News from Neptune

The German election has been seriously misreported in the US — an accident I’m sure. The real story is the breakdown of support of the major parties, and it may presage what’s to happen in US politics.

First, it’s been represented as a victory for the party of Angela Merkel (who’ll continue as chancellor), the CDU/CSU (roughly equivalent to the Republicans here).

In fact the CDU/CSU vote percentage remained about same at 37% as in the election four years ago — but far fewer Germans voted this time, 71% of those eligible, compared with 78% in 2005. (That’s of course still much greater than the US total.) If you look far enough, you can find that the AP admits that “[Merkel's] party suffered its second-worst showing since World War II.”

The reason that the CDU looked good is that the SPD (roughly equivalent to the Democrats) collapsed, from 36% to only 23%, their worst percentage since 1953. Maybe voters have gotten tired of people who call themselves socialists and aren’t.

That allows the CDU/CSU to form a government with the Free Democrats (a “liberal” party in the European sense, roughly equivalent to Libertarians — the word isn’t used in that sense in Europe), who raised their total from 10% to 15%, after dramatically announcing their opposition to German participation in the Afghan war (cf. the Ron Paul “revolution”).

The other beneficiaries of the SPD collapse were the left parties, Die Linke — from 9% to 12% — and the Greens (not very left) — from 8% to 11%. Naturally, the NYT reported the election as a defeat for “the left” — meaning the not-at-all left SPD — while not noticing that real gains came on the real left.

And on at least one important issue, the “left/right paradigm” isn’t very helpful. While the two major parties support the war in Afghanistan (just as in the US), the Libertarian/FDP oppose it, as do Die Linke and (some of) the Greens.

“All in all, however, the two big parties which have headed every German government since the second world war are now down to less than 57% of the vote [from over 70% only four years ago]. All the minor parties polled strongly and increased their shares. For the first time in modern Germany, all the parties in the new Bundestag have polled more than 10% but less than 40%” [Guardian/UK].
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Frank Rich has a disgusting piece in the NYT today, an attempt to establish the limits of allowable debate for Obama’s Great Decision on Afghanistan.

What are the (only) alternatives? McChrystal or Biden. God help us. McChrystal — tens of thousands more US troops; Biden — air war against our real enemy in the region, Pakistan.

On the way, Rich makes the liberal’s favorite move about Vietnam. He contends, quite ahistorically, that it was Johnson who “Americanized” that war, and Kennedy was conflicted and innocent. That’s hogwash, as anyone who wants to look at the historical record will conclude. The invasion of South Vietnam occurred in 1962, while Kennedy was alive. (The war was always against the people of South Vietnam, who didn’t have the good grace to accept the government that we’d picked out for them.)

The point of the piece is to delegitimize the only non-criminal path for the US, the withdrawal of its troops (and mercenaries, corporations, etc.) from the region.

“Invading armies have no rights, only responsibilities. Among them are the responsibility to pay reparations for their crimes, and to hold the guilty accountable. A crucial responsibility is to pay careful attention to the will of the victims. The decision to withdraw does not lie in the hands of the invaders. That should be elementary.” [Noam Chomsky]

William Pfaff, who’s been writing from Paris roughly since the German army left, has a piece in the International Herald Tribune (alias European edition of the NYT) “Presidents Need a War to Call Their Own — Now Obama Has His” .

Pfaff is an ex-CIA employee and a long-time member of the Hudson Institute, which is described by US foreign policy scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as “closely associated with neoconservatives”.

In this article he avers,

“I think the American government now has become institutionally a war government, which finds its purpose in waging war against small and troublesome countries and peoples, in the generalized pursuit of running the world for the world’s own good. In this effort, one war is pretty much like another, and every president, to be re-elected, needs one…”

The article nods towards how domestic constituencies — governmental and corporate — want aggressive war by the US, and on how the US has substituted physical force for its relatively declining economic power over the past 50 years. But it’s wrong to suggest that it makes no difference where US presidents wage war. (Clinton invaded Serbia, not Rwanda.)
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Canadian PM Stephen Harper has 42 minutes of face time with Barack Obama in Washington today. While Canadian institutions (notably healthcare) are being compared favorably with those of the US, quite rightly, here are some other things to remember:
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The much-predicted demise of newspapers can’t happen too soon, so it seems to me, if we want a well-informed citizenry.

