John McMurtry is a decorated professor¹ of philosophy who has pursued questions like these to the ideological foundations of today’s US-centric global empire. His analysis² offers insights that can help us identify and think our way out of this now ubiquitous “mind-lock”. McMurtry’s approach also turns out to be useful for illuminating core ideological contradictions in Israel’s US-supported ethnic cleansing regime, which has been forcing Palestinians off their lands for the last 60 years.

McMurtry narrates the ascendance of a “fanatic mind-set” in the west following the demise of the Soviet Union, when “a strange ideological inversion occurred.” Marxism’s ‘economic determinism,’ “abhorred by liberal theory,” was swiftly replaced with the West’s own brand of imposed economic determinism. “Inevitable globalization” was framed as a product of unaccountable and unstoppable forces unleashed by a veritable law of nature, the ultimate “wisdom of the market” that benefits all.

McMurtry demonstrates the destruction of value and meaning inherent in the adoption of this absolutist dogma, which claims to encompass all human activity and reflexively rules out of order any other explanation or concern. He also traces the use of this irrationality to justify brutal economic and military predation under the twin deceptions of “free trade” and “democracy”. The nakedness of this nonsense is revealed by McMurtry’s observation that it glorifies its “no alternative” market theory and bullying imperial trade policies as the ultimate in economic freedom.

Noting the ways in which similar inversions of meaning have been used in totalitarian ideologies, he concludes that inversion is one of the fundamental processes involved in the development of today’s “fanatic mind-set”:

Throughout the world re-engineering by the global apparatchiks, there has been a transformative principle of representation across phenomena and crises: to invert social values and general facts into their contrary so that no bearings remain for intelligibility of resistance. [emphasis in original]

Observers of Israel and its influence within the United States see a long trend toward ideological convergence between the two nations, especially in foreign policy, war, economics, and propaganda. One of the little-noted fundamentals of this growing affinity is a mutual and increasing need and desire to justify unjustifiable acts and obscure incriminating truths.

So it is not surprising that Israel is awash in the same intellectual process of inversion that McMurtry finds so pervasive in the US. Indeed, one could argue that many of Israel’s ideological contradictions are at least as old as the state. Using McMurtry’s style of formulation and taking broad liberties with his method, here are a few of the more obvious inversions of meanings and values underlying the Israeli government’s proclamations and practices. US readers may note the obvious parallels:

Israel’s “right to defend itself” assumes the “harsh necessity” of its military and civilian occupation of Palestinian land, which is an illegal act of war. Self-defense = Aggression

Israel’s security depends upon the continual provocation of forces that will threaten Israel’s security when provoked. Security = Promotion of insecurity

Israelis’ freedom depends upon the imprisonment³ of another people. Freedom = Denial of freedom

Israel’s democracy depends upon the racist⁴ exclusion of its indigenous⁵ citizens and the empowerment⁶ of the most intolerant of its privileged citizens. Democracy = Apartheid

Israel is a “bastion of religious freedom” in which civil law is based on an “orthodox”⁷ version of a single religion. Religious freedom = Religious exclusivity

Israel’s continued prosperity requires “market liberalization”⁸ that dramatically increases poverty⁹ and consolidates wealth at the top. Prosperity = Poverty

Israel’s commitment to the rule of law and sound economic policy (which promises to earn it a seat at the OECD next year) is reflected it its continuing slide down international corruption¹⁰ indexes, an unending string of serious¹¹ political scandals, and thriving organized crime.¹² Legality = Lawlessness

Peace for Israel requires its negotiating partners to accept terms that fall far short of their people’s minimum standards for peace. Whether or not these terms are met, the formula is: Peace = Continual war

Prospects for peace are enhanced when negotiating partners collaborate¹³ in banning, imprisoning¹⁴, and isolating¹⁵ their constituents who oppose Israel’s terms. Such actions also signal the negotiating partners’ “commitment to democracy”. Peacemaking = Democracy = Unconstitutional oligarchy, collective punishment, and civil strife = Illegitimacy and probable failure of any agreements reached between Israel and its partners = Continual (land-grabbing) war

The public’s acceptance of these inversions creates what McMurtry calls an “occupation of consciousness” that makes it very difficult for the citizen thus “occupied” to understand her predicament, much less anyone else’s.

