An Article by:

Ben Tanosborn

This past Sunday another citizen of the world, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, started his walk in that never-ending pilgrimage we refer to as immortality.  And he did it, not just as a laureate man of letters, but as a man of well thought-out choices, conscience and true humanity; a man who proudly and joyfully accepted his Russian beginnings, but also conceded highest priority to dignity and humanity as inalienable rights for every man.

News of his death came to me over the Internet as I was reading an article by AP writers Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang, “Seoul probes civilian ‘massacres’ by US,” that had just come over the wire.  Thoughts from those two pieces of news were running parallel in my then emotionally-charged mind: here is a man searching for truth (Solzhenitsyn) and, running parallel to it, here is truth searching for a man, some American great man acknowledging that truth… and finding no one.

While reading data of the horrific victimization, actually murder, of countless Korean civilians – as usual, mostly women, children and old people – at the hands of the US military during that 1950-1 period, I couldn’t help but think of the Gulag created by Joseph Stalin, “the whiskered one,” as described by Solzhenitsyn, and emulated militarily by followers of our own American empire: first in Korea, later in Vietnam and, these days, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

How many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, innocent civilians were strafed by bullets, or napalmed, in Korea?  Indiscriminately, yes, for our soldiers couldn’t tell “one gook from the next,” as they claimed… from the North, in flight to the South… or simply trying to find safety, refuge…anywhere.  Over 200 incidents; some, like the one that happened at No Gun Ri, where survivors estimate 400 Koreans died at American hands, have been kept under wraps from the American citizenry; all the military brass needed to do is just classify any and all the facts with the “secret” or “top secret” stamps thus letting the angry-radioactivity cool off, as if converting it to depleted uranium or denying it to be uranium at all, until two or three generations have passed.  By then, who will be charged with war crimes?  It’s not a cover-up since Americans pretend, and some actually believe, that we never engage in torture or cover-ups.  The White House has for decades given a free hand to the Pentagon… after all, crimes of war “just happen,” and the only crime Americans are not permitted to commit is one which may result in lowering the morale of the troops; or one bringing dishonor to the country.

Then I thought of Solzhenitsyn, and his recollection of being an officer in the Soviet Army, observing the inhumane treatment that the Soviets had inflicted on the Germans, military and civilians, in 1945 as WWII came to a close; perhaps crimes that many would excuse as retribution for what the Germans had done years earlier to them; a retribution that he would not find acceptable. 

Today’s counterpoint is simply the ease in which the American military accepts crimes of war, often candy-coating them and making them PR-acceptable, as simply “collateral damage.”  Our American military has gained vast experience at decriminalizing many repugnant acts of war during the past six decades, from No Gun Ri to My Lai to Fallujah, expecting future generations to be the ones passing judgment, if at all.  It will probably be three decades or more before we get to know the truth of what happened in Fallujah, Haditha and some of the other unresolved war crimes committed in the Middle East.  Documents will then be declassified as memories fade and many, or most, of the witnesses to the war crimes, as well as the perpetrators, are dead.  Also, after much of the anger in the victims’ families has subsided.

Solzhenitsyn was a loving son of Russia and its history; but his humanness made him a great citizen of the world.  He denounced what to him needed to be denounced in every facet of life, whether it pertained to the inhumanity of man towards man; or the way modern society was evolving, including such areas as music.  To his regret, and in spite of his desire for privacy, he was used in propagandistic ways by men he did not hold in high esteem, such as Ronald Reagan; and even criticized by many liberal-secularists who failed to understand that his acceptance of religion in the form of Christian Russian Orthodoxy had little to do with faith, and the inhumanity that faith may have caused, and much to do with history and tradition as basis for change.

Why is it that here in America we don’t produce notable figures, heroes of humankind?
Do we prefer not to be “snitches” to those who commit crimes, not to be “traitors” to the ugly face our country may show at times; this, when in truth we really are, maybe without realizing it, whitewashers of crimes… and traitors to our own humanity?
 

Tags: activism, empire, foreign policy, imperialism, military, religion, social responsibility, war
Categories: Commentary, Empire, Foreign Policy, Religion, Imperialism, military
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An Article by:

Russell Cole

Bad for Democracy is scheduled for publication in September of 2008

In order to ascertain the significance of the thesis propounded by Dana D. Nelson in her manuscript, Bad for Democracy, it is useful to first characterize the way in which American democracy is perceived according to the collective representations, instructing the political understandings possessed by the preponderance of Americans.

