One of the clichés repeated often by liberals and leftists, which always rubs me the wrong way, is that we must “speak truth to power.” But those with power usually already know the truth, but avoid it because it’s contrary to their interests or they don’t want to know it or hear about it, for the same reason. Informing the powerless is far more useful as they may not know the truth or may be confused about it, which helps make them inactive and unable to pursue their own interests. After all, it is an important function of the mainstream media to obfuscate the truth in their service to the elite interests that dominate them—to manufacture consent to programs that serve those elite interests. The powerless need facts and frameworks of analysis that will allow them to understand and evaluate outsourcing, tax evasion, privatization, union busting, and free market principles that help sustain these policies and ideologies. The powerful don’t need such intellectual resources and the dominant media don’t provide them. In short, we need more truth to the powerless, not the powerful, and we need to empower the powerless to speak for themselves.
Who Are We?
This question has been posed often by political leaders and mainstream pundits, who regularly claim that “we” don’t torture and, if some of us have engaged in it, this was an aberration. But it wasn’t an aberration. It is another one of those things, like aggression, that is as American as apple pie. Our government and many of its agents, including prison-keepers as well as military personnel, have engaged in torture and taught it to others for many decades. In Noam Chomsky’s and my 1979 book The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Haymarket Books, 2nd ed., 2014), we provided a Frontispiece entitled “The Sun and Its Planets: Countries Using Torture on an Administrative Basis in the 1970s, With Their Parent-Client Affiliations.” This chart has 26 lines running from the Sun (the United States) to its torture-employing clients, showing for each the dollar figures on military aid and numbers of security personnel trained by the U.S. It is noted also that only eight other countries in the world were large-scale torturers in that era.
This was the period when the United States sponsored and supported a string of National Security States in Latin America, right-wing military regimes that were notorious for death squads, murder, and torture, often carried out in numerous torture centers (at one point there were 60 in Argentina and 33 in Colombia). In its 1975 Report on Torture, Amnesty International (AI) noted that torture, “which for the last two hundred or three hundred years has been no more than a historical curiosity has suddenly developed a life of its own and become a social cancer.” Ironically, AI also noted that this was largely a Free World phenomenon, with 80 percent of the “urgent” torture reports now coming from Latin America, while torture in the Soviet Union and its clients had declined since the death of Stalin.
So “we” have long been in the torture business and will surely continue to revive it when national security crises appear and pose their usual allegedly dire threats. And we can see that even when torture so clearly violates both international and domestic law, as it has in the last 13 years, those responsible are not punished, which tells us, and tells potential and future torturers, that torturers will always be above the law. In fact, while Obama and company declare that “we” are not torturers, Obama not only refuses to prosecute them in violation of his constitutional oath to enforce the law, he has not ended the “rendition” of prisoners to allies and clients who will torture them. So hypocrisy and possibly self-deception help protect the torture regime. It should be noted that “we” is a deceptive word, regularly used by the powerful and their agents to pretend that what the government does is what the general population wants done. But in a failing democracy like ours, the distinction between the elite and commoners, between the 1 percent and 99 percent, is important. Polls have regularly shown that the U.S. majority want a smaller military budget and more resources for education and other civil society functions. Right now they oppose more aggressive actions in the Middle East that leaders and pundits of the Permanent War parties are pushing. Polls on the public’s view of torture are variable and uncertain, but they are greatly affected by the modes of questions, which often make the issue simply one of whether torture “works,” rather than the legal and moral aspects of the issue. It is of interest that the torture-supporting elite struggles valiantly to keep the details of torture secret, suggesting their own doubts about public support. But it is evident that the managers and clear supporters of torture are a minority, and probably a small minority. It is also true, however, that the public does not make an issue of torture and the recent disclosures have not created a groundswell of demand for prosecution of torturers in accord with the law.
Paul Krugman in Descent
Paul Krugman has produced hundreds of very good columns in the New York Times, but he has run out of steam, becoming a bit repetitive and, regrettably, branching into foreign policy issues concerning which he lacks expertise. It is notable that in his three recent columns that deal with Russia, Putin and the threat of war, he cannot escape the mainstream party line, which is followed by the New York Times editors and journalists, and which make him look foolish. In his initial foray “Why We Fight Wars” (August 17, 2014), he argued that wars are almost always not worth the cost, but he failed to note that, while the society as a whole may suffer losses, particular groups like the very large and powerful military-industrial complex may do exceedingly well. This was a surprising failure to break down “We,” especially as Krugman had come to recognize the importance of class and class war in economic policy.