However, just as one man’s meat is another man’s poison, the ideological contortions that befuddle and disempower the public simultaneously comfort the powerful with an automatic self-justifying narrative. While there is no gainsaying the cynicism of today’s leaders, the “fanatic mind-set” must be an irresistibly attractive narcotic to those driven to acquire the power to give the orders to drop the bombs.

One of the implicit subtexts of the mind-set is that cynicism is reality; the ends always justify the means if the means can be kept largely hidden from public view and the ends are framed as unassailable indispensables; freedom, democracy, “growth”, rule of law, etc. The negative side of the equation is always “more than” balanced by its positive equivalent.

The powerful are the anointed agents of the world’s “best hope.” To advance its interests (and their own) they ought to do anything “the market will bear.” It’s not just what the powerful want us to believe. At least to some degree, it’s what most of them need to believe, to do what they do.

McMurtry argues that the fanatic mind-set is “closed” and “self-referential”. From within the delusion, it would be logical to conclude that increasing the negative side of the equation can increase the positive. More denial of freedom to others equals more freedom for us, and (as an afterthought) all the other “good” people of the world.

We hear that ‘a greater readiness to use military force will better protect our democracy and freedoms at home’, and we hardly notice. But if this mind-set is closed in its circularity, it will increasingly diverge from reality. And, being self-referential, chronically ambitious, and uniquely powerful, it can only seek to outdo itself. If such a dominant mind-set persistently follows its inverted logic, it may rapidly auto-escalate with disastrous results.

What’s next? Rather than simply “protecting” our freedoms by creating, torturing, and slaughtering “terrorists” in Iraq, why not be “pro-active” and eradicate an “evil source of terrorism” that threatens everyone’s freedoms? Wouldn’t bombing Tehran — a supposed “existential threat” to nuclear-tipped Israel — produce more freedom and prosperity for all?

Ideologies create the authoritative psychic space within which the unthinkable can become possible. At one time, few could have imagined that the west’s Christian democracies would support a concrete wall splitting the little town of Bethlehem in two, or that the United States would pay for decades of bloody ethnic cleansing in the Holy Land. Israel’s ideology (to some extent crafted to appeal to western powers) supplied the framework of justification that made it possible.

In the US, we face a threat to our national sanity that is similar to the physical danger bearing down on the caged and impoverished Palestinian people—the destruction of what we have left. Our common foe is an irrational ideology that inverts fundamental values and legitimizes crimes against humanity. For us, the struggle to overcome the threat begins in the mind.

1. John McMurtry, Wikipedia
2. John McMurtry, Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy (London and Sterling Va.: Pluto Press, 2002), 277 pages.
3. “Prison within a Prison,” Gideon Levy, MIFTAH, 8/27/2007.
4. “GDP per capita of Arab Israelis third of that of Jews,” YNetNews, 1/18/2007.
5. “IRIN reports on the devastation caused to Bedouins by the Israeli forces in the Negev,” Ma’an News Agency, 6/27/2007
6. “Mr. Lieberman Comes to Washington,” Will Youmans, CounterPunch, 12/8/2006.
7. “Only Orthodox conversions accepted in Israel, Boim stresses,” YNetNews, 5/23/2007.
8. “Netanyahu: Cut taxes for rich to help poor,” Dalia Tal, Globes Online, 6/26/2007.
9. “NII report: 100,000 newly poor, half of them children,” Ha’aretz, 9/1/2006.
10. “Poll: 85% of public believe the leadership is corrupt,” Ha’aretz, 1/11/2007.
11. “A supreme effort is required,” Ze’ev Segal, Ha’aretz, 5/27/2007.
12. “Dichter: Police trying to block mafia’s bottle recycling takeover,” Ha’aretz, 1/9/2007.
13. “U.S.-Backed Campaign Against Hamas Expands to Charities,” Adam Entous, MIFTAH, 8/22/2007.
14. “Hamas members arrested by the Palestinian Authority,” Ma’an News Agency, 8/22/2007.
15. “Abbas urges Socialist leaders to help isolate Hamas,” Aude Marcovitch, Middle East Online, 6/29/2007.
    

