E Wayne Ross

The New York Times‘ Frank Rich has done more to expose fake news than just about anyone. In his column today, he draws a parallel between the war in Iraq and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds…and between W and Tom Cruise (star of Speilberg’s cinematic adaptation of Wells’ classic story).

The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn’t “worth it,” and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include “fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found” and “the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States.” The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military’s progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its “last throes.” But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries “freedom fries” (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it’s fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it’s hard to get the audience to fall for it again.

Last week the US Senate issued a formal apology to lynching victims (over 5,000 documented cases) and their descendents. The first time Congress has apologized to African Americans for any reason.

(Eight senators refused to support the apology: Larmar Alexander (TN), Thad Cochran (MS), John Cornyn (TX), Mike Enzi (WY), Craig Thomas (WY), Judd Gregg (NH), John Sununu (NH), and the Senate’s biggest racist of all, Trent Lott (MS).)

The Black Commentator‘s cover story this week ask why some Black folks are happy to hear an apology from people who don’t mean it?

“There are nearly a million African Americans in prison — one out of eight inmates on the planet — a gulag of monstrous proportions, clearly designed to perpetuate the social relations that began with slavery. We demand an end to those relations, not an insincere, risk-free “apology” that sets not one prisoner free.”

In the same issue of The Black Commentator, Margaret Kennedy muses on why racist Dixiecrats (who filibustered every effort to pass anti-lynching legislation in the Senate) turned Republicans, like Senatory George Allen (VA), are delivering an apology for lynching.

ZNet Commentary
Lessons From Vietnam: Wars Kill Empires As Well As People
June 06, 2005
By Saul Landau

In 2005, the United States has become Communist Vietnam’s single-largest trading partner. Vietnam’s products permeate U.S. stores. But the “Vietnam War trauma” remains central to U.S. politics. Note how the Vietnam service record of presidential candidates became a contentious issue in the 2004 elections. People don’t overcome traumas unless they understand them.

Since public education provides citizens with minimal context, we rely on mass media to reach into its collective attic and drag out “Fall of Saigon” stories. However, when the commercial press pushes the anniversary method of history teaching, the public tends to divorce rather than engage with its past connections.
Personal anecdotes overwhelm analysis. Relatives of dead soldiers weep at Washington’s Vietnam Wall; others relive battles and deaths of comrades. Few media presentations offer the past as a way to learn for the future.

As the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continue down their bloody paths, we should study the lessons of The Vietnam War. Vietnamese refer to that period between the early 1960s and April 1975 as “The American Phase.” They suffered periods of foreign domination by Chinese, Japanese and French occupiers who, unlike the Americans, learned the painful lesson of trying to subdue and occupy that land.

U.S. leaders adamantly refuse to learn that some people, like Koreans, Vietnamese and Iraqis, for examples, do not submit to force and brutality. How to teach that simple lesson? Teachers will have shared the experience of trying to educate students who have not ingested their own history. Instead of inculcating historical context from first grade on, U.S. students learn a kind of patriotic mythology disguised with words like “unbiased” – as if along with critiques of U.S. behavior in Vietnam – or Iraq – one had to present the good side of torture, mass murder and the napalming of villages.

A Voice of America reporter sympathized with U.S. historians who “have struggled for years to find a fair and balanced way to teach students about the Vietnam War – and the atrocities committed there by U.S. soldiers” (Maura Jane Farrelly, April 28, 2005 ).

“Fair and balanced” sound discordant in the era of Fox News and CNN. Teachers should show students news clips of the inglorious U.S. retreat from Saigon in April 1975. Military helicopters took off from the Embassy with desperate Vietnamese clients clinging to them and falling to the ground.

The high school texts don’t tell that story. Steve Jackson, an Indiana University of Pennsylvania Political Science professor, found that students in his Introduction to American Politics course “have little if any knowledge about the Vietnam War and its lessons. He finds that appalling, especially in light of the U.S.’s current involvement in Iraq.” (Michael A. Fuoco, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette April 28, 2005).

Gore Vidal calls this syndrome “The United States of Amnesia.” As memorials abound and the media teemed with veterans recalling fallen comrades and anecdotes of combat, many school boards want history taught as lessons of right and wrong in which our leaders might make mistakes, but don’t do evil.

