– Chitto Harjo (Crazy Snake), address to the Special Senate Investigation Committee for the Indian Territory, Nov. 23, 1906

Chitto Harjo, Crazy Snake, was the leader of a dissident band of Creek Indians that stood in opposition to the political leaders of the Creek Nation during the early years of the twentieth century. They would come to be known as “Snake Indians” in deference to their recognized leader.

The Snakes were motivated by their opposition to the allotment of Creek lands and the efforts to assimilate Creek people in violation of the terms of the Treaty of 1832 between the United States and the Creek Nation. With the Dawes Act of 1887 and the Curtis Act of 1898 the U.S. Government sought to break up the communal land bases of the remaining Indigenous Nations and allot the land in small plots to individual Indians with the “surplus” lands left over going to new waves of Anglo-settlers.

Harjo had travelled to Washington with a delegation of Creek leaders attempting to obtain the support of President Theodore Roosevelt for the terms of the treaty. Finding little or no support, Harjo returned to Oklahoma and called for the establishment of a separate traditional Creek government at the Old Hickory Stomp Grounds.

The Snakes urged tribal towns not to participate in the allotment process and began to engage in open conflicts with individual tribal citizens who did participate in the process. Chitto Harjo remained an ardent opponent of allotment and assimilation till his death in 1911.

What is apparent from Harjo’s words and actions was his position and perspective as a traditional Muskogee Creek. He stood in opposition to any attempt by the government of the United States to denigrate the sovereignty of Creek Nation. He stood opposed to the Creek National Council that was colluding with the Americans and the individual Creeks who were accepting the allotment of Creek lands. He was an ardent proponent of the Treaty of 1832 which he saw, correctly, as a formal agreement between two sovereign entities. He knew full well the price paid by the Creek people for the Treaty of 1832, the loss of their traditional homelands in southeast and the horrors of the “Trail of Tears” that lead them to the Oklahoma territory.

Chitto Harjo saw himself as a citizen of an Indigenous Nation and understood his relationship to the government of the nation that had colonized Creek territory. His loyalties and allegiances are obvious to any who examines his life and work.

As we look back at Harjo’s example we must ask ourselves how we, as Indigenous People, relate to the political power structures that exist around us. Like Harjo we need to ask, “What has become of the relations between the Indians and the white people?”

Divided Loyalties, Conflicting Interest

There is much to be learned from the terms that some of us have grown accustomed to using as self-identifiers. We generally give little thought to the implications of “Native American” or “American Indian” nor do we seriously examine the rhetoric that attaches itself to these terms. If we were to examine that rhetoric and pay close attention to the words being spoken in the name of “Native America,” we would get a much clearer picture of the struggles postulated by the Indigenous leaders today compared to the battles fought by leaders like Chitto Harjo a century ago.

On January 26th, 2012 Jefferson Keel, the President of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) delivered the tenth annual State of Indian Nations Address. The speech is often portrayed as the definitive description of the status of the native nations within the United States.

Perhaps the most telling difference between Chitto Harjo’s impassioned speech to U.S. Senate Committee in 1906 and the words of President Keel in 2012 has to do with the clarity of position and identity provided by Harjo.

Where Harjo provides distinct lines of separation between Nations and Peoples giving deference to Creek sovereignty we find much less clarity in the words of the NCAI President. The contrast is very apparent when President Keel articulates his vision for the political entity he terms “Our America.” Lacking in his speech is a defined acknowledgement of the separate sovereign status of native nations, Keel instead points to a linked destiny as he states… ”Our nations are committed to the success of the United States of America.” Where Harjo had stressed the importance of treaty rights and self-determination as the best strategies for the Creek Nation, Keel tells us that our goals need to be centered on greater participation in the U.S. elections and a more direct role within the American political system.

Harjo understood that for native nations the struggle for treaty rights and self-determination was a struggle for what freedoms they could retain in the face of a colonial reality. The struggle for self-determination is, after all, a struggle for freedom and the responsibilities that true freedom brings. After centuries of oppression large portions of the indigenous population cling to the concepts articulated by the colonizer, such as “trust status” and “domestic dependent nationhood,” and shy away from the obligations and responsibilities that true freedom bring.

Paulo Freire, the critical theorist, examines the syndrome in some detail:

“The fear of freedom which afflicts the oppressed, a fear which may equally lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined.”

“The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.”¹

We are being told that the Presidential election of 2012 will afford native America an unprecedented chance to engage in the U.S. political system. Under the Indian Country Today headline “President Obama’s Million-Dollar Native Fund-Raiser,” we are told: “In a sign of growing tribal political clout, 70 Indian officials attended a first-ever Native-specific campaign fund-raiser with President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. on January 27.” Tickets for this event started at the reasonable price of $15,000 apiece.

For some perspective let us quickly review some basic demographic figures for the indigenous population living within the borders of the United States of America. You can rest assured that the 70 tribal officials at this gala where representative of the 40% of federally recognized tribes that operate gaming enterprises. As a whole the native people comprises less than 2% of the U.S. population and are the most impoverished of all ethnic groups. Native people have the highest rates of teen suicide, the highest rates of teen pregnancy, the highest high school dropout rates, the lowest per capita income and the highest unemployment rate.

In over two centuries of American colonization, our people have been reduced to the poorest, most impoverished levels of society. We have struggled to maintain what aspects of sovereignty and self-determination were not stripped away by the plenary power of the U.S. Government and watched as the monolithic monster of western capitalism continues to devour the land and resources that have sustained us for a millennium. Now we are lead to believe that our answer lies in handing over a million dollars to help the election campaign of the current American emperor?

In response to the million dollar donation President Obama told the gathered tribal officials that he was committed to making sure that “we” get the relationship between the U.S. and tribal governments’ right. His promise to native people that “Your children and your grandchildren have an equal shot at the American Dream.” The reality, of course, is that the million dollar night will have little or no effect on the vast majority of the indigenous population but will make the gaming interest that produced most of the political payoff more secure.

The argument that is made in defense of this tactic is that it offers the only way forward for our people; we must after all be practical. Only by investing ourselves within the American political system can we have any hope of our voices being heard within the corridors of power.

Among my people, the Houma, this strategy has been put forth many times. Written accounts of our attempts to gain the ears of the rich and powerful are well known.

In 1921 Jean Baptiste Parfait, a Houma community leader, lead a delegation from the lower bayous to the Lafourche Parish seat in Thibodaux. They made the two day boat trip to meet and lobby Congressman W.P. Martin for a school for Houma children. Indian children were excluded from the all-white public education system with the only access to formalized learning coming from sporadic missionary efforts.

Unfortunately for the Houma, there would be no direct assistance from the congressman other than his forwarding the request to the Federal Office of Indian Affairs. This did little to address the problem and there would be no school for Houma children in the near term.

Of interest to our discussion is a short description of the Houma written in correspondence inspired by the visit to the congressman.

They are poor it is true, but they are devout Christians, loyal citizens and staunch Republicans. At the last Presidential election their undivided votes aided in carrying the 3rd Congressional District solidly for President Harding and Congressman Martin.²

This was the pattern at the time and the one that continues, to some extent, to the present day. Politicians come into the Indian community and express their great concern for the plight of the Indian people. The people are encouraged to vote for candidate “A” because they have paid attention to the tribe and have promised to remember the needs of the Houma community when they are elected.

The issues within the story illustrate perfectly the reality of the struggle for political influence and the futility of the strategy. The Houma case for inclusion in public education went as far as the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1917 and was laid before Congressmen, Governors, and Presidents for years on end. In the end, the basic need for education for the Houma People would remain unmet for generations. It would take the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the conclusion of a lawsuit aided by its passage that would finally open the doors of public education to Houma children. Gaining the ear of a congressmen in exchange for votes forty years prior had done little for the cause, victory for the Houma came from fighting from the outside and not access to the inside of U.S. politics.

Even the precious gaming compacts of the fortunate few tribes that have them are serious breaches of any concept of genuine sovereignty. Compacts are made subject to the input of local and regional powerbrokers as well as federal machinations. All these players are given the ability to control or influence any legitimate exercise of self-determination or economic independence on tribal land.

So again we ask the question, what are we fighting for? Are we content with the crumbs that fall from the table of the emperor, or can we set our sights on regaining the ability to feed ourselves? Can we stand again as free men and women like our grandparents. or will we continue to bend our knees to the will of the colonizers?

Admittedly our Nations today lack the ability to seize power as we once did but we can commit our communities to move towards real self-determination with every step we take. If we really believe in the rhetoric that we preach then should we not be obligated to walk that path? Have we not given up enough ground in the last two centuries?

If we ask these questions of ourselves with sincerity of heart and listen closely with earnest expectation then perhaps we will hear again the voice of the Dragon as it carries across the ages…

Should we not therefore run all risks, and incur all consequences, rather than submit to further loss of our country? Such treaties may be all right for men who are too old to hunt or fight. As for me, I have my young warriors about me, we will have our lands. A-Waninski, I have spoken. — Tsi’yu-gunsini, Dragging Canoe

1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
2. Ernest Coycault to L.M. Gensman, 1 Dec. 1921.

Today, material conditions for the vast majority of working people have sharply deteriorated as the capitalist class shifts the entire burden of the crisis and the recovery of their profits onto the backs of wage and salaried classes. One of the striking aspects of this sustained and on-going roll-back of living standards is the absence of a major social upheaval so far. Greece and Spain, with over 50% unemployment among its 16-24 year olds and nearly 25% general unemployment, have experienced a dozen general strikes and numerous multi-million person national protests; but these have failed to produce any real change in regime or policies. The mass firings and painful salary, wage, pension and social services cuts continue. In other countries, like Italy, France, and England, protests and discontent find expression in the electoral arena, with incumbents voted out and replaced by the traditional opposition. Yet throughout the social turmoil and profound socio-economic erosion of living and working conditions, the dominant ideology informing the movements, trade unions and political opposition is reformist: Issuing calls to defend existing social benefits, increase public spending and investments, and expand the role of the state where private sector activity has failed to invest or employ. In other words, the left proposes to conserve a past when capitalism was harnessed to the welfare state.

The problem is that this ‘capitalism of the past’ is gone and a new more virulent and intransigent capitalism has emerged forging a new worldwide framework and a powerful entrenched state apparatus immune to all calls for ‘reform’ and reorientation. The confusion, frustration, and misdirection of mass popular opposition is, in part, due to the adoption by leftist writers, journalists, and academics of the concepts and language espoused by its capitalist adversaries: language designed to obfuscate the true social relations of brutal exploitation, the central role of the ruling classes in reversing social gains and the profound links between the capitalist class and the state. Capitalist publicists, academics and journalists have elaborated a whole litany of concepts and terms which perpetuate capitalist rule and distract its critics and victims from the perpetrators of their steep slide toward mass impoverishment.

Even as they formulate their critiques and denunciations, the critics of capitalism use the language and concepts of its apologists. Insofar as the language of capitalism has entered the general parlance of the left, the capitalist class has established hegemony or dominance over its erstwhile adversaries. Worse, the left, by combining some of the basic concepts of capitalism with sharp criticism, creates illusions about the possibility of reforming ‘the market’ to serve popular ends. This fails to identify the principle social forces that must be ousted from the commanding heights of the economy and the imperative to dismantle the class-dominated state. While the left denounces the capitalist crisis and state bailouts, its own poverty of thought undermines the development of mass political action. In this context the ‘language’ of obfuscation becomes a ‘material force’ – a vehicle of capitalist power, whose primary use is to disorient and disarm its anti-capitalist and working class adversaries. It does so by co-opting its intellectual critics through the use of terms, conceptual framework and language which dominate the discussion of the capitalist crisis.

Key Euphemisms at the Service of the Capitalist Offensive

Euphemisms have a double meaning: What terms connote and what they really mean. Euphemistic conceptions under capitalism connote a favorable reality or acceptable behavior and activity totally dissociated from the aggrandizement of elite wealth and concentration of power and privilege. Euphemisms disguise the drive of power elites to impose class-specific measures and to repress without being properly identified, held responsible and opposed by mass popular action.

The most common euphemism is the term ‘market’, which is endowed with human characteristics and powers. As such, we are told ‘the market demands wage cuts’ disassociated from the capitalist class. Markets, the exchange of commodities or the buying and selling of goods, have existed for thousands of years in different social systems in highly differentiated contexts. These have been global, national, regional and local. They involve different socio-economic actors, and comprise very different economic units, which range from giant state-promoted trading-houses to semi-subsistence peasant villages and town squares. ‘Markets’ existed in all complex societies: slave, feudal, mercantile and early and late competitive, monopoly industrial and finance capitalist societies.

When discussing and analyzing ‘markets’ and to make sense of the transactions (who benefits and who loses), one must clearly identify the principle social classes dominating economic transactions. To write in general about ‘markets’ is deceptive because markets do not exist independent of the social relations defining what is produced and sold, how it is produced and what class configurations shape the behavior of producers, sellers and labor. Today’s market reality is defined by giant multi-national banks and corporations, which dominate the labor and commodity markets. To write of ‘markets’ as if they operated in a sphere above and beyond brutal class inequalities is to hide the essence of contemporary class relations.

Fundamental to any understanding, but left out of contemporary discussion, is the unchallenged power of the capitalist owners of the means of production and distribution, the capitalist ownership of advertising, the capitalist bankers who provide or deny credit and the capitalist-appointed state officials who ‘regulate’ or deregulate exchange relations. The outcomes of their policies are attributed to euphemistic ‘market’ demands which seem to be divorced from the brutal reality. Therefore, as the propagandists imply, to go against ‘the market’ is to oppose the exchange of goods: This is clearly nonsense. In contrast, to identify capitalist demands on labor, including reductions in wages, welfare and safety, is to confront a specific exploitative form of market behavior where capitalists seek to earn higher profits against the interests and welfare majority of wage and salaried workers.

By conflating exploitative market relations under capitalism with markets in general, the ideologues achieve several results: They disguise the principle role of capitalists while evoking an institution with positive connotations, that is, a ‘market’ where people purchase consumer goods and ‘socialize’ with friends and acquaintances. In other words, when ‘the market’, which is portrayed as a friend and benefactor of society, imposes painful policies presumably it is for the welfare of the community. At least that is what the business propagandists want the public to believe by marketing their virtuous image of the ‘market’; they mask private capital’s predatory behavior as it chases greater profits.

One of the most common euphemisms thrown about in the midst of this economic crisis is ‘austerity’, a term used to cover-up the harsh realities of draconian cutbacks in wages, salaries, pensions and public welfare and the sharp increase in regressive taxes (VAT). ‘Austerity’ measures mean policies to protect and even increase state subsidies to businesses, and create higher profits for capital and greater inequalities between the top 10% and the bottom 90%. ‘Austerity’ implies self-discipline, simplicity, thrift, saving, responsibility, limits on luxuries and spending, avoidance of immediate gratification for future security – a kind of collective Calvinism. It connotes shared sacrifice today for the future welfare of all.

However, in practice ‘austerity’ describes policies that are designed by the financial elite to implement class-specific reductions in the standard of living and social services (such as health and education) available for workers and salaried employees. It means public funds can be diverted to an even greater extent to pay high interest rates to wealthy bondholders while subjecting public policy to the dictates of the overlords of finance capital.

Rather than talking of ‘austerity’, with its connotation of stern self-discipline, leftist critics should clearly describe ruling class policies against the working and salaried classes, which increase inequalities and concentrate even more wealth and power at the top. ‘Austerity’ policies are therefore an expression of how the ruling classes use the state to shift the burden of the cost of their economic crisis onto labor.

The ideologues of the ruling classes co-opted concepts and terms, which the left originally used to advance improvements in living standards and turned them on their heads. Two of these euphemisms, co-opted from the left, are ‘reform’ and ‘structural adjustment’. ‘Reform’, for many centuries, referred to changes, which lessened inequalities and increased popular representation. ‘Reforms’ were positive changes enhancing public welfare and constraining the abuse of power by oligarchic or plutocratic regimes. Over the past three decades, however, leading academic economists, journalists and international banking officials have subverted the meaning of ‘reform’ into its opposite: it now refers to the elimination of labor rights, the end of public regulation of capital and the curtailment of public subsidies making food and fuel affordable to the poor. In today’s capitalist vocabulary ‘reform’ means reversing progressive changes and restoring the privileges of private monopolies. ‘Reform’ means ending job security and facilitating massive layoffs of workers by lowering or eliminating mandatory severance pay. ‘Reform’ no longer means positive social changes; it now means reversing those hard fought changes and restoring the unrestrained power of capital. It means a return to capital’s earlier and most brutal phase, before labor organizations existed and when class struggle was suppressed. Hence ‘reform’ now means restoring privileges, power, and profit for the rich.

In a similar fashion, the linguistic courtesans of the economic profession have co-opted the term ‘structural’ as in ‘structural adjustment’ to service the unbridled power of capital. As late as the 1970’s, ‘structural’ change referred to the redistribution of land from the big landlords to the landless; a shift in power from plutocrats to popular classes. ‘Structures’ referred to the organization of concentrated private power in the state and economy. Today, however, ‘structure’ refers to the public institutions and public policies, which grew out of labor and citizen struggles to provide social security, for protecting the welfare, health and retirement of workers. ‘Structural changes’ now are the euphemism for smashing those public institutions, ending the constraints on capital’s predatory behavior and destroying labor’s capacity to negotiate, struggle or preserve its social advances.

The term ‘adjustment’, as in ‘structural adjustment’ (SA), is itself a bland euphemism implying fine-tuning , the careful modulation of public institutions and policies back to health and balance. But, in reality, ‘structural adjustment’ represents a frontal attack on the public sector and a wholesale dismantling of protective legislation and public agencies organized to protect labor, the environment and consumers. ‘Structural adjustment’ masks a systematic assault on the people’s living standards for the benefit of the capitalist class.

The capitalist class has cultivated a crop of economists and journalists who peddle brutal policies in bland, evasive and deceptive language in order to neutralize popular opposition. Unfortunately, many of their ‘leftist’ critics tend to rely on the same terminology.

Given the widespread corruption of language so pervasive in contemporary discussions about the crisis of capitalism the left should stop relying on this deceptive set of euphemisms co-opted by the ruling class. It is frustrating to see how easily the following terms enter our discourse:

Market discipline – The euphemism ‘discipline’ connotes serious, conscientious strength of character in the face of challenges as opposed to irresponsible, escapist behavior. In reality, when paired with ‘market’, it refers to capitalists taking advantage of unemployed workers and using their political influence and power lay-off masses workers and intimidate those remaining employees into greater exploitation and overwork, thereby producing more profit for less pay. It also covers the capacity of capitalist overlords to raise their rate of profit by slashing the social costs of production, such as worker and environmental protection, health coverage and pensions.

Market shock – This refers to capitalists engaging in brutal massive, abrupt firings, cuts in wages and slashing of health plans and pensions in order to improve stock quotations, augment profits and secure bigger bonuses for the bosses. By linking the bland, neutral term, ‘market’ to ‘shock’, the apologists of capital disguise the identity of those responsible for these measures, their brutal consequences and the immense benefits enjoyed by the elite.

Market Demands – This euphemistic phrase is designed to anthropomorphize an economic category, to diffuse criticism away from real flesh and blood power-holders, their class interests and their despotic strangle-hold over labor. Instead of ‘market demands’, the phrase should read: ‘the capitalist class commands the workers to sacrifice their own wages and health to secure more profit for the multi-national corporations’ – a clear concept more likely to arouse the ire of those adversely affected.

