Memorial Day 2017

Remembering the dead and maimed of our many wars is always a somber occasion. If our leaders – politicians, generals, business tycoons – had any wisdom, they would be content to remember. But that wisdom is lacking and so the Memorial Day speeches not only remember but also engage in lavish myth making about the reasons we were involved in all these wars. The myth is always more or less the same: we went to war in Europe, in South East Asia, in the Mideast, in Latin America in order to protect our freedoms and our democracy.

The wars we fought since 1940 were of different sorts. Not one of them was unquestionably inevitable in order to defend our freedoms.

What about World War II, you will say. Surely Nazi Germany was a threat to freedoms not only in Europe but perhaps also on our continent. While that is no doubt true, no Memorial Day speech will mention that World War II also saved the harsh dictatorship in the Soviet Union for another 40 odd years. World War II did not preserve the freedoms in Russia or in Eastern Europe satellite countries. Instead it preserved the brutality of Stalin's government and that of his successors.

               The role of World War II in defense of American freedoms may be ambiguous. There is no such ambiguity about any of the wars we have been embroiled in since.

In Vietnam, as Martin Luther King explains in his Riverside Church speech of April 1967, the Vietnamese were defending their freedom against being colonized by the French and then by us. The eventual victory of the North Vietnamese did not deprive any Americans of their freedom to speak their mind, to assemble, to campaign for office and to vote. The Vietnamese were not a threat to our freedom. We were the threat to their freedom in that war.

“In his 1995 memoir of the war, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Robert McNamara– Secretary of Defense during much of that war – said he and his senior colleagues were "wrong, terribly wrong" to pursue the war as they did. He acknowledged that he failed to force the military to produce a rigorous justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood Asia in general and Vietnam in particular, and kept the war going long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the courage or the ability to turn President Johnson around.” (Washinton Post, 7/7/2009)

The war in Iraq was justified in a number of different ways by the administration of Pres. George W Bush. First we were told that Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction." When that turned out to be a pure fabrication, we were told that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack of 9/11. That, of course, was also a lie. What was not mentioned as often was that the majority of the 9/11 attackers were born and raised in Saudi Arabia, still our firmest ally in that region. The justification of the attack on Iraq still remains to be given. Was it really just about controlling the oil?

The Memorial Day speeches do not usually mention that Saddam Hussein was our ally in the 1980s when he attacked Iran. We supported him then. Presumably that alliance was not a threat to our freedoms. How did Saddam Hussein become a threat to our political institutions in the few years between 1980 and 1991? The answer is not at all obvious.

President Obama was more forthcoming than many others when he explained repeatedly that we needed to send our troops to all four corners of the earth in order to maintain our position as the most powerful nation in the world.

But even that explanation for our continued war making is implausible. It is true that we have troops everywhere in the world. But it is also true that we have been loosing all the wars we have been involved in since World War II – except for the invasions of Grenada (by President Reagan) and of Panama (by the elder President Bush). We lost the Vietnam war. We have not managed to bring peace to Afghanistan after 16 years of fighting there. We have not brought peace to Iraq. We are not playing a dominant role in Syria. Our intervention in Libya has left that country in political chaos.

In its early days, Osama bin Laden's Al Quaeda was armed and supported by our government. Since then Islamist movements have spread, expanded and become more destructive in their terrorist attacks. They have not been defeated by the most powerful military in the world.

The "most powerful nation on earth" continues to be on the losing end of its wars. Not an impressive record.

We are still waiting for a plausible explanation for fighting all these wars and demanding all these sacrifices from Americans and from the peoples of many other countries.

In the end we need to admit that our leaders are victims of their own myth making. After telling the nation every year on Memorial Day that our military interventions were glorious defenses of freedom and democracy, it appears that they themselves have forgotten that this story is made up. It has no relation to reality. The loss and bitter pain our wars have inflicted on the families of its victims did not in any way safeguard our institutions. That story simply cannot be supported by what actually happened. The enemies we have fought in all these different wars in did not threaten our institutions to begin with. When we lost those wars we did not in any way secure our freedoms for future generations.