The government envisioned by the constitution is a dramatic departure from the autocratic days of Arafat. The bulk of practical state power, including “public order and internal security”, is expressly assigned to the Council of Ministers, the prime minister’s cabinet. The president has the power to hire and fire the PM, approve the cabinet, and declare states of emergency, but is otherwise little mentioned in the document.

When the Basic Law was drafted during the 1990s, Fateh dominated the PA. Its authors may have hoped its democratic processes and responsibilities would reform their party as well as their government. They could not have foreseen that when the Articles finally came to life, it would be too late for Fateh to benefit as expected. Nor could they have known that the constitution would be threatened at birth because Hamas had been elected to lead the government.

The legal obligation facing President Abbas sixteen months ago was to respect the new division of powers enunciated in the constitution. This was also his duty to the people, who had long demanded democratic reform and an end to one man-one clique rule.

But Abbas was given excuses to escape this obligation. Washington forbade him to cooperate with the elected Hamas government. A brutal economic excuse was supplied by the western powers’ embargo against the PA. And, since he and his cronies had negotiated away control of the PA’s tax revenues in the Oslo Accords, Israel was able to illegally seize the PA’s money when the Hamas government took office.

What could he do?

He could have decided that the unity of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination was more important than the immediate needs of his cadres and the diplomatic bluster of Israel and its friends. He could have challenged the US, EU and Israel to support the democratic outcome of the elections, which would have forged a unified Palestinian front to shame the “international community” for its boycott and interference. He could have recognized that this strategy, conducted resolutely, would be more likely to restore the PA’s revenues, more quickly, than any confrontational approach he could take with Hamas.

Instead, Abbas has been listening to his old guard while trying to take orders from Washington, beg for crumbs from Israel, defeat Hamas, form a national unity government, and lead the Palestinian people. Who knew the old stiff could be such a contortionist?

We know from people who know him that Mr. Abbas is a “good guy”. We understand that the man has principles, but most of the time he seems incapable of acting on them.

He crossed the line when he allowed arch Zionist and former Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams, in the Bush White House, to arm and train his security forces, including those of Mohammed Dahlan, his chief warlord in Gaza. This opened the door to a plot to wage civil war against Hamas in Gaza. When Prime Minister Haniyeh responded by asserting his constitutional control of Gaza’s “public order and internal security”, the plot was soon vanquished, with brutality on both sides.

Or was it? As if he had expected the outcome, Abbas made his next move with unaccustomed speed. The Bush administration directed it and the EU and Israel broke out in instant applause. The firing of Prime Minister Haniyeh may have been his last legal act as president of the PA. His new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, appeared to have his unconstitutional “emergency” cabinet waiting in the wings.

Abbas, ever the political chameleon, now plays the unlikely role of strong man, directing his “security forces” in the West Bank to round up and detain Hamas members, some of whom are tortured. He and Fayyad are collaborating with Israel’s scheme to resume total control over Gaza’s borders, enabling it to isolate and starve the people in the futile effort to crush Hamas.

Abbas has now struck an open alliance with Israel and the US against Hamas, despite its continuing plea for dialog to restore the unity government. Abbas is even willing to disgrace himself in front of his own people by making preposterous accusations against the group. “They were going to blow me up! They are linked to Al-Qaida and are bringing it into Gaza! I won’t talk to ‘murderous terrorists‘!” Such talk, ridiculed at home, can only be fodder for the Zionist press and its many readers in Congress.

Now that Palestinian politics is everybody’s business, let’s put international forces in the Gaza Strip. That’s what Mr. Abbas has been urging lately. Employ “peacekeepers” to complete the overthrow of the constitutionally mandated caretaker government and seal its usurpation by Abbas’ Group of 13, so (ostensibly) beloved by Israel and the US. Somehow that would solve the “Hamas problem”.

