Monday, April 23, 2012

The Philanthropies of American Imperialism

The Philanthropies of American Imperialism

Foundations and American Power

by JOAN ROELOFS

Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard (1997) noted that “Cultural domination has been an underappreciated facet of American global power.” United States philanthropic foundations skillfully applied this weapon during the Cold War. If we define this war as a conflict between two ways of organizing societies, capitalist and socialist, we can see how broad were the fronts and diverse the weapons. We may also conclude that the Cold War is not over; targets such as Cuba, India, and Nepal are still under attack, and the small news we receive from Eastern Europe suggests considerable activity in the trenches.

Knowledge networks created in the service of American global hegemony are the main subject of Inderjeet Parmar’s book Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (Columbia University Press, 2012). These, he argues persuasively, promote technocratic capitalist economics while failing to eradicate poverty. His focus is on the “big three” foundations: Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller, traditionally the ones most active in foreign policy. Even given this limitation, the title and introduction are somewhat misleading, as only a slice of their activity promoting U.S. power in the world is discussed.

Nevertheless, the sponsorship of university programs and institutes, think tanks, and government policy agencies (and promoting links among them) worldwide has had dramatic results, as “intellectuals” are crucial to the support or overthrow of regimes (note Crane Brinton and Antonio Gramsci). Networks funded by foundations can offer status, wealth, travel, an exciting collegial atmosphere, or simply provide a living wage to those who wish to become or remain intellectuals. Failing to obtain this recognition may doom one to obscurity and/or poverty. “Intellectual” in the broadest sense includes teachers, professors, administrators, public policy specialists, activists, non-governmental organization staff, as well as artists, writers, philosophers and other cultural workers.

From the other side, journalists and politicians gain credibility by relying on the supposed “impartial, nonpartisan, scientific” publications and spokespeople of think-tanks—often the only source of policy ideas.

Parmar documents his theme in great detail:

The modern foundation mediated between the modern university and the state and between universities and big business. The foundation organized crucial state agencies, international corporations, and the universities behind a hegemonic project of domestic federal-state building and U.S. global expansion: Progressivism and imperialism went hand in hand (p. 66)

In addition to the incorporation of elites, mass public opinion and propaganda were not neglected by the foundations. Before and during World War II, The Rockefeller Foundation funded Princeton’s Office of Public Opinion Research led by Hadley Cantril, to enhance the “case for belligerence and to crush the case for isolation and neutrality.” “The U.S. Army. . . even went so far as to open an office at Princeton. . . a ‘Psychological Warfare Research Bureau.’” (p. 81)

The Foreign Policy Association, a project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (see Horace Coon, Money to Burn, on CEIP), aimed for the second rank of intellectuals—League of Women Voters, other local political discussion groups, organized labor et al. It was as well an advisor to the State Department. FPA sold or distributed thousands of books—the Headline Series—to high school international relations clubs.

During the same period, FPA produced and distributed maps, study guides, and bibliographies for students, teachers, and club leaders and organized teacher-student seminars and a college students’ conference. . . . [W]ritten . .in a style “readily understood by young people.” (p. 84)

This is the way to go. I have without any evidence of success implored my radical colleagues to produce children’s books, computer games, textbooks comprehensible to high school and actual college students, videos, TV cable channels—whatever format is “in,” yet so much energy is expended in dialectical discourses that even we learned professors find repetitive and tedious, and not always comprehensible.

Parmar also describes how the foundations worked abroad to fight anti-Americanism. He mentions the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the excellent study by Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War. The foundation-funded Salzburg Seminar in American Studies was “targeted at European men and women at the cusp of leadership positions in their own society. . . a ‘Marshall Plan of the Mind.’” (p. 108) The CCF enhanced the right wing of British Labour Party at the expense of those in the party protesting nuclear weapons and persisting in socialist schemes.

Bilderberg is briefly mentioned, but more description is needed. Many don’t know what this is and others are afraid to find out, as the very inquiry is tarred with conspiracy theory. How will we ever know if it is a conspiracy or reject that description if we don’t know what it is?

Parmer concludes that foundations were successful in their goals; so far, this assessment is justified. It can help to explain, for example, the “normalization” of NATO, even among social democratic and green parties and regimes, and the “partnership” status in NATO of “neutral” countries—Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland.

The second half of Parmar’s book consists primarily of three case studies, covering some of the ground earlier reported in Edward Berman’s The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy.

In Indonesia the Ford Foundation-sponsored knowledge networks worked to undermine the neutralist Sukarno government that challenged U.S. hegemony. At the same time, Ford trained economists (both at University of Indonesia and in U.S. universities) for a future regime supportive of capitalist imperialism.

This was a useful tactic; those on the left or right seeking to overthrow a government had better have people who know how to manage the new dispensation. Thus, the Fabian socialists created the London School of Economics to train administrators of a future socialist society, although this was considered elitist by socialists of other varieties. However, the LSE soon strayed from its original mission, and enjoyed Rockefeller enhancements during the early 20^th century.

Parmar’s labors in the Ford archives netted him clear evidence that Ford worked closely with the CIA in planning for the Indonesian massacre and transition to the U.S. friendly Suharto government.

In Nigeria, the big three foundations created institutes, networks and university departments, providing resources that were otherwise very scarce, and thus incorporating even progressive Nigerians into the pro-Western, pro-capitalist camp.

