ideological criminal

Howard Friel and Richard Falk’s The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports Us Foreign Policy (Verso, 2004) is a blistering indictment of the New York Times coverage of foreign policy over the past fifty years, with particular emphasis on the years following September 11, 2001, the invasion and subsequent occupation and torture of Iraq, up until the manuscript’s deadline of June 2004. The book also examines the US backed coup attempt of Hugo Chavez, the World Court case of Nicaragua versus the US, the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam war. It chronicles the paper’s record of ignoring international law (from September 11 2001 to March 21 2003, the editorial page never mentioned the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in the seventy editorials on Iraq), the consequences of it’s editorial policy of “non-crusading” journalism (as “former reporter and a former editor [John L. Hess and Aurthur Gelb, respectively] at the Time have pointed out, the Times applied its ‘non-crusading’ standard of editorial policy equally to housing corruption in New York City and to Hitler’s campaign in Europe”), and its legacy of “impartial” news coverage, which leaves the Times ideological on both sides of any given issue (see the chapter on Michael Ignatieff’s case for and against torture before and after Abu Graib for a devastating example of this).But more importantly, Friel and Falk highlight the relevant facts and considerations that necessarily become unspeakable by extension of the Times’ neglect of international law. For example, the following facts could not be uttered in regards to the US invasion of Iraq without appeal to international law, paraphrasing from the text:

• The US and UK repeatedly threatened the use of force against a UN member state without Security Council authorization in violation of UN Charter Article 2(4), which stipulates, “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state […]”.
• No Security Council resolution issued since 1991 has authorized the threat or use of force against Iraq.
• Iraq has not attacked any state since 1990; it has never attacked or threatened to attack the US or UK.
• Claims that Iraq intended to attack the US or any state indirectly by providing WMD to terrorist networks were speculative and self-serving and lacked credible evidence.
• The “preventive” use of force, including an armed attack against Iraq, as a response to prospective terrorist threat from Iraq violated the UN Charter and fundamental principles of international law with respect to the prohibition of the use of force.
• Failure to comply with disarmament obligations is insufficient as cause for threat or use of force according to UN Charter Article 51.
• No Security Council resolution has stipulated failure to comply with disarmament obligations as being sufficient as cause for threat or use of force.
• The resort to force in the absence of a resolution and any credible evidence of an imminent threat of armed attack violated not only the UN Charter; it also constituted a war of aggression and, thus, a crime against peace under the Nuremberg precedent.

All of these points, of course, are central to any evaluation of US policy towards Iraq, and even though the US “in large part established [the Nuremberg] precedent as an expression of global condemnation of Nazi aggression, the Bush administration not only violated Nuremberg-related law by invading Iraq, it do so without even a mention from the New York Times that such laws were violated or even existed.” Thus the Times is guilty of “not only a conspiracy but the commission of a war of aggression under international law.”

So, dual to their exposition on the Times is a full measure of US foreign policy against the rubric of international law. As they state in the Introduction:

It is our judgment, supported by a consensus of international law experts from around the world, that the United States government has repeatedly violated international law with respect to its war-making over the past half-century or so, resulting in unjustifiable death and destruction, as well as diminishing the quality of world order.

The exposition of a case against the last fifty years of US foreign policy according to international law makes the book worth reading in and of itself. The authors first citation is to a privately circulated memorandum by the international law expert, Howard N. Meyer, “On Not Taking International Law Seriously”. The essay lays out the book, more or less, in miniature, both in terms of the US violation of international law and the Times silence. I was able to find an expanded small collection of letters by Meyer, “No Regrets About Ignoring International Law”, which is available as a doc from the Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions. I’ve made it available in pdf and html on ideological criminal. If you only have a minute, read the essay. If you have a couple hours (and you should), read the book, it’s good.

