Harry
Blain is een student ‘politieke wetenschappen’ aan de City University
of New York, de CUNY. In die hoedanigheid heeft hij een opiniestuk
geschreven over de vergelijkingen tussen 2018* en de periode dat de
VS verwikkeld was in de Eerste Wereldoorlog (WOI).
Volgens
Blain had die periode (van 2 jaar) alles wat de VS heden ten dage heeft: een regering die
demonstranten haat, een hooggerechtshof dat in lijn liep met de
regering, de hysterie over het volkslied en nationalisme in het algemeen. Wat nu nog niet gebeurt
is het kussen van de vlag, al zie je nu in de VS bijna geen huis dat niet een VS vlag voor of aan het huis heeft hangen…….
Al
moet ik zeggen dat deze nationalistische hysterie fiks is opgepompt
na de aanslagen van 9/11, neem ook de Patriot Act.
Wat
we na die aanslagen nog niet zagen, waren de smerige beschuldigingen aan
het adres van de sociale media over het brengen van fake news
(nepnieuws) en de wil tot censuur op die media, terwijl de reguliere
media na 9/11 niet anders deden dan vooral veel fake news brengen,
waar de absolute top van liegen en bedriegen door die media destijds
lag in de aanloop naar en tijdens de illegale oorlog tegen Irak……… Waar dit
liegen en bedriegen nu standaard door die reguliere (massa-) media
wordt gedaan.
Ten
eerste was er in 2001 nog amper sprake van sociale media, die toen
pas in opkomst waren. Ten tweede zijn de reguliere media na
2001 voor een groot deel in handen gekomen van multimiljonairs/miljardairs of van grote
beursgenoteerde bedrijven, beiden groepen die belang hebben de
huidige neoliberale status quo te beschermen en te handhaven……. Leuke
bijkomstigheid, dat laatste, de media in handen van bepaalde figuren
of groepen, heeft er juist voor gezorgd dat er platforms op het
internet verschenen die zware kritiek leverden en leveren op die
reguliere media en die met deze kritiek op de (reguliere) berichtgeving zelf het echte nieuws brachten en brengen.
Lees
het volgende artikel en oordeel zelf:
Everything
About 2018 Shows Why Americans Should Remember World War I
The
Great War had it all: An administration that hated protesters. A
compliant Supreme Court. National anthem panics and literal flag
kissing!
By Harry
Blain, September
7, 2018.
It
wasn’t the good war. But, in our popular imagination, it wasn’t
the bad one either.
Instead,
it’s identified by a vague mixture of concepts, names, and events:
the Lusitania,
“Wilsonian Idealism,” Versailles, Theodore Roosevelt.
The
First World War — known as the “Great War” in Europe — has
largely faded from memory on this side of the Atlantic. Arguably,
this is because our involvement was so brief — joining the
slaughter over two years after it began and leaving it just over
eighteen months later.
But,
beyond the fact that it claimed the lives of over 100,000 Americans,
there are good reasons why, a century later, we should remember this
chapter in our history, not least because it has ominous parallels
with today.
Compliant
Courts
The
political science textbooks tell us that “checks and balances”
are central to American democracy.
And,
with a mechanical and historically dubious recounting of Marbury
v. Madison (1803),
students are immediately taught about the rise of one of these great
barriers to tyranny: judicial review.
Unlike in the crusty old
monarchies, they learn, wise and dispassionate judges can protect us
from oppressive laws and power-hungry politicians.
The
Founding Fathers would find this view surprising. As Alexander
Hamilton succinctly put it, the power of the judiciary would always
be limited because
it had “no influence over either the sword or the purse.” And
Madison repeatedly warned about the weakness of “parchment
barriers”
laid down in the constitution.
In
1917 and 1918, these fears — and worse — were justified.
Far
from merely accepting the various censorship laws passed by Congress,
one of the country’s most revered Supreme Court Justices, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, affirmatively endorsed them.
The
crime was committed by Charles Schenk, General Secretary of the
Socialist Party in Philadelphia, whose organization was distributing
leaflets protesting the first ever nation-wide conscription law (the
Union and Confederacy had separate conscription laws during the Civil
War).
Opposition
to the draft came from many motives and groups: socialists who saw
this as the rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight; second- or
third-generation immigrants whose parents had come to America to
escape conscription in Europe; German- or Austrian-Americans who
objected to killing their own friends and family in the trenches.
But
for Holmes, none of this mattered.
