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THE UNITED
STATES MILITARY MACHINE
By Dr. Joel Kovel
Dr. Joel Kovel is
the Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College. His books
include White Racism: A Psychohistory; A Complete Guide to Therapy; The
Age of Desire; Against the State of Nuclear Terror; In Nicaragua; The
Radical Spirit; History and Spirit; Red Hunting in the Promised Land;
and most recently The Enemy of Nature. He is also and editor of the journal
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
Dr. Kovel has been
active with the Green Party, and ran for the United States Senate from
New York in 1998. In 2000, he challenged Ralph Nader for the Green Party
presidential nomination in 2000. Dr. Kovel is one of the regionís most
prolific speakers in the Hudson Valley, educating people about the dangers
of the Bush Administrationís war machine. This article is based on a lecture
given by Dr. Kovel at suny New Paltz, November 21, 2002.
I want to talk
to you this evening about war - not the immediate threat of us war
against Iraq, but about how this conflict is an instance of a larger tendency
toward war-making endemic to our society. In other words, the phrase from
the
folksong, “I ain’t gonna study war no more,” should
be rethought. I think we do
have to study war. Not to make war but to understand more deeply how it
is put
together and about the awful choices that are now being thrust upon us.
These remarks have been stimulated by recent events, which have ancient
roots, but have taken on a new shape since the collapse of the Soviet
Union,
the rise of the second Bush administration, and the inception of the so-called
“War on Terror.” The shape is that of permanent warfare- war-making
that has
no particular strategic goal except total us dominance over global society.
Hence, a war without end and whose internal logic is to perpetuate itself.
We are, in other words, well into World War III, which will go on whether
or not
any other state such as Iraq is involved. It is quite probable that this
administration will go to war in Iraq, inasmuch as certain very powerful
people
crave it. But it is not necessarily the case, given the fact that the
war against Iraq
is such a lunatic proposal that many other people in high places are against
it and too many people are marching against it. And while war against
Iraq is a
very serious matter that needs to be checked by massive popular resistance,
equally serious are the structures now in place in the United States dictating
that whether or not the war in Iraq takes place, there will be another
war to
replace it, and others after that, unless some very basic changes take
place.
America Has Become
a War-Making Machine
The United States
has always been a bellicose and expansive country, built on
violent conquest and expropriation of native peoples. Since the forming
of the
American republic, military interventions have occurred at the rate of
about once
a year. Consider the case of Nicaragua, a country utterly incapable of
being any
kind of a threat to its giant northern neighbor. Yet prior to the Sandinista
revolution in 1979 (which was eventually crushed by us proxy forces a
decade
later), our country had invaded Nicaragua no fewer than 14 times in the
pursuit
of its imperial interests.
A considerable number
of contemporary states, such as Britain, South Africa,
Russia, and Israel, have been formed in just such a way. But one of the
special
conditions of the formation of America, despite its aggressivity, was
an
inhibition against a military machine as such. If you remember, no less
a figure
than George Washington warned us against having a standing army, and
indeed the great bulk of us interventions prior to World War II were done
without very much in the way of fixed military institutions. However,
after WWII a basic change set in. War-weary America longed for demobilization,
yet after a brief beginning in this direction, the process was halted
and the permanent warfare state started to take shape.
In part, this was
because policy planners knew quite well that massive wartime
mobilization had been the one measure that finally lifted America out
of the
Great Depression of the 1930s. One of the lessons of that time was that
propounded by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, to the effect
that
capitalist societies could ameliorate chronic [economic] crises by infusions
of
government spending. The Great War had certified this wisdom, and
permanent military expenditure readily became the received wisdom. This
was
greatly reinforced by the drastic realignment of capitalist power as a
result of
the war. America was essentially the only capitalist power in 1945 that
did not
lay in ruins and/or have its empire shattered. The world had been realigned
and the United States had assumed a global imperial role.
Policy planners like
George Kennan lucidly realized that this meant
safeguarding extreme inequalities in wealth, which implied a permanent
garrison to preserve the order of things. The notion was especially compelling
given that one other state, the Soviet Union, had emerged a great power
from
the war and was the bellwether of those forces that sought to break down
the
prevailing distribution of wealth. The final foundation stone for the
new military
order was the emergence of frightful weapons of mass destruction, dominance
over which became an essential element for world hegemony.
The Iron Triangle
These factors crystallized
into the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and,
domestically, into those structures that gave institutional stability
and
permanence to the system: the military-industrial complex (mic). Previously
the
us had used militarism to secure economic advantage. Now, two
developments greatly transformed our militarism: the exigencies of global
hegemony and the fact that militarism became a direct source of economic
advantage, through the triangular relations of the mic with the great
armament
industries comprising one leg, the military establishment another, and
the
state apparatus the third, profits, power, and personnel could flow through
the
system and from the system.
