I posted the text to the whole thing. Robert Jensen (rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu ) is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity." In an article written for The Austin American Statesman, Jensen recently claimed that "The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing." While Jensen was careful to say that the loss of American lives is not to be celebrated, he insulted our soldiers deeply by saying that their deaths "haven't protected Americans or brought freedom to Iraqis." Instead, he brushed off their service to our country as merely part of "a quest to extend the American empire." Jensen is awash in 60s proto-Marxian rhetoric and it sounds 40 plus years old...
In his article, Jensen proudly states, "I welcome the U.S. defeat." He also says "it's essential the American empire be defeated and dismantled." Why? Because, according to Jensen, "In Iraq, the Bush administration invaded not to liberate but to extend and deepen U.S. domination." He also says that the invasion of Iraq is "about control over the flow of oil and oil profits," though he concedes that it is not about outright ownership of Iraqi oil. According to Professor Jensen, "When we admit defeat and pull out - not if, but when - the fate of Iraqis depends in part on whether the United States (1) makes good on legal and moral obligations to pay reparations, and (2) allows international institutions to aid in creating a truly sovereign Iraq." According to Jensen, "we shouldn't expect politicians to do either without pressure. An anti-empire movement - the joining of antiwar forces with the movement to reject corporate globalization - must create that pressure." After reminding us that he is "glad for the U.S. military defeat in Iraq," Jensen says that we should pursue "the most courageous act of citizenship in the United States today: Pledging to dismantle the American empire."
When I was first sent a copy of Jensen's article, I was flabbergasted. I immediately tried to think of ways I could oppose the professor in his efforts to demoralize our troops and defeat our nation in a time of war. But, now, I've had a change of heart. As of today, I hereby announce the establishment of the new Robert Jensen Deportation Fund. Once the fund has enough money to buy Jensen a one-way ticket to Iraq, we can contact Iraqi insurgents to let them know he is on his way to help defeat our troops. WTF? No email? No website? Let's get on the stick, Adams. The Marines need the target practice.
Based upon my reading of Jensen's work, I can tell that he is a brave revolutionary warrior. There is no sense in keeping him here in the evil American Empire, seething with anger against our troops. We should do everything within our power to help him bravely face those troops in combat. After all, he is the one who says that we should be "courageous" and "dismantle the American empire." I look forward to seeing him face off against some of the Marines that he has tried to demoralize with his anti-American rhetoric. Good luck, Professor. One shot, one kill...
Who knows what will happen after Professor Jensen is deported to engage his enemies (the Americans) in combat in Iraq? I don't want him to die because, as Jensen says, the loss of American lives is not to be celebrated. If our Marines capture him, perhaps they could just dress him in a pink Burqua and send him across enemy lines for a lesson on tolerance and diversity in the Middle East. It is no laughing matter when we imagine the outrage Jensen's diatribe must bring to the hearts of the brave men and women who serve in Iraq. They risk their lives to preserve our constitutional rights. Sadly, some will die preserving a coward's perceived right to commit treason. Maybe he will go overseas where the rules don't apply the same as in the USA.
Posted by: badanov ||
12/17/2004 10:16:36 AM ||
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Dr. Jensen should have been giving the keynote at the Democratic Convention last year. It would have been more honest than JEdwards saying, "we will destroy the terrorists."
#2
when we imagine the outrage Jensenâs diatribe must bring to the hearts of the brave men and women who serve in Iraq.
Great rant, Bad, but to tell you the truth, I don't think the troops give a flying you-know-what about some bonehead college professor and his "I have all the surrender papers in order, sir." ramblings.
All the endorsement they needed came on the 2nd Tuesday of November.
#3
As much as I despise people like Jensen. In a democracy, everyone has a right to their opinion. However, he doesn't have a right to a secure cushy job in academia. Fire his a***.
#4
I am from Austin and I read the article. The comments from most of the citizens in the editorial section the next day blasted him. The only suppurtive comment was that at least we allow this kind of dissent here in the US.
Posted by: Bill ||
12/17/2004 17:05 Comments ||
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#5
allowed, yes. Subsidized, no. Audit his class and expose him
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/17/2004 17:15 Comments ||
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Isn't Austin a liberal democrat bastion? This total peice of shit needs a butt pounding. He won't get one in Austin I guess. I am sorry people shouldn't feel free to say this shit even if they believe it. For sure they shouldn't be allowed to teach it to our kids without fearing some pain.