One can tell that the book was put together in a fairly hasty manner. It’s clear that the book is covering events up until the final moments of publishing. There are typographical problems. There are editing problems. The two authors never seem to find a common voice. There are very clearly two tones in the book, the predominant one of international legalese and another more impolitic one that shoots from the hip with awkward analogies (you decide which is which). There is a fair amount of copy & paste from previous critiques by the author with regards to US foreign policy and international law, but none if it is unwelcome or unnecessary. Friel and Falk have a companion volume, Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East, and I would expect a fair amount of redundancy (or perhaps it is more accurate to say “scaffolding”) in this volume. But so what? The books are interesting beyond any superficial flaws. Moreover, the framework of international law is essential to our understanding of current events yet completely absent from mainstream analysis. Friel and Falk are able to speak comprehensively about current events and their context in a timely way. They offer a view of what newspapers could look like if they upheld their mandate.

Friel and Falk conclude by suggesting an editorial policy to replace its current “non-crusading” one with one borrowing language from the federal judiciary, which applies “strict scrutiny” on issues of fundamental Constitutional rights, whereas a criteria of “rational basis” is applied for limiting non-fundamental rights for the sake of public health and safety. So for example,

[T]he Times applied, at best, only a ‘rational basis’ test to whether the United States should bomb North Vietnam in response to the reported attacks on US ships in the Tonkin Gulf, when a ’strict scrutiny’ test would have showed that bombing North Vietnam violated international law under these circumstances. Applying a strict scrutiny standard journalistically to the US involvement in Vietnam, beginning at least since 1954, might have prevented, or at least discouraged, the full-blown war in Vietnam that followed, because it might have made the government’s twenty-year record of violating international law and misrepresenting important facts with respect to Vietnam impossible to sustain, or even initiate.

In short, an editorial policy of “strict scrutiny” would apply the most rigorous standards of journalistic review to news events and conditions that implicate war and peace, human survival, human rights, the global environment, and fundamental principles of the UN Charter and US Constitution.

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

When I was in Frankfurt in late September, I went to the Museum für Moderne Kunst and happened to catch the opening of Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. I was blown away. Simon’s photography is both stunning in its asthetics and astounding in its subjects. Moreover, the irony of having to travel to Germany to get a glimpse of a young and powerful artist exposing the unseeable in American culture and society was not lost on me. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but I knew of Simon’s earlier work from a New Yorker article about her book The Innocents, whose subjects have been accused and convicted of crimes they did not commit, often photographing them at the site of the crime. Simon’s work is smart beyond her years; each piece carries with it its full semantics and rattling insight into the pathology of everyday American life, and yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The MMK was also exhibited photographs from Larry Clark’s haunting Tulsa, which documents methamphetamine use among Clark and his friends, including a photo of a young pregnant woman shooting up meth. Another connection I didn’t make at the time was that Clark is the director of the film Kids.

Jeremy Scahill won me over when we was reporting for Democracy Now! on the 2004 presidential election. Wesley Clark was in New Hampshire campaigning just days before the primary. The usual campaign coverage is a about as informative as a dog turd. Everyone is in softie mode– journalists, politicians, public citizens. And in the midst of it, a young reporter walks up to Clark who is making his way down the street kissing babies, etc. And Scahill opens: “In Yugoslavia, you used cluster bombs and depleted uranium…”. (See the rest of the confrontation here).

So when his book Blackwater was announced, about the mercenary firm of the same name made famous by images of burnt remains of employees hanging over the Euphrates, I knew I had to read it. All in all, the book was great. It is clear and sober, yet a pleasure to read (Not nearly as academic–and therefore boring–as Peter W. Singer’s Corporate Warriors, although I recommend that book highly for a thorough and detailed portrait of how the system of mercenary armies arose and now operates, politically, financially, and historically). Scahill has a written voice that is far less confrontational than his spoken one, and yet the cutting analysis is still there. He is someone who thinks, and sadly we can’t say this about many of the journalists out there. Scahill represents hope for the future of investigative journalism. And unlike some of his colleagues, he checks his emotional baggage at the door, giving us a book far more substantial and potentially influential.

