EDucate! - Education

We have entered a reality–zone already captured by its opposite: unreality. It is a world where nobody really wanted to venture. It is a world where order has given way to disorder, where reason has given way to unreason, where reality is compromised by truth, where the once noble search for explanations has been replaced by a dizzying vortex of plastic flags, stars and stripes rhinestone belts, coffee klatch war strategists, Sunday barbecue patrioteering, militant denunciations of war protestors, a generalized fear of whatever lies ahead, xenophobic hostility, and point–blank outrage.

It is world of pure intensity where to seek refuge in the sanctuary of reflection is to engage in an act of unpardonable treason. Where previously silenced realities are now guaranteed never to be heard. It is truly a world turned, in the words of Eduardo Galeano, “upside down”. It is a looking–glass world that “rewards in reverse: it scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples, and feeds cannibalism. Its professors slander nature: injustice, they say, is a law of nature”. Within this looking–glass world, that world that exists upside–down, there exists the “looking–glass school” that “teaches us to suffer reality, not to change it; to forget the past, not learn from it; to accept the future, not invent it. In its halls of criminal learning, impotence, amnesia, and resignation are required courses”. It is the reverse mirror image of the democracy that we thought we knew, a democracy for which many had fought and some had died.

It is a world where it is safer to engage in rehearsed reactions to what we encounter on our television screens. After all, domestic dissent has now acquired a police state translation that equates it with terrorism. It is safer to react in ways that newscaster/entertainers big on acrimonious scapegoating and short on analysis define for us as patriotic: applaud all actions by governmental authorities (especially those of the President) as if they were sacerdotal or morally apodictic. CNN has already declared it is “perverse” to focus on civilian suffering, exercising a racist arithmetic that deems civilian casualties in the US to be superior to those in Afghanistan. Death and destruction have become as faceless as a smouldering turban on the side of a dirt road.

We are living in a world in which the act of patriotism has been shamelessly downgraded by making it compulsory. According to novelist John le Carre, “it’s as if we have entered a new, Orwellian world where our personal reliability as comrades in the struggle [against terrorism] is measured by the degree to which we invoke the past to explain the present. Suggesting there is a historical context for the recent atrocities is by implication to make excuses for them. Anyone who is with us doesn’t do that. Anyone who does, is against us”. Edward Said echoes a similar sentiment: “what terrifies me is that we’re entering a phase where if you start to speak about this as something that can be understood historically – without any sympathy – you are going to be thought of as unpatriotic, and you are going to be forbidden. It’s very dangerous. It is precisely incumbent on every citizen to quite understand the world we’re living in and the history we are a part of and we are forming as a superpower.”

As long as we live in an unthinking world where nations follow shallow ideologues and their corporate overworlder sponsors into the killing fields of last resort, there is not much hope for social justice and world peace. As Steve Niva notes, “Terrorism’s best asset, in the final analysis, is the anger and desperation that leads people to see no alternative to violence”.

Those stubborn enough to break away from the media’s unrestrained boosterism and insist on understanding world events and their connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11 are implored to submit to the explanations provided by carefully chosen ‘experts’ hired by our corporately–owned–and–controlled media if for nothing else than fear of public humiliation via media – speak homiletics. It is a world best left to the experts to figure out. After all, who are we to question the people who, after all, must ‘know things’ that we don’t – like CBC anchorman Dan Rather? Attempts to link September 11th to the crisis of global capitalism are left solely in the hands of a handful of leftist editors whose publications are marked by modest and diminishing circulation numbers whereas the mainstream media will be mining the entrails of academia for more comforting theories such as those offered by Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington. Huntington argues that the world is moving from a Cold War bipolar division to more complex multipolar and muticivilization divisions with greater potential for conflict. Here Islamic cultures conveniently collide with Western ones with the force of tectonic plates.

If the comfort of easy explanations feels familiar it is because it is part of the wilful compliance to the conservative status quo that we were taught so well in schools? For those in danger of dissent, watchdog organizations abound. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (founded by Senator Joseph Lieberman and Lynne V. Cheney) recently issued a report condemning the response of many university professors to the September 11 attacks. Titled “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America, and What Can Be Done About It”, the report itemizes 117 incidents that allegedly reveal a treasonous refusal on the part of radical professors to defend civilization. In other words, some professors have the temerity to be critical of Bush’s war on terrorism. Manning Marable declares that “[w]e will inevitably see ‘dissident profiling’: the proliferation of electronic surveillance, roving wiretapping, harassment at the workplace, the infiltration and disruption of anti–war groups, and the stigmatization of any critics of US militarism as disloyal and subversive”.