Parmar provides details about the transformation of economics departments at Chilean universities (well before the military coup of 1973) under the aegis of Ford, Rockefeller and the Chicago Boys. Gradually radicals and Marxists were excluded and choices of different capitalist strategies were the only ones permitted.

When the Pinochet government took over, leftists in government departments as well as university posts were dismissed; the resourceful Ford Foundation created non-governmental organizations and research institutes to harbor them. Ford was very successful in this cooptation strategy, because by the time the military government ended and “normalcy” returned to Chile, those harbored had become convinced of the technocratic rationality of the Washington consensus and globalization.

Discussing current operations, Parmar identifies a new rationale for US power: promoting democracy on the premise of “democratic peace theory.” This argues that democracies, interpreted as nations with “market” systems open to the globalized economy, are inherently peaceful. Now “regime change” through subversion or violent invasion becomes the road to peace—in our Orwellian vocabulary. Parmar does not mention the Carnegie Endowment doctrine of “humanitarian intervention,” proffered just in time for Clinton’s destruction of Yugoslavia.

In the service of U.S. hegemony, our wars work together with the “soft power” of foundations. They have created huge international philanthropy networks, and sponsor and fund the World Social Forum, where critiques of the market system may be aired. Parmar mentions that at the 2004 WSF in Mumbai, India, Ford money for the conference was rejected, because of the Foundation’s role in India’s Green Revolution. It would have been good if Parmar had included more discussion of the Ford, Rockefeller, and now Gates Foundations’ projects for remaking the agriculture of the world with the promise that they will end hunger. This premise of the Green Revolution is now questioned even by the very establishments nurtured by foundations, the United Nations agencies. In 2008, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) “report concluded that modern biotechnology would have very limited contribution to the feeding of the world in the foreseeable future. The conclusion was that a viable food future lies in the creative support of ecological agriculture in which small-scale farmers will continue to play a major role.”

The evidence in Parmer’s book adequately supports his conclusion: “The foundations remain primordially attached to the American state, a broadly neoliberal order with a safety net, and a global rules-based system as the basis of continued American global hegemony.” (p. 265)

However, there is much more to the story of the foundations and U.S. global power. Its scope includes the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, and the European Union. There were vast interventions beyond universities and think tanks into cultural and grassroots organizations throughout the world. Parmar mentions briefly the Ford/CIA effort to counter “anti-Americanism” in postwar Europe via the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This was only one prong of an intricate undertaking, as detailed in Stonor’s Cultural Cold War, and Phil Agee’s Dirty Work.

There was much regime change work to subvert Eastern European political systems, including Helsinki Watch (now Human Rights Watch) and subsidies to dissenters and overthrow groups via the East European Cultural Foundation and other “ pass-throughs.” In South Africa, the “big three” foundations played a role in the transition from capitalism with apartheid to capitalism without apartheid, despite the African National Congress commitment to socialism (see Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy). Throughout Latin America, radical protest was shepherded into NGOs fragmented by identity politics; this is well described in the work of James Petras. Traditional religion was employed against godless Marxism when Ford funded rupee editions of religious tracts in India, while a Bible translation project in South America was used by Rockefeller to co-opt indigenous people (see G. Colby and C. Dennett’s Thy Will Be Done). The Philippine Educational Theater Association (street theater inspired by Brecht) was formed to question imperialism and exploitation; after Ford funding it gradually became a theater of “empowerment,” presenting plays about domestic violence and reproductive health.

The full story may be too large for one book and one researcher, yet it is important to include a sketch of the larger picture for the guidance of future investigators. Even in the university-think tank area, there are mysteries requiring further sleuthing: Ford funding of economics education in China prior to its embarkation on the capitalist road, and funding of economics institutes affiliated with the Communist Party of India.

Many U.S. and foreign foundations are partners in global knowledge networks. However, one of those younger than the big three is so significant that a fuller discussion would be appropriate in the context of Parmar’s book: Soros’ Open Society Institutes, which reconstructed Eastern European universities and had a large role in creating the FIDESZ party in Hungary, along with a host of worldwide interventions.

As the foundations date only from the second decade of the 20^th century, a more complete historical context could easily have been provided. Parmar says that in the early 20^th century the United States was a society relatively content to expand within continental limits. Although there was an anti-imperialist movement, and there were proponents of international law, even outlawing war, most of the elite was not on that train. Progressives, including the foundations, were enthusiasts of “cultural imperialism” (see Robert Arnove’s anthology, Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism). Public-private partnerships, which have diluted democracy for the sake of efficiency, were advocated in Recent Social Trends (1933), itself a collection created by a Rockefeller Foundation-President Hoover partnership.

Nevertheless, Parmar’s book is a valuable contribution to the tiny field of critical foundation studies. He notes that foundations are rarely discussed by political scientists. One reason may be the enormous support they provide to individuals and institutions in that field, including the International Political Science Association.

The work is based on hours spent in foundation archives, where unpublicized gleanings often make intentions clear. He reports on a few rejected grant proposals. A comprehensive study of the rejectees might help us to understand what happened to all that idealism that shone throughout the world in 1945–social democracy, human rights, equality of persons and nations, international law, and an end to imperialism and war.