Clearly, this arrangement
had the potential to greatly undermine American
democracy. It was a “national security state” within the state
but also extended
beyond it into the economy and society at large, virtually insulated from
popular
input, and had the power to direct events and generate threats. Another
conservative war hero-become-president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned the
nation in a speech in 1961 against the emerging permanent war machine,
but
this time, the admonitions were not heeded.*
The machine made
a kind of war against the Soviet system for 35 years.
Although actual guns were not fired between the two adversaries, as many
as
10 million people died in its varied peripheral conflicts, from Korea
to Vietnam,
Angola, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. The Cold War divided the
world into bipolar imperial camps, directed by gigantic superpowers that
lived
off each otherís hostility. It was a terrible war whose immense
suffering took
place largely outside the view of the American people, but it also brought
about
an uneasy kind of stability in the world order, in part through the standoff
in
nuclear weapons.
During the Ford and
Carter administrations, another great crisis seized the
world capitalist economy. Having matured past the rebuilding that followed
the
world war, a period of stagnation set in, which still has the global economy
in
its grip despite episodic flashes of vigor. Predictably, a spate of militarism
was
central to the response. A “Second Cold War” took place under
Reagan,
featuring an accelerated nuclear arms race, which was deliberately waged
so
as to encourage Soviet countermeasures in the hope that this would cause
breakdown in the much weaker, bloated, and corrupt Russian system. The
plan worked splendidly: by 1989-91, the mighty Soviet empire collapsed,
and
the bipolar world order became unipolar, setting a stage for the current
phase.
The fall of the Soviet Union was widely expected to bring a ìpeace
dividend.î
This would have been the case according to the official us line, parroted
throughout the media and academe, that our military apparatus was purely
defensive (after all, we have no Department of War, only one of "Defense")
and
reactive to Soviet expansionism and military/nuclear threat. As this was
no
longer a factor, so the reasoning wentóindeed, as the us now stood
bestride
the world militarily as had no power since the Roman Empireóconventional
logic predicted a general diminution in American militarism after 1991,
with
corresponding benefits to society.
The last decade has
at least settled this question, for the effect on us
aggression, interventionism, and the militarization of society has been
precisely the opposite. In other words, instead of braking, the machine
accelerated. Removal of Soviet power did not diminish Americaís
imperial
appetite: it removed inhibitions on its internally driven expansiveness.
As a
result, enhanced war-making has replaced the peace dividend.
The object of this machine has passed from dealing with Soviet Communism
to a more complex and dispersed set of oil wars (Iraq I and now II), police
actions against international miscreants (Kosovo), and now the ubiquitous
War
Against Terror, aimed variously at Islamic fundamentalists, Islam as a
whole,
or anybody irritated enough with the ruling order to take up some kind
of arms
against it. The comparison with the Roman Empire is here very exact. As
the
eminent economist and sociologist Joseph Schumpeter described Rome in
1919: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest
was not
alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were
not Roman,
they were those of Rome’s allies. And if Rome had no allies existed,
the allies
would be invented. The fight was always invested with the order of legality.
Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors.”
The logic of constant
threat meshes with that of ruthless expansion, which we
see everywhere in this epoch of unipolar world dominion. Currently, the
military
budget of the us is 334 billion dollars. The budget for the next fiscal
year is 379
billion dollars- an increase of more than 10 percent. By 2007, the projected
military budget of the us is to be an astounding 451 billion dollars:
almost half
a trillion dollars, without the presence of anything resembling a conventional
war. The present military budget is greater than the sum of all other
military
budgets. In fact, it is greater than the entire federal budget of Russia,
once
America's immortal adversary, and comprises more than half - 52 percent
of all
discretionary spending by the us government. (By comparison, education
accounts for 8 percent of the federal budget.)
A considerable portion
of this is given over to "military Keynesianism,"
according to the well-established paths of the mic. Thus, although in
the first
years after the fall of the ussr certain firms like General Dynamics,
which had
played a large role in the nuclear arms race, suffered setbacks, that
problem
has been largely reversed for the entire class of firms fattening at the
trough of
militarism. It is fair to say, though, that the largesse is distributed
over a wider
scale, in accordance with the changing pattern of armaments.
us Armies Taking
Root Everywhere
From having scarcely
any standing army in 1940, American armies now stand
everywhere. One feature of us military policy since WWII is to make war
and
then stay where war was made, rooting itself in foreign territory. Currently,
the
us has military bases in 113 countries, with 11 new ones formed since
the
beginning of the War Against Terror. The us now has bases in Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan, and Kurdistan, encircling China and creating new sources of
military tension. On these bases, the us military has erected some 800,000
buildings. Imagine that: 800,000 buildings in foreign countries that are
now
occupied by us military establishments.
And America still
maintains large forces in Germany, Japan, and Korea, with
tens of thousands of troops permanently on duty (and making mischief,
as two
us servicemen recently ran over and killed two Korean girls, provoking
massive
demonstrations). After the first Gulf War the us military became installed
in
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, in which latter place it currently occupies one
quarter
of the country - 750 square miles devoted to military activity. This huge
investment is no doubt determined by proximity to Iraq. Again, after going
to war
in Kosovo, the us left behind an enormous base in a place called Bondsteel.