More than ever, today it is imperative that we understand why developing countries regard the United States with increasing cynicism. While on the one hand the US seeks cooperation from the world in its war on terrorism, it often refuses to cooperate with other nations unless it is in the direct interest of the United States to do so. As Dean Baker asserts, more than 35 million people in the developing world are HIV positive. In order to address this problem, the United States pledged $200 million, which amounts to six hours of the Pentagon budget. At the same time, those countries who provide low–cost drugs by ignoring the patents of US pharmaceutical companies are threatened with severe trade sanctions by the US government. Most of what official aid does get distributed (approximately 0.15 percent of GDP) goes to reward political loyalty, with Israel and Egypt being the two largest recipients. Marable captures some of the root causes of this cynicism when he asserts:

“The United States government cannot engage in effective multilateral actions to suppress terrorism, because its behavior illustrates its complete contempt for international cooperation. The United States owed $582 million in back dues to the United Nations, and it paid up only when the September 11 attacks jeopardized its national security. Republican conservatives demand that the United States should be exempt from the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court, a permanent tribunal now being established at The Hague, Netherlands. For the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, the US government authorized the allocation of a paltry $250,000, compared to over $10 million provided to conference organizers by the Ford Foundation. For three decades, the US refused to ratify the 1965 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Racism. Is it any wonder that much of the Third World questions our motives?”

In the face of such a hawkish scenario, and in the midst of widespread apprehension about the motives behind the US war on terrorism among Third World peoples, is a particularly difficult time to call for rethinking the role that the United States plays in the global division of labor. The recent events of mind–shattering apocalyptic dimensions, the sudden unfolding nightmare that saw death and destruction unleashed upon thousands of innocent and unsuspecting victims in Washington and New York City, such that the gates of hell appeared to have been blown open, have made it difficult for many United States citizens to comprehend why their familiar world has suddenly turned upside–down. Those of us who practice critical or revolutionary pedagogy take a strong position against terrorism. Even when you are careful to denounce terrorism as a crime against humanity, these days it is dangerous to be a radical educator. This is because the corporations and big business, who control the media, will not permit a debate on the root causes of terrorism. They never have.

Many people reject the idea that the United States exports terrorism. Some no doubt find it difficult to understand why a powerful nation such as the United States would need to employ what are generally considered to be the weapons of the weak. Klare asserts that “Throughout history, the weapon of those who see themselves as strong in spirit but weak in power has been what we call terrorism. Terrorism is the warfare of the weak against the strong: if you have an army you wage a war; if you lack an army you engage in suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism. (Remember: this is exactly what the American Revolution looked like to the British, the strong force in 1775.)”

Chomsky takes issue with this view of terrorism. He explains that, far from being a weapon of the weak, terrorism is primarily the weapon of the strong: That is the culture in which we live and it reveals several facts. One is the fact that terrorism works. It doesn’t fail. It works. Violence usually works. That’s world history. Secondly, it’s a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it’s primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon on the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn’t count as terror.

Acts of terrorism can be as backward and horrific as acts of capitalist–driven imperialism and in no circumstances can they be justified. At the same time, the cruelly – imposed carnage from the repugnant and immoral terrorist attacks witnessed recently on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon must not be used by reactionary forces in the United States government and media to turn public sentiment against critics of social injustice or to curtain the civil liberties of citizens. Nor must critics of US capitalism, and I count myself as one of them, simply list all the horrible acts of imperialism engaged in historically by the United States – a long and bloody list, to be sure – as evidence of or a rationale for why these terrorist acts occurred. They occurred without demand, or proclamation.

These acts were demonic crimes against working people. For instance, hundreds of Latinos were killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, more victims than from any other nation outside of the United States. They worked at Windows on the World, in the office cafeterias, cleaning services, and delivery companies and little media attention has so far been paid to them. And while we can gain a deeper understanding of these events by recognizing how the United States is implicated in a long history of crimes against the oppressed throughout the world – including interventions in post–cold war theaters – this history in no way justifies the terrorist attacks.

Such attacks have been propelled by reactionary religious fundamentalist ideology that represents only a small reactionary cadre of followers of Islam. As Edward Said remarks: “No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without having a real mandate to do so”. At the same time we must oppose in the United States the senseless xenophobic statism, militarism, erosion of civil liberties, and quest for permanent and indiscriminant military interventions overseas within the fracture zones of geo–political instability that have followed in the wake of the attacks, all of which can only have unsalutary consequences for world peace. This is particularly crucial, especially in light of another of Said’s trenchant observations – that “bombing senseless civilians with F–16s and helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as more conventional nationalistic terror”.

It is surely the case that US involvement in the Third World in general and the Islamic world in particular has created – and continues to create – the background conditions which are likely to lead to terrorism. The taproot of terrorism surely lies in the fertile soil of imperialism – both military and economic. It is nourished by capitalist greed and fertilised by the defeated dreams of the vanquished poor. The terrorism of 9–11 was rhizogenic – its roots and filaments interlaced with US foreign policy and practices. To say this is not to take a “hate America” position or a “chickens have come home to roost” position as it is to take a “wake up America and don’t be misled by your leaders” position. We cannot divorce the recent acts of terrorism from their historical context.

At a time when media pundits and high level government leaders are patrioteering for the cameras, calling for more blood to be spilled in the name of democracy and freedom, and clamoring for the killing of people who are not even directly involved in the terrorist attacks, we need to join together in a renewed commitment to global justice.