American mythology instructs us that the composition and ratification of the Constitution serve as historical markers for the solidification of American democracy. According to this narrative, prior to the Revolution, there was a growing democratic fervor. Ultimately, this ground swelling of radical democratic sentiment resulted in a rebellion against Monarchy and colonialism. Following the independence of the American Colonies, the devotion to democratic ideals continued; albeit, in a form that was reckless and unsustainable due to its unmanageability. As a consequence, the Founders of the Nation saw fit to innovate a political structure that both manifested democratic principles as well as a state with a workable governability. From there on, as this orthodox history suggests, the Nation was set along a course leading to the continual improvement of its democratic fixtures.

In contradiction to this grand mythology, Nelson provides us with a concise – although thorough – counter-narrative that expresses aspects to American historicity that run in opposition to the premises underlying the standard master-narrative. Central to her thesis is the recognition that the historical trends in American politics have not conformed to a trajectory headed toward an increasingly enhanced democratic embodiment. As Nelson quite correctly indicates, the practice of radical democracy and the cultural attributes with which it is associated – those behavioral habits that dispose the citizenry so that they take an active role in the ongoing affairs of government – had a more complete expression during the Colonial epoch than in subsequent periods of American history.

With the ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a centralized office wielding executive powers, a trend was set in motion that is comparable to the political transformation undergone by the Roman Republic during the Roman Revolution. That is, similarly to the Roman Emperor, whose ascendancy to power was associated with popular land reform, the Presidency in American governance has been interpreted as a political mechanism offering representation to the populous. Presidentialism, as Nelson terms it – which is defined as the stature that has been infused into the semiology attached to the conception of the High Office – has been, from its inception, increasingly interpreted as a vehicle for the realization of the popular will in the body of public policy.

Even more, the concept of Presidency has acquired a semantic value, adding to the concept a latent notion of paternalism. We, as citizens, are all too willing to submit to this parental authority; not only during times of uncertainly, peril, and calamity, but during times unmarked by social drama, because we see him as the personification of the democracy that we collectively form as Americans. When the President appears powerful and impacting, we relish his strong paternal presence because we conflate it with our collective contributions, as citizens, to American polity.

However, it is precisely this quality that is assigned to the Presidency – an attribution that causes the Presidential incumbent to be perceived not simply as the outcome of democratic process, but as the carrier of the vitality belonging to the body politic – that contributes to the cultivation of behavioral dispositions, rendering the citizenry democratically disinclined. We confuse our ability to engage in a ritualized affair – where we cast a single vote that infinitesimally affects the outcome of a Presidential Election – with the operations of a functioning democracy. This illusion is propagated by the growing authoritarianism of the Presidency – which reinforces the prejudice that voting in Presidential Elections somehow epitomizes democratic civic engagement.

As Nelson adeptly points out, democracy is more than mere electoral politics. For a political order to be democratic, public policy must be determined through the direct deliberative participation of the citizenry. The Republican Romans, for instance, indeed had elected officials. Furthermore, the aristocrats in the Republic formed the Senate. Nevertheless, only through passage in the House of Plebes could legislation be enacted. Although the Republican Romans possessed intermediaries between the state and the public, such as the Senate who could advise and consent, the commoners, whose votes were organized according to tribes, remained politically empowered through their ability to directly legislate.

Democracy, in order for it to exist in America, must take on similar attributes to those instantiated by the Roman Republic. Americans must learn to acknowledge that the unilateralism of the Presidency is antithetical to democratic organization. Democracy is a messy affair; one that involves an ongoing public dialog conducted in an effort to arrive at new compromises among shifting factions. Democracy is not a political condition whereby a “Decider,” as Nelson mocks, is endowed with solitary authority over pertinent matters of state.

The Populist Party of America has already adopted a platform that calls for political decentralization, with the intention to effect a condition conducive to what we have coined, localized democracy. We realized that through the political empowerment of local communities – a state of affairs that can be hypothetically achieved through the decentralization of government – the political influence of individuals can be amplified; thus, accentuating the motivations of ordinary people to participate in the dealings of their municipal polities.

People will become more politically conscious and politically engaged because, within the context of municipal affairs, their participations can have demonstrable consequences upon the public policies that bare the closest immediacy to the Lifeworlds that they inhabit. In other words, the impact that can be had through participation of people in localized democracy will seem more concrete and more relevant and, therefore, more worthy of their sustained interests and their persisting efforts.

In the prescriptions she lays out for a democratic revival, Nelson appears to have unknowingly joined Populist America’s activist chorus. She recommends political decentralization. Even more, Nelson introduces the verbiage, leaderless democracy, in order to designate an organizational state that is comparable to the networked politics that I had summarized in earlier writings that examined a developing theory of democracy, which has been labeled by members of open source software communities as Extreme Democracy:

http://www.midwest-populistamerica.com/articles/theories-of-extreme-democracy/; http://www.extremedemocracy.com/.