In fact, one of the few criticisms I have of the book are not about Scahill’s writing, but the publisher’s marketing. It’s published by Nation Books, and is blurbed by (among others) Joseph Wilson, Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Arundhati Roy. In other words, the usual gang. None of them have much expertise in the field, and all convey a sense of “yeah, another howler from the Left.” Anyone who makes it past the cover is already a believer. But in between the covers, the book is far more accessible than to just Mother Jones readers. It should have been put out by a university press and blurbed by actual experts (like Peter W. Singer). It deserves to be taken seriously.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the book are the occasional sprinklings of observations from Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has a way of calling a spade a shovel—with all the euphemisms and opaque language surrounding the thriving mercenary industry, Ratner has a way of getting the language right. In speaking of the unprecedented deployment of private mercenaries domestically immediately following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, Scahill quotes Ratner (page 332):

These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights.

Yeah, what he said.

Below is a brutal and hilarious affront to the Brandeis administration, written as a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, The Hoot, in response to the recent actions taken against Donald Hindley, professor of Politics. The incident is recounted in Inside Higher Ed’s article Sending in the Class Monitor.

Letter to the editor: Response to human apparatchiks

Dear Editor,

I was distressed to read that the administration is assigning human apparatchiks to monitor Brandeis classrooms to assure linguistic conformity and political orthodoxy. Surely, the administration knows that the technology of authoritarian surveillance has advanced far beyond the primitive methods employed by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Erich Honecker.

A laptop and a webcam can do the job far more cheaply and efficiently. Just position one unit per class in the back of the room, then patch the feed into a mainframe system located in Bernstein-Marcus. This simple expedient would not only provide an accurate audio-visual record of conversational malfeasance by faculty and students, but the real-time surveillance would allow the administration to dispatch agents immediately into the classroom to stop the utterance of verboten words or ideas.

-Prof. Thomas Doherty (AMST).

Reading bell hooks today, I came across this:

In retrospect, I see that in the last twenty years I have encountered many folks who say they are committed to freedom and justice for all even though the way they live, the values and habits of being they institutionalize daily, in public and private rituals, help maintain the culture of domination, help create an unfree world. In the book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King, Jr. told the citizens of this nation, with prophetic insight, that we would be unable to go forward if we did not experience a “true revolution of values.” He assured us that

the stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.

Today, we live in the midst of that floundering. We live in chaos, uncertain about the possibility of building and sustaining community. The public figures who speak the most to us about a return to old-fashioned values embody the evils King describes. They are most committed to maintaining systems of domination—racism, sexism, class exploitation, and imperialism. They promote a perverse vision of freedom that makes it synonymous with materialism. They teach us to believe that domination is “natural,” that it is right for the strong to rule over the weak, the powerful over the powerless. What amazes me is that so many people claim not to embrace these values and yet our collective rejection of them cannot be complete since they prevail in our daily lives.

From Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

The Yes Men have struck again (photos, videos, and links):

Imposters posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives delivered an outrageous keynote speech to 300 oilmen at GO-EXPO, Canada’s largest oil conference, held at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta, today [June 14, 2007].

The speech was billed beforehand by the GO-EXPO organizers as the major highlight of this year’s conference, which had 20,000 attendees. In it, the “NPC rep” was expected to deliver the long-awaited conclusions of a study commissioned by US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. The NPC is headed by former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, who is also the chair of the study. (See link at end.)

In the actual speech, the “NPC rep” announced that current U.S. and Canadian energy policies (notably the massive, carbon-intensive exploitation of Alberta’s oil sands, and the development of liquid coal) are increasing the chances of huge global calamities. But he reassured the audience that in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could “keep fuel flowing” by transforming the billions of people who die into oil.