Free Enterprise – An euphemism spliced together from two real concepts: private enterprise for private profit and free competition. By eliminating the underlying image of private gain for the few against the interests of the many, the apologists of capital have invented a concept that emphasizes individual virtues of ‘enterprise’ and ‘freedom’ as opposed to the real economic vices of greed and exploitation.

Free Market – A euphemism implying free, fair and equal competition in unregulated markets glossing over the reality of market domination by monopolies and oligopolies dependent on massive state bailouts in times of capitalist crisis. ‘Free’ refers specifically to the absence of public regulations and state intervention to defend workers safety as well as consumer and environmental protection. In other words, ‘freedom’ masks the wanton destruction of the civic order by private capitalists through their unbridled exercise of economic and political power. ‘Free market’ is the euphemism for the absolute rule of capitalists over the rights and livelihood of millions of citizens, in essence, a true denial of freedom.

Economic Recovery – This euphemistic phrase means the recovery of profits by the major corporations. It disguises the total absence of recovery of living standards for the working and middle classes, the reversal of social benefits and the economic losses of mortgage holders, debtors, the long-term unemployed and bankrupted small business owners. What is glossed over in the term ‘economic recovery’ is how mass immiseration became a key condition for the recovery of corporate profits.

Privatization – This describes the transfer of public enterprises, usually the profitable ones, to well-connected, large scale private capitalists at prices well below their real value, leading to the loss of public services, stable public employment and higher costs to consumers as the new private owners jack up prices and lay-off workers — all in the name of another euphemism, ‘efficiency’.

Efficiency – Efficiency here refers only to the balance sheets of an enterprise; it does not reflect the heavy costs of ‘privatization’ borne by related sectors of the economy. For example, ‘privatization’ of transport adds costs to upstream and downstream businesses by making them less competitive compared with competitors in other countries; ‘privatization’ eliminates services in regions that are less profitable, leading to local economic collapse and isolation from national markets. Frequently, public officials, who are aligned with private capitalists, will deliberately disinvest in public enterprises and appoint incompetent political cronies as part of patronage politics, in order to degrade services and foment public discontent. This creates a public opinion favorable to ‘privatizing’ the enterprise. In other words ‘privatization’ is not a result of the inherent inefficiencies of public enterprises, as the capitalist ideologues like to argue, but a deliberate political act designed to enhance private capital gain at the cost of public welfare.

Conclusion

Language, concepts, and euphemisms are important weapons in the class struggle ‘from above’ designed by capitalist journalists and economists to maximize the wealth and power of capital. To the degree that progressive and leftist critics adopt these euphemisms and their frame of reference, their own critiques and the alternatives they propose are limited by the rhetoric of capital. Putting ‘quotation marks’ around the euphemisms may be a mark of disapproval but this does nothing to advance a different analytical framework necessary for successful class struggle ‘from below’. Equally important, it side-steps the need for a fundamental break with the capitalist system including its corrupted language and deceptive concepts. Capitalists have overturned the most fundamental gains of the working class and we are falling back toward the absolute rule of capital. This must raise anew the issue of a socialist transformation of the state, economy and class structure. An integral part of that process must be the complete rejection of the euphemisms used by capitalist ideologues and their systematic replacement by terms and concepts that truly reflect the harsh reality, that clearly identify the perpetrators of this decline and that define the social agencies for political transformation.

Having set up his system Dühring undertakes to discuss the nature of the “state of the future.” His ideas are, Engels maintains, watered down simplifications of notions he has gleaned from Rousseau and Hegel. In his own words, Dühring bases his state on the “sovereignty of the people.” He explains what he means in the following passage of essentially meaningless mumbo jumbo:

If one presupposes agreements between each individual and every other individual in all directions, and if the object of these agreements is mutual aid against unjust offenses– the the power required for the maintenance of right is only strengthened, and right is not deduced from the more superior strength of the many against the individual or of the majority against the minority.

Don’t worry if that passage doesn’t make any sense as Dühring adds the following to explicate it. He says, “The slightest error in the conception of the role of the collective will would destroy the sovereignty of the individual, and this sovereignty is the only thing conducive to the deduction of real rights.” Engels thinks this pretty “thick” even by the standards of Dühring’s so called “philosophy of reality.”

This is especially so since the “sovereignty of the individual” consists in the fact that he or she is, Dühring says, “Subject to absolute compulsioin by the state.” This is because the state “serves natural justice” and that is the best guarantee of individual sovereignty. There will be a police force for internal security and an army as well — to enforce the will of the state — which is the same as that of the community of sovereign individuals and to ensure people don’t use their sovereignty in an incorrect and un-sovereign manner. And just in case the state makes an error, well, the citizens will still be better off than they would have been if left in the state of nature! Anyway, they will get free lawyers to boot.

Since Dühring says his new state is based on “sober and critical thought”, he announces that religion will be banished from the commune.” In the free society,” he says, “there can be no religious worship; for every member of it has got beyond the primitive childish superstition that there are beings, behind nature or above it, who can be influenced by sacrifices or prayers. [A] socialitarian system, rightly conceived, has therefore … to abolish all the paraphernalia of religious magic, and therewith all the essential elements of religious worship.”

It is important to note, since in the real history of socialism in the twentieth century, some socialist and communist states tried to eliminate religion and religious practices by forceable means, that this idea ["the state has to…"] comes from Dühring, an enemy of the Marxist outlook, and not from anything Marx or Engels had to say. Engels explicitly criticizes this view.

This is not to say Marx and Engels were in any way “soft” on religion ["opium of the masses" and all that] but they respected “individual sovereignty” enough not to dream of using the “state’ [which they wanted to abolish in any case] to trample on people’s rights of conscience in religious affairs.

At this point Engels adds a succinct account of the Marxist view of the origin, social function, and future of religion. It is more or less as follows. Religion is just a reflection in the brains of people of the forces in the external world that are out of their control which affect their lives and that they imagine as supernatural beings which they need to fear and placate. Originally these were the powers of nature that took on the guise of gods and goddess, but as human society progressed and evolved social forces also came to assume these roles. Over time, in the West at least, the many gods and goddess representing these alien powers were distilled down to one god [monotheism; e.g., Jews and Moslems, or three gods posing as one as in the Jewish-pagan synthesis called Christianity- tr] and in this form religion will have a lease on life as long as humans are dominated by natural and social powers they neither understand nor control.

In contemporary capitalist society people are dominated and controlled by an economic system that they have themselves made yet rules over them as if it were an independently existing power beyond their control. The Market– made by humans, rules humans. This is essentially the same reification as is found in religion, and it reinforces religious attitudes and beliefs already historically present in modern society. Engels thinks of this development as the First Act of human development. It is now time for the Second Act.

In the Second Act humans will take control of the means of production and distribution which they have created over the long ages [thereby hangs a tale] and by means of scientific understanding and advance be able to control them rather than being controlled by them. Science will also explain the origins of life, the workings of nature, and the role of humans, leading to advances in medicine, agriculture, education, etc., so that humans will seek to understand the world instead of bowing down before it in stupefaction.

Engels says “only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish: and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.” Dühring can’t wait and wants to administratively abolish religion before humanity has reached the intellectual and social level where it will of its own accord fade away. This will only inflame resistance, antagonize the masses, and strengthen the hold of superstition over the brains of people by giving it “a prolonged lease of life.” I might add, if some of the socialists and communists of the past century, let alone this one, would have taken Engels to heart many mistakes and tragedies could have been avoided.

After Herr Dühring has disposed of religion he tells us that “man, made to rely solely on himself and nature and matured in the knowledge of his collective powers, can intrepidly enter on all the roads which the course of events and his own being open to him.” Fine. Let us see how “man” travels down these roads. First he is born. Then he, or she as the case may be, is under the control of his mother the “natural tutor of children” until puberty (about 14 years) when the role of the father kicks in, as long as “real and uncontested paternity” can be demonstrated. If not a guardian is appointed. Ancient Roman law serves Dühring as a model for these ideas.

This shows, Engels says, that Dühring has no sense of history. The family, for him, is immutable, basically the same in Ancient Rome as in modern capitalism with no allowance for the changes in economic conditions and social relations between the ancient world and contemporary world. Engels then quotes the following passage from Volume One of Das Kapital to show the superiority of Marx’s outlook to Dühring’s. Marx wrote that “modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes [due to the rise of the working class movement capitalism's urge to exploit children in the productive process has been somewhat curtailed-- tr] creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and the relations between the sexes.”

This new form is still in the process of creation, but there is no going back to the Ancient Roman family, nor even, as our Republican politicians are learning to their chagrin, to the patriarchal family of the Christian Middle Ages — so beloved by the reactionary classes in our country.

Dühring next informs us that “Every dreamer of social reforms naturally has ready a pedagogy corresponding to his new social life.” He may think he is putting others down and himself coming up with a truly scientific plan for the educational needs of society, for the “foreseeable future”, but he is actually a worse dreamer than those he opposes, according to Engels.

In the schools of Dühring’s future cooperative society the children will, Dühring writes, learn “everything which by itself and in principle can have any attraction for man” and so will include “the foundations and main conclusions of all sciences touching on the understanding of the world and of life.” Dühring also tells us he sees in outline all the textbooks of the future but he is personally unable to actually see their contents and just what the children will be learning as that “can only really be expected from the free and enhanced forces of the new social order.” But they will concentrate on physics, math, astronomy and mechanics while biology, botany, and zoology and such will be “topics for light conversation” [!]. He completely forgets to say anything about chemistry. Engels says his knowledge of the sciences seems to be confined to Natural History for Children — a popular book of the 18th Century by Georg Christian Raff (1748-1788).

When it comes to the humanities, Dühring sounds like a second rate Plato. He wants to ban, for example, the great artistic creations of the past because too many of them have religious themes. As Plato banned Homer for portraying the Gods with human flaws, so Goethe is banned by Dühring for “poetic mysticism” and others for any religious content at all — since religion is banned completely in the future state.

American monoglot educators will appreciate Herr Dühring’s attitude to foreign languages. Latin and Greek will be junked entirely — who needs dead languages? Living foreign languages “will remain of secondary importance” and the students will really concentrate on their own native tongue. Engels thinks this is a way to perpetuate the dulling national narrow mindedness of people who are basically ignorant of the world and of the Other. Latin and Greek actually open up people’s minds to a broader perspective of the world and history, at least if they have a classical education, and learning foreign modern languages also allows peoples to have greater understanding of others and their cultures. Dühring’s views are those of the narrow minded Prussian Philistine and similar to the “English only” bigotry found on the right in this country.

Engels gives Dühring credit for at least being aware of the fact there will be a difference between educational policies under socialism and those currently employed in bourgeois society, but since he keeps capitalist relations of production in place in his future communal society he can’t quite figure out what those policies will be. Thus he is reduced to coming up with such ideas as “young and old will work in the serious sense of the word” which, along with other empty phrases, Engels calls “spineless and meaningless ranting.”

Engels counterpoises a brief comment on socialist education from volume one of Das Kapital where Marx says that “from the Factory system budded, as Robert Owen has shown in detail, the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.” Our own educational system, which produces dropouts and graduates functional illiterates, is American capitalism’s answer to what education will be in the future.

Finally, after we find out how children will be educated in Dühring’s future society, we find out how they are to come into the world. Dühring, no doubt inspired by Plato’s Republic, tells us that future humans must be “sought in sexual union and selection, and furthermore in the care taken for or against the ensuring of certain results.” We are here on the road to Dühringean eugenics. The most important thing to keep in mind about the future births is not the number but “whether nature or human circumspection succeeded or failed in regard to their quality.” This leads Dühring to conclude that “It is obviously an advantage to prevent the birth of a human being who would only be a defective creature.”

Modern scientific sentiment would not reject this conclusion out of hand, regardless of the feelings of those blinded by religious prejudices or logically challenged. It all depends on the kinds of defects that are presented. Dühring is thinking, however, along lines made popular by Nietzsche, of some sort of super human race compared to the run of the mill humans that unaided Nature tends to produce.

Dühring believes in a human right which may be important, but is not generally appealed to these days, for the purposes of eugenics; i.e., “the right of the unborn world to the best possible composition” [biologically-- tr]. “Conception,” he says, “and, if need be, also birth [infanticide- tr] offer the opportunity , or in exceptional cases selective, care in this connection.” Dühring is not just talking about medical defects– but also “aesthetic” defects.

He thinks, in fact, that people should be bred to look like the ancient Greeks! “Grecian art — the idealization of man in marble [not "European" man but "man"]– will not be able to retain its historical importance when the less artistic, and therefore from the standpoint of the fate of the millions, far more important task of perfecting the human form in flesh and blood is taken in hand.” OK, so we won’t all look like Antinous or the Venus de Milo but that goal will be a work in progress for the future Dühringean society.

How does Dühring bring about the this perfection of the human [ancient Greeks-- Dühring had no use for modern Greeks] form? Well, he says force would be harmful but it will come about as a natural result of the mating of beautiful people– sort of by an “invisible hand” (but in this case a different anatomical feature will be at work). Here is Dühring’s quote: [From the] “higher, genuinely human motives of wholesome sexual unions … the humanly ennobled form of sexual excitement , which in its intense manifestations is passionate love, when reciprocated is the best guarantee of a union which will be acceptable also in its result…. It is only an effect of the second order that from a relation which in itself is harmonious a symphoniously composed product should result.”

Engels thinks Dühring’s views on sex are “twaddle.” This is because force would have to be used to make sure all unions were “wholesome” by Dühring’s standards. In the real world it is not just the beautiful people who fall in love and have children (symphoniously composed products) but all kinds of people so “the second order” effects of lovemaking would be the same in the future communal state of Herr Dühring as they are now. [He could, however, try for a rigged lottery a la Plato's Republic to match up the "best" people and only allow those with baby licenses to reproduce. This would lead to more problems than the Chinese have had with the one child policy -- which was successful in limiting population numbers but a failure from the point of view of creating balanced population growth.]

Engels also critiques Dühring’s “noble ideas about the female sex in general”[prostitution is a normal activity due to the constraints of bourgeois marriage]– but both Dühring’s ideas and Engel’s response are too shaped by nineteenth century conditions to be applicable to twenty-first century advanced industrial societies so I will pass this topic by and come to the conclusion of Anti-Dühring.

After having gone over all the major views that Dühring had presented in a series of writings over the years, and refuting them by giving a proper Marxist response to his mixed up theoretical constructions, Engels sums up Dühring’s oeuvre as being the product of mental incompetence due to megalomania.

Postscript: Eugen Dühring survived Engel’s critique and wrote more books and articles. In the 1880′s he began turning out anti-Semitic writings some of which led Theodor Hertzel to conclude that the Jews needed their own state. Frederick Nietzsche’s rantings against socialism were the result of his having read Dühring’s works not those of Marx and Engels (although I doubt it would have made any difference). Of his many books only one has been translated into English — his anti-Semitic tract on the Jewish question was published in 1997 as Eugen Dühring on the Jews by 1984 Press. Dühring died in 1921 thus being deprived of seeing the fruits of his anti-Semitic labors. These and other interesting facts about Dühring are to be found in the Wikipedia article “Eugen Dühring.”

A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.

— President Ronald Reagan, 1987¹

On April 23, speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama told his assembled audience that as president “I’ve done my utmost … to prevent and end atrocities”.

Do the facts and evidence tell him that his words are not true?

Well, let’s see … There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Iraq by American forces under President Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Afghanistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Pakistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Libya by American/NATO forces under Obama. There are also the hundreds of American drone attacks against people and homes in Somalia and in Yemen (including against American citizens in the latter). Might the friends and families of these victims regard the murder of their loved ones and the loss of their homes as atrocities?

Ronald Reagan was pre-Alzheimer’s when he uttered the above. What excuse can be made for Barack Obama?

The president then continued in the same fashion by saying: “We possess many tools … and using these tools over the past three years, I believe — I know — that we have saved countless lives.” Obama pointed out that this includes Libya, where the United States, in conjunction with NATO, took part in seven months of almost daily bombing missions. We may never learn from the new pro-NATO Libyan government how many the bombs killed, or the extent of the damage to homes and infrastructure. But the President of the United States assured his Holocaust Museum audience that “today, the Libyan people are forging their own future, and the world can take pride in the innocent lives that we saved.” (As I described in last month’s report, Libya could now qualify as a failed state.)

Language is an invention that makes it possible for a person to deny what he is doing even as he does it.

Mr. Obama closed with these stirring words; “It can be tempting to throw up our hands and resign ourselves to man’s endless capacity for cruelty. It’s tempting sometimes to believe that there is nothing we can do.” But Barack Obama is not one of those doubters. He knows there is something he can do about man’s endless capacity for cruelty. He can add to it. Greatly. And yet, I am certain that, with exceedingly few exceptions, those in his Holocaust audience left with no doubt that this was a man wholly deserving of his Nobel Peace Prize.

And future American history books may well certify the president’s words as factual, his motivation sincere, for his talk indeed possessed the quality needed for schoolbooks.

The Israeli-American-Iranian-Holocaust-NobelPeacePrize Circus

It’s a textbook case of how the American media is at its worst when it comes to US foreign policy and particularly when an Officially Designated Enemy (ODE) is involved. I’ve discussed this case several times in this report in recent years. The ODE is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The accusation has been that he had threatened violence against Israel, based on his 2005 remark calling for “wiping Israel off the map”. Who can count the number of times this has been repeated in every kind of media, in every country of the world, without questioning the accuracy of what was reported? A Lexis-Nexis search of “All News (English)” for for the past seven years produced the message: “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3000 results.”

As I’ve pointed out, Ahmadinejad’s “threat of violence” was a serious misinterpretation, one piece of evidence being that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.”² Obviously, he was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place remarkably peacefully. But the myth of course continued.

Now, finally, we have the following exchange from the radio-TV simulcast, Democracy Now!, of April 19:

A top Israeli official has acknowledged that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said that Iran seeks to “wipe Israel off the face of the map.” The falsely translated statement has been widely attributed to Ahmadinejad and used repeatedly by U.S. and Israeli government officials to back military action and sanctions against Iran. But speaking to Teymoor Nabili of the network Al Jazeera, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted Ahmadinejad had been misquoted.

Teymoor Nabili: “As we know, Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran policy is to exterminate Israel. Ahmadinejad’s position and Iran’s position always has been, and they’ve made this — they’ve said this as many times as Ahmadinejad has criticized Israel, he has said as many times that he has no plans to attack Israel. …”

Dan Meridor: “Well, I have to disagree, with all due respect. You speak of Ahmadinejad. I speak of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, Rafsanjani, Shamkhani. I give the names of all these people. They all come, basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right. But ‘It will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor that should be removed,’ was said just two weeks ago again.”

Teymoor Nabili: “Well, I’m glad you’ve acknowledged that they didn’t say they will wipe it out.”

So that’s that. Right? Of course not. Fox News, NPR, CNN, NBC, et al. will likely continue to claim that Ahmadinejad threatened violence against Israel, threatened to “wipe it off the map”.

And that’s only Ahmadinejad the Israeli Killer. There’s still Ahmadinejad the Holocaust Denier. So until a high Israeli official finally admits that that too is a lie, keep in mind that Ahmadinejad has never said simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we historically know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many other people of various political stripes. In a speech at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, in reply to a question about the Holocaust, the Iranian president declared: “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”³

Let us now listen to Elie Wiesel, the simplistic, reactionary man who’s built a career around being a Holocaust survivor, introducing President Obama at the Holocaust Museum for the talk referred to above, some five days after the statement made by the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister:

How is it that the Holocaust’s No. 1 denier, Ahmadinejad, is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons — to use nuclear weapons — to destroy the Jewish state. Have we not learned? We must. We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.

