were treated into these mythical stories about themselves, and at that point you can’t connect because you’re not speaking about a reality that is defined by verifiable fact. You’re speaking about a myth, and I find the rhetoric against Muslims, and even the acts now that are carried out against Muslims, extremely frightening.
That kind of rhetoric is incendiary. I saw it in every war I covered. You get people to speak in the language of violence and then they carry out acts of indiscriminate violence. I think we’re entering a very frightening and dangerous moment in American history as the government is increasingly, of course, hostage to corporate power and military power, unable to respond to the citizenry, carrying out acts of austerity, stripping us of our civil liberties. We’re the most watched, spied-upon, photographed, monitored population in human history, and I covered the Stasi state in East Germany. You will ignite these proto-fascist forces and it will become sacrelized in the Christian religion. And it speaks in the gun culture and the language of violence, and it is a symptom of a dying civilization because in the end all this is magical thinking. It’s not real and I think the only way to save ourselves, which is why I’m a socialist, is to re-integrate these people into the economic system, and in essence give them hope, give them the possibility of a life, but, in fact of course, we’re doing the opposite. We’re pushing them further and further into extremism. As we do that, that will have very frightening political consequences and there is no shortage of examples throughout human history to prove that.
Two weeks ago, Obama made a bizarre announcement that Venezuela is an “extraordinary threat” to US national security and that he is “deeply concerned” about its human rights abuses – a declaration necessary to justify a new round of harsh sanctions.
The measure comes on the heels of another round of US sanctions against the Venezuelan government, allegedly for violating protesters rights during demonstrations last year.
In this episode of Media Roots Radio, Abby Martin talks to Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and president of Just Foreign Policy about the hidden agenda behind this latest move of aggression and why the country really poses a threat to the US establishment.
US vs. Venezeula: Regime Change and Resilience
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In fact, the US has never stopped trying to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution. Eva Golinger, author of the Chavez Code, talks about the Western backed coup happening in real time in the form of paid opposition forces, propaganda and economic warfare.
Why the CIA Won’t Give Up on Venezeula
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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has launched a global signature-gathering campaign to pressure Obama to repeal the sanctions. The letter reads “sanctions, blockades and armed aggressions are no substitute for genuine dialogue.”
When Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95, the outpouring of praise from the political elite and establishment media around the world was overwhelming. In larger-than-life terms, Mandela was lionized and romanticized as the world’s most admired human being.
In some ways, such praise is encouraging in our age when the wealthy and powerful, usually lacking any admirable values, are held up by their mass media as our success stories. In a world with such dehumanizing, violent, and unjust images and unworthy role models, the overwhelming praise for Mandela is hopeful. His was a life of dedicated struggle for freedom, self-sacrifice, suffering, courage, and admirable moral, economic, and political values.
In other ways, such praise is hollow, hypocritical, self-serving, and troubling, especially when uttered by many who condemned Mandela during his lifetime of struggles for freedom and who continue to uphold the most anti-Mandela priorities and values. The powerful, lavish in their praise for Mandela, conveniently fail to mention how our economic and political elite favored white apartheid South Africa and classified Mandela as a “terrorist.” During the Nixon Administration, the Kissinger Doctrine singled out white supremacist, apartheid South Africa as one of America’s pivotal allies. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opposed the anti-apartheid divestment movement, despised the “terrorist” Mandela and opposed his release from prison. Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense and later Vice President under George Bush, was extreme in expressing his contempt for Mandela, viciously labeling him a terrorist who should not be freed.
In general, those with corporate economic, political, and military power in the U.S. identified with the anti-Mandela white power elite in South Africa, who were pro-Western, anti-Communist, and provided access to South Africa’s diamonds and other vast economic resources and their exploited labor. Indeed, the elite professing current admiration for Mandela conveniently fail to note that he remained on the U.S. terrorist list until 2008, even while he served as President of South Africa’s first multiracial democratic government.
The establishment now praises Mandela by emphasizing his great humanity and his ability to forgive his enemies, even those who imprisoned him for 27 years. Yet it conveniently omits his radical critique of U.S. and other unjust relations of domination, corporate capitalism, imperialism, inequality and exploitation, militarism and war making, racism and other forms of oppression.
It is important to distinguish between celebrating Mandela, in which there is so much to celebrate in appropriating what we can learn and apply from his life and values, and packaging and commodifying him. In reducing Nelson Mandela to a celebrity, those with power define how we should honor him. They selectively soften a completely political person who repeatedly proclaimed “the struggle is my life.” In return, we get a fake and depoliticized icon, not a complex human being with strengths and weaknesses.