As Jon puts it on the heads list:

The Yes men have consistently found some of the best ways to deal with hard hitting topics. Their use of humor to humiliate organizations is brilliant, and we should all be thankful to them. If only there was more of this going on. It seems that the use of truthful information and satire against blatantly assholic organizations really has potential (especially when it’s directed at a large group of their sheep).

Or, as Marissa succintly puts it:

These guys don’t fuck around, and they are smart and hilarious to boot.

I first came across the Yes Men at an art exhibit at MASS MoCA. They were running a video projector of The Yes Men documentary. In it, the Yes Men give a talk at a WTO “future of textiles” meeting in Finland. During the talk, Andy tears of his velcro-seemed business suit to reveal a golden body suit. A large golden phallus inflates from between his legs (at the exhibit, they had the suit fitted on a mannequin with phallus constantly inflating and deflating). The phallus sends signals to devices implanted in the textile workers anuses and gives immediate feedback to the boss donning the suit. It’s one of the funniest and smartest actions I’ve ever seen.

For a limited time, ballistichelmet is now hosting the movie for your viewing pleasure.

Jon also pointed out a recent documentary, Bringing Down A Dictator, he saw on the student movement Otpor (Serbian for “Resistance”) that helped bring down Milosevic in 2000 using humor and satire in a similar way to the Yes Men.

A few more links to Yes Men videos (thanks to Jon):

• Democracy Now! video - The Yes Men have struck again. On Tuesday, a man claiming to be a representative of Halliburton gave a presentation at the “Catastrophic Loss” conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Amelia Island, Florida. Conference attendees include leaders from the insurance industry. We speak with the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum, who took part in the hoax. (transcript).
• This is a little satire from the Yes Men fooling around and seeing if people will sign a petition in favour of preemptively annulling all gay marriages. very funny!
• The Yes Men strike again. Impersonating a Dow Chemical spokesman on BBC, “Jude Finisterra” promises a huge compensation for the thousands of victims of the Bhopal disaster in which Dow Chemical’s subsidiary Union Carbide India was responsible for in 1984.
• The Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum is interviewed after the media finds out about his Dow Chemical impersonation
• The Yes men and their take on the oil industry.

Again I am reminded of the situationalist spirit and the book Lipstick Traces seems all the more relevant to the best of today’s activism.

Tanya Reinhart has apparently died of a stroke in New York. Reinhart was one of the few critics of Israel that I felt could consistently be relied upon for sharp, correct, and just analysis of Israeli policy and advocacy for Palestinian rights. So many other intellectual big hitters have let me down, but not her. Her books, Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948 and The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003, have been listed on ideological criminal’s very short “Recommended Books” list since the beginning. Israel/Palestine in particular is perhaps the best account of the conflict and a must read for anyone interested in the context of the occupation and a way forward to a just peace. Concise, unflinching, demystifying and well-written, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Her voice will be missed. The world needs far more of her intellectual integrity and sense of justice.

Noam Chomsky, her PhD adviser, has written a eulogy which appeared on CounterPunch today, and Democracy Now! played excerpts from a 2004 interview and a February 2007 talk given as part of the Israel Apartheid Week.

My good friend Aaron Fishbone has just published a book, The Struggle for Water: Increasing Demands on a Vital Resource. The synopsis from Powell’s reads:

This title brings together a wide variety of materials on the issues and controversies surrounding the complex subject of water ownership and freshwater privatization. It presents a general overview of the state of the world’s fresh water and offers articles on both sides of the privatization controversy. Sections also deal with cooperation and conflict over water resources, international trade in water, and the growing struggle between farms and cities over this scarce resource. The anthology concludes with an appendix of primary source documents from a diversity of sources representing all major viewpoints on the issue. A general introduction and introductory essays to each chapter give the reader the necessary background to put the issue in perspective.