As a result, my college students don’t know that the U.S. military dropped more bombs on Southeast Asia than they did in World War Two. General Curtis LeMay, wanted to bomb Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.” How Christian!

Despite overwhelming military superiority, the U.S. lost in Vietnam. When American forces departed in 1975, the U.S. puppet army in Saigon “had over three times as much artillery, twice as many tanks and armored cars, 1,400 aircraft and a virtual monopoly of the air and “a two-to-one superiority of combat troops” (Kolko, Anatomy of War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience.” See Counterpunch April 30, 2005).

Seven years earlier, the North Vietnamese lost a major battle and won the war. In late January 1968, the armies of the North and National Liberation Front of the South staged an armed uprising during Tet, the Vietnamese holiday. General Giap and the other Hanoi leaders had decided that the levels of casualties exacted by massive U.S. artillery shelling and bombing had become intolerable. Giap’s quick military victory plan called for coordinated attacks on targets near the South Vietnam border to lure U.S. troops away from the cities, where dramatic assaults took place by Viet Cong (the pro Communist forces in the South and by regular North Vietnamese troops who had infiltrated South Vietnam’s urban areas). Giap predicted that such bold and large scale initiatives would inspire citizens to revolt against the puppet South Vietnamese government. The fall of this U.S.-backed regime would remove the last pretext for occupation and the Americans would withdraw.

The puppet government, however, didn’t fall. U.S. forces took about 1,100 casualties and many more wounded, but then retaliated, inflicting heavy casualties on Giap’s troops – some 35,000 killed and 60,000 wounded. But Giap’s plan did lead to an unanticipated victory in the propaganda war. One TV news clips showed Viet Cong fighting their way inside the heavily-guarded U.S. Embassy in Saigon, thus dramatizing the gap between official statements of optimism about the enemy’s weakness and the real battlefield facts.

The Tet Offensive thus revealed the absurdity of President Lyndon Johnson’s boasts of how much “the enemy” had been permanently weakened. The fact that the offensive took place after repeated official assurances of impending victory – seeing light at the end of the tunnel, according to Defense Secretary McNamara – so undermined the war propagandists’ efforts that public opinion swayed convincingly against the war. Despite their immense losses, the North Vietnamese won the propaganda war.

Seven years after Tet, the TV public saw images of U.S. embassy officials burning documents and U.S. money to prevent the rapidly advancing Communists from getting them. These pictures and the commentaries that accompanied them induced disgust and doubt in the wisdom of U.S. leaders. Three years later, if doubts persisted about the duplicity of U.S. officials, Daniel Ellsberg, a former national security official, released a massive archive of documents that the New York Times printed. The thousands of documents in the Pentagon Papers confirmed that the government had lied and covered up important facts about the origins of the war. They also showed that the United States had made little “progress” in winning the “hearts and minds” of Vietnam’s people. The Pentagon Papers also revealed that Lyndon Johnson had lied repeatedly and that neither he nor any other official had devised a plan to end the war and leave. The credibility gap between government and people became unbridgeable.

Most Americans don’t remember or know why the United States intervened and then got deeper into Vietnam. Its leaders had not learned from Korea, where another tough Asia foe fought U.S. troops to a bloody standstill. Bush has repeated the murderous scenario in Iraq. In each war, the U.S. killing machine slaughtered many more natives than Americans. In Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson confessed to his National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy that he didn’t “think it’s worth fighting for.” But he continued to send hundreds of thousands of troops to kill and die – and ultimately lose.

On May 1, the paper of record featured a particularly foolish account. Stephen J. Morris of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies blamed anti-war lobbying for convincing Congress to cut funding, thus assuring the Communist victory in Vietnam. How many of the NY Times readers will recall the instant collapse of the militarily superior, U.S.-trained South Vietnamese army when they had to fight? How many will remember that the United States invented South Vietnam in 1955 as a way to avert a national electoral victory by President Ho Chi Minh? Or that rampant corruption characterized all the U.S.-picked regimes. How many will know that the U.S. chose Catholics to rule a predominantly Buddhist population? Morris’ sour grapes scenario belies the facts: South Vietnam in early 1975 showed all the signs of decomposition.