Joan Roelofs is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New Hampshire. She is the translator of Victor Considerant’s Principles of Socialism (Maisonneuve Press, 2006), and author of Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY Press, 2003) and Greening Cities (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). Web site: www.joanroelofs.wordpress.com Contact: joan.roelofs@myfairpoint.net

At the Pearly Gates: Alexander Cockburn tracks Christopher Hitchens and Henry (War Criminal) Kissinger

An Envoi for Christopher Hitchens

At the Pearly Gates

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

On April 20 there’s a memorial for Christopher Hitchens at the Cooper Union in Manhattan. There’s a PEN tribute, also in Manhattan, on April 30. Here’s my own little envoi. The regular Diary, tumbrils and all, will resume next week.

SCENE ONE

Antechamber to Heaven, a large reception room in the Baroque style. A door opens and an angel ushers in Christopher Hitchens, dressed in hospital clothing. The angel gestures for CH to take a seat. He is about to do so when he espies a familiar figure reading some newspapers.

CH Dr. Kissinger! The very last person I would have expected to encounter here. All

the more so, since I don’t recall any recent reports of your demise.

HK You will no doubt be cast down by the news that I am indeed alive. This is a secret trip, to spy out the terrain diplomatically, assess the odds.

CH You think you have the slightest chance of entering the celestial sphere?

HK Everything is open to negotiation.

CH Have you threatened to bomb Heaven — secretly of course?

HK Very funny. As a matter of fact, Woytila — Pope John Paul II, I should say — has kindly offered to intercede at the highest level. And talking of negotiation, perhaps we could have a quiet word.

CH What about?

HK That worthless book you wrote about me — The Trial of Henry Kissinger. John Paul says that the prosecutors here have been using it in drawing up preliminary drafts of their case against me. Now, he also says it would be extraordinarily helpful if you would sign this affidavit — my lawyers have already prepared it — saying that you unconditionally withdraw the slurs and allegations, the baseless charges of war criminality, and attest under eternal pain of perjury that these were forced on you by your Harper’s editors.

CH Dr Kissinger! Your idea is outrageous. I stand behind every word I wrote!

HK Hmm. Too bad. After all, you certainly have experience in, how shall we say, adjusting sworn affidavits to changing circumstance. I believe Mr. Sidney Blumenthal could comment harshly on the matter.

CH Dr. Kissinger, let me reiterate…

HK My dear fellow, spare me your protestations. Let us consider the matter as mature adults — both of us, if I may say, now in potentially challenging circumstances.

CH Speak for yourself, Dr. Kissinger. I do not recognize this as Heaven’s gate, or you as a genuine physical presence. I do not believe in the afterlife and therefore regard this as some last-second hallucination engendered in my brain in my room in M.D. Anderson hospital in Houston, Texas. I may be dying, but I am not dead yet. I have not dropped off the perch.

HK Off the perch… How very English. You will dismiss these as a mere last-second hallucination, a terminal orgy of self-flattery on your part, but (flourishes bundle of newspapers) The New York Times certainly thinks you’re dead. The Washington Post thinks you’re dead.

CH Let me look at those… (snatches the papers from HK’s hand; skims them intently)

HK Rather too flattering, if I may be frank. But, of course, as you say, all fantasy.

CH They’re very concrete. Far more amiable than I would have dared to imagine…. I… I… (passes hand over brow) Is it possible to get a drink in this anteroom?

HK Ah, after the soaring eagle of certainty, the fluttering magpie of doubt. I think we can bend the sumptuary laws a little (pulls a large flask from his pocket). Some schnapps?

CH I would have preferred Johnnie Walker Black, but any port in a storm. (drinks)

HK Bishop Berkeley, a philosopher, claimed, like you, that the world could be all in one’s imagination. It was your Doctor Samuel Johnson who sought to rebut Berkeley’s idealist theories by kicking a stone. And what did Dr. Johnson say when he kicked that stone?

CH He said, “Sir, I refute it thus.”

HK Precisely. Let the schnapps be your empirical stone. Now, if I may, let me continue with my proposition. As you know, you wrote another pamphlet, equally stuffed with lies and foul abuse, called The Missionary Position.

CH Yes, a fine piece of work about that old slag, Mother Teresa.

HK The “old slag”, as you ungallantly term the woman, is now part of an extremely influential faction in Heaven, including Pope John Paul II. Mother Teresa remains vexed by your portrait. She says it is in libraries and all over the Internet. She, like me, would dearly love to see you make an unqualified retraction of your slurs.

CH And that, of course, I will not do!

HK You’re aware of the fate of Giordano Bruno?

CH Certainly. One of reason’s noblest martyrs. Burned at the stake in the Campo de Fiore in Rome in 1600 for heresy. He insisted, with Copernicus, that the earth revolves around the sun and that the universe is infinite.

HK Quite so. A noble end, but an extremely painful one. Perhaps, with Satanic assistance, I can remind you of it.

He claps his hands, and two fallen angels in black robes draw open a pair of heavy red velvet curtains at the far end of the room. HK makes a theatrical bow and motions CH forward. The latter edges near the space are now suffused with leaping flames. For a brief moment there’s a ghastly wailing, and CH leaps back into the room.

CH Great God!