IN Washington this month, King Abdullah II of Jordan pleaded with his American hosts to postpone Iraq's first free election, scheduled for late January.
The king warned that Tehran has mobilized over a million Iranians to infiltrate Iraq and vote in the election, thus ensuring the victory of pro-Iranian candidates.
The claim is so bizarre that, had it come from a lesser person, it would not have merited attention. Recruiting, training and deploying over a million fake voters is no easy task. And the present Iranian government can't trust a million people in elections inside Iran, let alone in Iraq.
And where would one find a million Arabic-speaking Iranians who could talk and walk like Iraqis? It is enough for an Arabic-speaking Persian to open his mouth for everyone to know that he is not Iraqi. Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, the primus inter pares of Iraqi Shiite clerics, still retains his Persian accent despite having spent more than half a century in Najaf.
The king's claim, inspired by the Arab penchant for conspiracy theories, could be dismissed as fanciful. But Iran is determined to play a central role in shaping the future of Iraq, and will do all it can to affect the results of the election.
The reasons are not hard to divine.
Until 9/11, Iran was the only power interested in changing the regional status quo. It saw itself surrounded by enemies, notably Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It also nurtured hopes of de-stabilizing the traditional Arab regimes that it regarded as moribund.
The Clinton administration had gone out of its way to forge a relationship with the Taliban, sending a succession of emissaries, including then-U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson, to Kabul to sweet-talk Mullah Muhammad Omar into joining Washington in efforts to isolate Tehran. In 1998 and 1999, the Clintonites also tried to find a modus vivendi with Saddam.
But the 9/11 attacks persuaded Americans that the status quo they had cherished in the Middle East was a threat to their national security.
As far as destroying the Taliban regime and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein were concerned, Iran was on the U.S. side: The Americans were doing what the Iranians had prayed for. But when it comes to creating a new order in the region, Iran wishes to have its say.
Iran has accepted the new regime in Afghanistan for two reasons. First, the regime, by maintaining an Islamist appearance, does not cast itself as an ideological challenge to the Khomeinist system in Iran. Second, Iran has been allowed to retain a strong presence in Afghanistan, largely through the Hazara Shiite community, and to exert some influence at least as far as counterbalancing Pakistan is concerned.
The Iranian calculation is that America, thousands of miles away, is bound to one day wind up its military presence in Afghanistan. And that would open the way for a massive return of Iran, which will always be there as the region's principal power.
Iran uses a similar analysis in Iraq.
For Iran, the worst outcome of Iraq's crisis would be the emergence of a new regime based on Arab Sunnis with a pan-Arab, and thus anti-Persian, ideology. Given time, such a regime could claim the leadership of the Arab world and frustrate Iran's regional ambitions.
But the Arab Sunnis can only regain power by forcing the Americans into a precipitous withdrawal. This would be a disaster for Iran — so Iran does not want the United States to fail in Iraq.
Yet Iran does not want America to succeed easily. It wants to bleed the United States as much as possible en route to eventual success in Iraq. The cost of success should be so high as to make it impossible for the Bush administration, or its successors, to win popular support at home for any similar venture, for example, in targeting Iran itself.
So the Iranian strategy is to push the United States to the edge in Iraq, but no further. America should respond in kind.
The United States should acknowledge the fact that at this moment in Iraq, Iran is an objective tactical ally, insofar as it also opposes the revival of a Sunni-based pan-Arab regime. But the Americans should raise the political cost for Iran of a success that both seek.
While denying Iran a place at the high table, it is prudent for the United States to allow its regional rival a stool at another table at the banquet. The coming elections should be used to lock Iran into a policy of cautious support for a new, U.S.-shaped status quo.
The Irano-American rivalry has divided the new Iraqi elite into two camps.
In one camp are those who see Iran as Iraq's strategic enemy and hope to counter it with a discourse of pan-Arab nationalism. They deem the United States a tactical ally in helping Iraq rebuild a state, an army and a security service, leaving in place not a democracy but a "lite" version of Arab authoritarian rule.
In the other camp one finds those who are trying to stay in the good books of both Tehran and Washington. These people believe that the future Iraqi regime, which is bound to be dominated by the Shiite majority, would need Iranian support for years to counter plots by neighboring Arab states that fear both Shiism and democracy. Here the argument is that the U.S. attention span is short and that there is no guarantee that a future administration in Washington would remain as committed to Iraq as President Bush.
