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Today's
Stories
September 11
/ 12, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Swatting
at Flies
September 10,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Disappointment
at Samarrah?
Michael Donnelly
Democrats v. Democracy
Alan Farago
Mosquitoes in a Hurricane
Doug Giebel
Karl Rove's Terror Playbook
Mike Whitney
Bob Graham's Political Tsunami
David Domke
God's
Will, According to the Bush Administration
September 9,
2004
Joe Bageant
Karaoke
Night in Bush's America
Ed Kinane
Abducted in Baghdad
Peter Bohmer
The Cuban Revolution: Present and Future
Todd May
The Emerging Case for a Single-State Solution
Jeremy Scahill
The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad
Joshua Frank
Green House Party Gasses
Fran Shor
The Crisis in Public Dissent: When Protest is Considered a Terrorist
Act
Patrick Cockburn
Welcome
to the Dirtiest City in the World: Despair in Baghdad
Website of
the Day
Liberty Street Protest: No to War at Ground Zero
September 8,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
This
Doesn't Smell Like Victory: A War on Two Fronts in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush Confuses; Kerry Mute: Spinning 1000 Dead
Bulent Gokay
Russian and Chechnia After Beslan
Lisa Viscidi
Land Reform and Conflict in Guatemala
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Byrd's Eye View
Mike Whitney
Afghanistan: American's Drug Colony
Stan Goff
Body
Count: 1001
Website of
the Day
Bush and the Love Doctors
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
September 7,
2004
Diane Christian
Hostage Tactics: a Game of Mortal Poker
Joshua Frank
Greens
Unravel from Within
Patrick Cockburn
Fallujah
Erupts Again: US Death Toll in Iraq Nears 1000
Ron Jacobs
Bush and Putin: "We're Not Girlie Men"
Chris Floyd
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Dr. Carol Wolman
No Blood for Oil at Paul Bunyan Day Parade
John Ross
The
Politics of Darkness North / South
September 6,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
An
Anti-Labor Day That Lives in Infamy: How Many Democrats Voted
For Taft-Hartley?
Ralph Nader
The
Cruel Legacy of Taft-Hartley: a Labor Day Call for Rights for
Working People
Lee Sustar
What's Driving the Attack on Pensions?
Kathleen and
Bill Christison
Dual
Loyalties: the Bush Necons and Israel
September 4-5,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Elephants
and Gramsci
Ted Honderich
The
Way Things Are
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The
Holy Empire: Who We Are and What We Do
Douglas Valentine
What the World Should Know About Guantanamo
Patrick Cockburn
New Iraqi Police State Flexes Its Muscles
Gary Leupp
Neo Cons Under Fire
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: the Hempstead T-Shirt
William A.
Cook
The
Day of the Lemming
Dave Zirin
Kobe Bryant and the Price of Freedom
John Chuckman
The Day the World Ended
Karyn Strickler
God Save the Endangered Species Act
Vanessa Jones
Bad Day with an Ikea Cup
Mike Whitney
Kerry: the "Better" War Candidate
Mark Donham
Dear John (Kerry): Start Explaining and Fast
Mickey Z.
McBypass Nation: Feeling Clinton's Pain
Alan Farago
Can the Everglades be Fixed?
Poets' Basement
Landau and Albert
September 3,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Jesus Told Him Where to Bomb
Rahul Mahajan
Bush's RNC Speech: an Annotated Response
Carl Estabrook
The
Book of Slaughter and Forgetting
Joshua Frank
The Florida of the Northwest: Oregon Dems Sabotage Nader Again
Gary Leupp
Music to My Ears: Sunday's March
James Hollander
Deja Vu in Manhattan: Assisted Political Suicide?
Mark Engler
Republicans
Among Us: a Week at the RNC, Inside and Out
Jesse Sharkey
Making Students and Teachers Pay for the Crisis in Education
Jane Stillwater
Calling the Cops on Your Own Kid
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: the Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
Max Gimble
Et Tu, Menchu? Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Graves
in Guatemala
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Afghan Electoral Model: "If They Want to Vote
Twice, Let Them"
Todd Chretien & Jessie
Muldoon
Will the Democrats Expel Zell Miller?
Jack Random
Spite and Venom Day: the Turncoat and the Profiteer
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Christa Allen
Contre Bush
Website of
the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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Weekend Edition
September 11 / 12, 2004
A Review of
The Final Frontier
Indian
Wars
By
CARL G. ESTABROOK
An academic study published two years
ago, about machinations in post-World War One America, may have
more to tell us about today's politics than much of current journalism.
Dominick Jenkins' THE
FINAL FRONTIER; AMERICA, SCIENCE, AND TERROR (Verso 2002)
is an essay in American history, the history of technology, and
contemporary politics -- with observations, mostly germane, on
other matters. It is in the first place a detailed attack on
two myths about the history of the United States, viz.,
(1) that American foreign policy
for a hundred years has been an interaction between, on the one
hand, unilateralism and isolationism, traced back to Theodore
Roosevelt and identified with the Republican party, and on the
other, multilateralism and engagement, ascribed to Woodrow Wilson
and the Democratic party; and
(2) that the US government's
conjunction with science began with the Manhattan Project (which
during World War II built the first atomic bombs), was necessitated
by war-time conditions, and persisted during the Cold War because
of the need for "nuclear deterrence."