HK You seem to have reverted to religious belief with startling speed.

CH No, no. It was purely a façon de parler. Not a pretty sight.

HK But in your view, a pure hallucination, nein? No need to kick the stone, like Dr. Johnson.

Before CH can answer, the fallen angels seize him and start dragging him toward the open curtains. They are about to hurl him into the pit, when…

ST. MICHAEL (suddenly appearing through the gates of Heaven) Stop!

He hands CH and HK tickets.

These are one-day passes to Heaven. In Mr. Hitchens’ case, for purposes of interrogation by the Board of Inquiry and Final Judgment.

Exeunt St. Michael, HK and CH through ornate gilded doors to Heaven.

SCENE TWO

Heaven. A vast Baroque gallery, in which an animated throng is enjoying itself in something closely resembling a cocktail party.

ST. MICHAEL We’ve just remodeled. Before, we had something in the Gothic style, but the feeling was that in keeping with the times there should be more gold, more sense of extravagant illusion. And that of course brought us to the Baroque. You will no doubt detect many echoes of the Palazzo Colonna in Rome.

HK I think I see His Holiness John Paul II, over there. With your permission, I might have a word?

ST. MICHAEL Of course. And Mr. Hitchens, before we get to the Board of Inquiry, I’m sure there are some immortals you’d like to tip your hat to.

CH The hat is all very well, but….

ST. MICHAEL How forgetful of me! In general we’re an abstemious crowd here, but there’s no ban on moderate enjoyment.

A cherub swoops down, proffering a well-stocked tray.

CH (gulping down one glass quickly and taking another) Angel!

POPE PIUS V (joining the group) Michael, I couldn’t help overhearing your reference to the Palazzo Colonna, built in the late seventeenth century, and of course memorable for the marvelous depictions on the ceiling of its Grand Gallery of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, our Holy League’s historic defeat of the Ottomans.

CH Ha! The wily Turk, lurking like a cobra ’midst the fairest flowers of God’s creation, lies ever ready to pounce upon the unsuspecting traveler and bugg…

PIUS V I don’t believe I’ve had the honor.

ST. MICHAEL This is Mr. Hitchens, a British-American writer here on a possibly brief visit. And (to CH) this is St. Pius V, who indeed occupied the Holy See at the time of Lepanto.

CH (theatrical bow) The honor is mine.

PIUS V Those were the days, when the wind was truly at our backs! 210 ships of the Ottoman armada — almost their entire fleet — sent to the bottom of the Gulf of Patras; the Counter Reformation in full spate; the Council of Trent a magnificent success; heresy confronted and extirpated by our Inquisitors.

CH The screams of their victims no doubt inaudible amid the general brays of triumph.

PIUS V Speaking as a former Inquisitor, let me say that by modern standards of bloodshed consequent upon religious or ideological conflicts, the number of those who perished by reason of their adamant heresy was startlingly small. Have you kept up with recent scholarship on the topic? I thought not. Out of 62,000 cases judged by the Inquisition in Italy after 1542, only 1,250 ended with death sentences. The Spanish Inquisition held an average of 350 trials a year between 1560-1700 and executed between 3,000 and 5,000 people.

CH (snatching two more glasses from the tray of a passing cherub) I do not propose to stand silently here, your so-called Holiness, and endure from a dotard in a white petticoat filthy apologias for atrocious barbarism in the name of his so-called God.

ST. MICHAEL Mr. Hitchens! I suggest you moderate your language immediately.

PIUS V (walking away) Brutto insolente, ignorante, ubriacone pieno di merda!

MOTHER TERESA (approaching, with Pope

John Paul II; HK lurking discreetly) Brutto insolente, indeed! Mr. Hitchens, I understand from Dr. Kissinger that you are prepared to repudiate your libels upon me.

CH Certainly not.

JOHN PAUL II But why not? After all, your arguments against the Blessed Teresa were either trivial or absurd, and in all instances morally odious. To focus on the latter: by 1996, the Blessed Teresa was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. And you, what were you doing for the poor? Would a starving person near death be more likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed Teresa or from Christopher Hitchens?

CH I have never had pretensions to be in the professional charity business.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE If I may intrude. Of course, as a great admirer of Mother Teresa, I was in receipt of Mr. Hitchens’ barbs, so I do speak as a biased witness. I regard it as truly extraordinary that while Mr. Hitchens was blithely ladling his sewage over our heads, he was — as a sometime US correspondent, I have followed these matters closely from here in Heaven — a fierce and influential advocate of one of the most violent onslaughts on the poor in recent historical memory: first, the sanctions on Iraq, which caused untold misery to Iraq’s poorest citizens; then the actual attack of 2003, which eventually prompted the deaths of over a million Iraqis and a crisis that still virtually paralyses that wretched nation.

CH I would not change a syllable of what I wrote.

MM Worse still — I speak also as someone who reported from the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule — Mr. Hitchens displayed himself as a craven apparatchik of the Bush White House, actually going to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the night before the invasion to give a pep talk to the President’s staff about their noble mission.

Since Beatrice Webb was my wife’s aunt, I am intimately familiar with the follies of socialists. You, in your contempt for “lesser” cultures, remind me of the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, who argued that to oppose Rhodes’s suppression of the Matabele uprising was to oppose “the spread of civilization”, and that “the higher culture always has the greater right on its side over the lower; if necessary it has the historical right, yea, the duty, to subjugate it.”

