More terrorist casualties?

The political far left may commit suicide, too

By Lance Tapley

In reply to the war on terrorism, a new anti-war movement is up and marching, with protests, vigils, and teach-ins all over the country. Just as suddenly, the anti-globalization coalition, which united activist students and labor unions for the first time in 40 years, has fallen apart because of the immediate anti-war stance of many of the students and of the elder leftists who had traveled to the Seattle, DC, Quebec, and other anti-globalization protests with them. The AFL-CIO has come out strongly for military action against terrorists and is now looking at a domestic agenda.

In the midst of all these transformations, I was invited to represent the alternative press on a couple of panel discussions at an anti-corporate summit meeting, the “New Chautauqua,” held in the village of Unity on September 21 through 23. It brought together activist leaders from around the country including Jim Hightower, Ronnie Dugger, Richard Grossman, and Maine novelist Carolyn Chute. It was a perfect occasion to observe in detail the activist left’s reaction to the new political topography that had emerged from the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The reaction I observed — dominating the conversations of the 200 or so participants of the New Chautauqua — was anger, paranoia, hatred, and alienation. And I write with sympathy for the left.

The always-simmering anger of these activists, warmed by the anti-globalization movement, had been heated by new fears to such a degree that it had

boiled down to a congealed hatred of the government, the hardness of which I had not seen since the Vietnam War. Their hopes have been smashed: A conservative administration is in power as war begins, war is a conservative time, and labor leadership has wrapped itself in the flag.

And their vision of America had been proven true, but nobody was listening. To this group, the United States was the villain as much as the victim of the attacks; the US had been so tyrannous abroad that it had driven the Third World to such a response. So, unlike on the quiet streets of Unity a few feet away, no red, white, and blue was visible at the New Chautauqua. This absence not only signified alienation from the government; there was also no sense of community with the rest of the citizenry in this time of mourning.

These were not your garden-variety Democrats or Greens. These were the marching activists who, like their counterparts on the ideological right, have always provided the new ideas in American politics. Such a short time ago, swollen by the anti-globalization cause, the activist left had looked like a real movement for the first time since the 1960s. But if its profound alienation from most Americans holds, a major additional casualty of the terrorist attacks will be a shrunken, irrelevant left wing.

A meeting highjacked

Planned months previous by populist commentator Jim Hightower of Texas as the kick-off of a national, anti-corporation organizing campaign, the New Chautauqua’s scheduled discussion of how to counter domestic corporate power was buried by political debris from the destructions of 10 days prior.

The expected wartime ascendancy of the right inspired special anger and fear. “We shouldn’t be surprised how quickly they’ve mobilized the people to their will,” said Richard Grossman. Head of the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy, he was Friday night’s first speaker: “An attack on the American empire requires that the American empire act like an empire.”

Although Hightower referred to “murderous foreign zealots,” he told the audience they were in Unity to rise against our own zealots who want to “shut down protest in America.” In a speakerphone call from the West Coast, David Korten, author of the book When Corporations Rule the World (Kumarian, 2nd edition 2001), echoed this theme, bemoaning the attacks as an excuse for reactionary leaders to “legitimate the suspension of the basic rights of dissent.” Blaming corporate rule for worldwide poverty that led to the terrorism, Korten excitedly saw our government embarking on “a holy war against Islam,” potentially “the most devastating holy war of our species.”

Sticking more to the anti-corporate script, Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy, offered an alternative America in his address: public campaign financing, national health care, truly progressive taxes, size limits on corporations, limits to personal wealth, guaranteed family income, free college education, and “world citizenship.” But Dugger seethed as he attacked “an illegal president declaring an unconstitutional war,” and the group’s heart was no longer in pushing programs.

Fear and hatred also highjacked Saturday’s workshops. In the media panels, I felt forced to represent the entire press, out of a sense of fairness, against a unanimous disgust with the work of reporters and editors of all stripes. The animosity practically made my hair rise. “Does the government call the editors and tell them what news to put in, what meetings to cover?” one woman seriously wanted to know.

On Saturday evening, the blame-the-victim mentality fully flowered. Doris Haddock, 91-year-old “Granny D,” who had walked across the country to promote campaign finance reform, explained in her precise, aristocratic accent how “Americans are being killed now in great numbers because of our own policies.” Very precisely, she blamed “the politics of Mideast oil.” She understood, she said, why some Palestinians celebrated after the attacks: “Naturally they celebrate when we suffer. Just how innocent would they think [America’s] citizens are?” She received a standing ovation.

The highest pitch of paranoia came when another speaker proclaimed: “I thought it was my own government that did it at first. Whether or not they did it, I don’t know . . . Pre-disaster, things were not going that well. There was a flat economy, world-wide anti-globalization protests. Then everything changed.” The country was moving into “a calculated war to fulfill the needs of a war economy. . . . Hitler blew up a building in Germany [the Reichstag] to get people behind him.”

There was an apparent coldness about the thousands of people who were literally ground to dust in the attacks, which most Americans saw as a tragedy of Biblical proportions. References to it were in brief clauses introducing long diatribes. These activists appeared far more upset by insults to Muslims on the streets.

The only voice of real compassion for the attack victims came, fittingly, from a New Yorker. “We’ve been given a wonderful gift by the people in the towers and the people in the jets! Praise be!” shouted the “Rev. Billy” Talen, the comedian-activist who plays the part of an evangelical preacher. “From their cell phones they said good-bye. They said ‘I love you.’ Then it happened. Then ‘I love you’ flowed into us! Amen.” But he, too, warned, of war fever: “The ‘I kill you’s’ are starting to replace the ‘I love you’s’.”