He did trace the Ukraine crisis to internal Russian factors—“the roots of the Ukraine crisis may lie in the faltering performance of the Russian economy…. Russian growth has been sputtering—and you could argue that the Putin regime needed a distraction…” He makes the same point in his followup piece on “Conquest Is for Losers” (December 22, 2014), although he also seems to relate it there to Putin being an ex-KGB officer and thus, a “professional thug” for whom “violence and threats of violence…are what he knows.”
But although the “thug’s” “aggression” in the Crimea cost no lives, while the invasion of Iraq cost a million lives, there are no negative adjectives applied to the leaders responsible for so many deaths by the loyal Krugman. And for Krugman it was not internal factors that drove the United States into Iraq (and Krugman does not mention Afghanistan, or the numerous other countries bombed by his country on a daily basis), Iraq was a “war of choice” designed to “demonstrate U.S. power,” and resting on neo-con ideology. No military-industrial complex here nor vested interests in war; no pro-Israel lobby. No mention of the viciousness and illegality of killing vast numbers to “demonstrate power.” No thugs sponsored either this “war of choice” or the associated torture regime.
Krugman’s title, “Conquest Is for Losers,” runs into the fact that the United States has been fighting wars continuously for decades. Are we “losers?” He dodges the question, hiding behind his assault on Putin, but also satisfying himself with pointing out that although something like the Iraq War is enormously expensive, and has weakened the United States, “America is a true superpower, so we can handle such losses”—but Krugman “shudders to think of what might have happened if ‘the real men’ had been given a chance to move on to other targets.” This is blatant apologetics. We can possibly afford such losses, but how about the million dead Iraqis and their destroyed society? Imagine what Krugman would say if the “thug” Putin had killed a million people and some apologist for him said, “we can afford these losses but imagine what would have happened if a Stalin was in power.”
Krugman’s analysis of the Ukraine crisis and Putin’s and the U.S. role there is dishonest and incompetent party line propaganda. He calls the takeover of Crimea “Russian adventurism.” Again the word usage is instructive—for his own country Iraq was a “war of choice,” not adventurism. He also ignores the adventuresome U.S. involvement in the regime change in Ukraine that removed the elected president and replaced him with an amenable client government. He also ignores the deeper and essential context of NATO’s and the U.S.’s gradual and threatening encirclement of Russia and placement of missile-launchers within miles of the Russian borders.
In an article in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, John Mea- rsheimer writes: “The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West…. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and, in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a coup—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West” (“Why the Ukrainian Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs, Sept-Oct. 2014).
Krugman misses this crucial line of analysis, in parallel with the fact that authors that advance it are excluded from reporting or commenting with this alternative perspective in his paper. So Krugman offers instead a patriotic mythical history that would be easily refuted by any competent high school student.
It is interesting to note how Krugman tries to exonerate and even vindicate Obama in this story of villainy and war. He blames the neo-cons for the Iraq War, but even they are never designated thugs or criminals—they just made a badly mistaken, not criminal, “war of choice” that cost a lot of U.S. resources. He ignores the fact that Obama continued the Iraq war for years, escalated the Afghan war, greatly enlarged drone assassination attacks in half a dozen different countries, and carried out a war against Libya. While trying to distance Obama from the neo-cons, he ignores the fact that the State Department’s Victoria Nuland, who had been on the scene in engineering the February 2014 coup in Ukraine, is a neo-con, and his team of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton are de facto neo-cons and war-mongers. There is overlap and continuity between the Bush and Obama regimes.
In his recent “Tidings of Comfort” (December 26, 2014), Krugman closes with an homage to Obama’s foreign policy, saying that its attempt “to contain threats like Vladimir Putin’s Russia or the Islamic State rather than rushing into military confrontation, is looking pretty good.” That Russia’s was a defensive move against the expanding NATO and aggressive U.S., and that it is NATO and the U.S. that need containing, is outside Krugman’s and his paper’s chauvinistic and ideological framework.
That the Islamic State arose out of the debris created by U.S. violence is also in a non-Krugman realm, as is recognition that Obama was trying hard to go to war with Syria not long ago, only to be driven back by public opinion and Putin’s diplomatic intervention.
Obama has been aiding his Kiev client to pacify Eastern Ukraine and avoid a peaceful settlement of that conflict; he has been fighting an economic war against Russia and mobilizing NATO for greater violence; and he has contributed to war hysteria in the U.S. He hasn’t “rushed into military confrontation,” he is moving that way more moderately, like the moderate Warrior President that he is.
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Edward S. Herman is an economist, media critic, and author.