Capitalism or Democracy:  Your Vote, Please

George Bush keeps saying how surprised he is that people in the Middle East don’t like us when “we’re so good”.   His answer is to redouble our efforts to tell Middle Easterners how good we really are— while we bomb them back to the stone age, while we deny them democracy and the right to self-determination.  Twenty-three hundred years ago, a philosopher named Zeno of Citium  remarked, “Two ears, one mouth.  Listen more, talk less”.   Two thousand years later, my dad said, “If a little’s good, a lot’s better.”   He applied this thinking to adding swimming pool chemicals and just about wiped out the family in a cloud of chlorine gas.  George Bush seems to think that if the people of the Middle East don’t understand us, we should just talk louder and more often.  Or bomb louder and more often.

Perhaps we need to simply quiet down and listen.  And listen.  And keep listening until our president can say, “Now I understand exactly why they don’t like us.  I recognize the part of us they don't like.  I recognize when there are differences between what we preach and how we act”.  Then we can debate whether they are wrong not to like us or if perhaps they have a point. 

In the spirit of Zeno, I suggest opening one ear to the Muslim world, and the other to those voices of dissent right here in America.  I find it painful to have to preface my writing with the disclaimer that I in no way approve of the attack of 9-11. It bewilders me that so many people feel that to request national self-examination is paramount to treason.  It saddens me how many people forget that peaceful dissent is a patriotic act in a free, pluralistic society like ours.  “My country right or wrong” is not patriotism, it is delusion and nationalistic denial.  Patriotism is love of country.  Nationalism is exalting one’s country above all others, treating all others as less than you, even less than human-- just what the Nazis did. 

I deplore terrorism-ALL TERRORISM -including state sponsored, nationalisitic terrorism done under the guise of patriotism.  I deplore how the administration’s call to patriotism is being used to silence debate.  I deplore how the bosses at major networks are buckling under.  Rupert Murdock declares it is Fox’s patriotic duty not to show bin Laden’s speeches unedited.  CNN declares it will only announce Afghani civilian casualties after a prefacing reminder of the thousands killed on 9-11.  Fox anchor Brit Hume says journalists may be excused for presenting only the administration side of a story when the other side is “barbarian”.

I prefer to remember the words of John F. Kennedy who once said, “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation afraid of its people.”  He must have been a fan of Zeno

A friend recently pleaded to me, “I don’t agree with our policies in the Middle East.  I don’t think we should be bombing Afghanistan--  and I AM A PATRIOT!”  He went on to explain how it is his patriotic duty to engage in the national debate, his patriotic duty to dissent.  He reminded me that it was a generation of protesters who forced the White House to change U.S. policy and get us out of the war in Vietnam.  I’m sure there are still some who feel we could have won that war if we’d just kept up the bombing, kept throwing troops into the jungles, kept winning their hearts and minds with napalm and carpet bombing.  Or as one American officer so eloquently looked back upon a battle, " In order to save the village it became necessary to destroy it".

But thankfully, patriotic dissent eventually pulled us out of Vietnam.  The communists took over but  curiously, the dominoes did not fall.  U.S. leaders had been wrong to think they would.  They had been wrong to support French colonialism.  They had been wrong to interfere with Vietnamese self-determination.  Time has proven that patriotic American dissenters were right.  Thank God our constitution protected their right to dissent even when the Johnson and Nixon administrations sought to silence or discredit them.

Our president has asked the question “why don’t they like us?”  I hereby respectfully submit my response.  I begin my dissent with another historical parallel to our current situation: The infamous Bay of Pigs invasion.  For those of you too young to remember, and those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to read the recently declassified documents, a newly elected president, John F. Kennedy, was being pressured to respond to the perceived threat of communism from the Caribbean island nation of Cuba.  The joint chiefs of staff encouraged Kennedy to arm and assist a group of Cuban ex-patriots to retake their homeland.  The invasion was so poorly thought out, so nationalistically inspired, so poorly prepared, so nationalistically defended, that it was defeated in a single day.  The U.S. suffered a huge political embarrassment and many good men died needlessly.

Most people know that Fidel Castro and communism were what we hoped to oust from Cuba.  But who and what were we supporting?  The government which Castro ousted in his revolution was the dictatorship of  Generalisimo Fulgencio Batista who had--  not once but twice --taken control of the government by force, displacing popularly elected presidents.  Batista was considered a great friend to the U.S.  He accepted bribes from various American corporations in exchange for major construction contracts.  He provided safe haven for American mobsters.  When it suited him, he suspended the constitution, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated his enemies.  When Castro’s popular revolution finally toppled him, he and his supporters took refuge in the U.S.  If history is any judge, had the Bay of Pigs invasion succeeded, it is likely that Batista or another despot would have taken power.

Castro’s first action was to reinstate the constitution which Batista had unilaterally revoked.  When Eisenhower refused to recognize Castro’s government or sell them oil, Castro began accepting Soviet aid.  U.S. owned refineries in Cuba refused to refine oil shipped from the Soviet Union so Castro nationalized the refineries.  He nationalized some foreign held Cuban land, and nationalized the phone company, kicking out AT.& T and lowering prices.  But it was only after the U.S. invaded Cuban soil that Castro declared the country socialist and himself a Marxist-Leninist.  A case can certainly be made that our shortsighted government actions— trade embargos, denial of loans, pressuring neighboring countries to cut off relations with Cuba --combined to push Castro into the Soviet camp. 