“Nuclear weapons” is of course adding a new myth on the back of the old myth.

Wiesel, like Obama, is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. As is Henry Kissinger and Menachim Begin. And several other such war-loving beauties. When will that monumental farce of a prize be put to sleep?

For the record, let it be noted that on March 4, speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama said: “Let’s begin with a basic truth that you all understand: No Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.”⁴

Postscript: Each time I strongly criticize Barack Obama a few of my readers ask to unsubscribe. I’m really sorry to lose them but it’s important that those on the left rid themselves of their attachment to the Democratic Party. I’m not certain how best to institute revolutionary change in the United States, but I do know that it will not happen through the Democratic Party, and the sooner those on the left cut their umbilical cord to the Democrats, the sooner we can start to get more serious about this thing called revolution.

Written on Earth Day, Sunday, April 22, 2012

Two simple suggestions as part of a plan to save the planet.

1. Population control: limit families to two children

All else being equal, a markedly reduced population count would have a markedly beneficial effect upon global warming, air pollution, and food and water availability; as well as finding a parking spot, getting a seat on the subway, getting on the flight you prefer, and much, much more. Some favor limiting families to one child. Still others, who spend a major part of each day digesting the awful news of the world, are calling for a limit of zero. (The Chinese government announced in 2008 that the country would have about 400 million more people if it wasn’t for its limit of one or two children per couple.⁵

But, within the environmental movement, there is still significant opposition to this. Part of the reason is fear of ethnic criticism inasmuch as population programs have traditionally been aimed at — or seen to be aimed at — primarily the poor, the weak, and various “outsiders”. There is also the fear of the religious right and its medieval views on birth control.

2. Eliminate the greatest consumer of energy in the world: The United States military.

Here’s Michael Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Mass. in 2007:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis — either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That’s greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million — and yet it’s a gross underestimate of the Pentagon’s wartime consumption.⁶

The United States military, for decades, with its legion of bases and its numerous wars has also produced and left behind a deadly toxic legacy. From the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam in the 1960s to the open-air burn pits on US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century, countless local people have been sickened and killed; and in between those two periods we could read things such as this from a lengthy article on the subject in the Los Angeles Times in 1990:

U.S. military installations have polluted the drinking water of the Pacific island of Guam, poured tons of toxic chemicals into Subic Bay in the Philippines, leaked carcinogens into the water source of a German spa, spewed tons of sulfurous coal smoke into the skies of Central Europe and pumped millions of gallons of raw sewage into the oceans.⁷

The military has caused similar harm to the environment in the United States at a number of its installations. (Do a Google search for <"U.S. military bases" toxic>)

When I suggest eliminating the military I am usually rebuked for leaving “a defenseless America open to foreign military invasion”. And I usually reply:

“Tell me who would invade us? Which country?”

“What do you mean which country? It could be any country.”

“So then it should be easy to name one.”

“Okay, any of the 200 members of the United Nations!”

“No, I’d like you to name a specific country that you think would invade the United States. Name just one.”

“Okay, Paraguay. You happy now?”

“No, you have to tell me why Paraguay would invade the United States.”

“How would I know?”

Etc., etc., and if this charming dialogue continues, I ask the person to tell me how many troops the invading country would have to have to occupy a country of more than 300 million people.

Yankee karma

The questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: What’s the best way to block the flow into the country? How shall we punish those caught here illegally? Should we separate families, which happens when parents are deported but their American-born children remain? Should the police and various other institutions have the right to ask for proof of legal residence from anyone they suspect of being here illegally? Should we punish employers who hire illegal immigrants? Should we grant amnesty to at least some of the immigrants already here for years? … on and on, round and round it goes, for decades. Every once in a while someone opposed to immigration will make it a point to declare that the United States does not have any moral obligation to take in these Latino immigrants.

But the counter-argument to the last is almost never mentioned: Yes, the United States does have a moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping situations in their homelands made hopeless by American interventions and policy. In Guatemala and Nicaragua, Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting poverty. In El Salvador, the US played a major role in suppressing a movement striving to install such a government, and to a lesser extent played such a role in Honduras. And in Mexico, although Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico since 1919, over the years the US has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to Mexico’s police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own people’s aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the impoverished to the United States. Moreover, Washington’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized US agricultural products into Mexico and driven many Mexican farmers off the land.

The end result of all these policies has been an army of migrants heading north in search of a better life. It’s not that these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed on them by American police and right-wingers.

1. Washington Post, March 5, 1987.
2. Associated Press, December 12, 2006.
3. President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University, Transcript, Washington Post, September 24, 2007.
4. Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference, White House Office of the Press Secretary, March 4, 2012.
5. Washington Post, March 3, 2008.
6. The Pentagon v. Peak Oil, TomDispatch.com, June 14, 2007.
7. Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1990.

Once I had gotten past the Prologue – which I thought did not belong at the beginning of the book – Khan’s narrative never lost its power to sustain my interest. The book takes the reader through many unexpected shifts in the protagonist’s life – from cricket to charity work, from charity work to politics, from the life of a celebrity to a life of piety, from disdain for Islam to a deepening respect for its richness and depth, from contempt (a colonial legacy common to Pakistan’s elites) for ordinary Pakistanis to a growing concern for their tormented lives, from wilting shyness before audiences to a determination to face the glare of public life, from growing anxiety about Pakistan’s problems to an unshakable resolve to do something about them; etc. In short, the book takes the reader through the life of an extraordinary man, at first fully immersed in the privileges of his class and his cricket celebrity but slowly turning inwards, questioning the colonial mindset of his own privileged class, angry at the limitless corruption of Pakistan’s rulers, and, finally, reaching resolution in his commitment to take Pakistan back from its corrupt elites. A politician with Imran Khan’s record would be rare in Western ‘democracies.’ In a country like Pakistan, mired for decades in the corruption of rapacious elites, he is an anomaly – an outlier. Should the Pakistanis embrace Imran Khan, should they give him the chance to pick and lead the nation’s political team, this could be a game-changer for their country.

While describing his spiritual journey following the pain of his mother’s death, Imran Khan sums up his life in an aphorism, “A spiritual person takes responsibility for society, whereas a materialist only takes responsibility for himself (87).” Quite apart from the truth-value of this statement (since a ‘materialist’ or someone without belief in God or afterlife may also choose to take responsibility for society), this sentiment very aptly describes the author’s long and tortuous passage from indifference towards larger questions – both metaphysical and political – to a deepening engagement with God and the history and fate of Pakistanis and Muslims. In time, after much soul-searching, Imran Khan chooses to take “responsibility for society.” Once he has formed a conviction, Imran Khan has shown that there is no turning back for him.

Imran Khan’s autobiography contains some homespun theology too. At one point, he describes how cricket nudged him towards faith; it began with observations on cricketing luck. A game can turn on the toss of a coin; success in bowling can depend on the way the ball is stitched, on umpiring mistakes, on fortuitous injuries, on the weather, etc. In other words, “there seemed to be a zone beyond which players were helpless, and it was called luck (84).” He muses, “… could what we call luck actually be the will of God?” Is it possible, amidst the infinite complexity that produces any outcome, that God intervenes in our lives, nudges a particle here a particle there to confront us with outcomes that surprise us, overthrow our certainties, deflate our egos, forcing us to think of higher forces?

After his mother’s painful death from cancer, Imran Khan turned away from God. Questions of theodicy troubled him. He worried that his life’s accomplishments could vanish in a moment. In the face of this vulnerability, persuaded by a logic that recalls Pascal’s wager, he resumed his salaat. “This was really like an insurance policy – a sort of safety net in case God really did exist.” It is likely that Imran had arrived at his reasoning on his own, or he had encountered this argument in the Qur’an. Unknown to most Muslims, the Qur’an makes this argument on several occasions; it is then taken up by Hazrat Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and in the eleventh century by al-Ghazzali.

Imran Khan speaks reverently of the influence of Mian Bashir on his life, an obscure but spiritually gifted man who gently led him to discover the inwardness and beauty of Islam. People who have lost touch with metaphysics will likely frown at this influence. Untroubled by such skeptics, Imran Khan recognizes this obscure sufi as the “single most powerful spiritual influence” on his life. I respect this openness to the Unseen, this divinely implanted ‘naiveté’ – if you will – that lies at the heart of all authentic religious experience, and that Western rationalism and scientism have nearly destroyed in modern man. Despite the materialism that assails us, we can stay in touch with this ‘naiveté.’ In better times too, very few men and women could reach the summits of the mystical ascent; but they sought spiritual sustenance in the baraka of the valis, friends of God. Unknown to Pakistan’s militant secularists, Asadullah Khan Ghalib too – despite his celebrated skepticism – sought intimacy with God through veneration of Hazrat ‘Ali and his family.

2.

Imran Khan is nothing if not resolute in pursuing the goals he sets for himself; and his goals have never been modest. “Over the years,” he writes, “I came to the conclusion that ‘genius’ is being obsessed with what you are doing (63).” Quite early in his cricket career, spurred by the example of Dennis Lillee, he decided to remake himself as a fast bowler. His teammates and coach warned him that he “had neither the physique nor the bowling action to become a fast bowler (118)” and he could ruin his career if he tried to change his bowling style. Imran Khan was not deterred. He remodeled his “bowling action to become a fast bowler,” and as he worked hard towards this goal – he writes – “my body also became stronger for me to bowl fast.” Most cricket commentators agree that Imran Khan went on to establish himself as one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time. Fewer still have combined his eminence in fast bowling with skill at batting and leading his team.

When Imran Khan set out in 1984 to establish Pakistan’s first cancer hospital – he ran into a wall of skepticism. When he presented his plans for the Hospital to the leading Pakistani doctors in Lahore and Lon-don, they were dismissive; he did not give up. Working indefatigably to collect mostly small donations from tens of thousands of people at home and abroad, Imran Khan began construction work on the project in April 1991. The Hospital admitted its first patients in December 1994, with a com-mitment to provide free care to all poor patients. Skeptics had warned that this policy was not viable, but generous Pakistanis proved them wrong. Now plans are underway for building two more cancer hospitals in Peshawar and Karachi.

Our author has shown the same dogged persistence in the arena of politics. When he announced his entry into politics in 1996 – with the for-mation of a new party, Tehreek-e-Insaaf, dedicated to fighting corrup-tion in public life – Pakistanis ignored him. In the first elections it contested in 1997, the Tehreek won no seat; in the second election in 2002, it won a single seat. Imran Khan could draw large crowds to his rallies, but they were drawn to their cricket hero not the political leader who promised to deliver a better future for them. Perhaps, Imran Khan had not done his homework. His promise to fight corruption did not yet carry a broad appeal; his message did not resonate with workers, peasants, students, clerks and small shop-keepers. Pakistanis knew that their leaders are corrupt, but they did not see Imran Khan as the force that could pry Pakistan out of their dirty but powerful grip. Imran Khan had not begun the hard work of building his party from the ground up, creating a cadre of committed workers and donors. He spent too much time on talk shows and too little time organizing his party.

The failure of Tehreek-e-Insaaf to make an impact in the 2002 elections may well have ended Imran Khan’s political career; but he was not ready to quit the field. He persisted in his attacks on Pakistan’s corrupt elites through regular appearances on television talk shows that had proliferated following General Musharraf’s liberalization of the media. Then came the attacks of 9-11, the US decision to draft Pakistan into its so-called Global War Against Terror. Gleefully, Pakistan’s generals accepted every demand that the US made on Pakistan’s sovereignty; they gave the US air and land corridors to Afghanistan, control of one or more airbases in Pakistan, and free run of Pakistan to CIA operatives. Only the religious parties and jihadi factions opposed this surrender of Pakistan’s sovereignty, but they occupied limited political space in Pakistan. With few exceptions, Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ intellectuals also supported the US War; they were happy to see the Taliban driven out by the American invaders. The political tides were begging to turn for Imran Khan. This was his opportunity to broaden his critique of Pakistan’s corrupt political classes; their corruption now veered towards treason. None of this was surprising, but it did bring out into the open Pakistan’s descent to the depths of servitude.

As events unfolded, the charge of treason would gain greater plausibility. General Musharraf’s government kept the Americans happy by killing the Taliban who had sought refuge in Pakistan; others were captured and handed over to the Americans. In open violation of Pakistan’s constitution, the government also began to disappear Pakistanis who were then secretly transferred to the Americans. Pakistan’s involvement in America’s war entered a new phase in 2004 as the CIA mounted its first drone strikes on Pakistani territory. On American demand, the generals also directed the Pakistani military to attack Taliban sanctuaries in Waziristan. Pakistan’s political classes had now privatized the army. Pakistani soldiers now killed the Taliban and Pakistanis to enrich the country’s political elites.

While the generals collected cash from the US, Pakistanis would pay the price for this treason. Pakistan’s war against the Taliban and their Pashtun hosts produced a frightening backlash that has continued to grow. The logic of this backlash was simple, as Imran Khan also explains. No doubt encouraged by the Afghan Taliban, the families of the Pashtun victims – calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban – mounted devastating retaliatory attacks against military and civilian targets in Pakistan, but mostly against the latter. There was no change in Pakistan’s commitment to America’s war when a civilian government, led corrupt politicians rehabilitated under a deal hatched in Washington, replaced General Musharraf in 2008. While Pakistan’s liberal and left intellectuals wanted the government to exterminate the Pakistani Taliban; they insisted that the Pakistani Taliban was an Islamic fundamentalist movement to take power in Pakistan and had nothing to do with the war Pakistani military had unleashed against the Pashtuns. Imran made the opposite argument. Terminate the war against the Pashtuns and Afghans, and the Pakistani Taliban would cease their attacks; they would disappear as quickly as they had appeared.

After a long delay, Imran Khan’s strategy began to pay off. As Pakistan escalated the war against its own people in two of its four provinces, as Paki-stani capital fled and foreign capital shunned the country, as the economy worsened, as poverty deepened, as political factions in Karachi engaged in bloody turf battles, as power outages persisted, as supply of cooking gas be-come intermittent, the anger and desperation of Pakistanis also grew. Who could lift Pakistan from this descent into chaos? Pakistanis knew better than to expect a savior to emerge from the military or the established political classes: for they had produced the mayhem and were its chief beneficiaries. In this gloom, Imran Khan beckoned to Pakistanis. His calls for justice grew louder, his jeremiads against corrupt politicians became sharper, his critique of the generals became unsparing. Slowly, his message began to resonate with Pakistani youth and the urban middle classes in Pakistan. Starting in mid-2011, the polls signaled a surge in his popularity.

On October 30 2011, Imran Khan was ready to take a measure of his popularity with a rally in Lahore. The rally was a great success; more than two hundred thousand people showed up. Most people agreed that nothing like this had been seen since the days of the charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. On December 25, the Tehreek organized a second rally in Karachi, the stronghold of a local ethnic party, with the same results. Finally, some sixteen years after his entry into politics, people were beginning to rally around Imran Khan and his party. This surge in his popularity suddenly changed the political map of Pakistan. It also produced some unwelcome results; now that his prospects looked brighter, some members of the established political class began to knock on the Tehreek’s door. Imran Khan was now a political force; after wandering for many years on the margins, he had arrived with a bang on Pakistan’s political scene.

Imran Khan offered a more optimistic assessment of his prospects. He described the surge in his popularity as a political tsunami that would in time sweep out the old corrupt order. Was this a case of excessive self-congratulation? This would depend on whether the Tehreek could sustain the momentum it had generated, whether it could capitalize on this surge to build a grassroots organization, whether it could expand its program to incorporate the interests of workers and peasants, and whether it could create an intellectual cadre that would disseminate its message through print, television and the internet. Can Imran Khan energize the people, raise their hopes of change to a fever pitch, so that attempts to defeat them by extra-legal means could backfire and persuade the Tehreek to lead an uprising? I will return to these questions; but first, I wish to turn to the increasingly shrill and frenzied attacks against Imran Khan by Pakistan’s putative liberal and left-leaning intelligentsia; these attacks are most visible in the English-language print media. Their shrill commentary suggests that they are beginning to take him seriously.

3.

Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left-leaning’ groups bring three related charges against Imran Khan: he is an Islamist (or fundamentalist), a partisan of the Taliban, and a rightist. They rely on less than half-truths in making their case.

Imran Khan is certainly Islamic in his thinking, inspiration and identity but he is not an Islamist, a term that generally applies to Muslims who subscribe to a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and the Traditions of the Prophet. Unlike many Pakistanis who identify themselves as liberals or leftists – and take a Kemalist view of Islam as a backward religion that must be rigorously excluded from the public discourse and even public space – Imran Khan derives his identity from Islam and seeks inspiration in the Qur’an and the Traditions. In regards to the relevance of some of the legal aspects of the Qur’an, together with Allama Iqbal and Fazlur Rahman (for many years, a professor of Islamic Studies at University of Chicago), he recognizes the need for revisiting some of the rulings that were given currency by the consensus of a previous age. In this sense, it would be appropriate to describe Imran Khan as an Islamic modernist; but unlike most Islamic modernists he also feels a strong affinity for the sufi tradition of Islam that has emphasized the spirit and inward content religion without neglecting its outward practice. In both respects, I doubt if there are Islamists who would admit Imran Khan into their inner circles.

Is Imran Khan then a partisan of the Taliban? The United States has used its hegemonic control over mainstream global discourse – especially since launching its global military offensive under the cover of the Global War Against Terror – to smear all freedom fighters it does not support as terrorists. The discourse on terrorism is very cleverly designed to focus the world’s attention on the relatively insignificant acts of violence by oppressed peoples and thereby legitimize the massive acts of violence perpetrated by Western nations against the rest of the world. In American demonology, anyone fighting against the US occupation of Afghanistan is a terrorist – whether he is Afghan or Pakistani. Most ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ writers in Pakistan have internalized this American rhetoric; it follows that the Afghans and Pakistanis fighting the US occupation do not have a legitimate cause regardless of what fighting tactics they employ. In describing Imran Khan as Taliban sympathizer, then, these writers hope to smear him as a terrorist-sympathizer. This smear will not stick. Most Pakistanis recognize that Imran Khan supports the right of Afghans to rid their country of US occupation; other than that and his ethnic kinship with the Pashtuns, there can exist little affinity between him and the Afghan Taliban.

It is time now to explain the scare quotes surrounding the political labels left, right and liberal. In much of the Islamicate, politics has moved into strangely dubious territory, where these labels retain very little of their original meaning. As the liberal or left-oriented political elites in much of the Islamicate began to lose their legitimacy starting the 1970s – because of their dismal failure to create free, sovereign and prosperous polities – and faced growing opposition from various Islamist movements, they chose to sacrifice their ideology in order to cling to power. They had risen to power on an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and, in some cases, socialist platform. Starting in the 1970s, the survival of the increasingly repressive regimes they led was tied to the support of Western powers in return for keeping the Islamists out of power; this was the pact they made with the devil. It was an enduring pact that crushed any opposition to these regimes until the recent Arab uprising. The liberal and left factions in Pakistan also reprogrammed themselves after the end of the Cold War. Under Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan People’s Party, once left-leaning, anti-imperialist, sought legitimacy in Washington and quickly embraced its neoliberal program to open the economy to Western capital.