What exacerbates this problem is the global yearning of so many who suffer, including many oppressed and impoverished South Africans, to regard the very human leader as a kind of Messiah figure. In fairness, Mandela also contributed to this celebrity transformation, especially during the last two decades of his life. Partially based on very practical calculations, but enhanced by some personality weaknesses, Mandela, for all of his integrity, enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the rich and the powerful.
Therefore, in assessing the significance of Nelson Mandela for us today, we are confronted with many contradictory questions: Which Nelson Mandela? Do we accept the disempowering narrative in which Mandela is celebrated as a kind of Messianic leader who will save us and overcome widespread injustice? Or do we accept a Mandela narrative more consistent with how he actually viewed his struggles as a remarkable but flawed human being; a complex narrative we can selectively appropriate in ways that are contextually relevant to our social justice struggles?
Mandela was primarily a revolutionary, a freedom fighter for equality and justice. As he developed as a freedom fighter, he developed his remarkable capacity for self-control, controlling his emotions, self-discipline, strength of will, focus, and seeing the world with its injustices clearly so that one could respond intelligently and most effectively.
Mandela also emphasized the importance of core principles, of which one could then work out appropriate tactics and strategy. He was a radical egalitarian who believed in the core principle that everyone should have equal rights. During the 1980s while in prison and after his release on February 11, 1990, he focused on the core belief that South Africa should become a multiracial, democratic, constitutional, unified nation with a one-person, one-vote basis.
Although he experienced so much racism, classism, exploitation, humiliation, and inhumanity, Mandela believed that human beings are basically good, which was central to his remarkable focus on forgiveness. Not only are human beings basically good, but if you approach them as if they are, it will more likely bring out the best in them.
In contrast to our dominant Western view of the separate individual with one’s individualistic orientation, Mandela emphasized the basic interconnectedness and unity of life. This is often expressed through the African concept of Ubuntu: I am an integral part of a meaningful whole, and I am human only in relation to others. This belief system was part of the tribal decision-making process of Mandela’s youth in which group consensus was valued over conflict; in his view of his African National Congress as a collective, in which others were “comrades” and part of a unified community; and his emphasis on restorative justice, depersonalizing evil, and struggling for freedom and equality in which each one of us can realize our true interconnected unity.
Although Mandela should be seen as a freedom fighter in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, who spent 21 years in South Africa, and Martin Luther King, Jr., he did not fully endorse their views of nonviolence. Mandela personally disliked violence, but he disagreed with earlier African National Congress policies upholding nonviolence starting with its founding in 1912; the position of Chief Albert Luthuli, the proponent of nonviolence and head of the ANC, who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960, as was Mandela in 1993; and the philosophies of Gandhi and King, both of whom he greatly admired. For Mandela, nonviolence is not an absolute principle, philosophy, or way of life. In different contexts, where nonviolence is not possible or effective, the use of violence may be justified.
Nelson Mandela’s real legacy raises difficult questions about the contexts within which Mandela and we live, and how they reveal limitations of what we can achieve. These contextual power structures and relations are both limiting and enabling. From his youth and throughout his life, Mandela was willing to take big risks, defy authority, challenge or evade status quo limitations, and radically change his own positions. But there were always real economic, political, military, cultural, and historical limitations on his remarkable achievements. In other words, in dealing with the real world, and not some utopian world of his imagination, Mandela had many personal and political setbacks, and he was necessarily limited in the extent to which he and his comrades could reshape their South African world in ways that reflected his vision.
It is certainly open to debate as to how Nelson Mandela understood the changing limits throughout his life, and whether he redefined his positions in the most adequate ways. A small sample of such topics on contextual limits would include the following: Mandela’s earlier anti-white, Africanist view of the African National Conference as only open to blacks and his later formulations of a multiracial ANC and South Africa; his earlier anti-Communist views and exclusion of Communists from the ANC and his later embrace of important Communists as among his mentors and closest comrades in the ANC; his conclusion that policies of nonviolence had become ineffective and suicidal, with his launching of the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, the Spear of the Nation) in 1961 as the arm of the ANC dedicated to armed struggle directed at weakening the hold of the white apartheid regime; his conclusion while in prison that the liberation forces could not defeat the white racist regime through armed struggle; his subsequent decision, defying the ANC positions on negotiating and on collective leadership, that he would negotiate on his own with representatives of the white power structure; and most controversially, his secret meetings and negotiations with the most powerful white economic leaders after his release from prison that led to radical shifts in his own values and policies.