These self-expanding sites of militarism are permanent goads to terrorist
organizations. Recall that one of Osama bin Laden's professed motivations
for
al-Qaeda's attacks on American facilities was the presence of us bases
in his
home country of Saudi Arabia. The bases are also permanent hazards to
the
environment - indeed, the us, with some 800,000 buildings on these military
sites, is the world's largest polluter and the largest consumer of fossil
fuels.
With territorial expansion of the us military apparatus, there is a corresponding
expansion of mission. For instance, in Colombia, where billions of us
dollars
are spent in the "War on Drugs," us troops are now being asked
to take care of
pipelines through which vital oil reserves are passing. In addition, the
War on
Drugs is now subsumed into the War Against Terror. The signifier of Terror
has
virtually unlimited elasticity, for once an apparatus reaches the size
of the us
military machine, threats can be seen anywhere. With the inauguration
of the
new hard-line president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, the us authorized the
use of
1.7 billion dollars in military aid hitherto limited to anti-drug operations
for direct
attacks on deeply entrenched farc guerrillas. This redirection of aid
came after
Colombian officials and their American supporters in the Congress and
Bush
administration argued that the change was needed as part of the global
campaign against terrorism.
Within this overall
picture, American armed forces are undergoing a qualitative
shift of enormous proportion. In words read by President Bush: “Our
forces in
the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable, and must require
a
minimum of logistical support. We must be able to project our power over
long
distances in days or weeks rather than months. On land our heavy forces
must
be lighter, our light forces must be more lethal. All must be easier to
deploy.”
Crossing Weapons
Boundaries - Both Nuclear and Conventional
As a result, many
boundaries and limits of the bipolar era have been breached.
For example, the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons
had
always constituted a radical barrier. The standoff between the us and
the ussr
was epitomized by mind-numbing hydrogen bomb-missiles facing each other
in a scenario called “Mutual Assured Destruction.î”In
short, a strategic condition
of deterrence prevailed, which made nuclear weapons seem unthinkable.
With
the demise of the ussr, deterrence no longer inhibits us nuclear weaponry,
and
the weapons themselves have proliferated downward, becoming miniaturized
and increasingly tactical rather than strategic.
Meanwhile, the genie
of the weapons industries has developed ever more
destructive “conventional” weapons. These include non-explosive
devices of
awesome power, such as laser beams, microwaves, and large-scale climate
manipulation, along with a new generation of super-powerful explosive
devices. Thus the strongest non-nuclear weapons are now considerably more
lethal than the least powerful nuclear weapons, making the latter thinkable
and
eliminating a major barrier against their employment.
These so-called conventional
bombs have already been used, for example, in
Afghanistan, where the us employed a gigantic explosive weapon, called
a
ìBunker Busterî to root out al-Qaeda combatants in underground
bunkers. They
are based upon the “daisy cutter,” a giant bomb about the
size of a Volkswagen
Beetle and capable of destroying everything within a square kilometer.
Significantly, the model used in Afghanistan, the B61-11, already employs
nuclear technology, the infamous depleted uranium warhead, capable by
virtue
of its extreme density, of great penetrating power.
Depleted uranium
(du) is a by-product of the nuclear power industry (chiefly
being U-238 created in the extraction of U-235 from naturally occurring
uranium
ore). Over 500,000 tons of deadly du have accumulated and 4-5,000 more
tons
are being produced every year. Like all products of the nuclear power
industry,
du poses immense challenges of disposal. It has this peculiar property
of
being almost twice as dense as lead and it is radioactive with a half-life
of 4.5
billion years. Wherever depleted uranium is used, it has another peculiar
property of exploding, vaporizing at 56 degrees centigrade, which is just
like a
little more than half the way to boiling water. So it is very volatile,
it explodes, it
forms dust and powders that are inhaled, disburses widely, and produces
lethal cancers, birth defects, and so forth for 4.5 billion years.
In the case of depleted
uranium, the challenge of disposal was met by
incorporating the refuse from the ìpeacefulî branch of nuclear
technology into
the war-making branch. Already used in anti-tank projectiles in the first
Iraq war
(approximately 300 tons worth) and again in Yugoslavia (approximately
10-15
tons were used in each of the various Yugoslav wars), it is presumed,
although
the defense department coyly denies it, that this material was also used
in the
Afghanistan war. Depleted uranium has spread a plague of radioactivity
and
further rationalized the use of nuclear weapons as such. Consequently,
the
B61-11 is about to be replaced with the BLU113, where the bunker buster
will
now be a small nuclear weapon, almost certainly spear-tipped with du.
Pollutants to Earth
and Space
To the boundaries
crossed between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, and
between the peaceful and militaristic uses of atomic technology, we need
to
add those between earth and its lower atmosphere on the one hand, and
space on the other. The administration is poised to realize the crackpot
and
deadly schemes of the Reagan administration to militarize space and to
draw
the rest of the world into the scheme, as client and victim.