CH The mission to Baghdad was noble: the eviction of a filthy tyrant…

MM …was worth the denial of medicine and medical equipment for babies, the forcing of hundreds of thousands of poor Iraqis into near starvation, the creation of millions of internal refugees plus those who managed to flee the country, the unleashing of sectarian bloodshed on an unparalleled scale? Just so that your hero, Tony Blair, and your supreme leader, Mr. Bush, could boast, “Mission Accomplished”?

CH Since His Holiness St. Pius V, who has departed the field of disputation, was invoking the Battle of Lepanto, I’m surprised not to hear any parallels drawn between that engagement and the Crusade against Islam, of which the war in Iraq — and the terror axis of Hussein and Osama — was a significant element.

MM You mean your precious crusade against so-called “Islamo-fascism”, the bizarre coinage of a Trotskyite, such as you once were? Lepanto at least saw the Ottoman armada, and the unfortunate slaves who rowed their galleys, sent to the bottom of the sea. Your crusade in Iraq saw the triumph of the Shi’a, and a significant victory for Iran. With Vice President Cheney you must be the last two men alive who believe in the Hussein/Osama axis.

JOHN PAUL II The Holy See strongly opposed the war. Before it began, I sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to tell Bush it would be a disaster and would destroy human life. The war was useless, served no purpose and was a defeat for humanity. Such was my view, which was the recorded opinion of the Holy See.

MM Surely, a more humane posture than your own hosannas to cluster bombs: “Those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and, guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.”

CH Rather well put, if I say so myself.

MM You are impervious to rebuke, which is not surprising, since if one rebuke is let in the door, it can usher in another, and then some serious inner reflection may become unavoidable. As Cardinal Newman put it, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

CH Newman, that old queen!

MM Like St. Pius, I’ll quit the field now, but let me return to something His Holiness John Paul II said. “Would a starving person near death be more likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed Teresa or from Christopher Hitchens?”

What has constantly struck me is the desolate sterility of your atheism. We had atheists in our generation, of course, but they lived in a world and consorted with people for whom religion had profound meaning, often inspiring them to acts of nobility and extraordinary self-sacrifice. In your book, religious people are stupid. But they weren’t stupid, and the atheists — I’m thinking of my dear friend, a man you profess to have admired, Claud Cockburn — didn’t deride them, but cheerfully swapped quotations from the Sermon on the Mount. The context was one of respect and mutual striving for a better world.

What sort of moral leadership did you, the great and ultimately rather wealthy exponent of atheism display? Extreme disloyalty to close friends, constant public drunkenness and brutish rudeness, particularly to women, and a life, if I may say so, of almost psychotic self-centeredness and exhibitionism. You had your claque — Messrs Amis, Fenton and the others — and their energies in promoting you as a major intellectual and stylist were unceasing, and in their somewhat homoerotic loyalty, rather touching, but I don’t think the verdict of history will be quite so kind.

SCENE THREE

Antechamber to Heaven. CH is sitting on a bench. Door opens and St. Michael bids HK a cheerful goodbye.

HK Mr. Hitchens. You seem somewhat subdued. (proffering flask) A little schnapps?

CH My dear fellow! (drinks deeply) You arranged your affairs successfully?

HK Entirely so. In large part owing to you. Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, not to mention St. Pius V, were so shocked by your views and by your language that they entirely discounted the charges you leveled against me, and believe me to have been vilely traduced.

CH I suppose I should be glad to have been of service. But let me ask a question: since you are Jewish, why would you be taking such trouble to build up contacts in what is clearly a Christian Heaven?

HK Between ourselves, I am preparing for a final conversion and absolution. Jews are vague about heaven and, after a lifetime’s observation, I am inclined to think that the atmosphere in Gehenna would be extremely acrimonious. Your plans?

CH Once again, I feel it necessary to insist that I do not recognize myself as being in Heaven, or disputing with a sixteenth-century pope, or indeed being reprimanded by St. Michael and Malcolm Muggeridge. Or talking affably with Henry Kissinger. So, please, regard this as ongoing cerebral activity on the part of C.H. Hitchens, patient at M.D. Anderson.

HK As you wish. But here, (slips him the flask) just remember Dr. Johnson’s stone. Farewell, my friend.

Lights fade to a dark red.

END

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

The Philanthropies of American Imperialism - hmm, interesting, never had thought about it as a philanthropic state of affiars

The Philanthropies of American Imperialism

Foundations and American Power

by JOAN ROELOFS

Parmar documents his theme in great detail:

The modern foundation mediated between the modern university and the state and between universities and big business. The foundation organized crucial state agencies, international corporations, and the universities behind a hegemonic project of domestic federal-state building and U.S. global expansion: Progressivism and imperialism went hand in hand (p. 66)

Joan Roelofs is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New Hampshire. She is the translator of Victor Considerant’s Principles of Socialism (Maisonneuve Press, 2006), and author of Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY Press, 2003) and Greening Cities (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). Web site: www.joanroelofs.wordpress.com Contact: joan.roelofs@myfairpoint.net

Rick Santorumr, though he is a Catholic more popish than the Pope, and the Vatican

Will Netanyahu Tempt Fate?

