Cowardice

I have never been a fan of Toby Keith or Alan Jackson, and I don't listen to much country music. I'm more of a Neil Young kind of guy. So, let me illustrate the cowardice of the American public by looking at Young's music.

That may strike some as odd, given that Young's 2006 "Living with War" CD was a direct challenge to the Bush administration and the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But the key to my criticism is the year -- 2006. An anti-war record three years into the war should not be cause for uncritical accolades for a musician who claims to be a dissenter. We should be asking Neil Young, "Where were you in 2001?" The answer: He was writing and recording "Let's Roll," which was released on his 2002 CD, "Are You Passionate?"

That song is a tribute to the United Flight 93 passengers who intervened in the 9/11 hijacking of that plane and forced it down in Pennsylvania. One of those passengers, Todd Beamer, is said to have uttered the famous words, "let's roll" as they took that action. Even if we want to interpret the song apolitically, as a simple tribute to human courage, it adds to the cultural mythology about U.S. heroism, which contributes to U.S. arrogance and does nothing to correct the ignorance crucial to engineering people's consent for war. Beyond such a tribute, the song suggests a need for war:

My goal is not to single out Neil Young, but to ask us all to reflect on how easy it was for so many to fall in line with that hyper-patriotism after 9/11, and how easy it might again be in the future. The task of responsible citizens in the empire is not to critique illegal and immoral wars when they go sour, but to resist those wars of aggression from the start. With that in mind, Young's 2006 lyrics from "Living with War" ring just a bit hollow:

My cowardice

Again, while it's always easy to catalog the flaws of others, it's far more useful for all of us to attempt honest self-reflection, including those of us who opposed both wars from the start.

While I have worked hard over the years to learn about the Middle East and Central Asia, I recognize that it has been relatively easy given the resources and privileges available to me as a professor, and I also am aware of how much I still don't know about those regions and about other parts of the world. I struggle for humility and try to learn more, though there's ample room for criticism of me on those counts. But the virtue in which I feel most deficient these days is courage.

I have no problem defending the decision I made to speak out immediately after 9/11 and to contribute to anti-war organizing; at the time I thought those were the right things to do, and none of the criticism of those decisions -- from conservatives or liberals -- has ever offered a coherent moral or intellectual case against those actions. I am haunted not by what I did but by what I didn't' do, by my own cowardice. Why did those of us who opposed U.S. policy not take more risks and push harder? It's fine to be right in one's analysis; it's better to be right and effective. And, in retrospect, the only thing that might have been effective in impeding the mad rush to war was for those dissenting from that madness to take real risks, to put our bodies in the path of the war machine. Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, articulated this so passionately on the University of California campus in December 1964:

      There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Activists in the anti-war movement are sometimes accused of being cowards, of being afraid to fight. That is a slur designed to derail the anti-war movement's honest critique of (1) the violence of the powerful, (2) the propaganda the powerful use to persuade ordinary people to support the violence, and (3) the economic motives of the elites whose wealth and privilege depends on that violence. But those of us in the anti-war movement should ask ourselves: Have we built a political culture that provides the support we need to act with courage? Do we have the real courage necessary to undermine the U.S. empire? While people suffer and die around the world as a direct result of U.S. military and economic policies, what are we doing to stop the machine? Are we willing to put our bodies upon the gears, the wheels, the levers? If forced to choose between our relative affluence and real sacrifices that conscience might demand, how do we choose?

This is not a question on which I have standing to pontificate. The answer is simple: I have not done enough. We haven't done enough, because the machine is still grinding away, still grinding down people at home and around the world. Perhaps if anti-war activists had upped the ante and we had put our bodies in the way of the machine, the world would look very different tonight. Or perhaps all that would have happened was that we'd be in jail or dead because the machine would have rolled right along and rolled over us. There's no way to know.

But I do know this: In the months after 9/11, when the political stakes seemed so high, I never really seriously considered putting my body on the gears and I never heard others in my political circles seriously discuss such options. We had not built movements and a political culture in which that question was on the table for most of us. When I think about that today -- not that I didn't do something more drastic, but that I never really considered it -- I feel ashamed. That recognition doesn't lead me to want to rush out and risk my life to prove something, but rather reminds me that I should rethink the strategies with which I've grown comfortable.