While I was reading Ali Abunimah’s excellent book One Country, I came across a passage about Danae Elon’s film Another Road Home, which I put at the top of my Netflix queue and recently watched. Elon is the daughter of the noted Israeli author and former Ha’aretz correspondent Amos Elon, an outspoken critic of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. The film centers around Danae’s relationship with Mahmoud Obeidallah, who she knows as Musa, a Palestinian man who came to the Elon house shortly after the Six Days War in 1967 looking for work. Danae’s mother, Beth, hired him on the spot, needing help with the young Danae. Musa worked 18 hour days at the Elon house for the next 20 years, essentially raising Danae. Musa had 11 children of his own and he used the money from working at the Elon house to pay for his six sons to attend university in the US and to build a home in Battir. Musa raised Danae until she left to attend NYU to study film in 1991, after which she lost contact with him. The documentary, which takes place shortly after September 11, 2001, chronicles her efforts to reconnect with Musa and the Obeidallah family, many of whom were living in Patterson, New Jersey, at the time.

She is able to find many of Musa’s sons in Patterson and reconnect with them. They share a strange relationship—estranged from their father by his long hours at the Elon house, they came to know and envy the details of Danae’s childhood, while she remained relatively ignorant of theirs (she didn’t, for example, know the correct spelling of “Obeidallah” or that Musa’s real name was Mahmoud) and was the object of Musa’s attention and affection.

Danae’s parents, who had been living in Italy, moved to New York when Amos is offered a visiting position at NYU and Danae brings them to dinner with the Obeidallah’s. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is seeing Danae’s father, Amos, deal with the situations and questions that Danae forces upon him. He is reluctant to meet with the sons. In the car before they arrive, he asks Danae if they are extremists, or if they have beards, which he takes to indicate being extremists. He is fearful of their politics and unnerved by the intimacy of the encounter. At another point he rationalizes why like-minded Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs don’t spend time together—it is too painful, he argues. You feel that he is apologizing for himself. He is able to see the injustice of the Israeli position, yet he can’t bring himself to engage Palestinians as equals. The film reveals several sources of hypocrisy in Amos—a hypocrisy he is clearly aware of and that causes him a certain amount of guilt. In a telling moment in the film he states that in many ways Musa is a better man than “we are”. He hesitates at the end of this sentence. Clearly, he began to say “I am”, but changed it to “we”. The “we” can be taken to mean either his family, whom he’s addressing, or Israeli Jews in general, but by abstracting the claim, he softens the self-criticism and absolves himself of personal responsibility.

Shortly after Danae meets with Musa’s sons in Patterson, Musa decides to travel to the US to see his sons and Danae. Unable to travel through the main airport in Israel, he must take the arduous path through Jordan. His journey highlights the inequalities between Israeli Jews and Palestinians in their freedom of movement. He eventually arrives, clearly bone-weary. He confides in Danae that he truly came to see her. You often feel sorry for Musa’s children who seem always to be of second import to her (and doubly sorry for Musa’s daughters, who are hardly mentioned and it seems to go without saying that they were not candidates for schooling in the US—the great prize they paid equally for by the absence of their father).

Danae brings Musa to dinner with her parents. Again her parents seem uncomfortable by the situation, although they act warm toward Musa. When Danae begins to broach the subject of her childhood, they jump to frame the conversation as complicated, political, and to a degree unintelligible. They are ever fearful of what is “political” and they essentially keep Danae from posing her questions about her family, its contradictions, and the relationship they share to the Obeidallah family. The conversation epitomizes a theme that develops throughout the film. Danae views the conflict as utterly personal and familial, whereas her parents see it as political and national. Danae always treats the occupation from a secondary perspective—as it affects her and the Obeidallah family, and never directly as a subject in its own right. When her father tries to place the sons into notions such as “extremists” and “radicals” she responds that she doesn’t know what those words mean—she knows only the people in question, not her father’s notions. She highlights Israeli home destructions only through its impact on the Obeidallah’s in Battir. Likewise, Palestinian restrictions on movement through road blocks and lack of access to airports is shown through Musa harrowing journeys to and from Palestine and the fact that the sons cannot return to Battir, even though they have built homes there.