Starting
with the obnoxiously famous remark — “The most stringent
protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting
fire in a theatre and causing a panic” — Holmes argued further:
“When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of
peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will
not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard
them as protected by any constitutional right.”
This
was essentially an eloquent, lawyer-speak translation of Attorney
General Thomas Gregory’s chilling
promise to
the anti-war movement: “May God have mercy on them, for they need
expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government.”
Schenk
was found guilty and so were many others.
Few
high-profile socialists avoided the reach of the Espionage and
Sedition Acts, which defined both “espionage” and “sedition”
as almost any criticism of the war. A very partial list of targets
would include Eugene Debs, Rose Pastor Stokes, Joseph Stilson,
Frederick Krafft, Abraham Sugarman, and Edwin Firth.
Not
to mention less famous people like Walter Matthey in Iowa, who was
sentenced to a year in jail for (in the words of the attorney
general) “attending a meeting, listening to an address in which
disloyal utterances were made, applauding some of the statements made
by the speaker… and contributing 25 cents.” (Details of all these
cases can be found in HC Peterson and Gilbert C Fite’s
book, Opponents
of War, 1917-1918).
Media
Support and Flag Worship
Thankfully,
we have the “fourth estate” for times like these: dogged,
fearless, whiskey-drinking journalists working through the night to
keep our democracy on life support.
Here’s
a sample of how the New
York Times’ editorial
board approached this mission during and after the war (again,
documented by Peterson and Fite):
-
“It
is the duty of every good citizen to communicate to the proper
authorities any evidence of sedition that comes to his notice”
(June 6, 1917). -
“The
Selective Draft Act gives a long and sorely needed means of
disciplining a certain insolent foreign element in this nation”
(June 10, 1917). -
“The
I.W.W. [Industrial Workers of the World] agitators are, in effect,
and perhaps in fact, agents of Germany. The Federal Authorities
should make short work of these treasonable conspirators against the
United States” (August 4, 1917). -
“There
is no reason for sympathy with [Eugene] Debs” (March 12, 1919). -
“[Amnesty
for political prisoners] is of impudence and unreason all compact”
(April 5, 1921).
Meanwhile,
the Washington
Post lamented
the lack of war enthusiasm on the East Coast, in contrast to the
“healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country,”
which was praiseworthy “in spite of excesses such as lynching.”
Other
“excesses” included tarring-and-feathering, vandalism against
people who didn’t buy enough Liberty Bonds, the burning of German
books, and — almost unbelievably — rituals
of forced flag-kissing, which,
“by 1918, had become so frequent” that they were “hardly
first-rate news.”
Eerily,
Peterson and Fite recount: “Along with flag-kissing came a great
sensitiveness about respect for the national anthem,” as
“disorderly conduct” fines were dished out to people who failed
to stand for the Star-Spangled Banner across the country.
Drawing
from the Dissenters
The
main reason we know about these events is because they were
meticulously documented by an obscure organization called the
National Civil Liberties Bureau, initially part of the American Union
Against Militarism.
On
August 31, 1918, the Bureau had
its New York City offices raided and
records seized by the Justice Department.
Yet,
it survived the war years, and renamed and reorganized itself into
what we now know as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — a
crucial, if not saintly, defender of the Bill of Rights ever since.
The
ACLU will be the first to tell you that we are now living under a
president whose gutter patriotism and disdain for free speech rivals
the worst demagogues of that shameful era.
As
this same president edges closer to war with Iran — and continues
the permanent war against “terrorists” — we would do well to
heed the advice of Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette, expressed
in one
of Congress’s greatest speeches on
April 4, 1917:
“We
should not seek to hide our blunder behind the smoke of battle to
inflame the mind of our people by half-truths into the frenzy of war
in order that they may never appreciate the real cause of it until it
is too late.”
Harry
Blain is a PhD student in political science at the Graduate Center,
CUNY (City University of New York).
Lees voorts:
For
the U.S. Military, ‘Winning’ Now Means Staying at War as Long as
Possible
======================================
* In
feite vanaf het begin van de presidentsverkiezingen in de VS in 2016, dus ook
de voorverkiezingen binnen de democratische en republikeinse partij.
PS: vergeet eveneens niet dat ook de periode van het McCarthyisme weer geheel van stal is gehaald met de samenzweringstheorie die men ‘Russiagate’ noemt…… Kortom de VS keert terug naar nog meer duistere perioden van haar bestaan…… Niet voor niets zijn velen (waaronder ikzelf) ervan overtuigd dat de VS in feite al een politiestaat is…….