The losses imposed on so many American families by these wars only show that lies repeated often enough will finally confuse the liars. The victims of these lies are the families whose members died far from home and, more broadly, all the Americans whose health and welfare would have been so much better if we had not wasted trillions of dollars in needless wars.

Rule of the People or of Majorities

We say two things about democracy. Both of them are sort of true. But it is easy to see that they cannot be true at the same time. And that creates a problem for our understanding of what democracy is.

The first thing we say is that in a democracy the people rule. To be sure, we do not govern. We do not issue executive orders, issue driver's licenses, or building permits. The government does that. But we always have a supervisory role because we elect representatives to the legislature and we elect the head of the Executive, the president. Persons to fill many other important jobs in the executive must be approved by the elected representatives. All of this is familiar.

We also say that our democracy is an electoral system where there are periodic votes, with every vote having the same weight and getting counted only once. Votes are secret so that no one is exposed to political pressure for the vote they cast. When not everyone casts votes for the same candidate, for instance, the majority wins. Where two or more candidates compete the one who has more votes gets elected.

The people who vote for the majority, whose candidate gets elected thereby gain some influence over the next government and thus may be said to rule.

But what about the minority? What about the people who work really hard for their candidate who is, for whatever reason, less popular and does not win? They have no influence over the government. They have no influence at all. They cannot really be said to rule.

Here is our problem then. When we practice electoral democracy with majority rule only the winners of elections maybe said to rule and the other people do not. When we say that democracy consists of an electoral system with majority rule, we seem to contradict the other thing we say, namely that in a democracy, the people—meaning all the people—rule.

Many people are fully aware of the tension between the different ways in which we describe democracy. If it were easier for us to come to agreement on different things or on who is the best candidate for a particular job, obviously this would not be a problem. The people would make their choices by "consensus" as it is called. They would discuss a matter, consider alternative proposals for resolving an existing problem and then figure out the best resolution of the problem and adopt that. Once everyone agreed, the only thing remaining to do would be to execute the policy agreed on.

That scenario would obviously be lovely but it is, in our world quite unrealistic. In almost any situation we are unable to reach agreement. To this many people say: “Yes, majority rule is a second best arrangement but it's really not so bad.” Electoral systems with majority rule are widely accepted as an acceptable form of democracy. 

But to do so is a mistake. Decisions are made only by a portion of the citizenry. The minority has nothing to say and it is not  accidental who belongs to the winning majority. The people who can pay for expensive lobbyists,who can afford to hire high-class advertising agencies to promote their perspectives  win most elections; the people who are poor, who work more than one job and therefore have no time to agitate on behalf of their points of view usually lose. Electoral systems with majority rule are not democratic. They produce oligarchies, the rule of mere portions of the population, of the wealthy, the owners, the employers.

The defenders of electoral democracy will argue that we have no choice because people just cannot agree and therefore we need to fall back on majority rule. But this defense of majority rule completely ignores the fact that there are a whole lot of trained and highly skilled people in our country at this time and, in fact, all over the world who know how to get people who have different perspectives on something to agree in spite of their differences, but many of these people make their living helping different groups to overcome serious disagreements and forging agreements that everyone is pretty happy with.

This sort of technique is called alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Thousands of practitioners of ADR all over the world have training institutes, trainings and conferences. They have different domestic and international organizations that accredit practitioners. Their members write many books and pamphlets. The different versions and techniques and theories of ADR are readily available to anybody who wants to know anything about it.

ADR differs from the typical political. In ordinary political conversations people debate with each other and are at pains to win and to show that the other is mistaken. Businesses cannot afford to waste time on debates that do not reach a speedy and mutually acceptable agreement. In the business world, the conversations between groups of people who disagree are often facilitated by trained experts. These experts learn to remain neutral. They do not take sides. Their only interest is in getting the conflicting parties to come to some desired agreement, be that about a policy, or about the possible candidate for an important position, or about some more general principles of politics. The facilitators have many tasks. Often political debates go round and round because people misunderstand each other. A facilitated debate will make quite clear what they disagree on.