All this underlines the importance of the January election. The mullahs of Tehran would find it hard to bully a people-based government in Iraq. The beginning of democracy in Iraq is bound to encourage the democratic movement in predominantly Shiite Iran. The religious leadership in Najaf is already beginning to build a network of support throughout Iran and, given time, is certain to challenge the cult of Khomeini's personality, which is the basis of the Iranian regime's ideology.
The future Iraqi regime will be based on a coalition in which both pro-Iranian Shiite groups and pan-Arab elements will have a share. The best policy for the United States is to stand above the fray and to insist on only one thing: In a democratic Iraq, there is room for all, including its adversaries. E-ma
Posted by: tipper ||
12/17/2004 10:44:12 AM ||
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There is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that the demise of many of their cherished beliefs and institutions was not the fault of others. More often, the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking — such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions "political correctness" or "progressivism," the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence.
Democratic leaders are never going to be trusted in matters of foreign policy unless they can convince Americans that they once more believe in American exceptionalism and are the proper co-custodians of values such as freedom and individual liberty. If in the 1950s rightists were criticized as cynical Cold Warriors who never met a right-wing thug they wouldn't support, as long as he mouthed a few anti-Soviet platitudes, then in the last two decades almost any thug from Latin America to the Middle East who professed concern for "the people" — from Castro and the Noriega Brothers to Yasser Arafat and the Iranian mullahs — was likely to earn a pass from the American and European cultural elite and media. To regain credibility, the Left must start to apply the same standard of moral outrage to a number of its favorite causes that it does to the United States government, the corporations, and the Christian Right. Here are a few places to start.
1. There really isn't a phenomenon like "Islamophobia" — at least no more than there was a "Germanophobia" in hating Hitler or "Russophobia" in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the "security profiling" of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves — here in the U.S., in the U.K., the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel — to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile "allies" in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
So both here and abroad, the Western public believes that there is a double standard in the moral judgment of our left-leaning media, universities, and politicians — that we are not to supposed to ask how Christians are treated in Muslim societies, only how free Islamists in Western mosques are to damn their hosts; or that we are to think beheading, suicide murdering, and car bombing moral equivalents to the sexual humiliation and roguery of Abu Ghraib — apparently because the former involves post-colonial victims and the latter privileged, exploitive Americans. Most sane people, however, privately disagree, and distinguish between a civilian's head rolling on the ground and a snap shot of an American guard pointing at the genitalia of her terrorist ward.
Moreover, few of any note in the Arab Middle East speak out against the racial hatred of Jews. Almost no major Islamic religious figure castigates extreme Muslim clerics for their Dark-age misogyny, anti-Semitism, and venom against the West; and no Arab government admonishes its citizenry to look to itself for solutions rather than falling prey to conspiracy theories and ago-old superstitions. It would be as if the a state-subsidized Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi party were to be tolerated for purportedly voicing the frustrations of poor working-class whites who "suffered" under a number of supposed grievances.
What is preached in the madrassas on the West Bank, in Pakistan, and throughout the Gulf is no different from the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred. What has changed, of course, is that unlike our grandfathers, we have lost the courage to speak out against it. In one of the strangest political transformations of our age, the fascist Islamic Right has grafted its cause onto that of the Left's boutique "multiculturalism," hoping to earn a pass for its hate by posing as the "other" and reaping the benefits of liberal guilt due to purported victimization. By any empirical standard, what various Palestinian cliques have done on the West Bank — suicide murdering, lynching without trial of their own people, teaching small children to hate and kill Jews — should have earned them all Hitlerian sobriquets rather than U.N. praise.
2. "Imperialism" and "hegemony" explain nothing about recent American intervention abroad — not when dictators such as Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein were taken out by the U.S. military. There are no shahs and Your Excellencies in their places, but rather consensual governments whose only sin was that they came on the heels of American arms rather than U.N. collective snoozing. There really was no secret Afghan pipeline behind toppling the Taliban, nor a French-like oil concession to be had for the United States from the new Iraqi interim government. Many of Michael Moore's heroic "Minutemen" of the Sunni Triangle are hired killers — hooded fascists in the pay of ex-Baathists and Saddamites, along with Islamic terrorists and jihadists who hate the very idea of democracy in the heart of the Arab world. The collective cursus honorum of these Saddamite holdovers during the last two decades — gassing the Kurds, committing atrocities against the Iranians, looting and pillaging in Kuwait, launching missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, slaughtering Shiites and again Kurds, and assassinating Western and U.N. aid workers — rank right up there with the work of the SS and KGB.