Will Iran War be Another October Surprise?

by ANDREW LEVINE

Will Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu concoct a war with Iran? Not if they have a tenth of the sense they were born with. But that’s not much consolation when we’re dealing, on the one hand, with a vulture capitalist and one time Mormon bishop whose flip flopping gives opportunism a bad name and, on the other, with a fascistically inclined ethnocratic zealot on a mission from God.

Each of them is nefarious enough to tempt fate. To make matters worse, it turns out that the two of them are friends.

It doesn’t help either that Barack Obama, having publicaly endorsed the Israeli view of Iran’s nuclear program, reinforced their pretext, the one that media pundits in thrall to the Israel lobby have promoted for years. Neither does it help that, despite overwhelming evidence that it produces the opposite of the intended effect, it is now taken for granted in Western capitals that it is good policy to wage or threaten to wage disarmament wars – ostensibly to block nuclear proliferation.

If we could be confident of the rationality of the parties involved, there would be no cause for alarm. But can anyone reflecting on the absurdity of American politics in the Bush-Obama era, or on Israeli politics, not help but worry? In both countries, the left is a shell and the center is spineless and insipid. Meanwhile, the right is not just mindless but also dangerously full of what William ButlerYeats called “passionate intensity.”

Therefore the irrational could come to pass. It isn’t likely because the consequences would be so catastrophic, but it isn’t impossible either.

* * *

As if to underscore the debasement of his character and the larger political culture of which it is an integral part, watch how, between now and November, Mitt Romney heaps praise on Ronald Reagan, the Son of Man second only to the Son of God in the minds of the Republican faithful.

As an opportunist ever on the lookout for opportunities, Romney knows that praising Reagan can’t hurt with “moderates” either — especially not when Obama Democrats chirp on about how Reagan’s was a “transformative” presidency, and as they praise his “pragmatism” on taxes and his willingness to accord amnesty to undocumented aliens. They have a point: Reagan’s views on many of the current fixations of the Republican base are closer to Obama’s than to the Republican Party line today.

But the Reagan cult is not about the man, the so so actor and acting President who served as an amiable figurehead for plutocrats intent on rolling back organized labor and undoing the New Deal-Great Society settlement. It is about a mythical figure whose character took shape in the nether regions of the political culture during the Clinton years. By 1998, the process had gone so far that few Democrats even bothered to object when Bill Clinton renamed Washington’s National Airport for that villainous (and already senile) scoundrel.

Even so, it would cost Democrats to venerate Reagan the way Republicans do; so they seldom dare. Yet our two post-Reagan Democratic presidents have done more than any Republican could to implement the vision that has come to be associated with his name. Their efforts were not ideologically driven. Unlike Republicans, they have no beef with the social and economic advances achieved in the middle decades of the twentieth century. To the very considerable extent that they have acted as if they did, it is only because that’s what the oligarchs who own them wanted them to do.

To the extent that Democrats in Congress have gone along, it has mainly been a case of follow (or at least support) the leader. When Republicans are in the White House, Democratic legislators are more inclined to accord weight to the interests of the people who vote them into office.

So when the Republicans are in the White House, the Democratic legislators act somewhat more like an opposition party (the Cheney Administration got EVERYTHING passed that it wanted to get passed, legislatively, until they went to mess with Social Security. Was there ever a time of bi-partisanship? WELL ... LBJ got a lot of important legislation passed early in his term.

How is it then that after eight years of Clinton and more than three already of Obama, Social Security and Medicare are still intact? The short answer is: we’ve been lucky.

After ending “welfare as we know it,” Clinton set out to take on Social Security. He failed only because Republicans couldn’t resist making a federal case out of his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. When Obama, aiming to please deficit hawks, tried much the same, he encountered a less salacious obstacle – obstinacy. If Obama proposed it, Republicans were against it. (This is the wonderful thing about today's Republican Party's Congressional Critters. They are DUMB FUCKS! that don't appreciate that they've got (potentially) the greatest Republican President ever in office RIGHT NOW AT THIS MOMENT; the one (the annointed one capable of rolling back social security, Medicare, and Medicaid) And so they turned down a Grand Compromise confected in the White House that Reagan could only have dreamed of achieving. In a second Obama term, we may not be so lucky.

My point is not that the historical Reagan was a liberal at heart, quite the contrary. It is that Obama and Clinton are, or might as well be, “secret Republicans.”

And what about adherents of today’s Reagan cult? Since their antics are of more clinical than political interest, the traditional compass points of the political lexicon are inadequate. Political space, or rather the end of it occupied by the hard core Republican base, has become too unhinged for received concepts or traditional understandings of party labels to be of use.

* * *

Some things don’t change, however. Politicians will be politicians, whether or not the inmates are running the asylum; and attitudes about their violations of civics lessons norms have remained consistent even as the Democratic Party has veered rightward and the Republican Party, leading the way, has flipped off the charts altogether.

Everyone despises Lee Atwater-Karl Rove style “dirty tricks.” That level of sleaziness is fit only for the likes of Bush family operatives or worse. But truly ballsy machinations, like the Kennedys’ involvement with organized crime in the West Virginia primary in 1960 and their conniving with the Daley machine to fix the election in Chicago later that year, or the shenanigans that won the young LBJ a place in Congress and the nickname “landslide Lyndon” are a different matter. Even squeaky-clean liberals can’t help admiring exploits like these.