In November 2002,
Bush proposed that nato allies build missile defense
systems, with components purchased, needless to add, from Boeing,
Raytheon, etc, even as Congress was approving a fiscal 2003 defense budget
containing $7.8 billion authorization for missile defense research and
procurement, as part of the $238 billion set aside for Star Wars over
the next 20
years. The administration now is poised to realize the crackpot and deadly
schemes of the Reagan administration to militarize space and to draw the
rest
of the world into the scheme, as client and victim. A new missile defense
system bureaucracy has risen. It is currently developing such wild items
as
something called ìbrilliant pebblesî which involves the release
of endless
numbers of mini satellites into outer space.
All of this was to
protect the world against the threat of rogue states such as
North Korea. As the Seattle Times reported, the us expects the final declaration
to, “express the need to examine options to protect allied forces,
territories, and
population centers against the full range of missile threats.”
As an official put
it, "This will establish the framework within which nato allies
could work cooperatively toward fielding the required capabilities. With
the us
withdrawal this year from the anti-ballistic treaty with Russia, it is
no longer a
question of whether missile defenses will be deployed. The relevant questions
are now what, how, and when. The train is about to pull out of the station;
we
invite our friends, allies, and the Russian Federation to climb on board."
The destination of this train is defensive only in the Orwellian sense,
as the
missiles will be used to defend us troops in the field. In other words,
they will
be used to defend armies engaged in offensive activities. What is being
“defended” by the Strategic Defense Initiative (sdi), therefore,
is the initiative to
make war everywhere.
Space has now become
the ultimate battlefield. And not just with use of these
missiles. The High Frequency Active Aural Research Program (haarp) is
also
part of sdi. This amounts to weather warfare: deliberately manipulating
climate
to harm and destroy adversaries. A very dubious enterprise, to say the
least, in
an age when global warming and climate instability are already looming
as two
of the greatest problems facing civilization. The chief feature is a network
of
powerful antennas capable of creating controlled local modifications of
the
ionosphere and hence producing weather disturbances and so forth.
All of these technical interventions are accompanied by many kinds of
institutional and political changes. The National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, nasa, for instance, is now a partner in the development
of this
strategic defense initiative. The very way in which the United Nations
was
drawn into the resolution in the war against Iraq is a breach and a violation
of
the original un Charter, which is to never make war, never to threaten
to make
war on any member state. The un was a peacemaking institution, but now
the
Super power has forced it into its orbit.
The scrapping of
the abm and other elements of the treaty structure (non-
proliferation, test-ban) that had organized the world of the Cold War
is one part
of a process of shedding whatever might inhibit the cancerous growth of
militarism. It also creates an atmosphere of general lawlessness in the
world.
This is felt at all levelsófrom the rise of an ultra-militarist
clique in the White
House to the formal renunciation of no-first-use nuclear strategy, the
flouting of
numerous un regulations, the doctrine of pre-emptive war, and, as the
logical
outcome of all these developments, the condition of Permanent War and
its
accompaniment of general lawlessness, media slavishness, and a wave of
repression for whose parallel we have to go back to the Alien and Sedition
acts
of the 1790s, or Trumanís loyalty oaths of 1947.
Militarism cannot
be reduced to politics, economics, technology, culture, or
psychology. All these are parts of the machine, make the machine go around,
and are themselves produced by the actions of the machine. There is no
doubt,
in this regard, that the machine runs on natural resources (which have
to be
secured by economic, political, and military action), and that it is deeply
embedded in the ruling corporate order. There is no contradiction here,
but a
set of meshing parts, driven by an insensate demand for fossil fuel energy.
As
a man from Amarillo, Texas put it when interviewed by npr as to the correctness
of Bush’s plan to go to war in Iraq: “I agree with the president,
because how
else are we going to get the oil to fly the F-16s?”
We go to war, in
other words, to get the oil needed to go to war.
A Who's Who List
of mic Beneficiaries
The fact that our
government is front-loaded with oil magnates is another part of
the machine. It is of interest, therefore, that Unocal, for example, celebrated
Condoleezza Riceís ascendancy to the post of National Security
Advisor by
naming an oil tanker after her. Or that Dick Cheney, originally a poor
boy,
became a rich man after the first Gulf War, when he switched from being
Secretary of Defense, in charge of destroying the Kuwait oil fields, to
ceo of a
then-smallish company, Halliburton, in charge of rebuilding the same oil
fields.
Or that G.W. Bush himself, aside from his failed venture with Harken Oil,
is
scion of a family and a dynasty that controls the Carlyle Group, founded
in 1987
by a former Carter administration official. Carlyle is now worth over
$13 billion
and its high officials include President Bush I, his Secretary of State
(and fixer
of the coup that put Bush II in power) James Baker, Reaganís Secretary
of
Defense Frank Carlucci, former British Prime Minister John Major, and
former
Phillipine President Fidel Ramos, among others.