On the contrary, Jenkins argues
that the federal government and "big science" struck
a malign bargain at the time of the First World War, to their
mutual enhancement and the growth of "terror." Jenkins,
a researcher at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science
at Cambridge University (UK), does not offer a concise definition
of that last term, but his book makes clear that he would not
disagree with the definition of terror quoted by Noam Chomsky
from a US army manual: "the calculated use of violence or
threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious,
or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation,
coercion, or instilling fear."
Certainly our current usage
would add a distinction that the army manual rather disturbingly
doesn't make -- that this violence is directed against civilians.
As Chomsky points out, it's difficult to craft a definition of
terror that doesn't also describe the foreign policy of the US
for the past century. THE FINAL FRONTIER examines how that came
to be. The mating of presidential authority and science in the
rank sweat of the enseamed bed of imperialism -- urged on by
the class anxieties of the American elite -- produced the monstrous
birth of 20th-century technological terror.
Jenkins begins with a striking
illustration -- an article from a New York newspaper describing
an attack on that city: "The sun rose today on a city whose
tallest tower lay scattered in crumbled bits of stone ... The
sun saw, when its light penetrated the ruins, hordes of people
on foot, working their way very slowly and painfully up the island
... Rich and poor alike, welded together in a real democracy
of misery, headed northward."
Not a description of the attacks
of 11 September 2001, those lines appeared in the New York Herald
for 30 July 1921 under the headline "City in Theoretical
Ruins from Air Raid." The article tells how "General
Billy Mitchell of the US Army Air Service had led a force of
heavy bombers from Virginia to New York ... in a simulated bombing
raid." Eighty years before 9/11, the maverick military careerist
was demonstrating how techniques growing out of the late Great
War would be employed in the next. The Herald observed, "The
majority had died swiftly of poison gas."
The book that begins with this
signal introduction ("New York in Ruins") has three
parts. In the first, Jenkins relates what he calls the hitherto
"untold story of how America [in the wake of World War I]
came to see itself as the guardian of international law with
the right to use high-technology terror to deal with outlaw states."
If you think the sort of fear whipped up amongst Americans by
the government-media propaganda campaign against Iraq in 2002
was fantastic -- Americans becoming the only people in the world
who were actually afraid of Saddam Hussein -- then read about
how the military and the chemical industry tried to convince
Americans after World War I that a defeated Germany represented
a dire threat to the US. (One can argue that even Nazi Germany
did not represent such a threat, twenty years later -- as is
suggested by the facts that the US didn't bother to declare war
against Germany until the reverse occurred; and that the Second
World War was won in the East: even after Normandy, until the
end of the war, the large majority of German troops were engaged
against the Soviet Union.)
In the second part Jenkins
considers the domestic political campaign at the outset of the
20th century that made America's imperialist out-thrust possible
and in a sense necessary. He refers (without mentioning him)
to Frederick Jackson Turner's classic "frontier thesis"
of the United States, which suggests among other things that
the "frontier" -- land taken in the "Indian wars"
(which to this day remain a model for the US military)-- acted
as a safety valve for class antagonisms in the US, a safety valve
that was shut off with the closing of the continental frontier.
First set out in academic form in 1893, the idea was taken up
by elite elements in the US -- Jenkins illustrates it especially
from the writings of the first Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and
the cabinet member and senator Elihu Root (who in 1912 received
the Nobel Peace Prize -- his being as sardonically amusing as
Henry Kissinger's). These "patrician reformers" proposed
a "final frontier" abroad for Americans, which they
hoped would have the same salutary social effect on the lower
orders as Jackson Turner said the continental frontier had had.
It was "a diabolical deal," says Jenkins. "In
return for accepting elite rule and giving up Americans' struggle
to extend democracy within the United States, the elite would
praise them as heroes fighting to extend democracy throughout
the world." This conscious propaganda campaign at the beginning
of the 20th century has obvious parallels at the beginning of
the 21st.
In the final part of the book,
Jenkins "argue[s] against the idea that science and technology
must inevitably lead to new means for exercising terror."
He insists that citizens must instead exercise their democratic
rights "to intervene in decisions about the direction of
scientific research and technological development" and "decide
in which direction new scientific research and technological
development should proceed." He thinks that, since "we
no longer have strong emotional investments in the partisan disputes
of this era" -- namely, World War I, the time of the first
marriage of imperial policy and technology -- the dangers will
perhaps be easier to discern than in our own.
His account of the era accurately
reveals Roosevelt as a pompous fraud and Wilson as a conniving
racist, and how "military professionals" began the
militarization of the US a generation after Appomattox, when
the social advances of Reconstruction had been reversed and the
revulsion against the blood-letting of the Civil War had begun
to ebb. (I think one of the things that would astonish an American
of a century ago, suddenly revived today like the man in Edward
Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD, would be how militarized American
society has become.) "In the light of Wilson's use of terror
to support the liberal capitalist world revolution," Jenkins
writes, "it is entirely appropriate that, as well as naming
an aircraft carrier the 'Theodore Roosevelt,' the US Navy has
named a ballistic missile submarine the 'Woodrow Wilson.'"