In a political debate each side is wedded to their particular proposal; in contrast, facilitators will encourage parties to be creative and find new solutions that both parties might accept gladly. Political debates are often hard to close because the parties make assumptions that they have not really examined or fact-checked. Facilitators will probe gently to encourage each party to examine any unexamined assumptions. That process will often open up new conversations.

Using such techniques, facilitators, mediators and others resolve problems every day --often problems that have festered and have created serious hostilities. Testimonials to that accomplishment come from large corporations, important law firms, and other powerful people whom we can trust not to spend money for help with their disagreements unless that help is indubitably worth its price.

If we applied these techniques to our political disagreements many of those would disappear and our decisions would more often be based on consensus and not exclude electoral minorities from ruling. Using the skills of various professionals in facilitating agreement and consensus, we would be able to turn our back on the injustice of majority rule. Using the techniques of facilitation and mediation, democracy resting on consensus may well be possible.

“But this will take too long” the defenders of majority rule will tell us. However, the reality is that mediation and facilitation have not so far being used to any extent  to settle political disagreements. We do not know how difficult  or time-consuming it  would be to apply these techniques in politics. A lot of experimentation will be needed before we are in a position to have reliable opinions on the feasibility of resting consensus democracy on mediation and facilitation techniques. The encouraging results in various business situations should encourage us to engage in that kind of experimentation.

We do not know today how well a mediated and facilitated democracy would function. But we do know that it is a real alternative to our present. The insistence that majority rule is the optimal procedure is clearly mistaken, given the positive experiences many enterprises are having with mediation and facilitation. Electoral techniques and majority rule  or not unavoidable. Using electoral systems and majority rule is a choice we make. It is, as we saw above, a choice of oligarchy over genuine democracy.

The dogma of the inevitability of majority rule is being promoted by the winners in existing oligarchies. It is in their interest to make everyone believe that there are no other options. But there are. We should take back our democracy by trying large-scale experiments with mediated and facilitated democratic conversations.

Bogeyman Foreign Policy

In an article in the Boston Globe Stephen Kinzer rehearsed the history of the current crisis with North Korea which not only has an arsenal of atomic weapons but is coming close to developing intermediate range missiles which, armed with nuclear warheads, could reach the United States. There is a great deal of huffing and puffing on the part of the Trump administration but not much action because there is not a lot they can do. Kinzer believes that we could only persuade the Chinese, who have a great deal of influence in North Korea, to put pressure on that government if we were willing to withdraw all troops from the Korean Peninsula thereby ensuring the Chinese that they would not have possibly hostile soldiers on their borders.

Kinzer traces the current crisis to the Carter administration when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The US wanted to base military units to fight the Soviets in Pakistan and the Pakistanis were willing to allow that. But their price was the permission to develop their own atomic weapons. The US had previously made major efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation. That involved the US making sure that Pakistan would not be able to have its own nuclear weapons program. We had been very serious about that all along but being in a complete tizzy about the Soviets in Afghanistan, we reversed policy and allowed the Pakistani nuclear program to go forward.

Contrary to what had been agreed, Pakistan shared its nuclear technology with the North Koreans who then also became an atomic power. We see now that that was a disastrous choice on our part. We had been right to resist nuclear proliferation. Changing policy on that was a serious error that led us to the present impasse with North Korea.

At the same time, of course, we armed the mujahedin, the guerrilla fighters against the Soviets who, after the American invasion of Afghanistan, turned against us and morphed into Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

Our near hysteria about the Soviet Union led us to arm countries and guerrilla movements against us. The serious troubles we have in the Middle East and in North Korea are largely self created and self-inflicted.