Democrats are loathe to admit it, but they yearn for the days when their party still had a will to win, and when knowledge of the art of putting in the fix had not yet been lost. That would have been long before the year 2000, when the Gore campaign, inept and spineless, let George W. Bush’s father’s friends snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Back in the day, Republicans too had it in them to be magisterial crooks. No one knows for sure what arrangements Richard Nixon made with Vietnamese diplomats in Paris in 1968; all we can say for sure is that the Vietnamese must have come to regret trusting Tricky Dicky. But there is a line of thought that holds that, notwithstanding the Democrats’ disarray after the police riots at their Chicago convention, Hubert Humphrey might have won but for Nixon’s scheming.

But Nixon, according to received opinion, was a small-time operator compared to Reagan. The mother of all October surprises, the archetype, is the one the Reagan campaign is believed to have engineered in 1980 with the Ayatollahs in Tehran. In exchange for who-knows-what, they supposedly got the Iranian authorities to agree not to release the hostages being held in the American embassy until the moment Jimmy Carter’s presidency gave way to the Gipper’s.

Cult adherents don’t like flaunting candidate Reagan’s treasonous pursuits any more than Democrats like harping on Kennedy’s ribald hijinks or his and Johnson’s shady dealings. But they do believe that Reagan pulled off that greatest of all dirty tricks, just as surely as they think that, as President, he commanded the Berlin Wall to come tumbling down. The idea that their Idol came into office by sticking it to his hapless predecessor is one of the glories of the Reagan legend.

It therefore behooves us to worry that candidate Romney, a Reagan acolyte in these later days of the primary season, might, in imitatio Dei, have an October surprise of his own up his sleeve. Could Romney be planning to have Israel drag the United States into another Middle Eastern war by promising who-knows-what to Netanyahu in exchange for defying Obama for the umpteenth time?

Bringing the world economy to ruin and wreaking havoc throughout the Middle East might seem a high a price to pay just for again putting Obama in a humiliating situation. But the only sure thing about Romney is that he wants to be President, and that he will do anything within his power, no matter how dangerous or dumb, to make it happen.

* * *

The likely consequences for Israel of a war with Iran would be even worse than for the United States, and so one would think that an Israeli government, even one led by the likes of Netanyahu, would be disinclined to go along, much less to instigate what would in all likelihood turn into a catastrophe for the Jewish state. Sane minds in Israel agree. But with Netanyahu believing, not unreasonably, that he has carte blanche from the American Congress to do as he pleases, and with his known predilection for pushing Obama around, all bets are off.

It was Netanyahu, after all, who discovered, even before Republicans did, that Obama has feet of clay and that, when challenged, he can be counted on to back off. But surely even he does not believe his propaganda. No one who is even minimally rational and informed – that is to say, no one this side of the John McCain-Joe Lieberman-Lindsay Graham axis – could possibly think that an Iranian bomb, much less the capacity to build one, loses an “existential threat” to Israel.

Netanyahu is not that stupid. The real reasons for his war mongering have nothing to do with what he says.

The problem Netanyahu or any Israeli Prime Minister faces is that there is only so much moral capital left to squeeze out of Holocaust guilt. Much as Republican obstinacy merits admiration, one can only marvel at how successful Zionists have been in maintaining that gift that keeps on giving. Not only have they submerged Jewish identity politics under its spell; they have even swept up into it all but the most liberal and the most retrograde strains of contemporary Judaism. But nothing lasts forever.

In the words of Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories: y’esh g’vul, there are limits, limits to what their North American and European enablers will permit the state of Israel to do to Palestinians and others in the region to make up for what European fascists did to European Jews before the state of Israel even existed.

Those limits have yet to register politically to a degree that would worry Netanyahu and his comrades, but even they must realize that the time for that to happen is long past due, and that no matter how much Holocaust remembrance they can still drum up seven decades after the end of World War II, public opinion is bound eventually to turn against the idea that Hitler gave Israel a “get out of jail free” card that never expires.

This is why Israel needs at least the specter of an existential threat to maintain such international support as it has. It needs to be able to present itself as the state of a people defending itself against an enemy eternally bent on its annihilation. One might almost say that if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not exist, AIPAC would have had to invent him.

The specter of impending annihilation is also useful for keeping Israeli society from splintering apart. Countries under attack draw together, and Israel is no exception. With Zionist convictions on the wane and the Nazi Judeocide a distant memory, existential threats have become a condition for the possibility of the Jewish state.

Threats of war are almost as useful as actual wars, especially if they are or can be made to seem credible; and there is the advantage that, as long as matters don’t get out of hand, no one needs to be killed or maimed. Therefore, an Iranian bomb that doesn’t exist is a godsend for Israel. Netanyahu has every reason to talk the specter up.

Ironically, his trusty, if unwitting, accomplices in the Iranian government have been more than helpful in this endeavor. For their own reasons, they talk an ominous line. It’s a win-win situation, so long as it stays just talk. If Netanyahu can keep his wits about him, it will. But that’s a big “if.”

