DEAD PARROT

Number 27 -- Saturday, May 31, 2003

ONE MORE WAR ZONE

Chris Hedges is a New York Times correspondent who has reported from almost every battleground in the past two decades, including Central America, the Punjab, Israel, Sudan, Iraq, and the Balkans. He has survived numerous ambushes, shellings, and firefights, along with a stint as prisoner of the Iraqi Republican Guard. The son of a World War II veteran who became a pacifist, Hedges is not a pacifist himself; he believes that war is an inevitable human activity and that some wars, at least, are politically justified. At the same time, he regards war as the ultimate nightmare, somewhere between a disease and an addiction, and he is quick to acknowledge that he himself is not immune. In 1988, as he was leaving El Salvador after five harrowing years, his psyche was so frayed that he vaulted a ticket counter at the airport and attacked an innocuous clerk. (The story appears in Hedges' recent book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.)

One might imagine that all this experience, together with an undergraduate degree in English and a masters in divinity, would make Hedges an unusually interesting commencement speaker; but when he addressed the graduating class at Rockford (Illinois) College on Saturday, 5/17, the speech was far from a hit. In fact, as reported by the Rockford Register Star (5/20) under the astonishingly inaccurate headline "SPEAKER DISRUPTS RC GRADUATION," students booed, shouted, sounded air horns, unplugged the microphone, charged the stage, and eventually forced Hedges to abandon his remarks midway through. He may have thought he was back in Sarajevo.

There are political views and political views. One can imagine a very different reception if George Bush had used the podium as a launching pad for remarks on the thrill of a carrier landing and the pleasure of squashing Saddam like a cockroach. About the value of listening to less popular opinions, only the college president, Paul Pribbenow, seemed concerned, and his effort to remind the audience about academic freedom and civility won Hedges only another couple of minutes before the scene became too chaotic for him to continue. Pribbenow is now said to be "rethinking the wisdom of such controversial topics at future commencements."

The virulence of the response, the determination not just to disregard an alternative viewpoint but to shut it down, is open to several interpretations. Perhaps Hedges simply insulted the students' vanity by implying that their completion of a course of study was not the central event in history. Perhaps his depiction of the world they will be entering was too frightening for them. Perhaps his cautions about the limits of military prowess and the arrogance of empire awoke a spontaneous outburst of patriotic rage. Another possibility is that College Republicans were flexing their muscles.

The growth of conservative activism on American campuses is the subject of a story in the NY Times Magazine (5/25). On the cover, five unsmiling Bucknell students in blue jeans and Bush t-shirts form a grim flying wedge. The article, headed "The Young Hipublicans," points out that this generation of budding conservatives is careful to avoid nerdy attire like neckties and tasseled loafers and to dress like real students. Groups like the Bucknell Conservatives Club get both money and talking points from national right-wing organizations such as Young Americans for Freedom, Young America's Foundation, and the Leadership Institute. Old Glory is their preferred wall hanging, and they wipe their feet on Hillary Clinton doormats. Though too young to have seen Ronald Reagan dodder in person, they worship him, in the words of author John Colapinto, "as a Norman Rockwellian, mist-shrouded icon of Better Times."

Charles Mitchell, the editor of the club's newspaper, is the son of an NRA member and came to conservatism via gun rights. He wooed his girlfriend, Denise Chaykun (now the club's president), by giving her a book arguing that "law-abiding citizens" should be allowed to carry concealed handguns as a "deterrent to violent crime." Once he had converted her, he made her a Christmas gift of a semi-automatic rifle. When they and their clubmates gather at a shooting range near campus, Chaykun is still squeamish enough to aim at a standard bull's-eye, but Mitchell and his friends entertain themselves by blazing away at images of bin Laden and Hussein. Can the Chris Hedges target be far behind?

LAST CALL FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA

DP REVIEWS

One of the accomplishments of last winter's antiwar movement lay in forcing Bush to reveal his authoritarian nature. When hundreds of thousands of Americans protested, he derided the demonstrations as "focus groups." When it became obvious that no combination of threats and bribes could produce a war vote in the UN Security Council, he simply declared the UN irrelevant and went ahead with his plans. In the best Otto von Bismarck style, he acted on the principle that "the great questions of the time are decided not by speeches and majority decisions...but by blood and iron."

What Bush and his advisors understood too well was that blood and iron quickly become their own justification. In February and early March, majorities in both the US and Britain opposed war without UN consent. But as soon as cruise missiles started falling on Baghdad and armored columns crossed the border from Kuwait, support in both countries swung overwhelmingly behind the invasion. Having made Bush show his hand, many people evidently felt that their first obligation was to lick it.