If the formerly liberal and left leaning forces completed this metamorphosis with little difficulty, this is not entirely surprising. Even when they proclaimed socialist ideals or employed anti-imperialist rhetoric, the thinking of the politically dominant classes in much of the Islamicate had been shaped by an Orientalist narrative. After the Western powers had destroyed or marginalized the traditional learned classes – judges and jurisprudents trained in Shariah, theologians, physicians, engineers, architects and artists – this created space for the emergence of new intellectual classes that were beholden to their colonial masters. More often than not, they were secular and nationalist in their politics, and, following their Orientalist mentors, they blamed Islam for their backwardness; as a result, even when they paid lip service to Islam, they were determined to exclude it from their political discourse. In keeping with their colonialist thinking, they affected Western styles and mannerisms but did little to acquire the institutions, sciences and technology that were the motors of Western power and prosperity. It is no exaggeration to assert that these new elites – despite their nationalist rhetoric – felt closer to their colonial masters they had replaced than to the people they claimed to lead.

In consequence, as Islamist opposition movements began to reject their claims to leadership, the failed political elites retreated into the arms of their former colonial masters. They sought to convince the Western world that they faced a common enemy; the Islamist parties eager to replace them would turn the clock back on human rights, women’s rights and the rights of minorities. Worse, should the Islamist opposition gain power they would pursue policies openly hostile to Western interests. Despite the about-turn in their policies, however, these elites continued to sport their old political labels. They were ‘nationalists’ but owed their survival to Western arms, money, diplomatic support, intelligence, and advice. They were ‘liberals’ but they were happy to use the police state to suppress opposition to their regimes. They were ‘socialists’ but eagerly embraced the neoliberal dictates of the IMF and the World Bank.

In Pakistan, different factions of the ruling elites – who variously claim to be ‘nationalists,’ ‘liberals’ or ‘leftists’ – strenuously lobby the Americans or the British to gain power or to keep it. They outbid each other in sacrificing vital national interests; they never tire of proclaiming that the nation’s economic salvation depends on attracting foreign investment; they have backed unconditionally America’s so-called war on terrorism; they oppose the Afghans’ right to free their country of foreign occupiers; they cheered when General Musharraf used Pakistan’s military to fight Pakistanis who aided the Afghans; they privately assure the Americans that – despite their public stance – they stand firmly behind the deadly drone strikes against ‘targets’ inside Pakistan. Disregarding Pakistan’s Islamic sensibilities, a tiny minority of ‘secularists’ in Pakistan want to impose Western sexual mores on Pakistan; they have campaigned to abrogate the nation’s laws against blasphemy, not prevent its abuse or mitigate its penalties; they refuse to defend the rights of Muslim minorities in Western countries; they support America’s demands to shut down the madrasas in Pakistan but have long supported a colonial system of education for the elites that uses syllabi and exams designed in Cambridge.

Indeed, recently, one columnist at Dawn – a leading English newspaper – lampooned Imran Khan for refusing to share the podium with Salman Rushdie at a literary event in India. I do not know what inner demons drove Rushdie to produce his obscene caricature of Islam, but it does seem odd that a writer – that any person with imagination – would seek to sully and shatter a sacred treasure of humanity only because he finds himself excluded from its deep mystery. Needless to say, I did not support Ayatollah Khomenei’s call for Rushdie’s assassination; nor do I support the death penalty for apostasy. Islam supports free choice in matters of conscience, but the state may limit the activities of well-funded foreign missionaries that use pecuniary inducements to gain converts.

4.

Imran Khan has a great deal to say about the canker of Pakistan’s colonial legacy; the cultural divide that separates the class of brown sahibs and the great mass of Pakistanis who remain anchored in their history and traditions; and the new American masters this class has served since the departure of the British.

He also writes about his own struggles to overcome the Orientalist culture into which he was born, the culture of the brown sahibs, their sneering contempt for Islam, their denigration of the ‘natives’ and their culture. He describes his long and distinguished career in cricket that reveals a perfectionist and a man undaunted by failures. He shares with the readers his personal discovery of God, about growing spiritually through his own struggles in cricket and his charity work; finding inspiration in Islam’s great thinkers, poets and sages – most of all the great Islamic poet, visionary and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal – but also seeking the blessings of nameless sufis, who prefer to live in obscurity and poverty despite their spiritual gifts. This review can only look at some of these issues; to accompany Imran Khan on his life journey, to walk through the many stages of his life, to explore his personal narrative of Pakistan’s political failures you have to read his Pakistan: A Personal History.

Quite rightly, Imran Khan blames the brown sahibs – a few thousand of the most powerful military officers, bureaucrats, and influential landed families – for never giving Pakistan the chance to develop into a self-respecting, sovereign and prosperous country. This class had retained or acquired its social rank, wealth and power during the colonial era by rendering loyal service to the British rulers; demonstrating their servility to their foreign masters by adopting their dress, mimicking their life style and mannerisms, and gaining familiarity with the history of British royalty, British place names, and British writers. They turned to jaundiced Orientalists for their knowledge of Islam, the history of Muslims and of India; and from them they acquired their deep contempt for Islam, the Muslims and their languages and traditions. Like their British masters, they interacted with the ‘natives’ – those who did not speak English or spoke it with a native accent – only as social inferiors, as clerks, peons, servants, peasants, low-ranking military officers and nameless jawans in the army.

Imran Khan provides several vignettes from the social life of these brown sahibs in Pakistan. “In the Gymkhana and the Punjab Club in Lahore,” he writes, “Pakistanis pretended to be English. Everyone spoke English including the waiters; the men dressed in suits; we, the members’ children, watched English films while the grown-ups danced to Western music on a Saturday night (43).” At Aitchison College, where the sons of Punjab’s landed elites were trained to become brown sahibs, boys “caught speaking in Urdu during school hours were fined, despite it being the official language of Pakistan (47).” Elsewhere, he writes, “When I was a boy I remember one of my uncles asking a cousin of mine, who was wearing shalwar kameez, why he was dressed like a servant (49-50).” Asked if he could speak Urdu – I can recall – the son of leading civil servant who served during General Ayub Khan’s tenure, shot back, “Only a little, when talking to the servants.”

Led by Iqbal, Jinnah and a small band of dedicated leaders – from the various provinces of British India – the struggles and sacrifices of ordinary Muslims had created a country they had hoped would make them proud, a country that would be guided by the highest Islamic ideals of justice, a country where they would be safe, where they could prosper, a country that would be a source of strength for the Muslims they had left behind in India, a country that would offer inspiration and leadership to the Islamicate. This was not to be. Within a few years of gaining independence, the brown sahibs in Pakistan seized control over the affairs of the country. That was the beginning of Pakistan’s descent into a shameless kleptocracy in the service of foreign powers.

“Far from shaking off colonialism,” writes Imran Khan, “our ruling elite slipped into its shoes (43-44).” Our brown sahibs made no significant changes to the colonial structures developed by the British to keep their Indian subjects on a tight leash. This omission was deliberate: the intent was to keep the ‘natives’ down, to continue to smother their long-suppressed energies, to stifle their creativity. As a result, the economy that Pakistan’s elites promoted soon became dependent on foreign loans; its capitalist class built its wealth on defaulted loans; its manufacturing sector could not move too far beyond processing raw materials; the educational standards at state institutions were allowed to deteriorate so that quality education was confined to the rich; and sixty years after independence more than half the population remains illiterate.

Over time, the emerging middle classes too began to mould themselves in the image of the brown sahibs. Since Urdu or the regional languages would get them nowhere in Pakistan’s private or public sectors, they began sending their children to English schools. Under colonial rule, the Muslim middle classes had abandoned Arabic and Persian, thus losing contact with the classics of their civilization; in the sixty years since gaining nominal independence, the new generations that attended English schools have become strangers to Urdu as well. Were it not for the logic of audience ratings – most viewers do not understand English – that forced the proliferating television channels to run their programs in Urdu, spoken Urdu too would be on its way out. Nevertheless, many of the actors who play lead roles in the Urdu serials can scarcely carry on a conversation in Urdu; the credits for these serials too are often presented in English. A growing number of commercial billboards in the cities also display their Urdu slogans and jingles in Roman letters.

The style of education at Aitchison College – the elite boarding school that he attended – Imran Khan writes, transformed Pakistani students “into cheap imitations of English public school boys.” These students adopted Western sportsmen, actors and pop stars as their role models. Only much later did Imran Khan come to understand how much this “education dislocated our sense of ourselves as a nation.” A generation later, this cultural dislocation is being reproduced on a much larger scale in dozens of elite schools – all run as profit-making enterprises – that prepare their students for the Cambridge O-level and A-level exams. As a result, writes Imran Khan, “Today our English-language schools produce ‘Desi Americans’ – young kids who, though they have never been out of Pakistan, have not only perfected the American twang but all the mannerisms (including the tilt of the baseball cap) just by watching Hollywood films.” In imitation, poorer children too are deserting the state-run Urdu schools to attend poorly staffed English medium schools run out of apartments but carrying exotic labels. Some are named after Catholic saints, in a tawdry attempt to bask in the prestige of Christian missionary schools. Others carry more hilarious names. One school, less inclined to borrow the halo of Catholic saints, calls itself, Oxford and Cambridge Islamic English-Medium School. I am aware that this faux Anglicization is being driven by global forces as well, but – in the Islamic world alone – Turkey, Iran and Indonesia continue to give primacy to their national languages.

A slavish Westernization among the elites has forced Pakistan into intel-lectual sterility. Over the past century, these Westernized classes have produced little world-class scholarship on the country’s history or social and economic structures; their scientific production too remains mostly meager and mediocre, if not worse. Nearly all the great Muslim thinkers and writers of the previous hundred and fifty years in South Asia had received their early education in wholly or partly traditional setting; and this includes Ghalib, Hali, Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Kalam Azad, Shibli Nu’mani, Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi, Saleemuzzaman Siddiqui, and Faiz, to name only a few illustrious figures from that period. Yet the growing cohorts of Western-educated Muslims since the 1900s have produced scarce any thinker or writer who could stand comparison with their predecessors. As the middle classes too increasingly submit themselves to the same shallow Westernization, this has deepened the poverty of Muslim intellect in South Asia. As the shift towards Western education has drained the Madrasas of its recruits from the middle classes, this has produced another deleterious effect: the coarsening of the Islamic discourse that flows from the madrasas. Imran Khan is deeply cognizant of this intellectual malaise. “If our Westernized classes started to study Islam,” writes Imran Khan, “not only would it be able to project the dynamic spirit of Islam but also help our society fight sectarianism and extremism… How can the group that is in the best position to project Islam do so when it sees Islam through Western eyes? The most damaging aspect of the gulf between the two sections of our society is that it has stopped the evolution of both religion and culture in Pakistan (340-1).”

The coarsening of religious discourse in the West too flows in large part from similar causes: the abandonment and denigration of religion and its mystical traditions by the intellectual classes. In the West this process began with the Renaissance and the Reformation, gained strength with the Enlightenment, and reached its apogee in the nineteenth century with the launching of Darwinian evolutionalism. As a result, over the past three centuries, Christianity has increasingly adopted hard fundamentalist positions – especially in the United States – that draw their inspiration from the conquest narratives of the Old Testament not the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Over the past half century, especially, the more fundamentalist variants of Christianity have become the refuge of whites who have been marginalized by the rapid economic and social changes in the United States. They vent their anger at immigrants, blacks and Muslims, at women who take charge of their bodies, and – paradoxically – at ‘big’ government, the only institution that could help reverse their economic marginalization. Increasingly also, they have been led by Christian Zionism and Israel’s military successes to identify with Jewish colonization of Palestine. In their commitment to Israeli expansionism, these messianic Christians are more intransigent than the Israelis themselves.

5.

Imran Khan blames the Westernized elites for the Pakistan’s deepening problems. Quite early on, these elites ensured that independence would merely exchange one set of white masters for another: the Americans for the British. Unlike the British, the Americans would rule over Pakistan through local surrogates; the brown faces of these surrogates would maintain the happy illusion that Pakistanis were in control of their destiny.

Although this neocolonial relationship has seen some ups and downs, starting in the 1990s, the top echelons of Pakistan’s governments have been appointed by Washington and, accordingly, their activities are monitored and supervised by the US ambassador in Islamabad. In turn, the Pakistani rulers and their cronies use the government to capture rent, much of which is transferred to foreign bank accounts. Pakistan’s subordination to the US reached a new low after the 9-11 attacks as the rulers – civilian and military – rented the country’s ports, highways, airspace, air bases, and, soon, its military to the US for moneys that have largely gone into private coffers.

Although Imran Khan does not spell out the manifold linkages that bind Pakistan’s corrupt rulers to the United States, he understands that Pakistan cannot move forward unless it ends its neocolonial ties to the United States. To this end, he sets himself several interrelated tasks. A Tehreek government will pull Pakistan out of America’s so-called war on terrorism; this means stopping the drone attacks on Pakistani territory, revoking all the territorial concessions General Musharraf made to the United States, and ending Pakistan’s war against its own people in Pakhtunkhwa. “Pakistan should disengage from this insane and immoral war,” writes Imran Khan (360). If this could be done, the chief factor that has been destabilizing Pakistan, pushing it to the edge of a civil war, will disappear. Pakistan’s military disengagement from the US will be followed by efforts to end Pakistan’s dependency on foreign loans to pay for gov-ernment programs, much of which have been diverted to private coffers in the past.

Is all this doable? Despite the dire warnings of slanted commentators, should Pakistan withdraw from the US war against terror, it is extremely unlikely that it would face a war. At present, the US has no stomach for starting another war even as it and Israel threaten to start a war against Iran. The US will certainly stop payments of the blood money, but this should not hurt Pakistan since most of this money finds its way back where it came from. China too will oppose any US attacks against Pakistan, and will stand ready to tide Pakistan through its balance of payments difficulties.

Pakistan can gain economic independence – Imran Khan argues – by ending tax evasions; this alone will double the government’s revenues. Ending corruption at the highest levels of government, therefore, is the Tehreek’s signature policy goal. Imran Khan has sought to develop a culture opposed to corruption in his own party; the Tehreek requires the party’s office bearers to declare their assets and tax returns; it has set in motion steps to elect all office bearers to the party; it will deny the party’s ticket to anyone with a record of corruption; and, it has promised to make all elected and unelected officials accountable to an independent National Accountability Board. Ending corruption at the top – Imran Khan maintains – will banish corruption from lower levels of government. I am afraid this is a wish not a well-considered expectation. It will take a lot of hard work – a variety of administrative reforms – to push back against Pakistan’s rampant corruption.

Reforming the country’s education system is a fundamental goal of the Tehreek. The country’s three-tiered system – consisting of private English-medium schools, public schools using Urdu and local lan-guages, and the madrasa system – is divisive. The English schools reproduce the class of brown sahibs and spread their pernicious culture to the growing middle classes; the poorly staffed and poorly equipped public schools deny the great majority of the country’s population a decent education; and the madrasas have become a welfare system for the poorest children. The plan is to replace this multi-tiered educational system, one that has perpetuated the colonial mindset, with a uniform system of education for everyone that will embrace mathematics, the natural and social sciences, and history while giving their proper place to the Pakistani languages, English, and the Islamic sciences.

Another important policy goal of the Tehreek is to create a system of local governance for Pakistan’s 50,000 villages. This will take local development funds out of the hands of politicians and put them in the hands of elected village councils, who will decide how this money is spent. They will also serve as the local government for the villages, with responsibility for maintaining municipal services, including a registry of births, deaths and marriages; and reviewing the work of local officials responsible for policing, health, irrigation, and education. In addition, like the panchayats of the pre-colonial era, the village councils will provide cheap and quick adjudication of local disputes.

Imran Khan has not articulated – at least in his book – an economic policy. Most likely, this omission is deliberate; he has had many occasions to set forth his economic policies but he has persisted in reiterating his position on a few signature issues, including corruption, lawlessness, and the betrayal of Pakistan’s , national interests by the rulers. As a result, we know very little about what policies he favors on infrastructure, industry, agriculture, urban labor, urban transportation, exports, energy, water, R&D, etc. This appears to suggest that he takes a rather Adam Smithian view of economic development. If you provide honest governance – I have heard him say this a few times – this will create the right incentives for all other matters to move in the right direction; the proverbial invisible hand will sort things out for the best. With their property rights secured, private individuals, pursuing their own interest, will generate savings, investments, innovation and, therefore, rapid economic growth. It is possible that Imran Khan has not had time to formulate policies in these areas; or he believes that the focus on a small number of core issues will best help to energize support for his party. In either case, it is this writer’s view, that he should quickly remedy this neglect. For good governance alone will not energize Pakistan’s people to become active economic agents of change. In addition, from an electoral standpoint, he is more likely to expand his support base by articulating his position on issues that are vital to the inter-ests of workers, peasants, ordinary citizens anxious for their health, and pro-spective investors in Pakistan’s economy.

Certainly, better governance will be a hugely positive thing for Pakistan; it can start to reverse the ruination produced by decades of rampant corruption. But good governance alone will not lift Pakistan out of poverty nor will it produce economic miracles. Objectively considered, no one will contest the British claim that they instituted ‘good governance’ in India once the rule of the East India Company was replaced by representatives of the Crown. Nevertheless, the evidence is also clear that during their long stay in India the British produced a great deal of economic misery; unfettered British imports destroyed India’s manufactures; British capital displaced indigenous capital from the most vital areas of the economy; their destruction of indigenous educational institutions produced mass illiteracy; and they pauperized the Indians. Good governance alone will not produce economic development if that governance is not used to encourage the growth of indigenous capital, institutions, technology, education and skills. Good governance must also be used to correct past social inequities and the new ones that a capitalist system is certain to produce. If good governance is used only in support of markets and capital, it will very quickly be overthrown by the inequities produced by the capitalist system. Let us not forget that Western democracies – especially in the United States and Britain – are now mostly hollow institutions; they are tolerated by corporate leaders only because they can game these systems to perpetuate their wealth and power.

6.

Notwithstanding the surge in his popularity in the cities, what are the chances that the Tehreek, if given the chance, will be able to form the country’s next government?

If Pakistan had a presidential system of government, it is more than likely that Imran Khan would sweep the polls; the rivals that any party might place against him would look like cretins. Under Pakistan’s parliamentary system, however, he faces an uphill task. In this decentralized system, where elections have to be won in several hundred local constituencies, the Tehreek candidates will have to fight against the power of corrupt local incumbents who will use their traditional authority, their money, dirty tricks, thugs, and help from their foreign masters to defeat a challenge that threatens to end their plundering binge. Winning a majority of these local contests cannot be easy.

On his path to power, Imran Khan will have to face a showdown with several factions of Pakistan’s corrupt elites. Many top generals, bureaucrats, politicians, media barons, loan-defaulting mill-owners, journalists, television anchors, and leaders of civil society have become entangled with American interests: they have cultivated ties with various US agencies; they or their close relatives hold green cards; they or their relatives work for subsidiaries of Western corporations; they have advised or worked for Western think tanks; their NGOs have thrived on foreign funding; and they have become rich and are hungry for more. Perhaps, the corrupt elites may concede victory to the Tehreek, since they may soon engineer a return to power; but it appears more likely that they will fight back, since this will end even if temporarily the bonanza they have enjoyed since 2001.

If it appears that the Tehreek is going to win the next elections scheduled for 2013, will these elections be held or, if they are allowed to proceed, will they not be rigged to ensure the Tehreek’s defeat? Alternatively, the political parties in power may try to increase the chaos in Pakistan’s cities, and thus pave the way for a military takeover that may end Imran Khan’s political career. More simply, the CIA or some segment of the corrupt elites, or the two working together, may assassinate Imran Khan. Can Imran Khan forestall these subterfuges? None of these options are certainties, but not to anticipate them and have contingent plans to deal with them would be reckless.