Many participants feared a fascism they believed would accompany the “militarization” of the country. The Orwellian language of the title of George W. Bush’s Office of Homeland Security doesn’t help much to quell their fears. But there was virtual unanimity that their big task was to turn public attention to how the US was to blame for the attacks.

Why the alienation?

Alienation from the government among this group has become enormous. “I don’t love the institution that is the United States of America. It has caused too much harm, too much hate, too much oppression to those throughout the world and within its borders for me to be able to perceive it as an entity to care about,” wrote Hillary, a participant in the New Chautauqua, on the Maine Global Action Network’s Internet space.

Alienation from their fellow citizens is also enormous. Ninety-two percent of the people of the country, according to a recent New York Times poll, support the war on terrorism. Quite a few of the activist left, however, are pacifist, ostensibly nonviolent no matter what, and this is important to understand their political approach. Pacifism is an ideology. Its hero, Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi, said that he would not have used violence to stop Hitler. As with Islamic fundamentalists, ideology provides inflexible certainty. Right-wing preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson demonstrated a similar ideological certainty when they uttered their now-notorious remarks about how the attacks were God’s punishment of America for condoning gays and abortion. This view is actually like the left’s. Both the far left and the far right sound like they have given up on sinful America. The sins they see are just different.

But a good deal of the alienation comes from paranoia that has developed from being so long and so far on the outside. I knew the left was in trouble before I went to the New Chautauqua. An old socialist friend, a gentle, white-bearded man who had worked as a lawyer for the poor all his career, had come up to me in the supermarket on the day of the attacks and said, eyes gleaming, that he suspected they had been arranged by the right wingers so they could take over the country. “Why would they bother?” joked a liberal acquaintance when I told him this story. “They already have.”

Then there is the stream of email coming from one of the two national press coordinators for the Green Party, who happens to live in Maine. She has always been a relentless source of anti-government and anti-corporate news. Since the attacks, her anger has gone off the charts. One day she forwarded a story about how genetically modified corn from the US was contaminating indigenous corn in Mexico. “The real terrorism?” she headlined it. Was she implying that New York and Washington didn’t suffer real terrorism?

Later she sent along a piece about how the American intelligence agencies — “those fascists within the secret services,” the article noted in an objective tone — probably were behind the attacks. But the prize item was from “the BBC” about how the TV footage of Palestinians celebrating the attacks had actually been shot in 1991. This was an Internet hoax, and she was forced to transmit a denial.

What does this kind of news channel do for the Greens’ credibility among the press, which is an important factor in political success?

“It is not a wise and prudent thing,” lamented John Rensenbrink, a government professor emeritus at Bowdoin College in Brunswick. One of the founders of the national Green movement, he is author of Against All Odds: The Green Transformation of American Politics (Leopold, 1999).

“We’re engaged in self-destruction,” he feared. “It’s a ritualistic hatred and disparagement of America that comes from the culture of the left. It leads to a desensitization to what happened. But in the end, the terrorists did it!”

Leftists have been so mesmerized by the Marxist notion that economics underlies everything, he felt, that they can’t comprehend that government’s first duty is to protect its citizens. Instead, the government is only something to distrust and protest. In other words, the activist left — ironically, because many of them are socialists — has ceded the government to the right. The right wing also dislikes the government, but it is willing to use it. The American left “hasn’t learned the language of responsibility,” Rensenbrink said.

Jeff Faux agrees. The president of the Economic Policy Institute, a prominent left-liberal think tank in Washington with close ties to the union movement, Faux believes “the left-wing ambivalence about government has been with us since Vietnam and the ‘60s.” He recalled that in the early 1960s the left was still in tune with the progressive movement that actually had power in the administrations of Roosevelt and Truman in the ‘30s and ‘40s. This left thought that the government could be good — for example, that people should be brought under the protection of the government, such as with civil rights laws, who hadn’t had this protection. But as a result of the Vietnam War, many on the left “abandoned both the reality and the symbols of government as an instrument of democracy,” Faux said.

Faux, who used to live in Maine, also believes that among many on the activist left there isn’t much sense of community with working people: “The notion that, because people in the American working class wave the flag, they must want what Goldman Sachs wants — this needs to be rethought. They’re not waving it to support oppression in Bolivia. Right now they’re waving it to show solidarity with the firemen who died and the people on the planes.” He pointed out that 70 percent of those killed at the World Trade Center were working-class people: secretaries, technicians, janitors, firemen.

“To the extent that people are alienated from [Americans waving the flag], they ought to look into their own souls,” he said. “If there is no room for America as a community, then that point of view is just politically irrelevant — and socially as well. What is missing is a sense of humanity.”

A teachable moment

The left has much to teach a receptive America. Right now most Americans desperately want to understand why our country is so hated abroad that some people want to kill us — us, our families, not just our soldiers. The horrors of September 11 can’t be explained simplistically by invoking Muslim extremists opposed to “freedom,” as George W. Bush put it. Everyone can understand that fanatical fire often arises from the ashes of oppression and poverty. Americans even might be persuaded that our government’s arrogance and our corporations’ greed may have fed this fire.

Americans might be persuaded, too, that, through the smoke of the terrorist attacks, our State Department’s Middle East policy can be discerned. And, while the overwhelming majority of Americans agree that it is normal and necessary to eliminate the specific source of the murderous terror we have experienced, and to do it soon before there are more such catastrophes, most people can be readily convinced, if they haven’t been already, that the bombing of innocents in Afghanistan, if that occurs, may bring worse things upon us.

All this could be taught. But it is questionable if anyone will pay attention to the teachers.

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net