* * *

Along with Turkey, Iran used to be Israel’s best friend in the Middle East – not just under the Shah but in the decade that followed the Iranian revolution too. This made sense for as long as both Israel and Iran feared Soviet influence and the Iraqi army more than they feared each other. That was the case until the Soviet Union imploded and the first Bush’s Gulf War made Iraq militarily inconsequential.

Revolutionary Iran was an ally of Israel, but in its effort to become a hegemon throughout the Islamic world, it took pains to present itself as anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian. In Israel, they knew enough to focus on deeds, not words. It has only been since the geopolitical context changed in 1991 that Israeli governments and their supporters abroad have found it useful to promote the view that the Iranians really mean what their most rabid spokesmen say.

* * *

Thus it is hardly the prospect of being “wiped off the map” that worries Netanyahu and his co-thinkers. What they want is for “the international community” – the usual designation for friends and vassals of the United States – to prevent Iran from developing a deterrent to Israel’s freedom of action in the Middle East. An Iranian bomb would be an obstacle in the way of the untrammeled exercise of Israeli power, much as the Soviet Union and a flourishing Iraq once were.

By Netanyahu’s lights, a powerful Iran would not be good for Israel. From the moment the Shah fell, the foreign policy establishment in the United States has also wanted Iran kept weak. Inasmuch as the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened Iran’s hand in the region, the stewards of the empire now have even more reason to want Iran’s nuclear capacity expunged.

Romney is with them on this, and why not: moderates are on board and the hard right, the current object of his pandering, is awash in Islamophobia. Under neoconservative tutelage, it has become the vanguard of the perpetual war party. Were he focused more on the world he would have to operate in were his electoral campaign to succeed, he would by now have second thoughts about a war with Iran. But, for the time being, winning is all; and, to that end, bellicosity, in both word and deed, makes sense.

But, of course, in the not very much larger scheme of things, it makes no sense at all. To will the end is not always to will the means thereto; not if the means would undermine ends one wills even more. This is why an Iran war for an October Surprise would be unconscionably reckless on both Romney’s and Netanyahu’s parts.

* * *

And yet! Romney wants to win in November and Netanyahu is almost as eager to deny Obama a second term – not because he hasn’t been servile enough but because he fears, not unreasonably, that Obama knows better, and that, in the right circumstances, he might act on that knowledge.

I used to think that Netanyahu would have doubts about Romney too. The problem, I thought, was not only that Romney is too unprincipled to be a reliable ally, but also that, as a Mormon, he and the Christian Zionists in the Republican base are not of one mind on who the Chosen People are or where the Promised Land is. This theological difference would also put his reliability in question.

I therefore thought that, of all the Republicans in contention as the primary season reached its denouement, Romney was the worst from Netanyahu’s point of view; or rather the second worst after Ron Paul.

Rick Santorum would be better, though he is a Catholic more popish than the Pope, and the Vatican, for all harm it does in the world, is at least sensitive to the Palestinians’ plight and dubious of Zionism’s claims. One would think that that would lower Santorum’s appeal. But not so much! Santorum is, after all, of a piece, morally and intellectually, with the most benighted evangelical Protestants, and so, from Netanyahu’s point of view, his popery can be forgiven.

Newt Gingrich, also a Catholic (of late) but a Southern Baptist at heart, would be better still. However, to Netanyahu’s dismay, not even Sheldon Adelson’s money could keep that miscreant’s campaign afloat.

I therefore thought that Netanyahu just might end up doing what Wall Street did four years ago and may well do this year again if Romney founders – let Obama be their “yes we can” man. He is not their first choice but, as the song (suitably mangled) declares, if you can’t be with the one you love, love or at least get by with the one you’re with – if he’s desperate to be with you.

However my confidence in the likelihood that Netanyahu would go that route was shaken by the April 7 edition of The New York Times where I learned that he and Romney are old friends – practically soul mates.

It seems that in the mid-70s, they both worked as “corporate consultants” at the Boston Consulting Group, where they formed a fast and lasting friendship based on their “shared conservative ideologies” and “the same profoundly analytical view of the world.” According to the Times, they’ve not only kept in touch over the years but also advise one another when the occasion arises.

The good news, then, is that if these are the kinds of people who are called upon to advise corporations at the pinnacles of the capitalist system, the system cannot be long for this world. The bad news is that, in the spirit of friends helping friends, those two could well conspire not just to bring Obama down, but the world along with him. This would be an October Surprise surpassing anything the maleficent Reagan could have imagined, a surprise to end all surprises.

I’d be more worried than I am about what these brothers under the skin might be cooking up were it not for the timing. October is too late to start another “stupid war,” as Obama said of the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq before he made it his own. A war so close to Election Day would most likely strengthen the Commander-in-Chief’s position. For Obama to own the devastation an Iran War would unleash would take time; perhaps more time than there is between now and November.

It might have been otherwise had Romney sealed the deal sooner and if his standing within his own party were more secure. In other words, had “moderates” or at least saner plutocrats been calling the shots in the GOP, we might now be closer to an outcome compared to which the murder and mayhem Obama has superintended these past three and a half years would almost seem benign.

The irony is palpable. In the end, it just might be that the trajectory the campaign for the Republican nomination has taken thanks to the out of control lunacy of the Republican base and the candidates who represent its views is our best protection against a devastating October surprise.

ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).