The power of the corrupt elites will be hardest to dislodge in Pakistan’s rural hinterlands that are still dominated largely by traditional power barons: the landlords, dynasties of so-called pirs, and tribal chiefs. Despite his tremendous charisma and notwithstanding his populist rhetoric, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto chose the easy route to electoral victory by co-opting the traditional rural power barons. This compromise brought an easy victory but, bending to the power of these barons, Bhutto proceeded to marginalize the left block in his party. At the same time, he implemented his farcical ‘socialist’ agenda of destroying Pakistan’s nascent capitalist class; he seized and handed over their industries, banks and even schools to the stalwarts in his party. Imran Khan too is aware of the handicap he faces in a parliamentary system; and – on a smaller scale so far – he too has opened leadership positions in his party to the old power barons. This compromise is certain to alienate the old workers in his party, but it also carries the more serious risk of alienating the young voters who have pinned their hopes for change on the Tehreek’s commitment to establish a just order in Pakistan. The propagandists of the old order are already hammering home this point. It does not inspire confidence when the Tehreek takes a strong stand against drone strikes but appoints a former foreign minister – who supported these strikes during his tenure – as the vice-chairman of his party.

Imran Khan’s defense of these compromises is not convincing. These old politicians – he parries – are welcome to join his party but he will vet them for corruption before he awards them the party’s tickets to the national and provincial assemblies. If the Tehreek cannot win the rural constituencies without enlisting the local power barons, he will have to embrace many more of their kind. Should he do this, however, he will surrender his chief strength – the unwavering commitment to reform the old order. Once the scions of the traditional political families begin to fill his party – even if they look less corrupt than others – the Tehreek cannot implement the reforms that will hurt the economic and political interests of this class of people.

Aware of these risks, Imran Khan is seeking to strengthen his hand by organizing his base, consisting of younger voters. He has launched a drive to register them as members of the Tehreek. Once the membership rolls are ready, he promises that they will elect their local, regional and national leaders. It is a formidable undertaking; it has never been done by any party other than the Jamat-e-Islami that restricts membership to practicing Muslims. If the Tehreek succeeds in this endeavor, this may begin to alter the dynamics of power at the local levels. As a grass-roots party with a strong organization, it could stand up more effectively against the power of the local barons. This will reduce the need to bring these rural barons into the party; the Tehreek could use them selectively to win a few seats in districts where its support base is weakest.

The Tehreek has a chance to extend its populist appeal to the rural areas with its plan to institute thousands of elected village councils. This is the only program that carries the prospect of mobilizing the peasants behind the Tehreek, but for this populist appeal to take roots, the party has to do two things. It must ensure that the rural population hears about this program and understands the benefits it can bring to them. More importantly, the Tehreek has to come up with a plan to assure the rural poor that these village councils will not be captured by the local power barons. How is this to be done? If the party members can be organized at the level of the villages, they can pit their organized strength against the bullying of the local thugs. The Tehreek should also create mobile brigades of young idealist college students who will be ready to travel and deploy to the villages to support – with their disciplined but non-violent presence – the rural poor during the elections to the village councils. The elections can be staggered to ensure that these college volunteers are available at the village elections. In addition, these elections should be held only after the Tehreek has had time to reform the police force.

Since it began drawing crowds, its rivals have accused the Tehreek of receiving support from the ‘establishment,’ a code word for the security agencies working under the umbrella of the Pakistan army. This is a smear. The Tehreek‘s support has grown because the people can see more plainly than before their country being pushed ever closer to the brink by the unbridled corruption of their rulers: and they see Imran as their only real chance of reversing their country’s slide into chaos. The Tehreek should continue to distance itself from any material assistance of the security agencies, but I hope that that it enjoys the tacit sup-port of the mid-level and junior officers and the jawans in the military, who cannot be too happy at having to kill other Pakistanis and whose lives were sacrificed by the military leadership so that they and the civilians leaders could collect blood money from the United States. In 1996, the Pakistan army faced a spate of desertions from its ranks as they were asked to fight the Afghan resistance and their Pakistani hosts. Although these desertions were contained, it cannot be doubted that resentment still simmers in the army’s rank and file against the military leadership for their readiness to do the bidding of the United States for pecuniary gain. One hopes that as the Tehreek ratchets its campaign, it will work in subtle ways to win the esteem of the rank and file in Pakistan’s army. The knowledge that their own rank and file have their eyes on their backs will restrain the generals who may want to extend their profitable partnership with the United States.

The Tehreek should also send out signals – convincing signals – that it has a second arrow in its quiver. It must let Pakistanis know that it is ready to mobilize its ranks for more forceful action if the corrupt political elites will use dirty tricks to extend their corruption binge for another five years. Pakistan cannot survive another five years of their depredations. In times of crisis – and Pakistan has never faced a greater crisis than it does now – the movement to save the country must be ready to proceed along two tracks: change through the electoral process but if that is obstructed the people must be ready to bring down the corrupt rulers through massive and sustained but non-violent protests. Victory only comes to those who are prepared to broaden their democratic struggle if change becomes impossible through the ballot box.

The issue of gender has been a key prong in the strategic trident to unify bi-partisan and mass support for US interventionism in the Muslim world. Both Arabic and English media have been flooded by a slew of contrived, opportunistic, and charlatan Muslim and Arab women, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, and Brigitte Gabriel, advancing Western-centric attacks on Islam.

As Sheehi points out, these attacks have mostly focused on issues such as the veil, as well as honor crimes, with the advocates so listed vaulted to the top of expert panels and best-seller lists by virtue of their parroting the dominant discourse, as befits the role of the comprador class. To this shameful compendium we can add another woman, as well as another line of attack: Asra Nomani, and adoption in the Muslim world.

As an adoptee who has returned to his birthplace of Lebanon, I have been actively watching the rise of this trope in the media, on online forums, as well as in private online exchanges for the past seven years. In 2009, for example, the AP reported on a couple trying to adopt from Egypt. Compared to the crime of this couple and the corruption of government officials there, it is nonetheless Islam that bears the burden of opprobrium in the article: Adoption in Egypt is defined as being “snarled in religious tradition”. This became a contentious discussion on the web site Canada Adopts, where the given of the argument was basically how to get around these Islamic invocations, as if they somehow were to blame for the legal transgressions of the would-be adopters, painted as virtuous Samaritans.

For another example, we need go to Pamela Geller’s web site Atlas Shrugged. Here the tables are turned on would-be adoptive parents of Moroccan children who would be required to maintain the child’s Muslim faith. Ms. Geller describes this as some evil Islamic fifth column in the making, despite the fact that most every orphanage on the planet is Christian-based and missionary in outlook and likewise requires that the parents be of a particular faith in order to adopt.

Similarly, in her article for The Daily Beast, Asra Nomani writes an article which implies that the orphaned children of Pakistan are being recruited by Al-Qaeda as future suicide bombers. Her answer to this problem? To undo the “antiquated, shortsighted, and regressive stricture that makes adoption illegal [within Islam].” This focus on Islam as a problem for adoptive parents who supposedly want to help the orphans of the world is quite loaded, and needs to be deconstructed on two levels, first in terms of the historical and economic/political function of adoption, and second in terms of linguistic and theologic use/misuse of the term.

The Big Picture: Economics and Politics

Whatever the motivation for adoptive parents in the First World, it is a fact that adoption source countries have followed a particular pattern that would quite easily make an additional chapter to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, in which children become just another resource to plunder and export. Geller and Nomani, in their acceptance of adoption as a given institution in the civilized world, follow in the footsteps of the founding spokeswoman for the so-called plight of “unwanted” orphans, Pearl S. Buck, who in 1964 published the book Children for Adoption. In terms that mimic today’s rhetoric concerning these children, which we currently see repeated in the current hype concerning Kony in Uganda, attention is shifted from the needs of parents (to start a family, to procreate) to those of children (need for a nuclear-family environment), while simultaneously castigating the seeming indifference of their cultures and countries and their inability to care for them.

This infantilization of other countries, now requiring the intervention of a “doting Uncle”, leaves unremarked the fact that such countries–Korea in the 1950s; Uganda today–have been targets of First World punishment via war, sanctions, and economic exploitation. This would explain the presence in Nomani’s article of cliched photographs of children in Iraqi orphanages, as the move is made to the last holdout against such wanton appropriation of foreign children. Nine long years after the invasion of Iraq, however, their inclusion here begs the question: Where has Ms. Nomani been for the past five American administrations, the sanctions, warfare, and sponsored internecine battles of which have killed more children outright than could possible ever be adopted to the West? Furthermore, on a list of countries that allow refugees from these Muslim lands, the U.S. remains near the bottom, behind countries such as Sweden, not to mention leagues behind Iraq’s neighbors that have taken in millions of refugees.

To focus on these children without focusing on their families or communities thus becomes an ignoble hypocrisy; as if to say, “give us your huddled masses–but only if they are cute children and can be indoctrinated from an early age.” This brings us to the other propaganda photos used on the Daily Beast, showing children dressed as soldiers, evoking the specter of infants inculcated with anti-American sentiment, the major fear expressed by the article. Similar to the willful ignorance of the plight of women by Islamophobes in their own locales, Nomani seems not to notice her own culture’s use of such imagery and cultural tropes: she need just visit the Intrepid Navy Museum, or any Civil War town, to see the red, white, and blue version of what she claims to fear most.

But we don’t have to dig so deep when Nomani wears her sentiment on her sleeve:

The council, noting that the Prophet Muhammad was an orphan, supports adoption, citing a Quranic verse enjoining us to practice islah, or “to make better,” the condition of orphans. It says: “And they ask you about orphans. Say: Making things right for them (islah) is better.” (2:220) The women argue that adoption encourages “the protection and promotion of healthy minds.” Indeed. Perhaps it protects kids from becoming terrorists as well.

It might behoove the author to define “terror”, especially given the millions of Arabs and Muslims who have died as a result of overt American attempts to exploit their countries, or of subsidiary attacks from Israel, or via the dictators put in place to keep oil running freely.

This hypocrisy was perhaps best exemplified by an adoption that was lauded in the American press during the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. “Logan”–inauspiciously named after the airport of his arrival–was “rescued” from Lebanon with special visas provided by U.S. Senators, while many Americans waited days and days for evacuation, and in racially profiled order. No mention is made of the 1400+ civilians killed in that conflict, a third of them children. More importantly, nowhere do we read the fact that Lebanon has a long history of trafficking children. Sayyed Mohammad Fadlallah’s orphanage system in the South, going back to the 1950s, was created in no small part in response to the trafficking of children from the poor and rural areas of the country. In this light, the Spence-Chapin organization exalted in Nomani’s article is no better than the Holt International Adoption Agency of post-war Korea: Not a civilizing entity, but instead a gentle face put on a monstrous industry. That Morocco sees fit to participate in such trafficking should not be seen as a sign of its enlightenment. Quite the opposite.

Most important to note is how one-sided the adoption argument is in all of these cases. Adoptive parents and the agencies and industries that support them speak of adoption as being the given. This ignores all evidence to the contrary, but most importantly the growing number of voices of adoptees, mothers, fathers, extended families, and communities who are speaking out against adoption which has become simply another form of humanitarian imperialism. Whether in the lyrics of the Moroccan-born French rapper Y-À-Z, the laws passed by Korean-American adoptees who have returned to their place of birth and have effectively halted adoption from that country as of this year, or the court writs of mothers in Guatemala who are suing to have their children repatriated to them from the United States, the tide is definitely turning against the ongoing efforts of those such as Nomani who would use adoption as a juggernaut against the Third World, and Islam more specifically.

In an effort to paint adoption as a given, a marker of civilization, she and others like her revert to the worst tropes of colonialism, Orientalism, as well as Islamophobia.

The Subtleties: It’s All in the Language

The tactics used in this article that attempt to reframe the Qur’an as supportive of Nomani’s claim are disturbing, and they are also with precedence, mostly from within evangelical Christian circles. Comparative use of the Bible to allow missionary inroads into subordinate populations now finds its equivalent in those who would propound the Qur’an as advocating for the equivalent treatment of Muslim communities. On the Christian evangelical side, “adoption” is redefined to mean our relationship to Jesus, and by extension, adopting a child is therefore to be seen as “Christ-like”. Nomani gives us the mirrored reflection of this when she states that the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was himself “adopted”.

Nomani further follows this evangelical/missionary lead when she advocates the use of the Qur’an as supportive documentation for such efforts. In both cases, though, the logic used is hugely flawed. Learning Arabic these past seven years and reading Qur’an on a daily basis has given me an idea of what Aramaic might have been like in a purely conceptual sense, both being Semitic languages of the same region. Furthermore, Levantine Arabic differs from Standard Arabic in its use of Aramaic and Syriac words, and thus I am working with a wider possible vocabulary to make the following points. Based on this, I can state that the word used for the modern-day idea of “adoption” is most likely a conceptual back formation from the English or the French–a colonial hand-me-down–or at best is a completely metaphoric use, since it also carries the meaning similar to the English “to start using [something]“, as in “cell phone adoption”.

Most telling is that the word I use in Modern Standard Arabic to describe myself–mutabanna (vaguely, “en-son-ed”)–is not the same words translated in the Qur’an as “adopted”. One such term, translated as “your adopted sons”–ad‘iya’akum–comes from a root that means to be claimed by or advocated for, such as a townsperson is claimed by a town; they are an extension thereof, a part of a greater whole. Here we see a positive use of the term. Another word used in the Qur’an (itakhadha) means moreso “taken in”, as in this example from the story of Joseph: “perhaps he might benefit us or we might take him in as a son”. This is more like acquiring a boy servant than it is adopting a child into one’s family. More to the point, Joseph’s “adoption” comes after he is bartered “as a merchandise”, according to the Qur’anic description; furthermore the Qur’an is very explicit that these are temporary and invalidated situations, and here we might
say that this is a negative use of the term.

Our analysis here is aided by the English use of “adoption” which has strayed from its original meaning as well, especially since we know that adoption conceptually within the Anglo-Saxon tradition was about indentured servitude, and not family creation. This is made most obvious to me by the fact that the use of this word only has currency within a certain class of the population here in Lebanon, which lives closer to a globalized and globalizing Anglo-Saxon model than anything locally relevant culturally speaking. For everyone else not of this stratum I cannot say “mutabanna“, I have to state that I was an “orphan” (‘atm), or that I was in an “orphanage” (dar al-’aytam). My adoption, as understood locally, involving a “bartering of merchandise”, maps much more closely onto the example of Yusuf–seen as negative–than any other invocation that might be painted in a positive light.

The main point still holds true: The modern-day concept of adoption, as practiced in primarily first-world nations, has no precursor from Biblical times that would allow the imposition of this current notion on Biblical or Qur’anic readings or texts–it’s current use is a fabrication of modern-day needs and conceits. It thus becomes disturbing the lengths to which current interpreters of these Writs will go to twist the language and the stories to suit their purposes, such as the recent example found in the book Reclaiming Adoption, and now in this article by Nomani.

Comparatively speaking, and contrary to Nomani’s analysis, the Qur’an is extremely enlightening in this regard, if only because its language is unchanged and untranslated since its inception. Readings of the Qur’an reveal that its supreme invocation concerning orphans–representing the most vulnerable members of society–is that they be taken care of, that they remain within their community, that their filiation remain intact, that the community preserve their property until they should be of age to make use of it. This is very much in line with the given social fabric of the countries of this region, despite it being stretched to the breaking point by globalization and other foreign pressures.

But Nomani willfully leaves out the following, where the Qur’an also states: “None are their mothers save those who gave them birth” (–Al-Mujadalah, 58:2), and:

God did not give any man two hearts in his chest. Nor did He turn your wives whom you estrange (according to your custom) into your mothers. Nor did He turn your adopted children into genetic offspring. All these are mere utterances that you have invented. God speaks the truth, and He guides in the (right) path.

You shall give your adopted children names that preserve their relationship to their genetic parents. This is more equitable in the sight of God. If you do not know their parents, then, as your brethren in religion, you shall treat them as members of your family. You do not commit a sin if you make a mistake in this respect; you are responsible for your purposeful intentions. God is Forgiver, Most Merciful. –Al-Ahzab, 33:4-5

This call to communal care is offensive to Ms. Nomani and her advocates because it is preventing them from fulfilling their familial role as proscribed for them by Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, borrowing Margaret Thatcher’s maxim that there is no basis for society but the nuclear family. This way of seeing things is radically different from the majority of the planet that serves as source material for the wishes of those in the First World who plunder their children via adoption and surrogacy. This is best summed up by Mohammad Al-Haddad, after a scandal involving the kidnapping of Chadian children to France:

But why don’t the rich bother themselves with the poor? Now, we forbid immigration to poor adults, but we allow it for their children? All the same, to decide if a child can be adopted, we do not apply the same criteria in the West as in the Third World. In the West, the family is “nuclear”; the conditions that make a child adoptable are therefor the absence of a mother and father. In many African countries, on the other hand, the family is extended–that is to say it includes equally the grandparents, as well as maternal and paternal aunts and uncles: All work in solidarity to take care of the child.

This lack of a strict concept of nuclear family on the scene where I find myself now, or anything outside of what is a given here–extended family and communal solidarity–explains the reaction of most of those who hear my story from this perspective: They apologize that I was removed from my family, my place, my land. They sympathize wholeheartedly with my efforts to re-establish an identity here and find family, because historically and culturally the notion of “adoption” or “guardianship” is, as locally understood, about the importance of place: One’s people, one’s house, one’s community. This is a welcome relief from the endless barrage of statements such as “you were chosen”, or “you are lucky” that most of us grew up hearing; furthermore, it explains why these tropes of being “chosen” or “lucky” are projected onto Biblical accounts, ignoring the historical context of the book and its cultural underpinnings.

The deceit of adoption revivalists is most revealed then by what they omit. In terms of the Bible, each and every invocation concerning the “fatherless” also contains within the same passage a call to care for widows and others who are unable to sustain themselves. Would not a logical conclusion of this be that the expectant mother–especially if she be single, or widowed–be afforded this same zealous care and protection?

In terms of the Qur’an, let’s re-examine the cited reference from the article, but in full this time:

And they will ask thee about orphans. Say: “To improve their condition is best.” And if you share their life, they are your brethren: For God distinguishes between the despoiler and the ameliorator. –The Cow, 2:219

This ayat from the Qur’an, in the deceptively abridged form put forth by Nomani, might support this Western modern-day notion of adoption, but only if one espouses supremacist ideas of certain cultures being better or more valid than others. Obviously, given the inability to read one ayat of the Qur’an out of the context of the whole, this is not valid. Everyone who is claimed to have been “adopted” in both the Bible and Qur’an, most notably Joseph (Yusuf) as mentioned, but also Moses (Moussa) (pbut), in fact pose a contrary argument to those who would read these Books so literally. For both were adopted against the wishes of their parents; their removal caused great anguish to their families; they did not start the true calling of their lives until they were returned to their rightful place, status, and people.

This is especially poignant in the Qur’anic story of Joseph, who is sold to and “taken in” by first a wealthy lord and then the king but whose destiny is to be returned to his family (note the class differential here). The Qur’anic story of Moses is even more pointed, when it states that Moses was taken in by “those who were his enemy, and the enemy of his people”. The Qur’an also forbids forced conversion, one of the primary motivating factors for missionary adoption practice historically speaking.

Analyzing the Qur’an even further, we can state that the removal of someone from their family is an ultimate act of self-inflicted alienation, since the only instances of such separation used in the Qur’an are metaphors for the punishment of removing oneself from the community of God–meaning, the result of one’s own sin. Thus you have the son of Noah (Noh) drowned, the wife of Lot (Loteh) left behind and destroyed, the progeny of Abraham (Ibrahim) as being “on their own” in terms of their deeds and the judgment thereof, etc. The point being that such a separation–as punishment–supercedes the strong familial bond otherwise implied. How then, could there be a willful separation of child from parent, condoned by God at that?