Simultaneously, Mr. Abbas claims to be a legitimate partner for immediate negotiations with the occupation. Since Israel traditionally signs treaties with the PLO, which Abbas chairs, these statements are worrisome. If he continues on this course, he could, at the very least, fracture the PLO, just as he is threatening to fracture the resistance by cutting deals with Israel to spare Fateh militants who quit.

AIPAC, Israel’s powerful Washington “lobby”, has just announced its support for Abbas’ moves. The Zionists relish this chance to poison Abbas with their public praise while using him to weaken Hamas. “Divide and conquer” means that they defeat both halves. Why is he still playing along?

The piece, ‘Why Boycott Israel? Because It’s Good For You’, begins with a review of the reactionary response in the UK and Europe to the British University and College Union’s call for an academic boycott of Israel.

Mr. Ash asks why Europe, especially the EU, has become such a craven supporter of the US-Israeli agenda in occupied Palestine, and of the “war on terror” in general. “What . . . lies at the root of this quite natural [sic] alliance between Christian fundamentalists, market fundamentalists, billionaires, Zionists, islamophobes, and garden variety warmongers?” He finds answers in the ideological history of postwar Europe and the ascendancy of a neoliberal capitalist power that spawned a neoconservative political agenda.

We are reminded that neoconservatives are anti-labor just as surely as they are “pro-Israel”. They inherit the right-wing tradition of an anti-labor ideology that has served the propaganda needs of financial and business elites for the past century. Today’s neocons still read Karl Schmitt, “the Nazi philosopher of law…. [who] saw the necessity of having an existential enemy, one that the whole state can be fully mobilized against.” Mr. Ash notes that in Europe the “new Schmittianism of the Islamophobic front is a right-wing reaction veiled in the trappings of the traditional left.”

The demise of the Soviet Union and the “communist threat” necessitated the invention of a new enemy. Anyone who lived through the mainstream US media of the 1990s should be able to recall how this was done. First we got warnings about the coming age of “asymmetrical warfare”. Then we began to acquire new enemies, because they supported or committed “terrorism”.

Ash explains: “Having an enemy across the border — alien, total, menacing — helps the right assert political power domestically, the power it now needs to liberate stock markets from the fetters of the welfare state. This is the revolution’s goal, and support for Israel is right at the center of it.”

This provocative premise suggests that US and European elites have had a long-term economic interest in cultivating “terrorist” enemies. The “forward leaning” types among them would have been laying the groundwork for the next enemy even before the end of the Cold War.

And so they were, in many places around the world. The exposure of the NATO-CIA Operation Gladio in Italy during the 1980s peeled the lid on similar false-flag intelligence networks across Europe. Formed by NATO intelligence in the 1950s as mole networks that would resist communist takeover of the host nation, they morphed into agents provocateurs that controlled “left wing” groups like the Red Brigades. They also perpetrated the kidnapping and assassination of Italian PM Aldo Moro and dozens of other political crimes in Europe that were routinely blamed on “leftist terrorists”.

Southwest Asia and Northern Africa comprised the main laboratory for the creation of the “existential” enemy of the future. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Somalia, Lebanon, and Chechnya were a few of the places unfortunate enough to attract the combined “assistance” of the CIA, the Mossad, and their nefarious shadows.

As demonstrated throughout Latin America since the early 1950s (to cite one large example), the prime objective of CIA “black operations” has been destabilization of local economies, governments, and civil societies in order to expand opportunities for western control and plunder.

Frequently, this has involved ‘false flag’ attacks to discredit and demonize indigenous political movements. At one time, the object was to brand labor organizations and land reform movements as part of the “global communist threat”. Nowadays, similar tactics are used to tar Arab and Muslim resistance groups with the broad brush of the “global terrorist threat”.

Neconservatives chafed under Bill Clinton despite his prodigious advancement of their shared neoliberal economic agenda and his unwavering allegiance to Israel. In foreign policy, the problem was not so much that he failed to fight “terrorism” but that he failed to instill the desired fear of “terrorism” in the public heart.

The mysterious creation of Bush II by the Supreme Court provided the platform neoconservatives needed to make up for lost time. After the highly questionable events of 9/11, it was all downhill. On 9/12 we were informed that we had ‘joined the Israeli people’ in a fight for survival against a shared ‘scourge of terrorism’, etc.

