Saturday, August 20, 2005

Collateral language: A user's guide to America's new war - John Collins and Ross Glover, eds.

The trouble with lefty challenges to the way the world works is that for some reason, they can't get their position to be taken seriously either by the power elite nor the majority of the Joe and Jane Sixpacks. Heck, they can't even be heard. So what happens? A bunch of intelligent, concerned, and politically engaged people tell each other how misguided the people in charge are, how they're pulling the wool over the people's eyes, betraying the trust of democracy and freedom, and generally agreeing that something needs to be done.

Here we go again. This collection of essays, published shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, are fairly cogent and reasonable arguments against the status quo of the War on Terror(ism), and all the other things the US power elite does in order to ensure its global hegemony, like sponsoring the 'disappearance' of social democratic figures in South America in favour of despotic arseholes who'd rather kill off their own citizens in exchange for money and weapons from Uncle Sam.

The problem, and several of the essays get it, is that the discourse has been so effectively framed to support the dominant world view - America as a beacon of freedom and democracy, ill-defined terrorists (generally, whomsoever the American executive doesn't like) are threats, therefore high ho, it's off to war we go.

I had a rather leftish university education, and two things led to my distance from the cause, as it were: First, saving the world and advancing the cause of the proletariat, unless one is a suitably well-regarded professor or populist writer, does not the mortgage pay. Second, this problem of actually getting anything done sort of is disillusioning. Answers to the problem of being heard, of having an effect, are few and far between. The discourse has been so coopted and controlled by the elites, that when the lefties make a statment or organise a march, it's really easy for them to be marginalised as the nutters in the way of progress. Only the left takes the left seriously, unfortunately.

After that rather cynical rant, I must admit having a soft sport for the arguments in the book. Hell yeah, I think our civil liberties are being eroded in favour of a false sense of security. Hell no, I don't think bombing the bejesus out of poor hungry people is the way to global security. Hell no, I don't think accelerating the consumption of natural resources is the manifest destiny of the 'developed world'. Hell yeah, I think a nation ought to be able to protect its global trading interests (does anyone else want their copyright laws remodeled in America's image? Most Aussies don't seem to remember this part of the Free Trade Agreement). Hell yeah, I think people are being fooled by the power elites. Yeah, I think that innocent Iraqis, Afghanis, and Nicaraguans get just as dead as innocent Americans, and their families weep in sorrow and in anger just as much.

I am aware of populist resistance to the machinations of the global groups - WTO et al - but the stuff that doesn't make the headlines is the scary stuff. Genetic engineering and genome patenting and so on - we don't hear so much about that.

There's a bunch of non-mainstream news sources listed at the end of the book - I'll put in links to them here in the hope that maybe one or two more people see one of the alternative realities. The left needs to figure out how to play the power and discourse framing game with the big boys, though.

Interesting links from the book (page 223):
Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)