The Carlyle Group has its fingers everywhere, including ìdefenseî,
where it
controls firms making vertical missile launch systems currently in use
on us
Navy ships in the Arabian sea, as well as a range of other weapons delivery
systems and combat vehicles. And as a final touch which the worldís
people
would be much better off for knowing, there are very definite connections
between Carlyle and the family of Osama bin Laden - a Saudi power whose
fortunes have been fused with those of the United States since the end
of
World War II.
Thus the military-industrial
complex lives, breathes, and takes on new
dimensions.
There is a deep structural
reason for the present explosion of us militarism,
most clearly traceable in the activities of Vice President Cheney, made
clear in
the energy report that he introduced with the generous assistance of Enron
executives in May 2001. According to the report, American reliance on
imported
oil will rise by from about 52 percent of total consumption in 2001 to
an
estimated 66 percent in 2020. The reason for this is that world production,
in
general, and domestic production in particular are going to remain flat
(and,
although the report does not discuss this, begin dropping within the next
20
years). Meanwhile consumptionówhich is a direct function of the
relentless
drive of capitalism to expand commodity productionóis to grow by
some two-
thirds.
Because the usage
of oil must rise in the worldview of a Cheney, the us will
actually have to import 60 percent more oil in 2020 to keep itself going
than it
does today. This means that imports will have to rise from their current
rate of
about 10.4 million barrels per day to about 16.7 million barrels per day.
In the
words of the report: “The only way to do this is persuade foreign
suppliers to
increase their production to sell more of their output to the us.”
The meaning of
these words depends of course on the interpretation of “persuade”,
which in
the us lexicon is to be read, I should think, as requiring a sufficient
military
machine to coerce foreign suppliers. At that point they might not even
have to
sell their output to the us, as it would already be possessed by the superpower.
Here we locate the root material fact underlying recent us expansionism.
This may seem an extravagant conclusion. However an explicit connection
to
militarismóand Iraqóhad been supplied the month before,
in April 2001, in
another report prepared by James Baker and submitted to the Bush cabinet.
This document, called “Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the
21st
Century,” concludes with refreshing candor that ìthe us remains
a prisoner of
its energy dilemma, Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to the flow
of oil to
international markets from the Middle East, Saddam Hussein has also
demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use
his
own export program to manipulate oil markets, therefore the us should
conduct
an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic,
and political diplomatic assessments. Note the absence of reference to
“weapons of mass destruction,” or aid to terrorism, convenient
rationalizations
that can be filled in later.
Clearly, however
things turn out with Iraq, the fundamental structural dilemma
driving the military machine pertains to the contradictions of an empire
that
drives toward the invasion of all social space and the total control over
nature.
Since the former goal meets up with unending resistance and the latter
crashes against the finitude of the material world, there is no recourse
except
the ever-widening resort to force. But this, the military monster itself,
ever
seeking threats to feed upon, becomes a fresh source of danger, whether
of
nuclear war, terror, or ecological breakdown.
The situation is
plainly unsustainable, a series of disasters waiting to happen.
It can only be checked and brought to rationality by a global uprising
of people
who demand an end to the regime of endless war. This is the only possible
path by which we can pull ourselves away from the abyss into which the
military
machine is about to plunge, dragging us all down with it.
*Dwight D. Eisenhowerís
Military-Industrial Complex Speech can be read in its
entirety at:
www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/speeches/eisenhower001.htm
University
of Michigan Press to Continue Publishing Joel Kovel's "Overcoming
Zionism" After Initially Dropping Book Due to Rightwing Criticism
DemocracyNow! video 10/29/2007
|
[ DENIAL ]
Zionism's
Bad Conscience
For
Spanish translation CLICK
HERE
Joel Kovel
Let me begin with some blunt questions, the harshness of which
matches the situation in Israel/ Palestine. How have the Jews,
immemorially associated with suffering and high moral purpose,
become identified with a nation-state loathed around the world
for its oppressiveness toward a subjugated indigenous people?
Why have a substantial majority of Jews chosen to flaunt world
opinion in order to rally about a state that essentially has turned
its occupied lands into a huge concentration camp and driven its
occupied peoples to such gruesome expedients as suicide bombing?
Why does the Zionist community, in raging against terrorism, forget
that three of its prime ministers within the last twenty years
Begin, Shamir and Sharon are openly recognized to have been
world-class terrorists and mass murderers? And why will these
words just written and the words of other Jews critical of Israel
be greeted with hatred and bitter denunciation by Zionists and
called "self-hating" and "anti-Semitic"? Why do Zionists not see,
or to be more exact, why do they see yet deny, the brutal reality
that this state has wrought?
The use
of the notion of denial here suggests a psychological treatment
of the Zionist community. But in matters of this sort, psychology
is only one aspect of a greater whole that includes obdurate facts
like forceful occupation of land claimed by and once inhabited
by others. The phenomena of conscience are of course processed
subjectively. But they neither originate within the mind nor remain
limited to thoughts and feelings. Conscience is objective, too,
and linked to notions like justice and law that exist outside
of any individual will. It is also collective, and pertains to
what is done by the group in whose membership identity is formed.