Carrying the logic forward, as long as “terror” is the existential enemy of choice for the all-fronts campaign to rob and disempower labor, the poor, and indigenous peoples while demolishing the Bill of Rights and humane values in general, Israel’s grossly illegal and unjust treatment of Palestinians must continue. It is a centerpiece of Islamophobic provocation, a kind of ‘eternal flame’ that helps sustain the necessary “terrorist” fires burning around the world.

And if the domestic intent of the “war on terror” is to cow the people into accepting the steady erosion of their rights, wages, government services, personal privacy, and economic security, its overseas effect is to create what neoconservatives call “constructive chaos”; bountiful opportunities to take control of resources, free land, and cheap labor while advancing geostrategic objectives.

This analysis offers a fresh perspective on the 40-year failure of the “peace process” to yield anything but death, misery, and dispossession for the Palestinian people. Conventionally, this astounding record of diplomatic failure is blamed on a complex interaction of forces unique to the situation, including the power of the pro-Israel lobby over US policy, racist Zionist ideology, western guilt over the Holocaust, the supposed inability of Palestinians “to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”, and so on.

Yet even this tangle of real and imaginary factors does not seem to explain everything, especially since the US has armed and trained a faction of Fatah to challenge Hamas and trigger Ariel Sharon’s dream; a schism in the recently unified PA, half of which the US controls through the malleable hands of President Abbas. A Palestinian friend says that Abbas is now referred to as “Mahmoud Abdul Maliki el-Karzai”.

Will “sheer stupidity” be added to the perennial list of reasons for the ongoing “diplomatic” failure? Do you feel your credulity being strained? Does it smell like Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, and El Salvador all over again?

The art of enemy creation, the meat and potatoes of US foreign policy-in-practice in Southwest Asia, involves more than simply spreading chaos in foreign lands. It must also hide the real enemy from public view.

Mr. Ash identifies the influence of Europe’s financial giants, especially the City of London, behind the steady rightward march of European politics and foreign policy. He cites instances in which European politicians have used the “enemy threat” card to distract public attention from their attacks on labor rights and government services.

We are weary of such stunts in the US. We need only remember Katrina, or gaze at the astounding growth of the national income gap over the past thirty years, to realize that we are being taken for a long, rough ride. Corporate power, which is nearly the definition of the problem with today’s media, Congress, and universities, is so pervasive that we must seriously consider its influence in every nook and cranny of US foreign policy.

Gabriel Ash’s robust and compelling hypothesis may explain a good deal more than we can glean from the conventional wisdom. It certainly suggests fresh grounds for considering support for Israel’s apartheid regime in its true “globalized” context, right down to the sustained erosion of our own wages and rights and the dwindling of our children’s future. For that reason alone it deserves our careful consideration.

A shared sense of impunity that can pay for mass murder and torture chambers without self-reproach requires denial, distortion, and ignorance of swaths of reality. In totalitarian societies, the state handles these chores to try to keep the people unaware of its most criminal activities.

But in societies that enjoy relative freedom of the press, citizens encounter many unsavory facts that are impossible to deny directly. When “democracies” engage in war crimes, this knowledge pressures citizens to internalize a collective sense of impunity, which must be robust enough to neutralize incriminating truth as it appears.

Most informed US citizens are aware that their government runs a global network of secret detention centers where torture is routinely employed. They also know what this activity looks like, having seen photos of their troops’ bestial behavior at Abu Ghraib. If they followed the story, they know that this behavior was also reported at several other prisons and detention centers in Iraq, under policy directives from the very top of the Pentagon.

They know about the human rights horrors of Guantanamo and Bagram Air Force base, that the CIA runs a global ring dedicated to kidnappings, “extraordinary rendition,” and torture, that hundreds of our detainees have disappeared, and so on.

It is possible to know these things by reading big city newspapers. An objective observer could glean the general shape of these facts from network television news. The American public has been told. And the public has turned the page.

