American Glasnost
By Roger H. Lieberman
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the young German
astronomer Johannes Kepler was teaching mathematics in the
Austrian town of Graz. One afternoon, as the story was
recounted by Carl Sagan in “Cosmos”, he was gripped by a
notion so powerful that it became the focus of his work for
years to come.
Kepler’s original hypothesis was an attempt to reconcile the
revolutionary (and, in some quarters, heretical) Copernican
model of a Sun-centered solar system with the traditional,
Church-sanctioned doctrine of perfect, divinely-inspired,
celestial geometry. He proposed that the orbits of the six
planets then known, Mercury through Saturn, as well as the
distances between them, were based on a nested set of the five
regular solids (cube, tetrahedron, icosahedron, octahedron,
and dodecahedron) identified two thousand years earlier by the
Greek scholar and mystic, Pythagoras.
With immaculate hindsight, such ideas seem remarkably silly,
and one cannot help but feel sorry for Kepler that he wasted a
good part of his career pursuing what Sagan aptly described as
a “geometrical phantasm”. But such doomed efforts to perform
an intellectual balancing act between long-established dogma
and observable realities are by no means a thing of the past.
On the contrary, they are much in evidence in our modern world
– and perhaps nowhere more so than in the realm of politics.
As the American presidential race kicks into high gear, one
can readily observe among the leading Democratic contenders
such an ungainly effort to distance themselves from the Bush
Administration’s disastrous foreign policies – while
simultaneously assimilating most of the prejudices and
misconceptions that have inspired them. No aspect of George W.
Bush’s presidency is more overdue for Democratic censure than
the horrible humanitarian consequences of his actions
regarding Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon. Yet these are
precisely the issues Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seem
most reticent to confront the Republicans on.
This is, alas, not a phenomenon of recent or novel origin.
Quite the contrary, it has been a highly destructive fixture
of American politics since the end of the Cold War – when both
major parties accepted the basic contours of a highly
aggressive, unilateral foreign policy that severely undermined
international law and led to a series of senseless wars
against incomparably weaker adversaries in the Middle East and
elsewhere. Since the inauguration of the Bush Administration’s
post-9/11 “War on Terrorism”, this “gentleman’s agreement”
between the Democratic and Republican party establishments has
had devastating global repercussions – from the Iraq war, to
the erosion of the US Constitution, to Israel’s brutal
repression of the Palestinians.
One has only to consider how different things might be today
had the Democrats acted more resolutely on these matters a
mere eight years ago. Suppose Al Gore, in the course of the
2000 presidential campaign, had made an effort to distance
himself from the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy
record by speaking candidly about the appalling loss of life
among Iraqi civilians stemming from the draconian US-led
embargo. Suppose he had revealed to the American public the
degree to which Clinton had mismanaged the Oslo process –
allowing Israel to rapidly expand segregated Jewish
settlements in the West Bank, undermine the territorial and
economic viability of a prospective Palestinian state, and
foment disillusionment and radicalism among many Palestinians
who found themselves facing a bleak future dictated by
closures, barbed wire, and abject poverty.
Not only would such a course of action have helped define Gore
as a progressive, independent thinker unfettered by Clinton’s
morally compromised legacy. It might also have helped draw out
then-Governor Bush’s true agenda for America’s role in the
world – an agenda that remained largely hidden until the
tragic events of September 11, 2001.
Unfortunately, Gore failed to articulate such a vision,
despite many opportunities to do so. And his failure to
generate decisive enthusiasm among progressives was to have
rueful consequences in the electoral fiasco that November. Had
Gore confronted sensitive foreign policy issues of vital
importance to young voters, the Florida controversy might
never have made it into the papers – and the Democrats might
not have squandered the next four years (and longer) smearing
Ralph Nader as a “spoiler” for venturing into political
terrain where Gore dared not tread.
Four years later, America found itself well into a disastrous,
unprovoked war in Iraq, instigated by the Bush
Administration’s pet ideologues via a torrent of lies and
distortions. Meanwhile, the situation in the Holy Land
continued to deteriorate as Israel proceeded to unilaterally
“disengage” from the Occupied Territories and build
monstrous, illegal barrier on Palestinian land.
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Here, again, events presented the Democratic candidates with a
critical opportunity to offer a new trajectory, a new
paradigm, for America’s role in the Middle East. Yet once
again, the Democratic establishment crippled its ability to
confront Bush and the neo-conservatives by submitting to
childish self-censorship.
At one critical juncture early in the campaign, Vermont
Governor Howard Dean caved into pressure from party honcho
Nancy Pelosi, when she chided him for so much as arguing that
US policy toward the Israel-Palestine conflict should be
“even-handed”. As Senator John Kerry overtook Dean for the
nomination, he promptly showed deference to dogma by
denouncing the International Court ruling against Israel’s
Apartheid Wall in the West Bank. Nor could Kerry articulate a
consistent opposition to the Iraq war, rooted in the readily
available evidence of calculated deceit by the White House and
terrible loss of life among Iraqi civilians.
Another anemic performance by the Democrats, another slim
victory by Team Bush – again with rumors of wrongdoing at the
polls (this time in Ohio). Another four years of war,
deteriorating international relations, and general erosion of
America’s democratic values. And four years later, the
Democrats seem all too willing to repeat their mistakes. A
pattern emerges, and it tells a story with all the pathos of a
Shakespearean tragedy.