These group phenomena are, we might say, organized into "moral
universes," in which history, mythology, and individual moral
behaviors are brought together and made into a larger whole. Such
universes may themselves be universalizing, wherein that whole
is inclusive of others, who are seen as parts of a common humanity
(or for non-human creatures, nature). Or, as all too often happens,
they may be unified only by splitting apart of the moral faculties.
Now, the
situation prevailing in Israel/Palestine is that common humanity
is denied, the Other is not recognized, and the double standard
prevails. In such conceptions, which have stained history since
the beginning and comprise one of the chief impediments to the
making of a better world, talion law reigns, violence toward the
Other is condoned, and violence from the Other is demonized. Like
the realms of matter and anti-matter, each such moral universe
is paired with that of its adversary. But such mirroring does
not imply moral equivalence; that is settled according to the
rules of justice. In this instance there should be no doubt that
those who have dispossessed others and illegally occupy their
national lands have to bear prime culpability. This is not meant
to excuse such Palestinian or Arab wrongdoings as have arisen
in the course of the struggle which would be a denial of moral
agency but it provides context for understanding the conflict
at a deeper level and obliges us to look with special care at
the curious situation of the Jews. Despite the innumerable variations
between different fractions of Judaism, here certain unique historical
forces have shaped a common dilemma and played a crucial role
in the unfolding of Zionism.
Jews were
supposed to know better, to be better. Suffering persecution
and being eternally on the margins of Europe were supposed to
have made Jews more morally developed. I speak from first-hand
experience, having been made to feel as a boy that I had inherited
a two-fold superiority, by belonging to a people both cleverer
and more highly moral than the non-Jews who surrounded us. We
Jews were history's exceptions.
A myth made
this belief coherent over the ages and shaped Jewish identity:
A "covenant" existed, a kind of special treaty and promise between
Jews and God. How Odd of God, ran the title of a book from
my boyhood Yeshiva days, to Choose the Jews. There was
an unmistakable lift one got from feeling endowed by the Supreme
Being and made superior to the mere "goyim." The morally
dubious implications of this attitude and the hateful contempt
that often accompanied it indeed, one could almost hear the sputum
striking the ground as the word, "goyim," was spoken was
mitigated by the fact that Jews were speaking from the position
of victim. Jewish exceptionalism was a kind of payback that nullified
the centuries of being forced into ghettos, being denied ordinary
rights such as land-holding, and being kicked around, massacred,
and expelled, not to mention being constantly in the cross-hairs
of the reigning racist system of anti-Semitism.
Living with
anti-Semitism, even when its overt violence was latent, contributed
to the heightened self-consciousness of the Jewish character and
also to its thin skin. Few Jews are able completely to avoid the
visceral fear integral to the legacy of Judaism: a drumbeat of
blame, with its intimations of the pogrom to follow. The Jew still
lives with the fact that his/her people have been scapegoated
for centuries by Christian Europe we still hear in our heads
that Jews were the killers of Christ, hence responsible
for the failures of Christianity; Jews were the usurers
who destroyed the medieval community, not the landlords/barons;
Jews were responsible for the misery of the Russian masses,
not the Czar. In ways too numerous to list here, Jews were made
to pay for the crimes of the West, and the betrayal of its ideals.
The peculiar exaltation of believing oneself the chosen people
is both the effect and, to a degree, the cause of anti-Semitic
persecution: They hate us, but we are better than them; and then,
they hate us because we are better than them. Exceptionalism
reinforced the tribalism imposed upon the Jews; and tribalism
played into the hands of anti-Semitism even as it defended against
it.
Within this
matrix a great variety of ways of being Jewish arose. These included,
especially for Jews in the Western European Diaspora, the possibility
of assimilating or remaining apart from the societies they inhabited.
Some Jews, of course, embraced the protection of tribal ways as
a defense against a harsh and accusing world. Others embraced
the calculating pecuniary skills which had been foisted upon Judaism
long before capitalism became the dominant order, and developed
these to become masters of finance once capital moved to the center
of the stage. In the West, some Jews saw in the great ideals of
universality and enlightenment a means to transcend the stifling
tribal role that had been imposed upon them. Having been persecuted,
brutally denied the elementary rights of self-determination given
to others, Jews of this type adopted the ideals of universal human
rights that arose with the Enlightenment, and championed the cause
of emancipation.
Then, toward
the close of the nineteenth century, the ancient promise of the
Covenant took the shape of a real Promised Land. Israel gave European
Jews a material opportunity to balance the tensions between tribalism
and enlightenment. Driven by the upswelling of anti-Semitism that
preceded and gave its horrific stimulus to the Third Reich, Israel
became the home of the tribe, the safe place where Jews could
be Jews. At the same time, it offered Jews identifying with the
enlightenment a chance to demonstrate their competence in western
liberal ways (including socialism). In this way, a project arose
that sought to combine and synthesize both advanced Western democratic
and ancient tribal values.