In the end, Musa must return to Battir. Danae, being the only one who can easily travel with him, accompanies him on the trip. They must fly to Jordan where they spend the night waiting for the bridge crossing the border to open. They are interrogated for five hours by an Israeli intelligence officer—it is suspect to them that a young Israeli Jew who served in the army is traveling with an elderly Palestinian who has never been arrested and whose six sons have never been wanted by the police. Their cab navigates through the long lines at the checkpoints with uncertainty. Through the windows, the camera shows ambulances unloading their occupants who must take another ambulance on the other side of the checkpoint. Once Musa is safely home, Danae, a person of priveledge in Israel, is able to get on a flight out of the airport and return to New York.

The story is one of personal history and the reconciliation of two families’ past. Danae approaches the subject with earnest conviction and openness. It’s clear that the larger geopolitical conflict reverberates many aspects of the personal conflict; although I’m not certain this was the filmmaker’s intenion, it is surely effective. The Obeidallahs have every reason for resentment and vengeance, but they accept Danae warmly. Both parties address, rather than dismiss, their common history and listen to each other’s—often contradictory—narrative. It’s painful at times, but they emerge with a strong bond and respect for the other. Danae’s perspective is radically different from her parents, people who are very much on the side of social justice in Israel/Palestine, but who find it too painful to deal with directly. Danae and the Obeidallah’s represent what I think is a new generation of thinkers on the issue of the occupation of Palestine. They are willing to listen to each other to an extent totally unacceptable to the previous generation. They are willing to consider solutions which were completely unthinkable to their predecessors. If there is any hope for peace and reconciliation in Israel/Palestine, it is in this generation; those who are willing to question the existing assumptions, to listen to and value the narratives of their counterparts, and to find another road home.

Last night, I spent my snowy Valentine’s evening at the Cambridge Forum’s hosting of Chris Hedges, who spoke about his latest book, American Fascists: the Christian Right and War on America (right now, the #3 bestseller on Powell’s). He spent fifteen years at the New York Times and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. He left the paper in 2003 shortly after the furor he caused in his Commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois (text available here, video available on YouTube: part 1, 2, 3, 4) in which he spoke against the war in Iraq. He was booed and jeered. His mic was cut twice. Finally, he was asked to leave and escorted off campus by security. He was denounced in a Wall Street Journal editorial. He was issued a formal reprimand by the New York Times. He was also right.

The thesis of his new book, American Fascists, is that there is a strong parallel between historical fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s and the contemporary dominionists movement—the radical Christian Right—in the US. (Hedges makes an important distinction in terms: dominionists are often mislabeled evangelicals or fundamentalists, but Hedges argues evangelicals and fundamentalists have historically advocated the withdrawal from secular society and away from the structures of political power. Dominionists seek the opposite, to highjack power and create a Christian empire).

Hedges’s talk began with a short memoir of his life growing up in rural New York state. His father was a Presbyterian minister and an early activist for gay rights, including same sex marriage. At the time Hedges was an undergraduate at Colgate, there was no gay student group. His father, who was speaking and counseling many of the gay and lesbian students, tried to convince them to start one. When he couldn’t find anyone to found the group, he turned to his son and told him he would have to do it, irrespective that he was not in fact gay. Hedges did found the club and his subsequent lunches were marked by the cashier calling him a faggot after each time he paid for his meals. He made it his undergraduate mission to seduce the cashier’s girlfriend.