The concept that the orphan should be removed from a given community, however justified, only reveals the moral bankruptcy of those whose primary concern is, in fact, their own nuclear family, their own salvation that might come at the expense of others now “saved”, as well as what is left unsaid in these works: the desired conversion of the heathen multitudes; their civilization, modernization, and the end of their barbarian ways.

These ideas of who is “civilized” take on an Orwellian shift in source countries such as Lebanon, where the sordid history of children trafficked from the south and Palestine is starting to come to light. By my observations into paperwork in my orphanage, I can safely say that a full 40 to 50 percent of infants circulating through my orphanage were from Muslim families, myself likely included. Based on stories I know from other countries and locally, as well taking into consideration the Islamic concept of the orphanage, I can state that many of the parents of these children had no idea that they would never see their infants again. In this way missionary and classist disdain for the religion of these children and their families is a prime motivator in their being targeted for adoption/conversion in the first place, despite protests to the contrary.

This brings us back to the originating efforts of those such as Pearl S. Buck who saw the world through this particularly noisome lens of colonialism, conversion, oppression, and universalism. Given that this same Anglo-Saxon culture has done nothing to alleviate poverty, racism, classism, and mono-culturalism on its own home front much less in the world at large, why should anyone believe that it truly desires to improve conditions elsewhere in the world? Can we really imagine a God who would allow some of his gerents on Earth to wage economic and political wars on others, and then claim some state of grace in adopting their children away from them? How is this different from the Romans enslaving the children of the peoples they conquered, if we want a more relevant Biblical analogy?

One of the greatest ironies of Islamophobia is the projection onto Islam of the failures of Western society. Here it is no different. The communal culture that needs to be broken down to make way for individualized/nuclear family-based Capitalism now extends to abducting children from the Arab and Muslim world, now that most of the other supply countries (including the First World’s internal poverty belt) are finally making the morally right decision in preventing their children from being exported wholesale. That Nomani would take such a literal view of the words of the Qur’an in fact reveals her to be the regressive one. We should, as people of good faith, be doing everything in our power to keep families together, and to prevent the conditions of war, poverty, and illiteracy that do more to promote the ills of the world that are decried in this article than any nascent putative extremism. The “charlatans” of Islamophobia wreak more injustice with their words and deeds than any boasted threat that might come from Muslims worldwide.

There is no innocence or objectivity in terms of supporting foreign policies of bombing, pillaging, and marauding, while simultaneously pretending to advocate for “orphans”, and using the Holy Books to support this worldview. Indeed, the only “antiquated, shortsighted, and regressive stricture[s]” that need be undone are those of Imperialism as we live it today. If we are truly hoping to “save the children”, then the despoilers of Nomani’s ilk should stand up as the class and community of power that they are and change the foreign policy of their governments. There is no evidence to support adoption as being a cure-all of any kind, indeed, Ms. Nomani is one in a long line of pyromaniac firefighters who don’t know how horribly they reek of gasoline. Her pretense of speaking for women is offensive to those who work locally via religious, charitable, or civil organizations in order to keep families and communities together. But most of all, she offends those mothers that she finds no common cause with in an egregious classism masked by a selfish and narcissistic career-building Islamophobia.

Any examination of human trafficking in the world points a very accusatory finger and paints a very scathing picture of the majority of First-World nations; this is where religious references might best be applied first–and then the “orphan” problem will take care of itself. Those with an axe to grind concerning Islam such as Nomani would do better than to hide their phobic attitudes behind institutions such as adoption, the actions of which have very real consequences for those of us removed from our place, our families, our communities, our culture, and our faith. For such supposed saving grace is always resented by those on whom it is imposed against their will. And the reaped fruit of such crimes is just as bitter.

“No one except possibly the late John Brunner… has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.”¹

Or now. The ability of ‘science fiction’ to extrapolate the future and it would seem often quite accurately, but one ignored by the priests of ‘high culture’ who consistently dismissed it as ‘genre’ writing, confined to a convenient niche where bug-eyed monsters live and bought where guys in dirty raincoats prowled. ‘Science fiction’ belonged in paperbacks with lurid covers of big-busted-babes molested by alien monsters but it wasn’t art let alone almost alone in being able to deal with the present as no other prose dared to.

[R]ioting and civil unrest sweep the United States, due to a combination of poor health, poor sanitation, lack of food, lack of services, ineffectiveness of services (medical, policing), disillusionment with government/companies, oppressive government, civil unrest, high incidence of birth defects (pollution-induced), and other factors; all services (military, government, private, infrastructure) break down.

A housewife in Ireland smells smoke, and says to a visiting doctor: “We ought to call the fire brigade, is it a hayrick?” to which the doctor replies, “The brigade would have a long way to go. It’s from America. The wind is blowing [from] that way.”¹

Worse still it used language that broke all the High Culture’s ‘rules’. It went where mainstream writers never ventured, into describing a world that was manufacturing ‘reality’ at a fast rate of knots. Thus science fiction was actually reality fiction. It even changed its name in the UK to ‘Speculative’ fiction.

Continuing the style used in Stand on Zanzibar, there is a multi-strand narrative and many characters in the book never meet each other; some characters only appear in one or two vignettes. Similarly, instead of chapters, the book is broken up into sections which range from thirty words in length to several pages.¹

Written even earlier, in 1968, Stand on Zanzibar could also have been written today, it,

…plunges us into the novel’s dysfunctional, overcrowded, media-saturated world via a random channel flip across the story spectrum with SCANALYZER, providing an “INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface” between the reader and “the happening world.”²

It’s a world where corporations, with their mercenary armies, buy entire countries, in this case, a small African one, where it will restore ‘peace’ in exchange for exclusive rights to the country’s rich natural resources. Ring any bells?

‘Ruling culture’ is capitalist culture, the kind that is taught in universities. It controls the written and visual world, all of it, from the Red Tops to Hamlet. The academia even have a ‘private’ language with which to communicate, thus denying ‘outsiders’ entré into their world.

The Youth/Pop revolution put an end to all that stuff, at least on the surface. But underneath an insidious process was at work. In a consumer economy such as we unfortunately live in, an understanding of what working class culture is when treated as a commodity is essential. Thus began the corporate takeover of working class culture, or what we call ‘commercialization’.

The eventual adsorbtion of working class culture into the ruling culture started in the post-war period with ‘youth culture’. Pre-war the culture of the working class was shunned by the ‘intellectuals’. Institutions such as the Music Hall, which had been with us since the 19th century, was considered too ‘lower class’ to be considered art. Opera was ‘high class’. And working class writers were rare animals indeed. A trip to university soon knocked that crap out your system.

It proves nothing else if not the fact that it’s us who create and the capitalists who appropriate. Thus whose culture is it?

It has been ‘science fiction’ writers like Brunner, JG Ballard, William Gibson, Frederick Pohl and the very well known Philip ‘Blade Runner’ Dick as well as a host of other writers who have had their fingers on the pulse of capitalism in a way that virtually no other contemporary writers had, until that is, ‘high culture’ novelists adopted the technique. Perhaps it was because their private language could no longer comprehend let alone describe the world their masters has created? I’d go further and say that ‘science fiction’ has completely transformed contemporary fiction.

One notable exception was George Orwell’s 1984, widely interpreted in the West as a critique of the Soviet Union, thus acceptable as a ‘mainstream’ novel. Yet today it describes our current situation in the West down to a tee (and beyond), not the Soviet Union of yore whose ‘thought control’ was amateurish and transparent when compared to today’s mainstream media, which probably explains why it was so ineffectual. ‘We pretend to work, you pretend to pay us’ was a typical Russian joke in the late Soviet era. Two realities coexisting, one ignoring it and the other pretending the other didn’t exist.

And not surprisingly two writers from the Soviet era, the amazing Strugatsky brothers in their book Snail on the Slope published in 1980, dealt with the dilemma of a statist Soviet society ‘ruled’ by a Directorate, even if it did take place on a faraway planet. (One reviewer has alleged that the movie Avatar is based largely on Snail on the Slope but a much poorer interpretation of almost exactly the same story.)³

Back in a previous age (or at least that is how it seems), two Soviet-era writers, the Strugatsky brothers (Boris and Arkady) wrote a superb novel called Snail on the Slope that concerned (though a somewhat disguised), future Soviet Union that had colonised an alien planet somewhere. The planet was covered in one big forest that was essentially a single organism. The Authorities were determined to ‘conquer’ the Forest even if it meant chopping the entire thing down. The problem was that the Forest fought back, reducing the colonisers to living in heavily defended enclaves with the Forest closing in all sides no matter what kinds of technology they brought to bear on a recalcitrant Nature. The Authorities realised that either they abandoned the planet or destroyed the entire Forest and of course, the idea of being defeated by Nature was simply not in their vocabulary. Ring any bells?⁴

Snails and sheep seem to be apposite descriptions of our current state in the West. We creep along herded by a state/media intent on describing our situation pretty much as the ‘Authority’ does in Snail. ‘Us’ against ‘them’, the unstoppable tide of the Great Unwashed about which see plenty but know nothing.

There are two protagonists in Snail; one wants to escape from the Forest and the other wants to enter it. Both are denied their wish.

Snail on the Slope is an allegorical tale, I suppose about the futility of trying to construct an imagined ‘perfect’ future in the here and now. And when you think about, the world we live is an imagined future in the here and now, a world where the future caught up with us and shoved us back into that awful past of Robber Barons, ‘Drone Diplomacy’ and Endless War. And we seem to be content to look down while they herd us into oblivion.

If and when we do look up, we are likely to see Drones circling overhead like vultures waiting to pounce but by then it might be just too late to do anything about it.

The issue is really quite simple: Whose reality do you want to live in? The Empire’s or your own? It’s pretty obvious to me that for the most part, we citizens of Empire have made our choices and sided with the Empire, preferring it seems a life of endless debt and ipads over sharing the planet and resources equitably and sustainably with the majority of its inhabitants.

Because finally, before the Empire truly visits Armageddon on us all, we have to take sides, either for or against life. For or against the Forest.

1. William Gibson
2. Stand on Zanzibar, from a review by Charlene Brusso
3. See also Disquiet the Strugatsky brothers later reworking of Snail on the Slope (itself a reworking of a story that originates in the 1960s), and ‘James Cameron has Stolen Avatar, Boris Strugatsky Claims‘, IC Russia 3 January 2010 and it wouldn’t surprise me at all. We’ve stolen everything else.

   It was also the Strugatsky brothers short story, ‘Roadside Picnic‘ that the great Soviet era film director Andrei Tarkovsky (and one of my favourites) turned into yet another prescient evocation of things to come, Stalker (or perhaps is already here).

4. ‘The snail on the (slippery) slope‘, William Bowles, 29 December 2005.

There will be cursing.

I was perusing sordid silly news the other day when I came across the unlikely teaser, “Jerry Lewis told fuck you by Hollywood producer”. I thought it was kinda rude to tell a dead guy “fuck you” and I’m not sure what purpose it serves…. so I went on to read what precipitated such –well, fuckery. Turns out, he’s not dead! But he is a jackass.

A few years ago, Jerry Lewis answered a question about women in comedy with “I don’t like any women comedians. A woman doing comedy doesn’t offend me but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.”

Wow! Jerry Lewis. Wow! That is some magnificent mildew.

I repeated this gem to a friend of mine, and she wryly commented that maybe it was actually a funny comment, but it was only understood in France. Possibly, but I tend to come down on the side of that guy who said “fuck you Jerry Lewis”.

I know Jerry Lewis has about as much cultural relevance at this time as a Clara Bow sexual dalliance, but even so, sometimes the assholes shine a light on some sordid beliefs stinking and lurking under the couch next to that damn sock.

Joel Apatow, the producer/director of much vanilla, but benign fare, was the one who said “fuck you” to Lewis. He would like more female comedy to be produced, hence his ire towards the mastodon–but he just didn’t go far enough though. There’s some more fuckery that needs to be addressed. That “producing machine” comment didn’t occur in a vacuum.

I’ve come across it before. When women make a joke it’s often disregarded unless it’s a self-debasing “math is hard” kind of  laugh. And I would say humor is the great connector. It can tie people together in warmth and empathy in a manner cold logic never can. It’s hard to maintain a war against a person, group (or an entire gender) when someone can point out the common absurdities of life.

Of course, the Jerry Lewis creeps of the world don’t enjoy a funny woman. It might erase some boundaries. Suddenly the mysterious withholder/controller of sex becomes just another poor schlub trying to make sense of the world too. The enigmatic virgin/whore or “baby producer” is just a more comfortable way of processing the world than addressing the fact that if you have issues with half the population….well maybe it’s you.

But women are not blameless in this. I have cracked jokes (that were pretty fucking good) in the company of women only to be given a cold look from them, but a hearty laugh from the men. Women can be gatekeepers of accepted behavior as well. These are the ones that can really sting you.

I’ll never forget an early, quite crappy job I had in college, not even 20 then.  It was as a hostess at a restaurant that hilariously considered itself to be quite elite, even though it was about one rung above Cracker Barrel. And the ladder rung was broken and hanging on the wall. It was incredibly boring, standing in front of the place, ushering people to tables so I humored myself by cracking jokes, basically being silly with the patrons waiting for tables to open when it was crowded and full. The owner noticed this and in a frigid manner told me it was my job to stand there and be pretty, not to do stand-up comedy. She actually got angry at me for this! Weird ass reason to be chastised by your boss. I wish I had pilfered a side of beef or something. Anyway, this was the same women who discarded a job application from someone because that individual was in her (gasp) 30′s… too long in the tooth to hire she said! I giggle with malignant glee sometimes thinking about this previous employer and how she would be firmly in old age by now. I can only hope she has urinary incontinence and a rascal. So fuck you too, women gatekeepers of feminine decorum. Fuck you right along with Jerry Lewis.

But it all really does get a bit more serious than just the issues of cracking jokes and looking unsexy. It’s a culture that springs from organized religions that peddle tales that women are the source of all that is unclean, and are to be viewed as the lesser “creation”. There’s not much love there in that dogma! I could go on and on how I think that worldview was necessary to push forward a culture of dominion and control, over not just women, but all fluid goodness on the planet. The end result sucks for most men as well, I’m thinking.

And hell, it’s not just that a woman can’t be funny, but it’s that she needs to be viewed as a two-dimensional being. It’s hard to denigrate those that we relate to, and discouraging female humor is about keeping those walls up. So fuck you organized religion for firming up the base that implies women aren’t every bit as fully fleshed out creations of humanity. Fuck you right along with Jerry Lewis.

And fuck every single person who can’t accept a person for what they are as long as it isn’t harming others.

So, yes, I think there is a lot of fuck you to go around. But Jerry Lewis is a start. The start of a fuck you dialogue and that makes me proud.

Now don’t even get me started about those who think women shouldn’t curse.

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)

The lexicon of Israel and its Western lobbyists constantly needs parsing to know just what is meant. Most glaringly is the term “settlers”, which suggests peaceful pioneers wishing to integrate with the locals. In Israel, the word “settlers” is a loaded term, for they are “aggressive squatters, half a million of them in over 100 illegal colonies — ugly blots on an otherwise lovely landscape … who terrorise local villagers, vandalise their crops, pollute their land and harass their children,” as described by Stuart Littlewood. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids that an occupying power transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

Most recently we saw casual reference to native Christian and Muslim Palestinians as an “invented people”. US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich revived this insult, repeating Gold Meir’s quip in 1969 to The Sunday Times. At the time, Israel was basking in its devastating victory in the 1967 war, occupying all of Palestine and Sinai. The eternal Sinai Bedouin are fortunate that Meir didn’t have enough time — or gall — to claim that they too are a mere figment of some anti-Jewish schemer’s imagination. Their cousins in the Negev desert are now being expelled to make way for 10 Jewish settlements “to attract a new population to the Negev”.

Meir was extrapolating on her more famous phrase, also recorded in the same Sunday Times interview, that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Not only is this a cruel lie, one intended to justify theft of a people’s land, but it is a case of plagiarism, as it was Lord Shaftsbury, an early enthusiast of using a Jewish state in the Middle East as an imperial beachhead, who first used the phrase in 1839.

Meir surely knew this, just as she knew that it is not the Palestinians, a people who can trace their heritage back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed or further, but the Israeli people who are the “invented” ones. Israeli citizenship is barely 60 years old, and Israelis are a disparate lot, made up most of East European and Russian immigrants and Arab Jews, most of whom do not share a common language or even religious practice. The Russian immigrants, many of whom are not even Jewish, are defiantly secular.

Even worse than invented people are “unpeople”, a term George Orwell coined in 1984 (1948) to refer to the complete elimination of people by vaporising them, leaving no trace. Israel’s growing arsenal of nuclear and white phosphorus bombs actually bring this reality uncomfortably close for Palestinians and other Arab neighbours of Israel.

Noam Chomsky points out that in October, Western media applauded the release of IDF prisoner Gilad Shalit, kidnapped in 2006 — during an illegal Israel attack on Gaza — in exchange for a thousand Palestinians, kidnapped for, well, simply being unpeople in the wrong place at the wrong time. One almost thinks the Israelis like to randomly jail thousands of these unpeople as collateral to retrieve the few “real people” caught in criminal acts, and then pride themselves that one Jew is more precious than a 1000 Arabs.

What about the claim of the representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations in May 1947, who said “‘Palestine’ was part of the province of Syria” and that, “politically, the Arabs of Israel were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.” Yes, the very notion of a nation state is a 19th century concept, and arose only as a result of imperialism spreading around the world, with the result that there are two kinds of nationalism — the empire’s, built on racism and exploitation of the Third World (hence “Rule Britannia” and “the Jewish State”) and the national liberation movements in the periphery (hence Palestine). So, when it comes down to it, we are all invented peoples, one way or another.

Another lexical sleight-of-hand that Palestinians have to fight is the now standard reference to “Jews versus Arabs”, which should be “Jews versus Muslims and Christians” or rather “diaspora Jewish colonisers versus native colonial subjects”, as many Jews are of Arab origin and “Jewish” in the first place refers to a religious affiliation. There is no Jewish nationality, despite Stalin’s decision to create one in the 1930s, just as there is no Muslim or Christian nationality, but rather a Jewish faith.

Even many Western Jewish critics of Israel such as Independent Jewish Voices say one thing and mean another. For them, fighting anti-Semitism is the primary goal. Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP) state that they “extend support to Palestinians trapped in the spiral of violence and repression” because they “believe that such actions are important in countering anti-Semitism”. In other words, even as they use words critical of Israeli atrocities, they effectively condone Israeli actions (as long as they are not too atrocious). Given that these critics are a tiny group, they act “to vindicate the Jewish people of crimes committed by the Jewish State in the name of the Jewish people”, says ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon.

So it is hardly any wonder that Egyptians are looking closely these days at the meaning of the word “peace”, as in “peace between Israel and Egypt”. An important part of the 1979 Peace Treaty was the clause that guaranteed “full autonomy” for the Palestinians within five years. For 27 years, Israel has been violating this clause. Instead of “full autonomy”, three decades on, the Palestinians are being called an “invented people”, and the US patron of this treaty is winking as Israeli leaders prepare to ethnically cleanse this imaginary people.