It’s also a matter of record that our government has orchestrated an international economic blockade against the occupied Palestinian Authority, while Israel withholds the PA’s tax revenues. After 15 months of this policy, an economy that aid experts had previously compared to sub-Saharan Africa has imploded. Social and civic services have ground to a virtual halt. (1) Diligent readers know that the Palestinians’ already high rates of malnutrition and food insecurity are now at alarming levels. Doctors warn that skyrocketing numbers of Palestinian children are being crippled for life by chronic malnutrition. (2)

The predictable (and predicted) result of economic siege against an occupied people has been burgeoning chaos and civil strife, eroding what is left of the rule of law in the occupied territories. The informed American knows that this is happening because, in the fairest elections yet seen in the Middle East, the Palestinian people voted for the wrong party.

Yet even the best-informed Americans will be hard put to think of a similar instance in history. When have great powers conspired to destroy the government and economy of a destitute people already crumbling under another power’s long colonial war?

To know about our government’s global gulag and remain silent requires a reckoning with snatching people and repeatedly subjecting them to depraved acts of torture, knowing that those who do not die will suffer lifelong physical and psychological torment.

This reckoning appears to turn on variants of a calculation; that our collective security is worth more than the cost to a few tens of thousands of foreigners of questionable race and religion. This quantifies and prioritizes an otherwise difficult problem, allowing us to minimize the crimes by rounding our sums.

We don’t notice that this pragmatic solution also fingers the people responsible for this inhumanity: us, the ‘collective’ whose security is so valuable that it’s worth committing torture every day of the week to protect it.

To know about the economic siege against the occupied Palestinian territories and say nothing is to acquiesce in crippling collective punishment of millions of poor people, for the crime of holding a democratic election.

Unlike our straightforward torture-for-security deal in the global reign of terror against terror, our justifications for the Palestinian siege are bureaucratic and symbolic.

Hamas is on our “terror list” and therefore beyond the pale of humanity. Before we will end the blockade, Hamas must kiss the three poisoned rings of obeisance: recognize Israel’s unique “right to exist” (as a “Jewish state” that refuses to recognize the rights of its current and former Arab residents), “renounce violence” (unlike Fatah, Israel, the US, etc.), and “accept past agreements” (the long sorry record of unreciprocated PLO concessions to Israel).

The public seems to accept this flimsy hypocrisy as reason enough to force Palestinian doctors to beg for syringes and bandages. (3) It goes down as easily as we close the cell door against the screams, to ease our pathetic fear of “terror”.

Objectively, the American public is much more responsible for the crimes committed in its name than were the people of Germany for the horrors of the Third Reich. We have far more knowledge, and far greater freedom and opportunity to stop our government’s criminal behavior.

But who is even asking the presidential candidates for their positions on torture and starving the Palestinians, or what they think of the respected study that found our war had killed as many as 665,000 Iraqis, as of almost two years ago?

Do we have any excuse for our abject failure to hold our leaders and ourselves responsible for our nation’s most heinous crimes?

If we cannot bring ourselves to say, “guilty”, then “innocent by reason of insanity” appears to be our only plausible defense before a future court of the world.

We will have to claim that our minds were not our own. The corporate media-government propaganda network had grown so ubiquitous that the people were essentially subjects in a mass brainwashing experiment. Unfortunately, the experiment was a success, so increasingly absurd versions of re-manufactured reality were implanted in the public mind.

At the time, some of us complained about cover-ups, lies, all the things we weren’t being told by the media. But the public already knew too much, so our values had already been subverted to accommodate us to our national life of crime. In the reality we were fed, deceit could be virtuous, “terrorists” could destroy us, only leaders could understand the world, and in “extreme” cases the normal questions of morality did not apply. This is why we were silent while “our” government committed these terrible deeds.

The argument has some merit. The elites of this country invented modern propaganda almost a century ago. Today the immense power of corporate-political “opinion formation” in certain reaches the public mind is undeniable. We need to understand how much this system has undermined the public will and dehumanized our lives.

However, to the extent that we as individuals still possess free will and are responsible for our own values, we have no excuse for our mute acceptance of these and other national crimes against humanity. Don’t we pay for them with our taxes, continue them with our votes, and support them with our silence?