As we ask ourselves why we’re bombing a country that many of us had never heard of before September 11^th, we might first ask ourselves why we supported the anti-Castro, Cuban ex-patriots.  They were asking us to restore to Cuba—  not democracy --but capitalism. They were asking us to intrude upon not despotism but a popular revolt against despotism.  We agreed because since the inception of the cold war we have supported anyone who was against communism, no matter what form of dictatorship, monarchy, or plutocracy they represented.  We agreed because we saw the anti-Castro Cubans as a group who would repay our largesse by restoring to AT&T, Texaco, Shell and other American corporations their Cuban holdings. 

Newly declassified documents now reveal that after the invasion failed, the U.S. joint-chiefs-of-staff signed off on a plan, code named Operation Northwoods, in which the U.S. would perpetrate terrorist acts against American citizens and blame them on communist Cuba--  I know what you’re thinking.  I didn’t believe it either; not until I saw copies of the actual signed documents.  The plan was never enacted but it clearly demonstrates to how high up our paranoid anticommunist thinking can reach, to what lengths our leaders are willing to go in short sighted search of political objectives

I’m by no means a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist but I did find it troubling to discover that shortly before his fatal trip to Dallas, Kennedy had OK’d secret talks with Castro’s representatives, with an eye to normalizing relations.  Kennedy never returned from Texas, Lyndon Johnson cancelled the proposed talks, and U.S. - Cuban relations still flounder.

Why don’t the Cubans like us?  Maybe they remember all we’ve done to destroy their economy and isolate them from their Latin neighbors.  Why don’t Middle Easterners like us?  I wonder. 

I love my country.  I love that we have a Constitution which reads, "All men are created equal".  But when it was written, we applied that line only to land owning white American men.  Later non-landowning white men were included.  After much debate and four bloody years of war, African-American men joined that group-- on paper at least.  They dissented their way to full participation through the Civil Rights movement. Women dissented their way to the vote.  Native Americans finally earned citizenship-- albeit mostly postumously. 

We’ve essentially made those words true for all Americans— at the expense of the rest of the world.  We don't make our minor children work-- we foster conditions which force foreign minor children to work.  We are righteously outraged that innocent lives were taken on 9-11, then turn a deaf ear as the number of innocent victims of American bombing pile up.  We give amnesty to illegal aliens from Latin countries-- while covertly and overtly disrupting elected governments in the lands from whence they came:  Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala.  Around the world, we prop up dozens of dictators.  We call them monarchs, sultans, even presidents although they serve themselves, not their people.  We look away while they silence dissent, trample democracy, steal national treasuries, torture and kill. 

We may pause a moment to pity a non-American but we refuse to see them as anything like ourselves, as worthy of the American dream.  We dehumanize them.  And that allows us to kill them.  It also makes it easy to claim that “these people aren’t ready for democracy”.  We keep ourselves ignorant of the Islamic tradition of Shura which has many parallels to democracy and predates all the dictatorships instituted by the European powers who carved up the Middle East after the world wars.

Jimmy Carter recognized both the need to reduce our oil dependence by exploring alternative energy sources, and also the need to protect the flow of Arab oil to America until we could become energy self-sufficient. In 1979, Carter declared that any move by a hostile power to gain control of Saudi Arabia would be considered an attack upon America’s vital interests.  But it took Ronald Reagan to decide that American capitalism was more important than foreign democracy.  In 1981, Reagan made clear that the United States would not allow the Saudi dictatorship to be challenged by internal dissidents.  “We will not allow Saudi Arabia to become another Iran”, he said.

So along comes Ossama bin Laden.  We aided his cause when he fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980's but not when he dissented against dictatorship in his own Saudi homeland.   Bin Laden’s stated goals are the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia and the overthrow of the current Saudi regime.  Granted, we do not favor a sexist, radically religious government for Saudi Arabia, but how about self-determination?  Or democracy?  Under Reagan, the U.S. trained the Saudi secret police in silencing public dissent.  In Saudi Arabia there is no right to free speech, no right to organize, no political parties, no elections—  in short --no right to dissent.

After Reagan reversed all of Carter’s alternative energy initiatives, the first Bush administration was left with an even greater dependence upon Saudi oil.  Bush entered the gulf war not to liberate Kuwait but to protect Saudi Arabia’s dictatorship and its oil.  A decade later, the situation remains exactly the same.  A revolution in Arabia, be it religious or democratic, would mean at least temporary destabilization of U.S. oil imports.  It would also effect profits and sweetheart deals held by American oil companies.

So the U.S. military has kept a presence in Arabian airbases from which the “no fly zone” in Iraq is enforced.  This is like having an armed police officer manning the hallways at your school— or your church— or your home.  He may say that he’s there just to keep an eye on your suspicious looking neighbor but how do you feel when he stays ten years in your living room?  The Saudi regime long ago outlawed peaceful dissent.  It is in such an environment that more radical dissent begins to grow.  You start to hear declamations like, “Give me liberty or give me death”.   Yet still we turn a deaf ear. 

Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and any number of presidents before them have as much as said that rule “of the people, by the people and for the people” is an American privilege, off limits in Saudi Arabia— or for that matter, dozens of other American allies.  Yet we still expect them to like us.  At best, we’re like the benevolent slave owner (an oxymoron of the first degree), who can’t understand why his slaves run away.  “Don’t I feed them three meals a day?  Don’t I put a roof over their heads?  I only ever beat them when they deserve it.  Why don’t they like me?”