Following Egypt’s revolution last year, the treaty immediately became a political football, with just about all politicians talking about revising or cancelling it. The alarm bells rang in Washington and Tel Aviv and there are ongoing secret negotiations between the US and the Egyptian military demanding ironclad assurances that the treaty will remain in force before the generals hand over power to a civilian government. This was confirmed last week by Egypt’s most respected statesman and presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei, who told the Iranian news agency Fars, “The negotiations were completely secret and confidential … I believe that the Americans wanted to ensure that the deals signed between Egypt and Israel will remain intact if Islamists ascend to power.”

No Egyptians want a US-backed military coup in Egypt, especially the Islamists. Hence, Salafist Al-Nour Party spokesman Yousry Hammad was quick to tell Israeli radio that “the treaty is binding because Egypt has signed it,” while explaining that the Egyptian people want to amend certain articles to enable Egypt to better control Sinai, “and that we must be able to send aid to our Palestinian brothers in Gaza without problems.”

Interestingly, the Muslim Brotherhood is more nuanced in its political platform, referring to criteria for examining international agreements based on Sharia law and the degree of Israel’s compliance with the agreement. Re-examining the treaty is embedded in the Freedom and Justice Party’s (FJP) platform and calls for any decision on the treaty by the new parliament to be put to a referendum. Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Rashad Al-Bayoumi says, “We weren’t party to the peace treaty; it was signed away from the Egyptian people and thus the people must have their say.” FJP Secretary-General Mohamed Saad El-Kataany reaffirmed last week that the FJP respects all international treaties as long as they achieve their goals. Which, of course, leaves the fate of the Camp David Accords of 1979 very much in question, given Israel’s violation of it for the past 27 years.

Nobel Peace Prize winner ElBaradei is dismissed by some Egyptians as a liberal who served the US world order as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, though, in fact, he has called for former President George W Bush and his cabinet to be tried by the International Criminal Court for war crimes for the “shame of a needless war” on Iraq. We must do this, he writes in his memoirs The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, to answer the question, “Do we, as a community of nations, have the wisdom and courage to take the corrective measures needed, to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen again?” ElBaradei also warned Israel in April that as president he would consider taking the ultimate “corrective measure”: “If Israel attacked Gaza we would declare war against the Zionist regime.”

If this liberal Egyptian politician is to be believed, then a Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist dominated parliament will most certainly support him, as would virtually all Egyptians. So all the US intriguing with the military behind Egyptians’ backs will not save Israel’s bacon. Nor will all the lexical sleights-of-hand about “settlers”, “invented people” and even soft Zionist criticism of Israel. And when the imperial project of colonising Palestine by the invented Israeli people inevitably ends, many of the latter will decide to dust off their European and American passports, brush up on their French, Russian or American slang, and rediscover their ethnic roots in the lands of their forefathers.

No less an Israeli icon that Theodore Herzl wanted just that. Herzl’s original idea about ending anti-Semitism is found in his diaries in a letter he wrote the pope offering to arrange a mass conversion of Jews in Hungary as the beginning of a total conversion to Christianity and complete assimilation of Jews into European secular society. When this didn’t pan out, he then turned to mass migration to Palestine as the fall back solution.

For all the lexical gymnastics employed by Israel lobbyists, Israel is really just the latest manifestation of the Jewish diaspora, a colony, the brainchild of British empire and Jewish dreamers, and is fated to remain so until it disowns its imperial origins and learns to speak the local lingo, which just happens to be Arabic, not reinvented Hebrew. Recall Humpty Dumpty’s fate, despite his clever use of words in the pursuit of power.

As you well know as aspiring young Corporate Flacks, your CEO and Board of Directors masters will be counting on your ability when being interviewed by a business stenographer … I’m sorry, Freudian slip … a business reporter, to point at a big bowl of shit and call it chocolate ice cream. It is very important that you learn to do this properly, because if mishandled it could lead to a loss of investor confidence, which would quickly be followed by the loss of your own job.

Got that? I see you nodding eagerly. You are such a great class. Attentive and docile and not overly bright.

Anyway, up here on the blackboard I have written down some terrific real world examples from just the past month or so of how your brothers and sisters already out there in the corporate world have successfully placed a positive spin on mass layoff notices. Please make sure you memorize these for the exam:

“The company is doing what it needs to rightsize and be more competitive.”
– CoreLogic

“Through a more efficient organizational structure, we can optimize our use of resources and great potential for further growth increase. This will strengthen our long term position in the dynamic market for online games. We take responsibility for our employees very seriously and strive to find a socially responsible solution for the affected team members.”
– Gameforge

“We have an obligation to make tough decisions when necessary to improve profitability and strengthen our financial position.”
– Lowes

“…we announced a global restructuring to our Western publishing team.”
– NCsoft

“Motorola Mobility continues to focus on improving its financial performance by taking actions to manage the company’s costs.”
– Motorola

“We’ve determined that we’re really going to fundamentally transform the way The Hartford operates, by really creating a simpler, more efficient and flexible organization,”
– The Hartford Insurance

“We believe our cost and capacity reduction initiatives, recently announced cost-based price increases and innovative product launches will enable us to expand operating margins and deliver long-term value to shareholders.”
– Whirlpool

“We went too far down the creative path and lost our way in terms of being a profitable organization. While today is a tough day, I am incredibly bullish on the business going forward.”
– Rock You (social game developer)

“The layoffs are part of a plan to win stronger deals from merchant partners and ensure growth.”
– Groupon

“This is a difficult but necessary decision that will better position Itron to succeed in today’s increasingly competitive market and create value for stockholders,”
– Itron

“Through this program, Philips is investing in growth, addressing structural change, focusing on execution, reducing overhead costs and adopting a new company culture.”
– Royal Phllips Electronics

“… given the uncertain global economic outlook, we felt it was prudent to realign our operating expenses and trim our cost base.”
– Erickson-Air Crane

“We must take painful, yet necessary, steps to align our workforce and operations with our path forward.”
- Nokia

“We strongly believe that the court-supervised restructuring we began today is the most effective means of strengthening our financial position and enhancing our standing as the leading producer of printing and specialty paper in North America.”
– New Page Corporation

Did you little bastards get all of that? Good, very good. Always remember, everything that happens to your company must be made to sound like a positive no matter how awful the truth is or how much devastation it causes to the lives of real people.

The exam will be next Tuesday. I expect that everyone here will pass with flying colors.

Recently, Dictionary.com featured a question: “Why is it called America, not Columbusia?”:

But what about America itself? Why aren’t the continents of North and South America called “Columbusia” after Christopher Columbus? The word America comes from a lesser-known navigator and explorer, Amerigo Vespucci.¹

Maybe Vespucci is the source for the naming of the western hemisphere, but it is disputed by others. The historian and sailor Samuel Morison was sure the hemisphere’s continents are named after Welshman Richard Amerike, the man who financed John Cabot’s westward voyage in 1497.²

BBC History wrote, “… it is also probable that, as the chief sponsor of the Matthew’s voyage, and with Cabot’s wife and children then living, at his instigation, in a house belonging to a close friend, Amerike sought reward for his patronage by asking that any new-found lands should be named after him.”³

A weeks ago, I read a grade 10 Social Studies test. On it was a question: “Who discovered Vancouver Island?” The multiple-choice question offered the names of five Europeans. Even if the question had been posed as “Which non-Indigenous explorer first reached an island later to become named Vancouver Island?,” all five proposed names were wrong. It was a terribly worded and trivial question. People who are not blinkered by ethnocentrism today realize that it is incorrect to depict a place where human beings already reside as being discovered by human beings from another ethnic group.

Can it therefore be morally correct to append a colonial designation upon the land inhabited by another people without their consent?

Three major First Nations reside on Vancouver Island (immodestly named Quadra and Vancouver Island by seafarers Bodega y Quadra and George Vancouver): Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Coast Salish. I have never been able to determine an Indigenous designation for the island. These nations each reside in their own section of the largest island on the west coast of Turtle Island.

Turning to the northern continent, how then should one refer to the landmass in deference to the Original Peoples? The eastern nations of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnabek both refer to the continent as Turtle Island – a name derived from folklore.

One Indigenous website, Mexica Uprising!, urges Indigenous peoples to “rise up against the illegal settler population whom continue to enslave us socially, economically, politically and spiritually.”⁴ It proffers another name for the landmasses of the western hemisphere.

The website complains, “Latin America is named after the White people of Latin descent who stole our land and claimed it as their own. The Europeans brand everything they ‘own’ with their name, it is no different with our land.” The proper name in Nahuatl is given as Ixachilan – “one mass of land united by the Eagle and Condor not two seperate [sic] continents.”

Mexica Uprising! implores Indigenous peoples, “It is time to de-colonize our minds and think as individuals. Don’t let the wasicu control your destiny, learn your true history and culture!”

Is de-colonization just meant for the minds of the colonized? Is it not about time for those who have profited from the actions of colonialist ancestors to reorient their thinking along a different moral path — a path that acknowledges and rejects past crimes against humanity and seeks to atone for past crimes, not committed by themselves, but from which they profit in some sense?

Or is aggressive Martian morality acceptable?

1. the hot word, “Why is it called America, not Columbusia?” Dictionary.com, 9 October 2011.
2. Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, Oxford University Press, New York, 1971.
3. Peter MacDonald, “The Naming of America,” BBC History. Last updated 29 March 2011.
4. “Welcome to Mexica Uprising!” Mexica Uprising.

Once it invades, the Machine seeks-and-destroys the enemy.  And who is the enemy?  Those who resist (“insurgents”), those who may resist, those who may be secretly planning to resist, those who may be harboring someone who may be planning to resist.  Root them out, “cleanse” the defined battleground of all those who would stand in the way of what?  Total occupation?  Total “pacification”?  Total submission.  “Transition” to “friendly” regimes which streamline privatization and capital investment through dispossessing the people from their own resources and public infrastructure.

A positive-feedback-loop of escalating madness: invasion and attack meet with “resistance,” which must be further crushed with more strikes and “surges” and “sorties.”  To guarantee “victory”–or at least the “success” of the however-ill-defined “mission”—all those still alive to resist must be hunted down and destroyed.  Yet the loop is further amplified because those killed had friends and sons and comrades who will not forget their deaths.  Thus, new pockets of “insurgency” appear, new episodes of violent resistance (e.g., IEDs) — once again re-activating this lurching Machine into attack-mode—into a nightmare of destroyed villages, senseless killings en masse, and hundreds of thousands of people forced to leave their homes and flee, destination (and ultimate fate) unknown.

Somewhere, somehow, real people are “at the controls,” real people trained to act like automatons of death, real people ultimately accountable, to themselves and to humanity, for their moral failure and criminal transgressions.

I do intend to make this book required reading in two of my courses, including a seminar on the politics of identity which has a gender component. However, as will become clear below, my only hesitation for not totally embracing Barry’s thesis derives from questions I have about the political lessons she draws from her research. But more on that later.

In recent years the gendered dimension of U.S. imperialism has received increasing attention and this book is a welcome addition. Certainly the dominant organizations supporting the empire are gendered and it behooves us to incorporate an understanding of the masculinization of these institutional subcultures into our analysis. Indeed, as Robert Jensen has noted, there is a close overlap between how men are socialized and the mission of the U.S. military’s killing machine: “Dominance and conquest through aggression and violence, in the service of deepening and extending elite control over the resources and markets of the world.”¹ Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Blood Politics, depicts this perverse construction of masculinity, coupled with warfare, as “mutually reinforcing enterprises.”

In a small but telling example of this phenomenon, political scientist Cynthia Enloe wonders about the male soldiers who remained silent about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. “Did any of the American men involved in the interrogations keep silent because they were afraid of being labeled ‘soft’ or ‘weak,’ thereby jeopardizing their status as ‘manly men’?”² And Francis Shor, a preeminent historian of U.S. imperialism, reminds us that “For hypermasculine warriors, compassion and caring become signs of feminine weakness, marking someone as a wimp or wuss.”³

This foreshadows how Barry answers the vexing question that prompted her to write this book, namely, “Why do wars persist in the face of our human urge to save and protect human life?” Her response is that “War will not be unmade without remaking masculinity.” In fact, the author’s answer to virtually all questions surrounding war is the same: masculinity of the violent, aggressive and militaristic form. The term she coins for this phenomenon is core masculinity. Here she’s careful to specify that this means core socialization and not violence as an essential biological trait in men. Barry argues that early on men are set up to be the protectors of women, children, tribe, and state. Violence and aggression follow from this role. Her argument is more nuanced than I can do justice to here, but she asserts that only by undoing core masculinity, eliminating blinding macho, and violent standards of manhood can we begin “remaking men from the ground up, from the personal to the political.”

The most compelling parts of the book are those in which she explains how masculinity requires that men’s lives be expendable; how the military’s intensive brainwashing reinforces and exploits earlier socialization of boys and men; and the dynamics of the process she labels “From Soldier to Psychopath.” The result is a soldier who kills without remorse, acts without conscience or regret—and then is praised for it. The personal trauma and “loss of one’s soul” that often follows in the wake of this behavior receive careful and sensitive treatment. This heart-rendering recital is driven home by anecdotes collected from firsthand accounts and interviews with soldiers. If empathy is putting oneself in another’s shoes, the indissoluble combination of core masculinity with brainwashing, degradation, and stripping away any sense of self aims to foreclose this response.

Further, there is general agreement in the literature that sociopathy is defined as the lack of empathy. Barry contends that by replacing empathy with desensitized callousness, the military is creating sociopathic characteristics, that the military itself is a sociopathogenic institution. That is, the task of the military is to “normalize amorality for soldiers … the same amorality found in sociopaths.” Here I was reminded of an interview with former combat marine Chris White (not included in this book) who recalled his recruiter explaining the purpose of the initial twelve-week indoctrination as removing any “undesirable traits, such as anti-individuality for the sake of a team work ethic, and, most importantly, the ability and even desire to kill other human beings.”⁴

Why Soldiers Fight

The debauched spirit reflecting an absence of remorse appears in this refrain from grunts on the ground in Vietnam:

Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the valley.

She quotes one Marine who recalls that shooting to kill “becomes muscle memory, you don’t think about it. You just do it.” Soldiers have “the remorse driven out of them” and the military counts on insensitivity to fill the void, allowing more killing without a second thought. Another Marine tells Barry that “shooting someone was like watching a moving target, hitting it, and watching it fall. It wasn’t real.”

To reshape human groups into effective killing machines the military uses male bonding and attendant fears of being ostracized. It would be unmanly, cowardly behavior not to proceed, even toward one’s own likely death.⁵ Even in retrospect, after feeling a modicum of remorse at “taking someone out” the soldier’s mantra remains “I was only there to defend the person next to me,” even as they return to the killing fields.

Barry understands that one of the consequences is that “support for your buddy and unit is as far as sympathy for others is allowed to go” (emphasis added). Anyone who threatens a buddy’s safety is “the enemy,” a potential enemy, and someone without a life at all. In putting forward this “fighting for each other” argument, Barry’s position is compatible with research suggesting that soldiers fight because those in their unit are depending on them.

Historian S.L.A. Marshall’s study “Men Against Fire” in 1942 concluded: “I hold it to be of the simplest truths of war that the one thing which enables an infantry soldier to keep going with his weapon is the near presence or the presumed presence of a comrade…. He is sustained by his fellows primarily and by his weapons secondarily.” This conclusion apparently holds true for recent wars.

A military study of American soldiers from Iraq concluded that the primary motive was “fighting for my buddies.” One soldier’s answer was typical as he responded, “That person means more to you than anybody. You will die if he dies. That is why I think that we protect each other in any situation.”⁶ And this view wasn’t limited to the “grunts.” Just prior to the start of the Gulf War in January, 1991, one Marine Corps lieutenant colonel remarked, “Just remember that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting just for each other, just for each other.”⁷ Journalist Sebastian Unger, after five months of observing U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan, concluded that “The guys were not fighting for flag and country. They maybe joined for those sorts of reasons, but once they were there, they were fighting for each other.”⁸

Patriotism, fear of jail if drafted, lack of economic opportunities, job training, naivete, or boredom might explain a recruit’s enlistment and undoubtedly there are individual exceptions, but topping the list for actually engaging in combat is the social connection of not wanting to let down one’s comrades. This unit cohesion bleeds into self-preservation because remaining alive means keeping fellow soldiers alive. Of course, while the soldier is fighting on behalf of joint survival, the larger context of the mission means he or she is a resource expended on behalf of state-sanctioned killing.

In Vietnam, Prof. James McPherson found that Army psychologists became intensely concerned because the largely draftees not only didn’t want to be there but “didn’t understand in many cases, why they were there.” But the pressing problem for the military was that because fresh replacements arrived individually, the indispensable bonding with other members of the unit was the issue.⁹

In terms of how to unmake war and remake men, Barry wisely advises that we adopt an attitude of critical empathy. This will allow us to see through the lies and disinformation suffusing these matters. That is, we need to employ the potent combination of emotion and intelligence. In that spirit and because I felt Barry was selective in applying the cognitive dimension of critical empathy, I’ll raise a few questions about her analysis.

First, the Pentagon might well prefer to rely on robotic warfare, a variation on empathy-devoid androids.¹⁰ “Closing with the enemy” already occurs with some frequency as “cubicle warriors” in suburban Las Vegas dispense death from 7,500 miles away. This wholesale substitution for “boots on the ground” is projected to occur sometime between 2020 and 2035.9 This doesn’t mean these changes won’t be masculinized or that recruiting posters will soon read “we’re looking for a few good androids.” But it has been suggested that because the combat warrior ethic has been inseparable from the military’s historic emphasis on face-to-face killing, change in military doctrine might strongly influence future generations of military masculine culture.¹¹

Second, military indoctrination is complementary, albeit in more intense form to the subtle and arguably more comprehensive indoctrination of the civilian population under neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism’s pathological numbing of our empathic disposition is what Shor terms “the hectored heart,” and those “imperial mental enclosures often work to deter most U.S. citizens from expressing empathy toward those brutalized by U.S. imperial policies.”¹²

As products of this empathy-deficient cultural programming, a certain preconditioning may soften up and facilitate some aspects of military training. However, as a tool of the state, the military is less concerned with what a soldier thinks or believes about “the system” because the objective is absolute compliance in service to a specific mission. Empire requires a “trained to kill” culture or the system would break down. Recall that the definition of Marine Corps discipline is “instant willingness and obedience to follow others”—all orders—and to follow them absolutely.¹³

For instance, the respected Zogby polling organization found in 2006 that 72% of American troops in Iraq believed the U.S. should exit the country within one year.13 No matter, as long as they follow orders in the field of combat, this is a non-issue.

Finally, it’s unarguable that the American empire currently requires this particular version of gender construction. In that sense, Barry’s book sheds needed light on the intersection between masculinity and empire. But as Shor argues in his comprehensive and accessible account of recent approaches to understanding U.S. imperialism, this endemic masculinism is only one constituent element deployed on behalf of creating, expanding, and defending political-military control of the globe.¹⁴ Therefore, in trying to understand war, it’s not helpful to claim, as Barry does, that U.S. presidents have repeatedly led the country into “unnecessary wars” to test and prove their machismo, their virility. In her treatment of psychopathic leadership, Barry specifically identifies machismo as the primary shared pathology of “leaders,” from George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon to Bin Laden and Dick Cheney. But not brutal war-mongers like Golda Meier, Indira Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher? And what of our rogues’ gallery of militarism enablers including Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton? If it’s socialized and not essential, it’s not confined to men.