Facing difficult realities

This rethinking requires facing some difficult realities, that lead me to these recommendations:

--Drop the arrogance and face a painful truth: The troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are not fighting for our freedom or for justice. Whatever the individuals who serve in the military believe or do -- and I realize that many believe they are defending us, and I know that many regularly act in compassionate and humane ways in the field -- the U.S. military is not a defensive force or a humanitarian institution. It is an offensive force that destroys vulnerable people in other societies to entrench the power of a small U.S. elite and deliver the short-term material benefits that come to middle- and working-class people in the empire.

--Reject the ignorance and face a disturbing truth: The institutions that claim to help us understand the world (schools, universities, and the corporate commercial media) are key components of a propaganda system that encourages ignorance on these vital matters. Whatever the individuals in these institutions believe or do -- and I realize that many believe they are part of a noble tradition, and I know many do challenge the conventional wisdom -- these institutions are not fundamentally educational in nature. They are ideological factories that the elite use to undermine critical thinking about how power operates.

--Find the courage to resist and face some obvious truths: The crises we face in this country and the world -- economic, political, cultural, ecological -- will not be fixed by electing a new president, nor will the culture be turned around by traditional progressive political strategies. I will vote, and I will continue organizing. But I do not believe that the oppressive systems that structure our world can be dismantled through those methods. We need to think creatively, and we need to come to terms with the likelihood that until those in power believe that those of us who want to challenge power are willing to take serious risks, the machine will continue grinding.

These problems we face are not the result of an idiosyncratic moment in history or of one particularly thuggish group of politicians in power at that moment. We are dealing with the predictable consequences of a world shaped by patriarchy, white supremacy, nationalism, and capitalism -- systems of coercion and control that are at odds with goals of justice and sustainability. That's not easy to face, but it can help us break out of the insular self-indulgence that is so tempting when one lives in the most affluent society in the history of the world.

So, the crucial question isn't, "Where were you when the world stopped turning?" The world didn't stop turning. The violence of 9/11 should be understood as another ugly episode in a relentlessly violent period of human history. Let's never forget that around the world people suffer 9/11-level violence on a regular basis. If that violence continues -- the visible violence of war, the quiet violence of economic inequality, and the deeper violence of humans against the living world -- it's not clear there will be a world left, at least not a world we would want to leave to our children.

So, let's ask another question: "Where are you as the world keeps turning?" As the violence continues, as the machine grinds on, where are we? What are we learning? What are we saying? What are we doing? What risks are we taking?

This is a time to realize that the dominant political institutions offer nothing beyond a tweaking of the same failed systems; in the middle of this presidential campaign, none of the major players are acknowledging the fundamental problems, let alone proposing meaningful changes in policy to acknowledge the problems. It's also time to realize that old approaches to progressive political organizing don't seem to be working; large scripted street demonstrations may have some benefits, for example, but they aren't significantly advancing the goals we claim to want to achieve.

Where do we go from here? I have no well-developed plan to present tonight. My gut feeling tells me that while we prepare to vote in this election and continue traditional organizing in the short term, we have to think about a long-term strategy focusing much more on local, small-scale endeavors that will foster solidarity during the empire's decline and could provide a soft landing when the empire is over. It doesn't mean giving up our obligations to the larger world; the 500 years of imperialism that helped create this affluent society impose a clear moral obligation on us to work for global justice. But we also have to recognize that the world in which we live is going to change dramatically in the coming decades, and we need to build new institutions and networks that can help us cope with those changes.

Some may find it depressing to focus on how often we have failed and the consequences of those failures. But that analysis also reminds us that we are moving into a potentially creative period. Letting go of the things with which we have become familiar is difficult, but it also opens up possibilities for something new, and that can be exciting. To have the courage to act on what we can know, with humility, is the only way to imagine bringing the imperial phase of U.S. history to a humane close and creating the conditions that could make justice and sustainability possible.

Let's return to the meaning of this day, September 11, which for so many evokes deep sadness and painful memories. Facing these harsh political realities and asking these questions does not dishonor those who died that day or trivialize the pain of their loved ones. It simply asks us to expand our moral circle, to recognize a common humanity and a common fate. To do that, we have to put aside our arrogance, correct our ignorance, and find our courage. That is hard, but that is the only way to imagine stopping the machine.

[A version of this essay was delivered to the "Struggle for Global Justice" film festival organized by the student group Azaad at the University of Texas at Austin on September 11, 2008.]

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