Reformers like Allawi and Yawar of Iraq are not "puppets" but far better advocates of democratic reform than anyone else in the Arab world. Nor does "no blood for oil" mean anything when an increasingly small percentage of American-imported petroleum comes from the Gulf, and when an oil-hungry China — without much deference to liberal sensibilities — is driving up the world price, eyeing every well it can for future exploitation without regard for political or environmental niceties.
3. It won't do any longer to attribute American outrage over the U.N. to a vast right-wing conspiracy led by red-state senators and Fox News. All the standing ovations for Kofi Annan cannot hide the truth that the Oil-for-Food scandal exceeds Enron. Indeed, Ken Lay's malfeasance never involved the deaths of thousands, while cronies siphoned off food and supplies from a starving populace. The U.S. military does not tolerate mass rape and plunder among its troops, as is true of the U.N. peacekeepers throughout Africa. There can be no serious U.N. moral sense as long as illiberal regimes — a Syria, Iran, or Cuba — vote in the General Assembly and the Security Council stymies solutions out of concern for an autocratic China that swallowed Tibet. Millions were slaughtered in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur while New York bureaucrats either condemned Israel or damned anyone who censured their own inaction and corruption. Rather than faulting those who fault the U.N., leftists should lament the betrayal of the spirit of the liberal U.N. Charter by regimes that are neither democratic nor liberal but who seek legitimacy solely on their ability to win concessions and sympathy from guilt-ridden Westerners.
4. So it is also time to take a hard look at the heroes and villains of Hollywood, liberal Democrats, and the Euro elites. Many are as obsessed with damning the senile dictator of Chile as they are with excusing the unelected President for Life Fidel Castro. But let us be frank. A murderous Pinochet probably killed fewer of his own than did a mass-murdering Castro, and left Chile in better shape than contemporary Cuba is in. And the former is long gone, while the latter is still long in power.
Similarly, Nobel Prizes increasingly go to either unsavory or unhinged characters. Yasser Arafat was a known killer and terrorist, not a global peacemaker. Wangari Maathai's public statements about AIDS are puerile and ipso facto would have eliminated any Westerner from consideration for anything. Rigoberta Menchu Tum herself was a half-truth, her story mostly a creation of a westernized academic publishing elite. Jimmy Carter's 2002 award was not predicated on his past work on housing for the poor, but his critically timed and calculated opposition to George W. Bush's effort to topple Saddam Hussein — as was confirmed by the receptive Nobel Committee itself. Recent winners Kofi Annan and Kim Dae-jung are now better known for having their own sons involved in influence-peddling and bribery while they oversaw bureaucrats who trafficked in millions with unsavory murderers like Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein. In short, such an august prize has come a long way from Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. — and precisely because it has privileged leftist rhetoric over real morality.
If the moralizing Left wants to be taken seriously, it is going have to become serious about its own moral issues, since that is the professed currency of contemporary liberalism. Otherwise, the spiritual leaders who lecture us all on social justice, poverty, and truth will remain the money-speculator George Soros, the Reverend Jesse Jackson of dubious personal and professional ethics, and the mythographer Michael Moore. And we all know where that leadsâŠ
Posted by: tipper ||
12/17/2004 10:18:09 AM ||
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classic. The left grew up and became what they hated most.
See what technology hath wrought! What American Cultural Influence really means to the world. I'm afraid I couldn't figure out where to file this, Mods, please move as you think appropriate. Thanks!
It's not Home Front, but it's certainly Culture Wars.
From the WSJ. Subscription req'd,so I give the article in full.
We see where a curator at France's Pompidou Center says his museum is opening a branch in Hong Kong, because "U.S. culture is too strong" there, and "we need to have a presence in Asia to counterbalance the American influence." With the Pompidou Center?
"American influence" is the great white whale of the 21st century, and Jacques Chirac is the Ahab chasing her with a three-masted schooner. Along for the ride is a crew that includes Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, Kofi Annan, the Saudi royal family, Robert Mugabe, the state committee of Communist China and various others who have ordained themselves leaders for life. At night, seated around the rum keg, they talk about how they have to stop American political power, the Marines or Hollywood.