The Zionists
took from the West the values of liberal democracy, but also the
goals, tactics, and mentality of imperialism that often accompanied
these. The convergence between tribalism and imperialism seemed,
on the surface, to be a successful alignment of the various impulses
of the Zionist project. From the first Jewish settlements in Palestine
an imperialist mentality enabled Zionists to readily rationalize
their displacement of indigenous Palestinians under the notion
of a civilizing mission, embroidered with a full repertoire of
Orientalist prejudices.
Zionism's
allegiance to modernity also gave Zionism a high degree of technological
prowess and organizational ability. During the years of the Yishuv,
or settlement, this was evidenced by the degree to which Zionists
would consistently out-produce and out-perform the indigenous
peoples despite the great numerical superiority of the latter.
Later, in the period of the wars leading up to the state of Israel,
as well as the wars carried out by this state, superior organizational
ability combined with superior weaponry made Israel into a regional
juggernaut one, moreover, driven by the talion law of tribalism
and the racist reduction of one's adversary.
It was for
some time easy to sympathize with a Jewish state and to overlook
its imperialist tendencies, especially in the crucial period of
the mid- to late 1940s, when evidence of the Holocaust surfaced
as a diabolic reminder of Jewish vulnerability to the malignancies
of so-called Western Civilization. I remember well as a youth
of twelve the rush of joy and hope as it became increasingly clear
that we were at last going to have "our state," and I know full
well how deeply the Jews around me shared that feeling.
But neither
understanding nor sympathy can nullify the judgment that in proceeding
down this path, Zionism set the stage, as surely as could an Aeschylus
or Euripides, for the present hellish outcome. And this has a
great deal to do with the fact that the notion of a democratic
Jewish state, despite its allure, is a logical impossibility and
a trap. It is remarkable that so sophisticated a people should
have so much trouble grasping the impossibility inherent in their
notion of a Promised Land: a democracy that is only to be for
a certain people cannot exist, for the elementary reason that
the modern democratic state is defined by its claims of universality.
Modern nation-states
are uneasy syntheses of the two terms: the nation, which embodies
the lived, sensuous, territorial, and mythologized history of
a people; and the state, which is the superordinate agency regulating
a society and having the capacity, as Max Weber put it, to wield
legitimate violence. In its pre-modern, non-democratic form, the
nation-state could embrace directly the will of a particular national
body. Under these circumstances, state power was held by those
who controlled the nation. In practice, these were a mixture of
kings and aristocrats who exerted direct territorial dominion,
along with the theocrats of the priest class who controlled symbolic
and mythopoetic production. Between the divine right of kings
and the territorial powers of priests, the legality of pre-modern
states took shape.
The democratic
nation-state was a mutation of this arrangement, forged to accommodate
the power of the newly emerging capitalist classes, but also to
advance the notion of an universal human right the stirring ideal
that all human beings are created equally free before the law.
The subsequent history of this political formation reveals, in
all its fragility, the tensions inherent in the fitful development
of human rights. But there should be no mistaking that our hopes
for a world beyond tribalist revenge and the arbitrary power of
rulers depend on strengthening and advancing the notion of universal
human right. The legitimacy of modern nation-states the legitimacy
of justice itself rests upon this right. Of course, not all democratic
nation-states are just in practice, nor have they necessarily
come into being in ways consonant with the universal human rights
they assert. The United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa
are just a few of the many examples of democratic nation-states
that have come into existence through violence. The various horrors
that have marked the history of these countries, however, have
not prevented them from offering full participation in the polity
to those who had been enslaved, expelled, and/or exterminated
as the nation-state came into existence. Thus Ben Nighthorse Campbell,
an American Indian, sits in the U.S. Senate, while Colin Powell
and Condoleezza Rice, descendents of enslaved Africans, run U.S.
foreign policy (needless to add, very cordially to Israel), and
may someday be president.
None of
this denies the racism that blocks the modern democratic state
from keeping its promise. But there is a big difference between
a state that fails to live up to its social contract because of
a history saturated with racism, and one where the contract itself
generates racism, as has been the case for a settler-colonial
Israel which claims to be both a democracy and an ethnocracy organized
by and for the Jewish people. Under such circumstances, racism
is not an historical atavism, but an entirely normal, and constantly
growing, feature of the political landscape. To have a state created
expressly for one people constantly eats away and mocks the democratic-emancipatory
aspects of Zionism. Zionism, in short, is built on an impossibility,
and to live in it and be of it is to live a lie.
In other
instances of post settler-colonial states, the democratic promise,
however compromised, confers legitimacy. In the case of Israel,
the logic of the ethnocratic state rules out an authentic democracy
and denies legitimacy. All the propaganda about Israel being the
"only democracy in the Middle East" and so forth, is false at
its core, no matter how many fine institutions are built there,
or how many crumbs are thrown to the Arabs who are allowed to
live within its bounds. This can be shown any number of ways,
none more telling than the inability of Israel to write a Constitution
with a Bill of Rights.
