Racial McCarthyism on the Right Redux
A repeat and a reminder to let your academic friends know:
"The petition I set up to defend John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt from scurrilous charges of anti-Semitism (which is to say, racism) for daring write an academic paper on the Israel lobby, is percolating along, accumulating signatures from post-secondary teachers, as I had hoped. Academics from all over the country are signing, from all sorts of institutions, and it is a pleasure to see so many standing up for the principle of freedom of rational inquiry. (Of course people from all walks of life are doing so, and I'm only asking academics to sign because I think this issue affects them in their workplace and in their professional lives in a special sort of way) . . ."
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/04/2006 08:00:00 AM
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2 Comments:
Has anyone called for them to be "silenced"? Last I checked most people had a problem with the numerous flaws in their "work", the rank speculation, and the guilt by assosiaction that was being pawned off as legitimate "research".
Professor Cole,
I grew up and came of age during the late 1950s and early 1960s. I know something about McCarthyism, especially as practiced by the virulent reactionary forces endemic to the United States during most -- and certainly the last half -- of the twentieth century. The repeatedly successful attempt by self-styled "conservatives" (usually meaning the Republican Party in any of its manifestations) to institute and exploit this mystic dread, reactionary panic, abstract angst, or just plain fear itself, has had far reaching -- and dreadfully debilitating effects on American life and essential human freedoms.
As you probably know, the classic science fiction movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" dealt quite effectively with this phenomenon. But lest anyone consider McCarthyism fiction or a thing of the past, simply look up on the Internet what happened to Congressman Jim McDermott of Washington State when he omitted mouthing the religious phrase "under gawd" from the so-called "Pledge of Allegiance" one day in the House of Representatives. Banner headlines appeared in the press immediately attacking him for his "lapse," forcing him to recant. Now think of that final scene in "Body Snatchers" where the last free soul (Nancy Cartwright) approaches a former friend (Donald Sutherland) only to have him point at her, open his mouth gaping wide, and emit a skin-crawling screech of denunciation. Faulkner had it right when he said "The past isn't history. It isn't even past."
Like Congressman McDermott, I remember my early school days in the 1950s before the Republican Party of Dwight Eisenhower and Joseph McCarthy rammed that religious phrase "under gawd" (emphasis on the "under" part) into the already onerous national loyalty oath inflicted daily on captive teachers and students in the public schools of America. Later in life as a public school teacher myself, I had to take great care when my school district employer forced me to "lead" my classes in reciting this abjectly conformist drivel. For my own professional survival I had to ensure that I not let my students see me "omitting" (by not vocally uttering) the aggressively monotheistic religious dogma that has no place in a free society where supposedly "the Congress shall make no law" having anything to do with religion. Luckily, I never had any of the little snitches go running home to their fascist breeding grounds breathlessly bleating: "mommy, mommy, Mr. Murry didn't say 'under gawd'!" and then trying to get me fired for not falling in line with the Nation of Sheep or the Fate Driven Herd -- pick your favorite Wildebeest metaphor.
Recently, I finally got around to writing a couple of little verses on the subject called "The Boobie Pledge of Subservience" and "America the Dutiful." (I know you probably don't have any free time for poetry, but if you'd like I'll e-mail you some copies.) At any rate: imagine a country that coerces its impressionable children into promising that they will unquestioningly obey their government's political/religious directives years in advance of ever possibly knowing the nature of those directives or the identities and motives of those who will issue them. Just try and imagine that!
I and many of my generation got sucked up into the American War on Vietnam because of the rampant McCarthyism that perennially pervades so much of pathetically conformist America. As the late, great historian Barbara Tuchman wrote in her classic March of Folly:
"The American government reacted not the Chinese upheaval [in 1949] or to Vietnamese nationalism [in 1954] per se, but to intimidation by the rabid right at home and to the public dread of Communism that this played on and reflected. [In the] social and psychological sources of that dread ... lie the roots of American policy in Vietnam."
Professor Tuchman also trenchantly noted that:
"Hysteria over the 'loss' of China took hold of America and rabid spokesmen of the China Lobby in Congress and the business world became the loudest voices in political life."
Now substitute "Israeli Lobby" for "China Lobby," "Global Terrorism" for "Monlithic World Communism," and don't even bother substituting an Orwellian euphemism for "the rabid right" of "the business world" which as always in America constitutes (through billions of dollars of corrupt campaign contributions) "the loudest voices in [American] political life."
Now another generation of Americans has to learn the hard way (if about half of the American population can any longer even learn at all) what unthinking, unblinking subservience to America's parasitic political/military class gets you: namely, bombed by nineteen unarmed Saudi Arabian hijackers and mired (increasingly alone and despised as a pariah rogue state) in twin Vietnam-style quagmires halfway around the world in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I apologize for going on at such length, but the fight against crypto-fascist Republican Party McCarthyism never stops. The rabid right never goes away. It keeps coming back year after year, decade after decade, gnawing and chewing away at our freedoms: especially under the hardly-even-disguised-anymore bloodstained banner of fundamentalist religious orthodoxy (currently Jewish and Christian varieties -- whatever will serve the purpose). The rabid, reactionary right in both America and Israel wants to silence "liberal" voices of conscience -- in both America and Israel -- through the time-dishonored tactic of spreading repressive and xenophobic McCarthy-style fear and loathing. I applaud you, other fearless academics, and intrepid reporters like Seymour Hersh (see "Plan B" and other of his articles in the New Yorker) for continuing to shed light on the pernicious and unwarranted influence of the rabid, reactionary "Israeli Lobby" in America. Patriotically exposing and criticizing this arrogant and unwarranted influence does not make anyone "anti-semitic," especially if your dictionary defines Arabs as racially and linguistically "semitic" peoples.
Keep up the good fight against McCarthyism, Professor. Whether it comes from the usual radical Republicans or intimidated, fellow-traveling "Democrats" like Senators Clinton and Lieberman, it must not succeed in smothering our right to think and say whatever we want about any subject whatsoever. As the British pragmatist philosopher F. C. S. Schiller said: "the word 'sacred' generally means a fear that anything so denominated cannot withstand scrutiny." The Republican Party and even a number of "Democrats" want to stifle criticism and scrutiny of imperial-commercial-religious militarism by cloaking it in the language and symbols of "sacred security." We must not allow this claque of demented demagogues to avoid scrutiny simply because they correctly understand and fear that they cannot possibly withstand it.
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