Both are due to the peculiar characteristics of the Cold War. Today we have serious disagreements with the Chinese and we try to resolve those as best as we can, using threats as well as promises as one does in foreign affairs. But in the Cold War there were not only disagreements between us and Russia, there was a whole other issue: Communism.

The Chinese call themselves Communists but that does not bother anybody, probably because they are the most unlikely Communists anybody has seen in a long time. But Russian communism was used to whip up intense hysteria in the United States. In the 1950s Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had the entire country believing that communist agents had infiltrated many public and private institutions. State employees and employees of many universities were forced to sign loyalty oaths, attesting to their firm belief in capitalism.

The country survived and Sen. McCarthy died soon afterwards but the fear of communism did not abate. We were willing to do anything whatsoever to fight the Communists. Russia was not just another country, a developing country at that, Russia was the "Evil Empire." It was the dark opponent of Star Wars and other movies. Rational policy considerations were not enough to defeat it.

This sort of magical thinking, "Bogeyman Foreign Policy" has caused serious problems for us and continues to do so. Our conduct in Vietnam, supporting French colonialism until 1954 and then refusing to deal with North Vietnam, whose founding document quoted our Declaration of Independence, because they were “Communists” laid Vietnam to waste and took the life of 54,000 American soldiers. We were blinded by the myth of evil and intransigent communism. We were not fighting a real government—North Vietnam-- but a myth—International Communism.

The “Evil Empire” collapsed in 1989. It was immediately replaced by international terrorism, and now by immigrants demonized like communism and terrorism before them. Immigrants are criminals. Immigrants are a shady presence; they take jobs away from Americans at the same time as they drain government coffers by drawing on social services. Immigrants are not like us, they are a threat to our way of life and our traditions. We must protect ourselves against immigrants at all costs, even if that means radically scaling back services for Americans who are poor and sick, or for the elderly who, after a long life of hard work find themselves in poverty.

Citing facts against the myth of the immigrant threat is useless. The immigrant bogeyman is too real in people's mind. It cannot be chased away by ordinary facts.

But the conclusion is only too obvious: once we indulge in Bogeyman Foreign Policy we encounter serious and perhaps irreparable losses. We should think twice about letting ourselves be terrified by imaginary threats. But in the clutches of Bogeyman Foreign Policy we cannot think straight. We frighten ourselves with bogeymen of our own invention.

Politicians encourage the creation of  bogeymen. Voters terrified of communism or immigrants  choose representatives who are "tough" on communism or immigration. They do not pay attention to the political candidate's other qualifications, or lack thereof. Fairly incompetent candidates get elected simply because they never stop talking about bogeyman threats.

Why don't they want join us?

I have belonged to a number of all-white organizations. These were different kinds of groups. Some were progressive political groups whose commitment to opposing all racist distinctions was an important plank in their platform. Others were groups of retired people trying to continue their education, or they were neighborhood groups trying to maintain their neighborhood and in the process having occasional social events. From time to time these group would notice and deplore the absence of members of color. There would be some discussion of ways of recruiting African-Americans and other persons of color. Some members of the group would make recruitment efforts but the group remained as white as before. We would end up disappointed, shaking our heads, not knowing what to think.

Why did African-Americans not want to join our group? Because we could ask the question and be at a loss for an answer. Because we had no clue about life for African-Americans in these United States.

Let me explain this in three steps.

1. Whites do not understand the reluctance of African-Americans to join white organizations because they are oblivious to the history of African-Americans on this continent. The first black people came to this continent in 1609. For the first few years they were treated no differently from other servants. But when at the end of the 16 hundreds white and black servants together joined an uprising of farmers oppressed by their debts, the white people in power decided to sow enmity between white servants and Blacks by turning the Blacks into slaves. For the next 200 years Blacks in America, with very few exceptions, were slaves. The Civil War put an end to slavery but very soon afterwards black Americans found themselves in pretty much the same condition. They worked for very little. They had no citizen’s rights. They were in no rrespect equal to whites. When a white man or woman came down the sidewalk they had to step into the gutter to make way for them. It was not worth a black man's life to look at a white woman in any way. They were pariahs.