The plasticity of opinion, its readiness to follow action--especially when that action is a spasm of violence sanctioned by nationalism--should have surprised no one, for it is such an ingrained historical pattern that we must reluctantly classify it as human nature. A classic and painfully pertinent illustration is the tidal wave of belligerent patriotism that swept through Germany in the first months of World War I. This story forms the climax of Amos Elon's The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 (Henry Holt, 2002).

Anti-semitism was already firmly in place in Prussia in 1743. Elon chooses to begin his narrative that year with the arrival of Moses Mendelsohn in Berlin. The 14-year-old boy, who would later become a famous philosopher, had to enter the city through a gate reserved specially for Jews and cattle. His determined and ultimately successful effort to educate himself would be an inspiring fable of oppression overcome (leave no child behind!) if we did not see the tracks of his religious and intellectual heirs converging inexorably on the gas chambers.

Twin pillars of the Jews' response to German racism were to make themselves inconspicuous and to make themselves useful. Many ceased to be observant or converted to Christianity, joining their neighbors in looking down their noses at Jewish hicks from the east who insisted on practicing "primitive" versions of the faith. Though prohibited from serving as officers (until the dire necessities of 1914 forced a change in policy), Jews filled the ranks in all of Germany's 19th-century wars. Others made their mark in commerce or finance, notably Gerson Bleichröder, Bismarck's banker and "Privatjude," who underwrote the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War and was rewarded by being allowed to insert the aristocratic "von" between his names.

Despite such compensatory baubles, Bleichröder's success was like that of a hammer roughly cast aside after the nail has been driven. He remained an outsider. During the negotiations with France over war reparations, Bismarck made him the target of vulgar anti-semitic slurs. At the Gatsbyesque parties--for high-ranking gentiles only--that he himself gave in Berlin, the guests drank his champagne and made fun of his pretensions.

The Bleichröder example might have taught his co-religionists that their most ardent efforts to assimilate and gain acceptance would fail and would simply result in their becoming tools of the state. But, hope being what it is, this lesson was not an easy one to learn, and in 1914 Jews flung themselves enthusiastically onto the war bandwagon in the belief that this time, at last, they would win their country's unconditional gratitude (or at least would be replaced by the English as the leading national scapegoats).

In a speech to the Reichstag on August 4, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm sounded the "united we stand" theme with which states in times of need invariably attempt to erase all history of internal tensions and all awareness of diverging interests. His big applause line--"I no longer know any parties, I know only Germans"--would surely have become a bumper sticker if bumper stickers had existed at the time. In any case, it did its work. A member of the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith wrote credulously that "the nation is like one family now." A soon-to-be-killed Jewish volunteer on the western front chirruped in a letter home, "At least in war we are equal."

In their martial fervor Jews joined many other Germans who also should have known better. The Social Democratic Party, which had for 25 years been preaching solidarity with the working classes of other countries, immediately threw in its lot with the home-grown aristocrats and militarists instead. Writers, artists, and intellectuals harnessed themselves energetically to the propaganda mills. During the first month of the war, German newspapers are said to have received 50,000 poems a day, virtually all of them either bloodthirsty doggerel about piling up Russian corpses or dreamy schmaltz about self-sacrifice for the Vaterland. One of the most ludicrous and pathetic perversions of aesthetic conscience came from Arnold Zweig, a fair-weather pacifist who mobilized for his country by publishing a short story collection called The Beast. According to Elon's piquant summary, the stories "teemed with upright, heroic [German soldiers] trying hopelessly to defend themselves against murderous Belgian civilians." The "Manifesto of the Ninety-three," a project of the War Ministry to press scientists and other academics into the justification business, asserted that the invasion of Belgium was itself a purely defensive maneuver. So eager were many of the signers to prostrate themselves that they put their names to the document without even having read it.

A long war gives people time to reflect. Suffering may nurture humility, compassion, humane insight. On the other hand, it may fuel still greater barbarism. In Germany after 1918, the balance tipped toward barbarism. May we hope for better results from a war that lasted only a few weeks and inflicted suffering only on our enemies? The abject surrender of all but a few Democrats to the administration's narrative of what happened and why, the sentimental drivel about heroism in a conflict so one-sided that American losses are indistinguishable from industrial accidents, the rumbling of the neocons about which country would make the most deserving target for our next punitive raid, the crass image-making of the presidential publicity team--all suggest that those who made or supported the war have learned nothing whatever in the humane insight department. The pity of it all.