How is it that after a month which has witnessed the killing
of over 100 Palestinians in Gaza by Israel – in contrast to 3
Israelis killed by Palestinians – and exacerbated viciousness
by the Israelis against the population of Gaza as a whole,
Barack Obama can call on President Bush’s to block UN censure
of Israel? Where in the body of international human rights law
(or good old-fashioned logic, for that manner) can such an
obscene policy as Israel’s collective punishment be justified?
Obama clearly knows better, yet he feigns “know-nothingness”
on this dire crisis because Democratic party dogma maintains
the falacious and insulting assumption that Jewish voters will
spontaneously reject any candidate who criticizes Israel’s
behavior.
The abject failure of the American political mainstream to
challenge America’s morally bankrupt Middle East policies has
been integral to the perpetuation of wrongs on the ground, and
well as to the chronic misunderstanding of the issues at stake
by the American public at large. Yet wrong ideas, like savage
customs, rarely linger in human societies from generation to
generation unless they have some perceived value – if purely a
psychological one. And there are very sound historical reasons
for suspecting that knee-jerk support for Israel, and general
insensitivity toward the suffering of Palestinians, Iraqis,
and other Middle Eastern peoples among the US political
establishment represents a kind of cult ritual repeated ad
infinitum as a mental eraser to avoid lucidly and responsibly
confronting a bad conscience.
No country on Earth could have done more to save European Jews
imperiled by the rise of German fascism and Hitler’s remilitarization in the 1930s than the United States. And no
country was more derelict in its moral obligations to provide
sanctuary and livelihood to Jews fleeing Nazi-dominated
Europe, or for more pathetic reasons.
To understand why events in North America and Europe played
out as tragically as they did, it is necessary to reexamine
the intellectual eccentricities of the Atlantic world in the
late 19th and early 20th century. At that time, many white
American thinkers, flush with a sense of racially-charged
exceptionalism in the wake of the violent seizure of the West
from its indigenous inhabitants, became paranoid about the
“racial” implications of massive immigration from Eastern and
Southern Europe.
The argument, as best exemplified by the nativist rants of
Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, went something as follows:
the American republic was built by “Nordic” immigrants – and
especially Anglo-Saxons – from Northwest Europe, so only
peoples of that general type could be regarded as “good stock”
for sustaining the American way of life, and only they should
be allowed to immigrate in large numbers. Eastern and Southern
Europeans, on the other hand, were “Alpines” and
“Mediterraneans”, who lacked the intelligence to function
responsibly in a free society.
Like many racialists of our own time, the Nordic supremacists
of the early 1900s called on science to provide supposedly
“objective” evidence to substantiate their prejudices. As
Stephen Jay Gould masterfully described in “The Mismeasure of
Man”, intelligence tests were given to US Army recruits during
World War I for the purpose of comparing the supposedly
hereditary mental faculties of various ethnic groups.
Administered under stressful conditions by officers barking
orders to men who often could scarcely speak English, the test
results inevitably “demonstrated” precisely what the champions
of immigration restriction had “predicted”.
As ludicrous as such crude pseudo-science seems now, it was
taken all too seriously by politicians who felt their own
prejudices to vindicated by it. The Army IQ tests, together
with studies of the “feeble-minded” undertaken by eugenicists
like Harry Laughlin and Charles Davenport, were instrumental
in convincing Congress to pass the Johnson Immigration
Restriction Act in 1924, which President Calvin Coolidge
enthusiastically signed into law.
These measures drastically curtailed the ability of “nonNordic” peoples – including European Jews – to enter the US
and acquire citizenship in the years leading up to the Second
World War. They remained in place even as terrifying reports
leaked out of Germany detailing Nazi atrocities – in no small
part because a considerable number of influential Americans
shared, to some degree, the violent racial bigotry that
ultimately manifested itself in the genocidal horrors of the
Holocaust.
The terrible irony of America’s post-World War II foreign
policy is that, in ostensibly seeking to make amends for some
of its worst prewar failures, these old prejudices were not
nearly so much mitigated or disavowed as they were transferred
onto new victims. In sponsoring Israel’s establishment as a
state privileging immigrant Jews over native Palestinian
Muslims and Christians, the US political establishment
committed afresh its old sin of presuming some people to be
inherently more “democratically inclined” than others – even
as it was strenuously forswearing such ideas on the home
front. In the name of preventing Saddam Hussein from becoming
a “new Hitler”, the US perverted international law by
launching an indiscriminate assault on Iraq’s civil
infrastructure in 1991, greatly exacerbating that damage
through 12 years of sanctions, and ultimately invading and
occupying the country on false pretenses in 2003. In the name
of “spreading democracy”, George W. Bush and his would-be
Republican successors mull a new war against Iran – and their
Democratic opponents show little desire to stop them. And in
the name of “national security”, right-wing ideologues have
fomented crude and inexcusable bigotry against Muslim
immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia – which
resembles nothing so much as the antipathy for Jews, Slavs,
and Italians that pervaded American racialist circles a
century ago.
Challenging entrenched prejudices has never been an easy
affair in human history, but no progress toward a more decent
society is possible without it. When Johannes Kepler
ultimately recognized the true forces that governed planetary
motion, he had the courage to abandon the five solids and
articulate his new insights – profoundly changing our
understanding of astronomy. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
have the power to alter the course of America’s role in the
world – by unequivocally advocating withdrawal from Iraq,
supporting the Arab League Initiative for a Palestinian state
alongside Israel, and laying out a plan for the revival of
civil society throughout the region. Their duty to exercise
that power is owed, not only to their fellow citizens, but to
all the world.
-The writer is a graduate student of Environmental,
Technological and Medical History at Rutgers University in New
Jersey.