Hedges would go on to earn a Masters degree from Harvard Divinity School, with the goal of being ordained and following in his father’s foot steps. (During the course of his talk, it would become clear that Hedges was endowed with the oratory skills of a preacher—as one audience member would later put it during the question and answer period: the boy can leave the seminary, but the seminary may not leave the boy). It was during his days in seminary that he would first be warned of the threat of Christian fascism; his ethics professor, aged 80, presciently said that when they, the students, were his age, they would be fighting a fascist movement from the Christian Right. At the time, it seemed unlikely to them, but this was a man who would know. He went to Germany in 1935 and ‘36 to work with the underground anti-Nazi church, The Confessing Church. He was detained by the Gestapo, who suggested he return to the US. He took the suggestion, leaving on a night train, and smuggled hours of film footage of the pro-Nazi churches he had accumulated. Placing framed photos of Hitler in his suitcases, the film went unnoticed by the border police beneath them.

It was only after he graduated that he decided to become a journalist, although he remains a believer. He spoke about his own faith, which informs his deep humility in the face of the unknown. He learned that the word of God is unknowable, and that those who speak for God, those self-appointed prophets, were dangerous. He learned that doubt and belief were not mutually exclusive. He learned that the Bible was not literally true: written by men, inconsistent and certainly fallible, it represented a history of people’s struggle with the unknown, rather the answers. Other religions, seen through this light, represent similar struggles through the unknown, equally valuable, equally correct.

Although I’m not a believer, Hedges values and ideals were close to my own. That his faith could inform his sense of doubt, his value of diversity and tolerance, his lack of righteousness, and his sense of struggle to do good with humility were refreshing, and inspiring. Having such belief, one can understand Hedges’s anger with the Christian popular movement in this country that teaches (selectively) the literal word of the Bible, that castigates homosexuals as moral deviants, that partitions the world into the saved and the damned, that teaches against science, against doubt, and against rational discourse—the struggle for understanding at the heart of Hedges’s belief. Cocksure and righteous, they seek to impose their will on the rest of us. In their view, we shall either be converted or eliminated.

American Fascists starts by quoting in full Umberto Eco’s essay “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen ways of looking at a blackshirt“, which lists fourteen characteristics of Ur-Fascism. Among them is a cult of tradition, a rejection of modernism, a despise of intellectualism and thinking, a rejection of dissent, disagreement and diversity, a culture of machismo and heroism, a contempt for the weak, and systematic use of newspeak. Hedges makes the case that the dominionist movement posses all of these characteristics.

Perhaps more important than Hedges’s observation that there are parallels between dominionist and fascist movements, is that he has a powerful analysis of where this movement comes from and how to deal with its rise. Hedges observes a culture of despair. Economic despair in the US has left large swaths of the population despondent. There is a cultural and social emptiness. Capitalism has robbed us of our spirit, bankrupted our communities, and exploited every aspect of human life. Reality has become unbearable and dominionism puts forth a constructed alternate reality that offers reprieve. Paramount to maintaining this alternative reality is an isolation from the outside world, hence the insular structures of Christian media, community, and values that undermine critical thinking.

Hedges believes the people involved in this community to be good, earnest, and hard working people, but overwhelmed by personal despair, tragedy, and loneliness. In many ways, I see Hedges as a perfect supplement to Richard Dawkins. He is everything I found lacking in Dawkins. Whereas Dawkins is somewhat of a geopolitical ignoramus, Hedges has a deep understanding and firsthand experience. Whereas Dawkins’s religious prowess is unsophisticated, Hedges’s is not. And whereas Dawkins sees the cause for belief to be mystical, irrational, and superstitious, Hedges can explain why people embrace these things, with a basis in socioeconomic factors. On the other hand, the subject of their criticism is largely the same, and both are fighting for a tolerant society that values reason, science, diversity, etc.; their goals are largely in common. Dawkins sees “moderate” religious institutions and the unfounded respect—the off-limits status of belief—as partly to blame for allowing such bigoted and irrational movements to survive, while Hedges likewise claims that government, higher education, religious and charitable institutions have wrongly allowed the dominionists room to grow. Dawkins, like Hedges, identifies many of the same characteristics that Eco lists, and both see the dire consequences of this movement coming to power, but it is only Hedges who appeals to a convincing historical analogy.