Despite the lack of originality marking the recommendations included under the breadth of the normative section belonging to Nelson’s work, she does provide a valuable survey of the various trends in Computer Mediated Communications that are not only leading to a new paradigm of democratic organization, but to a larger intellectual phenomenon that should be considered a new episteme.

The emergence of social knowledge – facilitated through the device of web based communications – is generally characterized as decentralized modalities of content authoring and editing. Wiki platforms, such as the Wikipedia, are demonstrative of this understanding of knowledge and the processes through which knowledge is most effectively constructed. In the spaces generated by the Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the creation of content by either authoring original materials or editing the materials already published on the platform.

Although there lacks a sufficient amount of studies to draw generalizations with certainty, preliminary studies, such as the one conducted by Nature, have compared the Wikipedia with traditional reference publications, such as Britannica, and have found the rates of errata between the two respective reference materials closer than one would probably suspect. Additionally, the Wikipedia, in comparison to Britannica, possesses a far greater amount of materials devoted to a broader range of topics. Further, due to its decentralized editing process, it takes less time for the Wikipedia to correct its errata than it does for publications, such as Britannica, that follow a traditional workflow process.

All of these developing social formations fall under the extension of the concept, Web 2.0: web platforms that are devoted to collaborative knowledge building conducted by a community of interlocutors. This new form of sociability suggests that radical democracy – a state that is, oftentimes, embodied by Web 2.0 communities – is not only a deontological ideal – a social condition that we should strive to foster, because it is inherently desirable – but a form of social organization that is pragmatically endowed.

In order to understand why social knowledge produces knowledge constructs on a scale that supersedes in volume and quality the knowledge built from traditional social institutions, such as the Academe, it is illuminative to first explore the precepts that support the epistemic prejudices associated with High Modernity and the Academe:

Political centralization, according to its interpretation under the lens of the new social knowledge understanding of knowledge, is a relic belonging to the social condition marked by industrial capitalism: a myriad of interdependent industrial productions that require homogeneity in order for there to be the predictability that is necessary for the various manufacturing outputs to be interoperable with one another. What is more, industrial capitalism calls for cultural uniformity, in order to effect a state wherein the activities of labor can be integrated into the system of interdependent industrial functions that collectively comprise the modes of production; a social organization that requires social agents, serving a labor, to react in predictable ways when operating as cogs in the machineries constituting the modes of production. Following this logic, organizations must possess an executive authority, under which all other offices and capacities are integrated, in order to ensure their synchrony. In short, they must all fall under a unified command structure.

The paradigm of centralized organization continues to reign dominant in contemporaneity. Nonetheless, this centralized model of social organization is not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Whether we are to compare a starfish to a spider; Native American Apaches to the Aztec or the Incas - decentralized structures are proving to be more resilient and adaptable.

Nelson refers to the popular work, The Starfish and the Spider, authored by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, who point out that leaderless organizations – similarly to the starfish and the Apaches – cannot be destroyed by annihilating a single component of their structures. Contrarily, in a case of spiders and in the case of the Native American empires, the organisms can be killed by simply targeting their central nervous systems – or, specifically in these cases, the head of the spider and the metropolises, belonging respectively to the Aztec and to the Inca.

The challenge for the reader is to understand how these properties, attributable to leaderless organizations, relate to potential democratic reforms enacted upon the American sociopolitical establishment. I would suggest that leaderless organizations – or, in the context of this essay’s ensuing sociopolitical considerations, what I shall call networked politics – possess a dual function:

Initially, networked politics can be used as an instrument of insurrection. The recent success of the popular uprising among the Filipino is evidentiary of the efficacy of networked forms of resistance. The insurgents relied upon a moblog – a server upon which contents derived from wireless gadgets can be published by a decentralized public – in order to coordinate their activities. Therefore, the Filipino revolution was not centralized, falling under a single command structure; rather, it was decentralized and voluntarily associational. Although networked politics have just now emerged as a topic of social scientific research, historical incidents, such as the historically recent Filipino revolution, suggest that they might be the optimal form of political resistance in a world where social actors are increasingly connected via the availability of Internet based forms of communication.

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, networked politics are more resistant to the consolidation of sociopolitical power under any particular hegemony. If we look to traditional forms of popular insurrection – those that were guided and controlled, to a large measure, by van guards – we see a tendency for the elites, who orchestrated the successful revolution, to simply consolidate power themselves, forming another hegemonic faction in control of the society’s sociopolitical power.