The world is lucky these despots and demagogues are breaking their harpoons on this hopeless quest. Because all around them their own populations are grabbing the one American export no one can stop: raw technology. Communications technologies, most of them developed in American laboratories (often by engineers who voted for John Kerry), have finally begun to affect an historic shift in the relationship between governments and the governed. The governed are starting to win.
That statue in the square was the "Goddess of Democracy", and if there was any real justice, we'd build one and put it in a park on an island in San Francisco bay. It'd be as tall as the Statue of Liberty and would face west.
In 2004, in Ukraine's Independence Square, they had cell phones. Using the phones' SMS messaging technology, demonstrators sent messages to meet to 10 or so friends, who'd each SMS the message to 10 more friends, and so on. It's called "smart-mobbing."
Meanwhile, community Web sites in Ukraine would post the numbers of tents on the square where medical help was needed, or the sites would recruit people with specific TV skills needed at Channel 5, the lone independent TV station. The Ukrainian Supreme Court's historic Dec. 3 decision, declaring the election a fraud, was streamed on the Internet live from a Kiev courtroom and watched real time in London, New York, Washington and Toronto, sent out on e-mail distribution lists so the next steps could be discussed by the reform network and put in motion within an hour.
Until recently, one-party or no-party governments had a standing list of answers for people with a different notion: a) we don't care what you think; b) shut up; c) we kill you. There's no sure cure for c, but Plans a and b are becoming obsolete. Once impervious political authorities must now face the possibility of having their information monopoly hammered by an array of mostly American-engineered technology -- smart cell phones, communication satellites, e-mail, Web logs (or "blogs") and a seemingly endless stream of information-sharing programs whose arcane names (RSS, Atom) hide their great power. The mass-market power of the older media -- radio, TV, print -- is also being integrated with the precision targeting of new technologies.
This past weekend, a few hundred of the people creating and driving these things gathered at a conference organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. It included individuals who are proselytizing the new communications technologies to Iran, China, Iraq, South Korea, Malaysia, India, Western Africa and even the U.S. military (individual GIs are running an estimated 100 Web logs).
Isaac Mao, a Chinese entrepreneur who runs a blog-hosting service, reported that in two years the number of personal, Chinese-language Web logs has grown from 1,000 to 600,000. Many are run by English speakers, who import, translate and distribute material from outside China.
Anyone want to guess the third-most used language on the Web, behind English and Chinese? Farsi. Iran now has about 75,000 individual Web logs. That's because a young, Toronto-based Iranian journalist who publishes as Hoder created tools in Farsi to make it possible. Only 10% of the Iranian blogs could be called political; most discuss music, movies, poetry and Iranian or Western culture. "Iran's most interesting political conversations take place in taxis," said Hoder.
There's more coming. Developers from California at the conference introduced the first Arabic-language blogging tool. Created with support from Spirit of America, it will be used now in Iraq. The Fadhil brothers of Iraqthemodel.com plan to assemble 25 Internet journalists to report the Jan. 30 election. This effort will be patterned after Ohmynews.com, the influential South Korean Web newspaper.
China uses up to 40,000 bureaucrats to police its explosion of blogs. We'll no doubt find out how many anti-Web divisions Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has. (One provocateur at the conference plausibly suggested the greatest opportunities for these technologies lie with one of the world's most monopolized precincts -- local U.S. politics.) In Africa, by contrast, the best political communication occurs outside cyberspace, on talk-radio. The most interesting is Ghana's JoyFM (it maintains a lively Web site of Ghanaian news at myjoyonline.com).
There is no need to oversell the power of these technologies. What happened in Ukraine won't happen in Cairo next month. But unless Hosni Mubarak and Vladimir Putin can come up with a way to shut down every engineer and programmer in America who is inventing new ways to output/input ideas and tweaking the ones we already have, they've got a problem.
Their problem -- and the promise here -- is that this stuff is moving the world's people, and fast, toward the one American product that governing elites really need to fear: free speech. Some at the Berkman conference worried this still isn't enough to "change things." Jeff Jarvis, one of this movement's most intelligent thinkers set them straight: "This is not about causes or organizing people. It's about us creating these tools and then simply having faith in people who use them elsewhere to do good."
Even the Pompidou Center won't stop that.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
12/17/2004 7:33:56 AM ||
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"American influence" is the great white whale of the 21st century...
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