It was a 19th-century gibe that “newspapers are half advertisements — and the rest lies between them.”

But the lies can be subtle — and usually lie (sorry) in the unstated assumptions (unstated, they’re harder to refute). But occasionally they break cover.

Take this morning’s Afghanistan article on the front page of the NYT, the country’s agenda-setting paper (and its agenda is put in place by its executive editor Bill Keller, a right-wing Democrat). It was written by long-time foreign and military reporter, Thom Shanker.

Half-way thru, we find the following, a complete paragraph:

The military’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan
is focused on protecting the population and
preventing the Taliban from destabilizing the country.

The Obama administration’s transparently false propaganda assertion is presented as simple fact. If it weren’t about killing people, the only reasonable response would be disbelieving laughter. But instead members of the political class in the US take that as one of their assumptions in the coming “debate about Afghanistan.”
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Remarks of President Barack Obama – As Prepared for Delivery
Address to Joint Session of Congress
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Madame Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, and the First Lady of the United States:

I come before you tonight in a spirit of remorse — which, I find, requires more audacity than hope does.
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The Lincoln birthday celebrations seem to have included little attempt to learn from the past. Lincoln is celebrated — by few more than the current president, who insists upon a resemblance — but there’s little critique of the devastation over which Lincoln presided. The end of chattel slavery is taken to be a retrospective justification of his launching of the war. (The actual economic and social position of American slaves and their families in the years after the Civil War is less attended to.)

I can find only one statement of a contrary view by a present-day American politician:

Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. It should have been done as the British empire did — buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans? And the hatred lingered for 100 years. Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. (Ron Paul)

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David Green writes to recommend “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe” by Avi Shlaim in The Guardian, Wednesday 7 January 2009. (“Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state’s legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions.”) He describes Shlaim’s piece as “An historical, detailed passionate summary,” and he’s quite right.

I do think however that Shlaim gets one point wrong, a point that has some significance for understanding the factions in the US government. Writing about the national unity government formed in the spring of 2007 by Hamas and Fatah (after Hamas had won a democratic election in 2006) “that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel” — Shlaim says

Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives [sic] participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

But David Rose’s article (“The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair, April 2008) describes how

the White House [sic] tried to organize the armed overthrow of the Hamas-led government after Hamas swept Palestinian elections [in  2006] … the administration boosted military support for rival Palestinian faction Fatah in the aim of provoking a Palestinian civil war they thought Hamas would lose.

The point is that this plot was carried out not by neocons but by the “realists” in the administration — and the neocons were outraged, because the plot involved arming the Fatah faction, while the neocons insisted that all Palestinians of whatever faction should simply be suppressed.  Their detestation of the realists’ policy led two leading neocons, David Wurmser and John Bolton, to become the primary sources for Rose’s expose — revealing how marginalized the neocons had become in Bush’s second administration. (Wurmser resigned as Cheney’s Mideast adviser in July 2007.)

The point is important because the same people who were running US Mideast policy in 2007-08 will be running it in 2009-10 — and not just SecDef Gates. The “loss” of Gaza to Hamas was not due to the neocons but to the realists of the “permanent government.”  –CGE

Perhaps it betrays my essentially reformist rather than revolutionary disposition to think that there is something wrong with what Eliot has Abp. Becket say in Murder in the Cathedral –

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

However much that may be a guide for oneself, Christians at least (and Eliot thought of himself as one) are cautioned against judging the motives of others. We’re reduced to trying to descry the good action and leaving alone the heart’s reasons that the reason does not know (in others at least).

But there can be as we might say operational differences in opposing the war (a) because it’s wrong, or (b) because it’s done wrong.

They’re obvious as soon as an appropriate remedy is proposed: the alternative is (a) stop doing it, or (b) do it better.

It may be that this distinction — indeed antithesis — has been exploited to neutralize the anti-war movement in the five years since the largest anti-war demonstrations in human history. In any case, that movement does seem to have been successfully neutralized, and it wasn’t an accident.
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This is a sample of the new video version of News from Neptune (radio with pictures), from the studios of Urbana (IL) Public Television, with thanks to Jason Liggett.  It features CGE and David Green. Topics include *elitism and contempt*, *class in America*, and *the Pareto principle*.

New programs will be posted inshallah in the new year.