The ongoing debate often focuses on what limits necessitated changes in values, priorities, and policies and which changes were not necessary but reflected disastrous shifts, concessions, and even betrayals. This is significant in terms of Mandela’s ineffectiveness in realizing many of his major goals during his Presidency. It is especially significant when examining Mandela’s post-apartheid, independent South Africa with growing class inequality, incredible poverty and frustration and violence among the black masses, continuing white power and privilege, and the rapid emergence of a corrupt, wealthy, black elite.
Through his secret negotiations with the white power elite, Mandela accepted loan arrangements with the International Monetary Fund and its structural adjustment requirements, endorsed what has been labeled as “the U.S. Consensus Plan,” and adopted policies of neoliberalism promoted by globalized corporate capitalism. The results for the overwhelming majority of South Africa have been disastrous.
In fairness, the situation that confronted Mandela was very complex and daunting with South Africa’s large debt; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the aggression of triumphalist globalized capitalism; the fact that Mandela and the ANC were part of a freedom movement with limited knowledge of economics and of the politics of running a nation; and, most importantly, Mandela’s understandable immediate priority of avoiding a likely civil war, with an incredible bloodbath, and creating a unified, multiracial, democratic nation that would not repeat the patterns of extreme divisiveness, dictatorship, tribalism, religious hatred and violence, and genocide found throughout Africa.
It is easy to second guess and have a critical analysis in hindsight, recognizing what has happened to South Africa and the globalized world, but it is fair to ask whether Nelson Mandela was pressured, flattered, and seduced by those with dominant power in ways that greatly sabotaged and subverted his vision, core values, and priorities, often expressed upon his release from prison and to the end of his life. Mandela is often praised for adopting a more “mature” and realistic “pragmatism,” but questions remain as to whether he compromised too much and unwisely gave away concessions that were not pragmatically necessary. Did he give such a high priority to overcoming the fears of whites and winning over their trust that he deemphasized the needs of the disadvantaged masses and what was needed for radical changes in the unjust power relations?
“Apartheid” is a Dutch Afrikaans word in South Africa meaning “separateness.” It was the name used for an economic, political, legal, and social system of the separation and control of black Africans and other nonwhites by the dominant white minority. It finally became the official system of apartheid or “separate development” of the Afrikaner National Party that ruled South Africa from 1948 until 1994.
Educating ourselves about the system of apartheid, showing solidarity with the liberation movement in South Africa and throughout the world, and exposing U.S. and University of Maine complicity in profiting from apartheid became major issues at UMaine, starting in the late 1970s and continuing for a decade. In 1982, the University of Maine (and the Maine System) agreed to divest all of their holdings in corporations and banks doing business in South Africa (one-third of the principle portfolio). We became one the first ten universities in the U.S. to divest completely. It took six more years of intense organizing and struggle before the semi-private University of Maine Foundation agreed to divest its large holdings in apartheid South Africa. We had the sense of a spectacular, rare, significant, and meaningful victory.
At this celebratory event, I read some of Mandela’s heroic and defiant speech at the Ravonia Trial in 1964 before his imprisonment. This included his words that had so inspired us, proclaiming that he was prepared to die for freedom: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.” Mandela continued: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
In 1990, after his dramatic release from prison, Mandela went on a tour of the United States that included being honored at a huge evening gathering at Yankee Stadium in New York. A group of us, who had been anti-apartheid activities for many years, gathered during the day at a church for workshops and celebrations. Suddenly, to our great surprise, Nelson Mandela appeared, much to the overwhelming tearful and joyful responses of the activists. I’ll always remember his words. “Tonight, all of the famous influential politicians and dignitaries will praise me. However, I want you to know that I’ll never forget who my real friends are, those who struggled all those years against the apartheid system and for my freedom.” In the last years of his life, Mandela made similar kinds of statements.
While preparing several Nelson Mandela talks after his death and in writing this article, it struck me how most students and community members easily admire Mandela and his message and genuinely believe in equality, freedom, democracy, and the need to overcome the injustices and oppressions of economic exploitation, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction. But we feel powerless, are so easily discouraged, and are often cynical. When one begins to appreciate what Mandela went through, his suffering and sacrifice and long struggle, it really puts into perspective how easily we become discouraged, feel hopeless, and give up.