Significant change occurred in the 1960s. There are now some African-Americans who are wealthy, who have positions of power and respect in our society. Many earlier forms of segregation – separate restrooms and water fountains – are a thing of the past. African-Americans attend and graduate from the best white schools. White patients are attended to by black physicians; white clients have black lawyers.

A second reason why black people, most of the time, refuse to join white organizations is that whites, seeing the changes that undoubtedly have taken place, believe that racism is a thing of the past. "We even had a black president" they say. But it does not take much to see that viewpoint to be a major error.

Yes, slavery where some human beings own other human beings is dead. Gone are the slave markets. Gone are the families broken up when some members were sold off to other owners. But unpaid or unusually low paid work still remains. Forced work, work that one cannot refuse to do, continues to exist. In one way or another significant numbers of incarcerated African-Americans (and whites) work in prisons for no pay at all or for somewhere between $.93 to $2.40 an hour. This forced labor is not that different from slavery. Prisoners are forced to work; refusers end up in solitary confinement for long periods. The work is unpaid or barely paid.

The main victims of the system of quasi-slavery are African-Americans. Lynching has ceased to be a regular occurrence. But African-Americans are still not safe. The murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson brought to national attention the fact that African-Americans, both men and women, are in danger of being killed by police and that local district attorneys and grand juries ignore these as crimes of murder and fail to seek appropriate punishment. Killing African-Americans remains unpunished. Slavery and lynching have not disappeared. They have been transmuted into more modern kinds of maltreatment.

There is a third reason why African-Americans stay away from white organizations. Most white people are willing to acknowledge that racism persists in the United States. It would be hard to deny that when the President appoints an avowed racist as one of his closest advisers. But many whites draw a sharp line between themselves who oppose racism, who seek to build mixed organizations, and who profess to oppose racism wherever they encounter it and avowed white supremacists. We think of ourselves as well meaning whites opposed to whites who remain racist and full of hate. We are good whites; they are bad.

But in drawing that distinction, we good whites are being much too easy on ourselves and take credit for an opposition to racism which we do not deserve. Most whites, however well intentioned, harbor often not quite consciously white supremacist attitudes. I myself again and again catch myself in those attitudes. As a Jew who suffered serious losses during the Holocaust, I have good reason to be dead set against any kind of racist beliefs or behaviors. But very recently when I attended a convention of philosophers, I met a man whose books I had read and admired and discovered that he is African-American, which I had not known. I was just about to say "I did not know that you are a black" but fortunately caught myself at the last moment. Since he did very good work which I admired, I had of course assumed that he was white because deep down I believe that black philosophers were not good philosophers. I obviously know better because there are a number of black philosophers whose work is clearly superior to anything I myself have written. I admire their work tremendously and so does almost everybody else. I know for a fact that there are black philosophers whose work excels. But the deeply ingrained distrust remains untouched by actual experience, untouched by fact.

It was this distrust I was about to express to this man whom I admired. Did he notice my hesitation? Did he think to himself "here it comes again”?

I don't think that I am that different from many other "well-meaning" whites. We harbor serious anti-black prejudices so deeply ingrained that we don't always notice them. That allows us to deny their existence and think of ourselves as good white people. But they make black people unwilling to be around us because these prejudices are extremely hurtful.

To sum up: why don't African-Americans want to join organizations of well-meaning whites?

For three centuries African-Americans were treated with exemplary cruelty by whites. While those forms of oppression have disappeared they have been transmuted into other equally hurtful and inhumane forms. Racism is not dead it has just changed how it manifests itself. Even those of us who oppose racism sincerely cannot always stop ourselves from being seriously offensive, from giving voice to prejudices we abhor but nonetheless are host to.

And finally we are so inattentive that we do not know any of this. We do not understand significant facts about African American lives in the US. How can we say that we really care?

It is no wonder that African-Americans are very hesitant to join white organizations.