As Orwell so brilliantly depicted in his Animal Farm, the revolutionary elites – which, in the case of Orwell’s short story, were comprised of the van guard pigs on the Farm – following the revolution, simply transform into the role that was assumed by the previous governing class. Consequently, the pigs, after staging the revolution, eventually morphed into an embodiment indistinguishable from the human farmer who had been expelled during the uprising.

However, in the case of network politics, there is no centralization, so there will not necessarily be any faction in a position to install an elitist governing structure, or hegemony, in the post-revolutionary social order. To translate the argument I am making into Nelson’s terms – the expressions she used when constructing an alternative American historicity – the emergent social condition will not possess a unified executive branch, and, therefore, it will be absent of Presidentialism: The cultural condition whereby Americans are disposed to conflate democratic processes with the presence of a strong, paternalistic Executive Authority.

Russell Cole

Tags: activism, constitution, decentralization, democracy, executive powers, government, populist party america, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, sociology, sociology web 2.0
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, constitution, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization, self-governance, Social Change, Sociology, activism, executive powers
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An Article by:

Ben Tanosborn

Last Sunday, at our annual family gathering celebrating the clan’s mothers, and their constant efforts to keep the men-folk firmly footed in reality, I assigned myself the task of counting happy and sullen faces at the reunion, excluding those of youngsters – all my grandkids are happy by default, what one might call by birth-fate.  Well, more than counting, I was trying to derive some obvious direct proportionality between happy faces and political conservatism.

Sole purpose of this exercise was a curiosity-check in my part, a sort of small sample verification of the recent findings in a scientific study funded by the National Science Foundation, which headlined as: Conservatives [Are] Happier than Liberals! 

Duh!  I could have told the two NYU researchers that; but, if scientific validation was the primary reason for the study… let’s just say that the money was well spent!

Well, the truth is that our family did not prove to be a good sample, being rather happy folks by their very nature… forget the politics.  And our politics are basically centrist; the extremists’ overflow divided down the middle.  Bottom line: there was nary a sullen face in the crowd… except for mine, but that is a given for this progressive head of the clan.

According to the results of this study, us-lefties are just a bunch of displeased, sad, discontent, sorrowful, depressed, dejected, joyless, miserable, gloomy, disconsolate, hapless, melancholy (plus a whole lot other adjectives) folks.  And that frame of mind apparently shows in our faces by being morose, sulky, gloomy, somber, glum, sour and moody among other things.  It seems, or so the study interprets, that we-liberals are truly bothered by the social and economic inequalities which prevail in this world.  And that because of biological or mental malformation, we were dispossessed of that magic gene that all conservatives have: the rationalization gene.  (That’s my take.) 

Results from many sociological and psychological studies tend to indicate that liberals succumb to the effects of inequality in such a fulminatory way that they feel impotent to counteract it by grasping for some measure of rationalization; while conservatives do not find a great problem in replacing any moral order with something more congenial to their needs or convictions.  Little surprise then that the Pew Research Center found in a 2006 survey that 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the United States described themselves as “very happy,” yet only 28 percent of liberal Democrats made the “happy” list.

When American conservatives claim adherence to family values, or to a certain moral order, they are not really coming down the mountain after having talked to the Creator.  Those values, and the moral order from which they are drawn, satisfy nothing but the permissibility of their desires, “their families”… values that are exclusionary as the very private reasons that created them; values that rationalize inequality in the crudest of forms, most particularly in social and economic aspects.  Thus, they may advocate the sanctity of life for an unborn child; yet neutralize, via rationalization, the genocidal killing of a million Iraqi children, or America’s warring involvement anywhere in the world.

Perhaps rationalizations which focus in the behavior of specific individuals can find eventual remorse and the return of one’s conscience in its original state, undamaged.  But group rationalizations, as those being used in society which permit the strong to abuse the weak in economic matters, or the subjugation of peoples, or the taking of human life no matter the circumstances; no, there is no return of the group conscience, not in its original state and, most definitely, not undamaged.

Aristotle said it well over two millennia ago when he wrote (The Ethics) that, “men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.”  Perhaps we could add cultural to revolutionary to find greater applicability to modern times.  Indeed, it is their private lives that drive conservatives to modify their conscience and take the low road of rationalization when it comes to inequality or defining social justice.

As for me, I’ll remain long-faced to the world… trying to stay in peace, happy, within.

Tags: activism, Ben Tanosborn, government, power, reform
Categories: Commentary, government, Power, Ben Tanosborn, activism, reform
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