Hedges acknowledges the massive inroads into power the dominionist movement have made, as seen by the spread of homo- and xenophobic legislation, the cowing of political heavy hitters such as John McCain who used to lambaste the intolerance of the Christian Right, and the “[f]orty-five senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives [who have] earned approval ratings of 80 to 100 percent from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups: the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council.” However, he still understands that as of yet the Dominionist movement is largely a marginal one. The worry, Hedges contends, is that the movement is well poised to be a revolutionary political force in the event of a large-scale terrorist attack, a series of ecological disasters, or an economic meltdown. Faced with crisis, the country may turn to the protection and comfort of the alternative reality offered by the dominionists and we will witness the destruction of American democracy in its wake. The stuff of V for Vendetta would no longer be an abstraction.

The movement has already secured a vanguard military body in Blackwater USA—the mercenary firm founded by dominionist millionaire Erik Prince—which employs some 20,000 mercenaries. (Incidentally, Jeremy Scahill, formerly of Democracy Now!, has a new book on the firm, due out soon: Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He recently spoke on the topic in an interview on DN!). Their handiwork can be seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans, the latter of which Hedges believes to offer a grim glimpse of a future under the boot of dominionism, with the oppression usually reserved for others visited upon ourselves. Hedges also observes that despite the movements isolation from, and condemnation of, almost every US institution, there are two exceptions to this rule: the police and the armed forces. They actively recruit their followers to join the state troopers and local police and to enlist in the military, they hold supportive rallies and are constantly lavishing praise upon both, and they have penetrated the chaplaincy of the armed forces to an alarming degree (claiming a huge percentage of the chaplain positions—50 to 70 percent if I recall correctly).

The paradox of tolerance, as Hedges sees it, has allowed the intolerant to amass more power than can safely be ignored. Media, universities, intellectuals, churches, and the government must stand up and oppose this movement. Beyond an intellectual confrontation, a legal and legislative battle must be waged by enacting hate crime laws as has been done in Canada. Hedges noted that on several occassions at the dominionist rallies he attended, the speaker would make a remark to the effect of eradicating gays, or immigrants, or some other ‘degenerate’ segment of the population, and then sneer and laugh and remark ‘we could never say these things in Canada, they’d throw us in jail’, which Hedges takes as evidence that they [Canadians] may be sane. I’m not so sure. Incendiary speech is not protected under the First Amendment in this country, although the burden of proof (that of ‘intent’) is extremely difficult to meet, but I would be very skeptical of any speech law reform. With any law, as with war, it is difficult to judge the consequences from the outset. I am so skeptical that reasonable reforms could be enacted that could not be made through interpretation to apply to legitimate speech. Hedges charges the movement with sedition and supposes this a legitimate ground for silencing the movement, but sedition should be protected in my opinion. What could be charged against the dominionists that could not, perhaps through contortion and misrepresentation, be charged against the Black Panthers or Malcolm X, for example? There is no need, in my mind to meddle with these things. Our position can overcome through the engagement of rationality alone, not with the movement itself, which is clearly irrational, but with policy makers, with institutions that can exert influence, and with the populace. The KKK was not defeated through hate speech legislation, but a raising of the collective conscientiousness. The same will suffice here.

But more importantly, as Hedges offers in his analysis, the surest way of defeating this movement is to fold back into the mainstream these large swaths of discontented people. A new New Deal is needed. Economic prosperity, jobs, healthcare, and security (in the real sense of the word) are needed. If we can address the very real causes of despair, these utopian movements will simply vanish. Historically, the US industrialists of the ’20s and ’30s saw the corporatism of Mussolini’s fascism as an attractive way to fight Roosevelt’s New Deal. Contemporary corporatism, which is the reluctant midwife of the dominionist movement, likewise needs to be confronted and challenged. As Hedges points out, much of this country looks like the third world and failing to address the causes of despair is simply, as he says, self immolation. The lessons of American Fascists are, as an audience member said, like a fire alarm in the night.