Mandela leaves us with a legacy of hope; that even in the darkest of times, we can live meaningful value-based lives of integrity and bring about dramatic, qualitative changes in the unjust status quo. Mandela shows us that we can live lives of admirable courage, even when we have deep fears and insecurities, as he often had. In an age when we are socialized to desire instant rewards and gratifications, Mandela teaches us the necessary value of disciplined will power and perseverance, as evidenced in the title of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and in his frequent declarations that we must view what we are doing in the long run. Mandela shows us the importance of having worthy principles, of clarifying what we really believe, and then, as he quoted Gandhi, “Be the change you seek.”
In an age when I am socialized to view myself as separate, isolated I-me, egotistic individual, who lives in an adversarial world of win-lose competitions and learns to calculate what is in my own narrow self-interest, Mandela teaches us that such aggressive self-interested individualism is false and destructive; that I am really an integral part of interconnected unified wholes in which others are a necessary part of who I am and how I can live a meaningful life.
It is now up to us to understand, appreciate, and selectively appropriate what is of lasting value in Mandela’s vision, values, and ideals and to contextualize his legacy in ways that inspire us, give us hope, and inform our lives as integral to an action-oriented interconnected movement working for a much better world.
Doug Allen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maine. He is Coordinator of the Marxist and Socialist Studies Program at UMaine, and he has lectured and published extensively on the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi.
They told us all we had to do to get rich was work hard. They said we had a world of opportunities to achieve all the success we wanted. Yet an uncomfortable truth is dawning over America: the American Dream was simply never meant for everyone. Anyone could get rich – but not everyone at the same time. It’s only a dream for a privileged few, and a nightmare for everyone else.
Let’s take the “Dream” apart so we can take a closer look of what it’s made of. I can reap the fruits of my own hard work. I can forge the career of my dreams, and through that career, I can make good money and live the good life. I can free myself from the oppressive chains of government and oligarchy. Me, myself and I. If there’s a single underlying issue with the American Dream, a single virus behind the symptoms of sick lady America, it’s the individualistic mentality that has it locked in a futile battle against none other than itself. It is this mentality that has academics at the country’s most elite institutions concluding that the United States is not a democracy but an oligarchy.
So how did a country that once provided asylum to refugees of Europe’s aristocracy come to be ruled by a modern-day aristocracy? Part of the problem is the inability to realize that certain freedoms and liberties inherently conflict with each other. My freedom as an executive to make as much money as I want conflicts with your freedom as an employee to be able to make a living and afford basic human rights such as food, shelter, education and health care. I could show you some compassion – but not in hyper-individualistic America. Instead, my power as an executive allows my freedom to prevail, whereas your lack of power as a mere worker leaves you deprived of yours.
That is why Detroit, once the embodiment of the American Dream, now epitomizes its sad end: the unleashing of international trade anarchy opened the door to outsourcing, which in turn wiped out the Motor City’s economy. Wall Street finished it off. Neoliberal economists, feigning scientific-ness in order to legitimize the world’s plundering by the corporate elite, preach free trade in the name of maximizing “efficiency”. Poverty, unemployment and thousands of abandoned buildings aren’t exactly a perfect illustration of efficiency.
Hyper-individualism is unsustainable, and until people find meaning beyond the dollar, the American nightmare will continue to be a harsh reality for many.
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How America’s Work Obsession is Killing Our Quality of Life
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How the American Dream Died
Abby Martin comments on a recent poll showing that a growing number of Americans believe the ‘American Dream’ is impossible to achieve; and urges US citizens to rethink what the dream should truly be.
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Written by Ming Chun Tang; image by Flickr user Memories_by_Mike
Red-baiting, used to smear individuals and organizations, remains the unofficial religion in capitalist America. Yet little is said about the role socialism played in building a strong labor movement and creating an unshakable anti-war movement.
Chris Hedges, New York Times best selling author, activist, and host of the new show on TeleSUR English Days of Revolt, joins Abby Martin to talk about war, propaganda, and the suppression of radical voices.
Two weeks ago, Obama made a bizarre announcement that Venezuela is an “extraordinary threat” to US national security and that he is “deeply concerned” about its human rights abuses – a declaration necessary to justify a new round of harsh sanctions.
When Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95, the outpouring of praise from the political elite and establishment media around the world was overwhelming. In larger-than-life terms, Mandela was lionized and romanticized as the world’s most admired human being.
They told us all we had to do to get rich was work hard. They said we had a world of opportunities to achieve all the success we wanted. Yet an uncomfortable truth is dawning over America: the American Dream was simply never meant for everyone. Anyone could get rich – but not everyone at the same time. It’s only a dream for a privileged few, and a nightmare for everyone else.