Perhaps it’s the lack of opportunity for women rather than core masculinity? Women now make up 20 percent of new recruits for the U.S. military, 14 percent of the active-duty force, 17 percent of the reserves and some 16 percent of senior officers. Women in the military have bitterly complained about the heretofore “military exclusion” rule because the lack of combat experience slows down their promotion through the ranks. Valorizing these behaviors for women will facilitate career advancement and based on reports requested by Congress that rule is now being reconsidered. Here I’m reminded of political scientist Michael Parenti’s observation (I’m paraphrasing) that it’s not what’s between one’s loins but what’s between one’s ears that matters. U.S. imperialist wars require empathy anesthetizing socializing agents that we generally associate with traditional masculinity—whether the soldiers are male or female. I wish Barry had done more to address these questions and I expect she’ll do so in the future.

At still other points she cites masculine revenge and irrational masculine thinking as the key factors behind U.S. interventions around the globe. I would argue that making core masculinity the stand-alone, virtually monocausal explanation for U.S. (and all) war making tends to weaken an otherwise sterling contribution. And to argue that all this violence is the result of a culture of socialized masculinity is more of a tautology than an answer. Don’t we need to understand whose interests are being advanced by this culture? Exactly who is reinforcing it? Yes, in some important aspects the military is an end in itself but I felt that Barry failed to address its primary role as servant to the ruling interests and their capitalist state. In fact, unless I missed them, Barry never mentions capitalism or imperialism, the critical political-economic context. Here I reference Parenti’s definition of imperialism: “The process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that country.”¹⁵ Unquestionably “core masculinity” complements the overriding motive of protecting and advancing the interests of transnational capital. However, I didn’t detect any appreciation of the very real geopolitical and economic motives behind U.S. global behavior. There’s not a single reference to pillaging of natural resources like oil and gas, military Keynesianism, exploitation of workers, the reasons for 750+ U.S. military bases around the world and related factors. I offer these few objections only to suggest that while socialized masculinity facilitates war-making, in and of itself it can’t explain the basis for U.S. imperialism.

1. Robert Jensen, “Critiquing Masculinity at the Corps.”
2. Cynthia Enloe, “Wielding Masculinity Inside Abu Ghraib: Making Feminist Sense of an American Military Scandal,” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 10/2/2004.
3. Francis Shor, “Hypermasculine Warfare: From 9/11 to the War on Iraq.”
4. Chris White, “Double Think: The Bedrock of Marine Corps Indoctrination,” Counterpunch, July 13, 2004.
5. I was reminded of Becky Johnson’s counter recruitment postcard reading “You Can’t be All That You Can Be If You’re Dead.”
6. Leonard Wong, “Why Soldiers Fight.”
7. Former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges in James M. Skelly, “Iraq, Vietnam, and the Dilemmas of United States Soldiers,” Open Democracy, 24 May, 2006.
8. Quoted in Skelly.
9. James McPherson, “Why Do Soldiers Fight?” Interviewed on NPR.
10. The classic sci-fi treatment is Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968.
11. Paul Higate and John Hopton, “War, Militarism, and Masculinities,” in M. Kimmel, J. Hearn and R.W. Connell, Eds., Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishers, 2005), p. 442.
12. Francis Shor, Dying Empire (London: Routledge, 2010, paper).
13. Chris White, “First to Fight Culture,” Counterpunch, May 29/30, 2004.
14. Shor, Ibid., 37.
15. Michael Parenti, The Face of Imperialism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011, paper), p. 7.

Yo! A-man! Evie? Where U at?—G-D

Behind the bushes, Big Guy!—E.

What the? U hiding?—G-D

We’re naked, Lord!—A.

Whoa! Who tole u u were naked?—G-D

Duh! I thought u knew everything?—E.

Enuf wid u! Who tole u?—G-D

The serpent bid me eat of the Tree of Knowledge!—E.

An u listened to that reptile scumbag? Not to Me?—G-D

She made me do it, Lord! Don’t smite me!—A

Adam, u twirp!—E

What have U wrought, Lord?—A

OK! That does it! Outa here! Hit the road!—G-D

What a Schlimazel!—E.

I saw that!—G-D

Where do we go, Lord?—A

Follow the Yellow Brick Rd, jerk-off!—G-D

She made me do it!—A.

Kiss-off! Both of you’s! Don’t let the primrose door bump ur ass!–G-D

Please forgive me, Lord.—A.

Fa-ged-da-boud- it!—G-D

U want the Blackberry back, Lord?—A.

Shove it where the sun don’t shine!—G-D!

2. Romeo and Juliet—The Balcony Scene

Romey? O! Romey? O! Where? For? RU?—Julie.

Am climbing the ivy now!—R.

OMG! It’s poison ivy!—J.

Now you tell me?—R.

Take me. I’m urs!—J.

Soon as I get there!—R.

Oops! Wait on balc! Mom’s at the door!—J.

Bring some calamine lotion, will ya?—R.

         (After 10 minutes…)

Romey? O! Romey? O! Where? For? RU?—J.

Tired of waiting! Maybe next time! Hugs!”—R.

3. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton

Liar!—AB

Blackguard!—AH

Federalist!—AB

Republican!—AH

Royalist!—AB

Democrat!—AH

English banker!—AB

French banker!—AH

Ur mama wears round-heeled combat boots!—AB

My father can tar n feather ur’n!—AH

Ur’n?—AB

Yeah!—AH

In ur dreams!—AB

In urs!–AH

Up urs! U dont even have a father, u Carib bastid!–AB

I’ll kill u 4 that!–AH

Not if I kill u first!—AB

Yeah?–AH

Yeah!–AB

4. Abe Lincoln at Gettsyburg

(Speaking…) “4 score & 7 yrs ago. …”

U R SOOOOO HOTT!—a fan.

Where RU?—Honest Abe

In the crowd. Pink bonnet!—a fan

I see u now! Wow! Catch me after the speech!– AL

Please wear ur hat!–me

You like hats? AL

I like men with hats! And from here, urs looks very big!

R we talking about hats?

Is the Pope Jewish?

HAHAHAHAHA!

5. Buddha at the Deer Park in Benares

So that’s the bottom line: Life is suffering. … Questions?—B

Sir. … —Disciple 1

Shoot!–B

Does “Being” precede “Non-being”? Or vice-versa?—D1

How should I know?–B

Master…, How shall we overcome suffering?—D2

Follow the 8-Fold Path!—B

What happens when we die?—D3

The condors eat you.–B

Is sex with women OK?—D4

Most of the time.–B

Can money buy happiness?—D5

Enuf money–yes. 2 much—no!–B

How do we know when we have enuf?—D6

That’s the problem.–B

The most misused word in the English language may be the one spelled G-O-D. It is a word used freely and frequently by hundreds of millions of English-speaking people who belong to the Christian churches, and even as a curse word by many people.

But how many really understand the meaning behind that word? How many have truly attained the state of consciousness known as God-realization? How many instead use the word to justify various forms of bigotry against those they perceive as non-believers? Can it be that misuse of the word has even given the being or reality the word may represent a bad name?

Christians profess belief in the Bible. Yet the word “God” never appears in the original language of the Bible. Instead, such words as Yahweh, Elohim, Ho Theos, or Ho Kurios are used.

According to the Reader’s Digest Family Word Finder, page 351, “Our word ‘god’ goes back via Germanic to Indo-European, in which a corresponding ancestor form meant ‘invoked one.’ The word’s only surviving non-Germanic relative is Sanskrit hu.” This form “appears in the Rig Veda, most ancient of Hindu scriptures as puru-hutas, ‘much invoked,’ epithet of the rain-and-thunder god Indra.”

The word “God” found its way into English-language Christianity through such translations as the King James Bible of 1611. But its origins are decidedly both racial and “pagan.” So in the most important word of their lexicon, Christians already use a term that may be far-removed from the scriptures they profess to believe and often cite in looking down their noses at others.

What has probably done the most damage to the idea of “God” has been the use of religion by its adherents for the justification of war. Throughout history, more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion or its ideological derivatives than for any other cause. In this way, organized religion has often made itself repulsive to sensitive souls.

The charge has often been led by Christians of the West. Immense damage was done to religion by World War I, when Christian nations murdered each other by the millions. The damage continues in what is obviously a latter-day crusade being carried out today by the U.S. military, and whatever allies it can muster, against the Islamic world. This crusade has been cheered on by many Christians, even to the point of burning the Koran in public.

The churches have also had little to say in criticism of the predatory system of Western-based capitalism that has increasingly polarized the world. The rich live in ever-increasing luxury, while increasing numbers are consigned to low standards of living or a growing hell of unemployment, poverty, and even starvation. While the churches rail against homosexuality and abortion, they say little or nothing about the corporate greed that places profits over people or destroys the natural environment.

The hypocrisy of the Christian churches has led many to flee the standard denominations for alternative forms of worship. These forms have included the formation of independent Christian congregations, reliance on the ethical standards inherent in secular humanism, or conversion to other religions such as Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism.

Striking have been the emergence of movements such as the Nation of Islam among African-Americans, the spread of yoga as both a spiritual practice and way of life, and the widespread adoption of Buddhist forms of practice among the Western intelligentsia. Also notable are the growth of the Sufi movement, the revival of indigenous forms of spirituality, especially among Native Americans of the Western hemisphere, and the search among Christians for their authentic roots by study of the Essenes, the Gnostics, and early Jewish Christian teachings.

One development dating from the 1960s is the Madonna House apostolate within the Roman Catholic Church that brings the Orthodox Russian practices of the prayer of the heart and poustinia into a Western context. Another important source of teachings is the Spiritis movement, deriving, it says, from direct appearances of Jesus Christ himself to its adherents, resulting not only in new and vibrant explanations of Christian scripture but also integration of spirituality with scientific discoveries in unified field theory.

Spiritualism too has played a role through such figures as Edgar Cayce, the appearance of channeled teachings like A Course in Miracles, and even the search among records of extraterrestrial contacts for the spiritual messages therein.

Faced with this plethora of new avenues of profound soul-searching, the usual Christian denominations often have little to say, except to retreat more deeply into doctrinaire interpretations of scriptures they do not really understand. No wonder Gandhi said: “I like your Christ. But I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”

But what all these movements point to is that in spite of the rejection by many of the forms of religion historically practiced in the West, the search for spiritual meaning and experience has never been stronger. So the likelihood remains that whatever the truth may be that hides behind the word “God,” it is a truth that continually calls to humanity for its exploration, understanding, and expression. For many, this search for truth has become a living fire.

While we may be tempted to dismiss the suffix “-ocalypse” being deployed much like “-gate” as an all-purpose distortion device, on another level we can also perceive that its very utilization as both a linguistic tool and interpretation of concrete outcomes is telling about the times in which we live. We’re actually in good company on this, at least historically speaking, as the sense of looming apocalypse has been woven into the fabric of Western civilization since its earliest days of recorded reckoning. And there certainly has been no shortage of cataclysmic harbingers in the modern era, from the inception of cinema itself to the invocation of the “mushroom cloud” as part of political theater. This is, in short, our cultural talisman, and its influence upon us is palpable.

Today, the news cycle brings reports of “natural disasters” of perpetually escalating magnitude, and we are increasingly aware of the cataclysmic potential of “climate collapse” and its attendant ravages. Spanning the literal and metaphorical gamut from Genesis to Revelation, our very existence appears conditioned by the constant recollection of our impending nonexistence. The recent widespread deployment of the “-ocalypse” motif in the vernacular signifies a casual acceptance of the notion that signs of the “end times” are everywhere — and perhaps likewise an urge to begin anew.

Even in the face of this history, the sudden appearance in locales around the world of birds falling from the sky and fish washing up on shores is particularly disturbing. Scientists for years have been tracking the increasing rate of species extinctions, correlating the surge with expanding human intervention into the planet’s regenerative capacities. It is distinctly possible that these recent events are related to the larger phenomenon of habitat degradation, and furthermore that we might be experiencing a nascent “canary in the coalmine” moment on a global scale. Whatever the cause, the symbolic impact of this small item in itself is noteworthy, and seemingly indicates a convergence of fiction with reality.

Whereas the specter of nuclear annihilation dominated the popular consciousness for decades, perhaps the ultimate “doomsday scenario” in our midst today concerns the rapidly changing climate — comprising a new paradigm in the lexicon that we might soon be calling the “Carbocalypse.” Consider a recent report from the Inter Press Service titled “Climate Change: Driving Straight Into Catastrophe,” which chronicled the sci-fi-sounding crises that are apparently at hand:

“Despite repeated warnings by environmental and climate experts that reduction of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions is fundamental to forestalling global warming, disaster appears imminent. According to the latest statistics, unprecedented climate change has Earth hurtling down a path of catastrophic proportions…. These findings have prompted leading environmental experts to warn that humankind is racing towards destruction. ‘The year 2010 was the hottest ever measured since the beginning of the recordings, 130 years ago,’ Anders Levermann, professor of climate system dynamics at the Physics Institute of the Potsdam University told IPS…. He added that the rapid rising of global temperatures could provoke extreme weather catastrophes that humankind won’t be able to survive…. ‘Climate change would destroy drinking water supplies, agriculture, habitats, and provoke giant waves of migration and mass mortality,’ he explained.”

Another post that recently analyzed the near-future tea leaves, this one from the respected author Michael T. Klare and titled “The Year of Living Dangerously,” also reads like a desultory stroll through the Book of Revelation:

Get ready for a rocky year. From now on, rising prices, powerful storms, severe droughts and floods, and other unexpected events are likely to play havoc with the fabric of global society, producing chaos and political unrest. Start with a simple fact: the prices of basic food staples are already approaching or exceeding their 2008 peaks, that year when deadly riots erupted in dozens of countries around the world…. Rising food prices leading to riots, protests, and revolts, mounting oil prices, mammoth worldwide unemployment, and a collapsed recovery — it looks like the perfect set of preconditions for a global tsunami of instability and turmoil. Events in Algeria and Tunisia give us just an inkling of what this maelstrom might look like, but where and how it will next erupt, and in what form, is anyone’s guess. A single guarantee: we haven’t seen the last of resource revolts which, in the coming years, could reach an intensity we scarcely imagine today.

Scenarios of this sort seem to leap straight out from the pages of apocalyptic science fiction. Consider Phillip Wylie’s 1973 tome The End of the Dream, in which he describes a series of baffling environmental calamities that at first seem relatively insignificant to all but a few individuals, yet in the final analysis result in the massive collapse of the biosphere. Those who warn of the potential consequences are dismissed at best as panicked “Chicken Littles” and at worst as dangerous heretics — mirroring the real-life treatment of prescient writers like Rachel Carson in her landmark work Silent Spring, which was published a decade before Wylie’s fictional work and seemed to inspire its basic thesis that humankind was blithely (and suicidally) toxifying its irreplaceable habitat.

An even earlier work of speculative fiction established the themes of “environmental sacrifice” and “doomsayer castigation” in a dramatic (and unfortunately prophetic) manner. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s 1958 classic The Space Merchants depicts a near-future world controlled by corporations to such an extent that any pretense of governance “by the people” is dispensed with altogether (e.g., “The Senator from Alcoa has the floor…”), and those few remaining souls who raise even a whiff of environmental consciousness are persecuted as dangerous terrorists known as “Consies” (i.e., conservationists). In this parable, the sense of looming environmental apocalypse is papered over by corporate propaganda, faux food, somatic pharmacology, and virtual realities to such an extent that the populace’s awareness of its plight is almost nonexistent.

A decade earlier, George Stewart’s haunting and award-winning work Earth Abides portrayed a world surreptitiously decimated by a cataclysmic pox that leaves only small pockets of humankind left to pick up the pieces. In the process of describing this apocalypse and its aftermath, Stewart explores in a visionary manner the ways in which our relentless “will to power” vis-a-vis nature are implicitly responsible for the resultant calamity, and likewise how our fragile dependency on a system of production that alienates consumers from essential knowledge and basic resources sets the template for the collapse of civilization and the near-eradication of homo sapiens in the process. Still, despite these apocalyptic sensibilities, Earth Abides manages to present a tale of human dignity and resilient innovation in the midst of profound crisis.

Later works have extended these themes in ways that are equally instructive. Pat Murphy’s brilliant 1989 book The City, Not Long After likewise depicts survivors of a self-inflicted plague struggling to maintain their humanity in the face of calamity. In this tale, peace-minded individuals band together in explicit reliance on a Gandhian nonviolent framework to stave off the ravages of militarists bent on asserting their control over the post-apocalyptic landscape. Similarly, in Starhawk’s evocative The Fifth Sacred Thing, eco-spiritualists draw upon a reaffirmation of nature’s power in confronting the domineering aims of a fascistic force trying to annihilate them. Ernest Callenbach’s landmark work Ecotopia is perhaps less metaphysical in its musings, but is equally based on reclaiming the virtues of ecology and deploying its inherent lessons as a counter-balance to the forces of devastation.

There are many such cautionary tales in the annals of science fiction — indeed, the cinematic depictions alone could fill a volume — that seem ripped right from today’s headlines. In most instances, the looming ecological collapse is foreshadowed by relatively minor (but in retrospect highly indicative) episodes such as those reflected in “Storm of the Century” and “Birds Fall from Sky” headlines. The characters in these speculative stories, much like ourselves perhaps, oftentimes tend to ignore the evidence in favor of official pronouncements that all is well and life should proceed as normal while the “experts” work diligently and altruistically on forthcoming solutions. What is omitted from this systemic propaganda, however, is precisely the sobering (and ultimately fateful) realization that it is actually our “normal” lives that are precipitating the onset of the apocalypse.

Oddly enough, we can take some hopeful inspiration from these fictional works. For one, their mere existence demonstrates a longstanding and sophisticated understanding of the issues we are grappling with today, and in this sense indicates a sociopolitical center from which to frame queries and guide actions. Fictional accounts allow a scathing critique of dominant norms to proliferate more widely than the mere ruminations of scholars and pundits, bringing an evocative sensibility and wider consciousness to bear on pressing concerns. They also portray the inner lives of thoughtful characters coping with breakneck changes in their world, overcoming ostracism and persecution upon raising their voices, and displaying dignified fortitude in meeting the challenges before them.

When science fiction writers suggest that “we are not alone,” they usually have something otherworldly in mind. Yet another meaning is suggested by the texts noted above and similar works in the genre — namely, that we are also part of a demonstrable tradition in the post-WWII era, calling into question the consumer-oriented and profit-driven values that are largely responsible for pushing the world to the point where apocalyptic nonfictions leap from the headlines nearly on a daily basis. Another positive revelation from these ostensible demise-themed works is the impetus of post-calamity characters to relearn basic skills of food production and capacities for social organization in the absence of nations and corporations — something they generally lament not having done before disaster struck.

Here, then, is one more addition to the lexicon, this one meant to capture the “gift of time” sensibility that Jonathan Schell once powerfully invoked in confronting the nuclear crisis: Prepocalyse, to indicate our narrow interval of time in which to reclaim skills of sustenance and community. Indeed, the desire and capacity for this reclamation is already emerging as a bona fide phenomenon, with a resurgence of interest in values and practices including localism, small-scale agriculture, food sovereignty, renewable energy, and grassroots democracy found in cities and towns everywhere.

As it turns out, these are also the strategies implicitly urged by the speculative fiction writers (and explicitly by many current advocates) as ways to avoid a self-extinguishing “total collapse” in the first instance. And in this sense may we find an opportunity for a new beginning, well before the end. Indeed, this is the very essence of the notion of apocalypse, comprising in equal parts the “final battle” of Armageddon and a time for “lifting the veil” on a new vision undistorted by collective delusion. The steady convergence of fiction and reality points the way toward a potentially positive eschatology in which we get to help write the next chapter, rather than merely consuming its leading edge.