As we well
know, there are many states in the modern world that proclaim
themselves for a given people and are in many respects more unpleasant
places than Israel, including some of the Islamic states, such
as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. But none of these assert extravagant
claims for embodying the benefits of democratic modernity as does
Israel. Thus one expects nothing from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia
in the way of democratic right, and gets it; whereas Israel groans
under the contradictions imposed by incorporating features of
Western liberal democracy within a fundamentally pre-modern, tribalist
mission.
In Israel,
Jewish exceptionalism becomes the catalyst of a terrible splitting
of the moral faculties, and, by extension, of the whole moral
universe that polarizes Zionist thought. For God's chosen people,
with their hard-earned identity of high-mindedness, by definition
cannot sink into racist violence. "It can't be us," says the Zionist,
when in fact it is precisely Zionists who are doing these things.
The inevitable result becomes a splitting of the psyche that drives
responsibility for one's acts out of the picture. Subjectively
this means that the various faculties of conscience, desire, and
agency dis-integrate and undergo separate paths of development.
As a result, Zionism experiences no internal dialectic, no possibilities
of correction, beneath its facade of exceptionalist virtue. The
Covenant becomes a license giving the right to dominate instead
of an obligation to moral development. Zionism therefore cannot
grow; it can only repeat its crimes and degenerate further. Only
a people that aspires to be so high can fall so low.
We may sum
these effects as the presence of a "bad conscience" within Zionism.
Here, badness refers to the effects of hatred, which is the primary
affect that grows out of the splitting between the exalted standards
of divine promise and the imperatives of tribalism and imperialism.
A phenomenally thin skin and denial of responsibility are the
inevitable results. The inability to regard Palestinians as full
human beings with equivalent human rights pricks the conscience,
but the pain is turned on its head and pours out as hatred against
those who would remind of betrayal: the Palestinians themselves
and those others, especially Jews, who would call attention to
Zionism's contradictions. Unable to tolerate criticism, the bad
conscience immediately turns denial into projection. "It can't
be us," becomes "it must be them," and this only worsens racism,
violence, and the severity of the double standard. Thus the "self-hating
Jew" is a mirror-image of a Zionism that cannot recognize itself.
It is the screen upon which bad conscience can be projected. It
is a guilt that cannot be transcended to become conscientiousness
or real atonement, and which returns as persecutory accusation
and renewed aggression.
The bad
conscience of Zionism cannot distinguish between authentic criticism
and the mirrored delusions of anti-Semitism lying ready-made in
the swamps of our civilization and awakened by the current crisis.
Both are threats, though the progressive critique is more telling,
as it contests the concrete reality of Israel and points toward
self-transformation by differentiating Jewishness from Zionism;
while anti-Semitism regards the Jew abstractly and in a demonic
form, as "Jewish money" or "Jewish conspiracies," and misses the
real mark. Indeed, Zionism makes instrumental use of anti-Semitism,
as a garbage pail into which all opposition can be thrown, and
a germinator of fearfulness around which to rally Jews. This is
not to discount the menace posed by anti-Semitism nor the need
to struggle vigorously against it. But the greater need is to
develop a genuinely critical perspective, and not be bullied into
confusing critique of Israel with anti-Semitism. One cannot in
conscience condemn anti-Semitism by rallying around Israel, when
it is Israel that needs to be fundamentally changed if the world
is to awaken from this nightmare.
This is
not the place to explore what such change would look like. But
the guiding principle can be fairly directly stated. By forming
Israel as a refuge and homeland for Jews from centuries of persecution,
and especially by making the Faustian bargain with imperialism,
those Jews who opted for Zionism negated their past sufferings,
and turned their weakness into strength. But such strength, grounded
in the domination, oppression, and expulsion of others, is worthless.
Zionism negated what had been done to the Jews but failed to negate
the negation itself, and thereby repeated the past with a different
set of masks. If one doubts this, look at the set of oppressions
forced upon Jews by Christendom being forced into ghettos, denied
ordinary rights such as land-holding, kicked around, massacred,
expelled, and subjected to a racist system by the oppressors and
ask yourself whether the same have not been imposed upon Palestinians
by the Zionist, with the only distinction worth noting being the
terms of the racism?
It is never
too late to remedy this state, and a sizable minority of people
of good will are already moving in this direction, against great
odds. But it would be irresponsible to gloss over the grim finding
that the journey is conditioned by the fact that the core of the
problem lies in Zionism itself, with its assumption that there
can be a democratic state for one particular people. So long as
this notion is held, poisonous contradictions will continue to
spill forth from the ancient land variously called Palestine or
Israel. And as a frankly non-democratic, or even fascist, Israel
can scarcely be imagined as an improvement, we are led to the
sober conclusion that a basic rethinking of Jewish exceptionalism
must be the ground of any lasting or just peace in the region.
The implications are many, and need to be worked out. But the
time has come for the Jewish people to resume their striving toward
universality.
Joel Kovel teaches at Bard College and is the author, most recently,
of The Enemy of Nature, just released by Palgrave (Zed
Books, London). For more information: www.joelkovel.org.
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