Jenkins does not always avoid
cliché, and there are some peculiar slips, like the spelling
of "Gettysburg" and the date of the Spanish-American
War, which may have to do with British proof-readers. But he's
writing about America, and some Briticisms actively work against
him (e.g., "tabling" a resolution means a different
thing across the Atlantic). Of course, the poets always get there
first, and as I read Jenkins, I was constantly reminded of the
novels of Pat Barker, the British writer born during the Second
World War whose novels are haunted by the legacy of the First.
The Bush administration's lies
in support of its invasion of Iraq recapitulate the story that
Jenkins tells. The neocon propaganda campaign, commencing in
earnest in September of 2002, depended on the parallel between
chemical and nuclear weapons. "Taking advantage of public
fears of the unknown, Iraq's chemical and biological weapons
were equated with nuclear weapons," Jenkins writes. "This
was reinforced by the use of the term 'weapons of mass destruction'
which placed all three in the same category, despite the fact
that nuclear weapons are both vastly more destructive and militarily
more effective. This allowed Iraqi chemical and biological weapons
to be equated with America's nuclear weapons."
Unfortunately, the story has
opened a new and even more dangerous chapter at the turn of the
21st century. Current American governments, Republican and Democrat,
have plans to extend the dominance of technological terror that
he describes. Chomsky wrote recently in HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL,
The basic rationale was explained
in [the US Air Force] brochure "Vision for 2020." The
primary goal is announced prominently on the front cover: "dominating
the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests
and investment." This is the next phase of the historic
task of military forces. "During the westward expansion
of the continental United States, military outposts and the cavalry
emerged to protect our wagon trains, settlements, and railroads"
... And "nations built navies to protect and enhance their
commercial interests." The next logical step is space forces
to protect "U.S. National Interests [military and commercial]
and Investments." The US role in space should be comparable
to that of "navies protecting sea commerce," though
now with a sole hegemon, far more overwhelming than the British
Navy in centuries past ... [That will require] "Full Spectrum
Dominance": overwhelming military dominance on land, sea,
and air as well as space, so that the US will be "preeminent
in any from of conflict," in peace or war. The need for
such dominance will mount as a result of the increasing "globalization
of the economy," which is expected to bring about "a
widening between `haves' and `have-nots'," an assessment
shared by US intelligence in its projections for 2015..."
Jenkins' wide-ranging and important
book sometimes shows evidence of unassimilated scholarship, and
he is perhaps too impressed with some recently-fashionable "postmodern"
critics -- from the quite interesting Susan Buck-Morss to the
largely forgettable Jean-Francois Lyotard. At one point, Kenneth
Grahame's children's classic, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (1908)
makes an unexpected appearance as a not-too-implausible allegory
for the imperialistic outlook of Grahame's friend, Theodore Roosevelt.
It's arguable that Jenkins
has tried to do too much in a book that he says was "many
years in the making." In his final chapter, "Manifesto
for a Global Deep Science Movement," he spends three pages
discussing the atom-bombing of Hiroshima as an act of terror
(as it surely was), followed immediately by four pages on Immanuel
Kant's 1795 essay, "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophic Sketch,"
before getting around to explaining what he means by "deep
science" and setting out some maxims for it. (On the model
of the deep ecology movement, which "is committed to identifying
and challenging the fundamental causes of environmental destruction,"
deep science "is committed to changing the direction of
science and technology where, in seeking to answer human needs
or satisfy human curiosity, they are actually leading to relations
of control.")
But Jenkins does have a terrifying
story to tell, possibly the most important and dangerous of the
last hundred years -- how the US government has prepared for,
threatened, and carried out technological mass murder, with a
bodyguard of lies to protect it from its greatest enemy, the
US public. It has been said that if Americans actually knew what
was being done in their name, they would be appalled. THE FINAL
FRONTIER gives substance to that charge.
Carl Estabrook is a Visiting Scholar University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a CounterPunch columnist. He
can be reached at: galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept 4 / 5, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Elephants
and Gramsci
Ted Honderich
The
Way Things Are
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The
Holy Empire: Who We Are and What We Do
Douglas Valentine
What the World Should Know About Guantanamo
Patrick Cockburn
New Iraqi Police State Flexes Its Muscles
Gary Leupp
Neo Cons Under Fire
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: the Hempstead T-Shirt
William A.
Cook
The
Day of the Lemming
Dave Zirin
Kobe Bryant and the Price of Freedom
John Chuckman
The Day the World Ended
Karyn Strickler
God Save the Endangered Species Act
Vanessa Jones
Bad Day with an Ikea Cup
Mike Whitney
Kerry: the "Better" War Candidate
Mark Donham
Dear John (Kerry): Start Explaining and Fast
Mickey Z.
McBypass Nation: Feeling Clinton's Pain
Alan Farago
Can the Everglades be Fixed?
Poets' Basement
Landau and Albert
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