The Times does not print historian Gabriel Kolko’s vital lessons. “Successive administrations in Washington have no capacity whatsoever to learn from past errors. Total defeat in Vietnam 30 years ago should have been a warning to the U.S.: Wars are too complicated for any nation, even the most powerful, to undertake without grave risk. They are not simply military exercises in which equipment and firepower is decisive, but political, ideological, and economic challenges also. The events of South Vietnam 30 years ago should have proven that.” (Counterpunch, April 30, 2005)

In Iraq, Bush repeats Lyndon Johnson’s sinful stupidity of wasting a surplus on military and security madness. Congress’ new budget froze domestic spending, but not military and “security” funding. Bush’s advisers should read him Pat Buchanan’s lines from A Republic, Not an Empire: ”
all the empires had disappeared. How did they perish? By war – all of them.”

Landau’s new book is THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA: HOW CONSUMERS HAVE REPLACED CITIZENS AND HOW WE CAN REVERSE THE TREND. He directs Digital Media at Cal Poly Pomona University’s College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The “conservative” weekly Human Events asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help them compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th & 20th Centuries.

Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. “Appropriately,” according to the editors, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing. Marx was the only author to have 2 entries, with Das Kapital at No. 6.

John Dewey’s Democracy and Education checked in at No. 5. Here’s the summary of Dewey’s most important work provided by the editors of Human Events

Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a “progressive” philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education–particularly in public schools–and helped nurture the Clinton generation.”

The balance of the list includes Hitler’s Mein Kampf (No. 2), Quotations from Chairman Mao (No. 3), and The Kinsey Report (No. 4).

Rounding out the top ten are: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Comte’s The Course of Positive Philosophy, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

The link above will take you to the full list, including “summaries” and a run down of the panel.

In an effort to preserve free enterprise against the assualt of Top Ten (and honorable mention) books by Marx, Engels, Mao, and Lenin, Human Events has convienently provided links to Amazon.com for each title for your consuming pleasure (or perhaps to facilitate local book burnings).

(Thanks to DG for the tip on this list, I’ll have to remember to send him a gift subscription to Human Events for his next birthday.)

In his Z Net commentary published today, activist Tim Wise argues for a “double standard” in when it comes to racial/ethnic slurs (in the context of the recent firing of Okalhoma University’s baseball coach over the use of the n-word).

Wise concludes, “As with all racism, it is power and position that gives a racial slur its ability to injure. This is why slurs against whites like cracker or honky seem more juvenile than truly offensive. And this is why the n-word, spoken by whites, is so fundamentally less acceptable than the same term spoken by blacks, however potentially problematic the latter may be.”

The full commentary follows:ZNet Commentary
A Double Standard Worth Keeping May 30, 2005
By Tim Wise

As soon as Oklahoma University’s baseball coach Larry Cochell was fired recently, for using the n-word during off-camera conversations with two ESPN reporters, I knew instinctively what some were likely to say. Though I am far from psychic, it hardly required clairvoyant ability to see what was coming.

Sure enough, the foreseeable dialogue found its way into my local paper, in the form of an editorial by one of Nashville’s most respected sports writers, Joe Biddle. His remarks would mirror several others to be heard on sports radio in the past few days, and appear, from my experience at least, to represent the views of large numbers of whites in America.

As Biddle put it, while Cochell’s choice of words to describe one of his players (ostensibly in a light-hearted manner), was clearly unacceptable and deserving of censure, it was no more offensive than the casual use of the same term by blacks themselves, on the playground or from a stage, as with the comedy of Chris Rock or Richard Pryor (the latter of which has actually stopped using the n-word for more than two decades, unbeknownst, apparently, to Biddle).

In fact, the difference between Rock and Pryor in this regard largely mirrors the divide that exists throughout black America. About half of African Americans, when polled, say the word or it’s derivative (the one that ends with “a” instead of “er”) should never be used, and the other half argues that it can be used among blacks in certain contexts, as an endearment, or a subtle but unhateful dis, or as a way to “reclaim” the term and arguably strip it of its power to injure.

But whether or not some in the black community continue to use the term, there is no reason why whites should audibilize it, ever. That Biddle (and probably most whites) would call this a double standard is irrelevant. Fact is, history has been a double standard too, and it is this history that explains why the n-word is so much more offensive when coming from a white mouth than the mouth of an African American. That most whites don’t know much about the history of racism hardly pardons us: it has been a willed ignorance, after all, and as such can hardly be used as an excuse for the phony claims of equivalence forwarded by Biddle, or any number of white high school students I discuss the subject with each year.

Simply put, the historic use of the n-word in the white community is not one of mixed meaning. It is not a history in which we called our black friends or colleagues such a term, as if it meant little more than “hey there dude, let’s go grab a burger and fries at the Mickey D’s.” In the mouths and hearts of whites, that word has only been used in the context of contempt, of presumed white superiority, of anti-black bigotry.

As such, for any white person to use it today is to force the black person hearing it to immediately wonder what’s behind the comment, what the speaker’s intent really is, in a way they don’t have to sweat as readily when spoken by another black person. History creates a natural and internalized warning bell for any black person hearing a white person use the word, which, if triggered enough can create psychological scars far deeper than most whites could ever fully comprehend.

But to understand the fundamental difference between the white and black use of the word, beyond its historical legacy, consider a similar example.

I am from the South, and frankly, have never much appreciated the word “redneck,” which is so often used against white Southerners, largely because I know it as a slur against working class whites, especially rural folks, whose labor in the sun would cause their necks to become “red.” Though I admit to having used it before, often in fact, I have resolved not to do so in the future because of its derogatory implications, and because, frankly, many in my family, going back generations, would qualify for the designation.

But having said that, I must also note that when Jeff Foxworthy tells twenty minutes of redneck jokes (as in, his “You might be a redneck if…”
routine), I have a hard time taking offense. I don’t find the bit particularly funny, as it’s not my comedic cup of tea. But I don’t get pissed. And why? Simple: Jeff Foxworthy is in the family, so to speak. He too is a white Southerner; someone who could be viewed as a redneck; and as such, I can pretty safely assume he isn’t hating on his people or himself. Self-deprecating humor, while it can sometimes straddle the line with self-hatred, generally has a different feel than when someone outside the fold tells the same jokes.

In other words, if Jerry Seinfeld starts telling redneck jokes, we’re gonna have a problem.

It’s the same thing with Jewish jokes. I’m Jewish, as is my father’s father’s side of our family. For generations, Jewish comics have made a living telling jokes about our community. In fact, as a kid, I remember coming across several books of Jewish jokes in my dad’s old room, all of them written by other Jews. And while I didn’t think them very funny (after all, there’s nothing amusing about playing upon stereotypes with such quips as, “Why do Jews have long noses? Because air is free.”), nonetheless, I could assume this humor was emanating from a less toxic place than had it been published in a Klan pamphlet or church bulletin.

It’s sort of like the old playground wisdom that I can talk about my momma, but you had damn well better not do the same. Double standard? Sure. But so what?

That many whites won’t be able to understand this simple point is testimony to nothing so much as our own sense of entitlement. In other words, we are not used to anyone telling us that we can’t do something, or shouldn’t, and as such take great offense when our own freedom, including the freedom to offend, is constrained.

What else can explain the white hysteria over so-called political correctness, which, after all, was really never anything but the desire for folks not to be racist pricks, and to inculcate a norm of civility and respect for persons different from oneself?

I can think of no other reason than the desire to maintain a certain form of white privilege: the privilege of saying whatever we want, whenever we want, and feeling as though our right to lecture others on their behavior should logically take precedence over controlling our own.

In other words, the same privilege that (as the flipside to racism itself), has historically given the n-word its power to injure in the first place. As with all racism, it is power and position that gives a racial slur its ability to injure. This is why slurs against whites like cracker or honky seem more juvenile than truly offensive. And this is why the n-word, spoken by whites, is so fundamentally less acceptable than the same term spoken by blacks, however potentially problematic the latter may be.

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull, 2005) and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge, 2005).