[Mb-civic] Tomgram: Jonathan Schell on Creating an Uncivil Society

[Michael Butler]

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Tomgram: Jonathan Schell on Creating an Uncivil Society

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2306

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the USA Patriot Act, the
following exchange took place between former White House Counsel Alberto
Gonzales, now Attorney General and Senator Arlen Specter (R., PA):

    GONZALES: Mr. Chairman, let me, kind of, reassure the committee and the
American people that the department has no interest in rummaging through the
library records or the medical records of Americans.

    GONZALES: That is not something that we have an interest in.

    SPECTER: Does that mean you'd agree to excluding them?

    GONZALES: We do have an interest, however, in records that may help us
capture terrorists. And there may be an occasion where having the tools of
215 to access this kind of information may be very helpful to the department
in dealing with the terrorist threat.

    The fact that this authority has not been used for these kinds of
records means that the department, in my judgment, has acted judiciously. It
should not be held against us that we've exercised, in my judgment,
restraint.

    It's comparable to a police officer who carries a gun for 15 years and
never draws it. Does that mean that for the next five years he should not
have that weapon, because he's never used it?

    SPECTER: Attorney General Gonzales, I don't think your analogy is apt,
but if you want to retain those records, as your position I understand. And
let me move on. 

Actually, Specter is wrong. Gonzales's analogy is all too apt. That sheathed
gun is, in this case, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act which gives the
government the ability to demand -- as librarians fear -- records of a
person's library reading habits. A library, so requested, is banned from
informing the reader of this search. But of course Section 215 applies to
far more than libraries;and when it comes to basic civil liberties as well
as the most basic aspects of civil society, the Bush administration does
indeed carry a gun that we have no reason to believe has remained sheathed.

The actual wording of Section 215 reads, in part:

    "The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of
the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in
Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any
tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other
items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or
clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a
United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities
protected by the first amendment to the ConstitutionŠ No person shall
disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce
the tangible things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section."

In other words, they can do it and we can't know. Nothing civil about it.
Note, by the way, that "not conducted solelyŠ" which assumedly means that an
investigation can be conducted against "activities protected by the first
amendment." And keep in mind that the man now testifying, before he morphed
into the Attorney General of the increasingly ill-named Justice Department,
was sitting in the White House Counsel's office overseeing some of the most
pretzled language and tortured logic ever-produced to create a
prosecution-free basis for promoting a presidential regime of torture
throughout our various jails, camps, and detention centers then being set up
abroad.

It's one of those commonplaces to say that empire and its appurtenances like
torture never stay long out in the imperium, but it's another thing to note
that the men who now run the Pentagon (Donald Rumsfeld), the Homeland
Security Department (Michael Chertoff), and the Justice Department (Alberto
Gonzales), as well as the White House (George Bush & Co.) have been deeply
involved in creating the opposite of a civil society around an
American-garrisoned world, and that everyone should think twice about
letting them into a library with that sheathed gun. Even their language is a
language of armament. While FBI Director Robert Mueller "asked lawmakers to
expand the bureau's ability to obtain records without first asking a judge,
and he joined Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in seeking that every
temporary provision of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act be renewed," Gonzalez
was insisting that "now is not the time for us to be engaging in unilateral
disarmament" when it came to the "legal weapons available for fighting
terrorism."

In his latest "Letter from Ground Zero" for the Nation magazine (posted here
thanks to the kindness of that magazine's editors), Jonathan Schell
considers ways in which a striking development of the pre-9/11 decades, the
creation of "civil societies" around the world in places where previously
only uncivil ones had existed, is slowly being turned into something else
entirely. He also explores ways in which, domestically, a society that could
hardly be thought of as civil is being created by men whose most powerful
impulse is to draw their guns. Tom

    Faking Civil Society
    By Jonathan Schell

    Perhaps the most beautiful achievement of political life in the late
twentieth century was the international movement for democracy that brought
down several dozen dictatorships of every possible description --
authoritarian, communist, fascist, military. It happened on all continents,
and it happened peacefully. It began in the 1970s, with the collapse of the
Greek junta and of the right-wing regimes in Portugal and Spain; it
continued in the 1980s, mysteriously jumping the Atlantic, with the collapse
of dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and Brazil; then, vaulting the Pacific,
it claimed the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Finally,
in the early '90s, it spread to South Africa, where the white apartheid
regime yielded to majority rule, and returned to the Eurasian continent
where the great Soviet empire itself shuffled off history's stage.

    The actors in this benign contagion acquired a name: civil society.
"Civil": they were peaceful, meaning that the bomb in the cafe, the
assassination of the local official, the paratrooper invasion of the
Parliament building, were not their tactics. "Society": they expressed
popular will, not the will of governments. The movement broke or made
governments. It was their master.

    Recently, however, the movement has undergone a change both at home and
abroad. Civil society groups in the more prosperous societies began to lend
welcome assistance in poorer ones. But governments also joined in. Unlike
private civil groups, governments are in their nature interested in power,
and the civil society movements clearly exercised it. Here in America, the
National Endowment for Democracy was created in the early eighties. Funded
by Congress and governed by a board that includes active and retired
politicians of both parties, it nevertheless calls itself a
"nongovernmental" organization. Its declared mission was to support
democracy per se, not any political party, but the distinction was soon lost
in practice. Most of the $10.5 million handed out in Nicaragua during the
elections of 1990 went to the opposition to the Sandinistas, who were duly
voted out of power. In 2002, the Endowment funded groups in Venezuela that
backed the briefly successful coup against President Hugo Chávez, in which
the Venezuelan Parliament, judiciary and constitution were suspended.

    The day after the overthrow, which Omar Encarnación of Bard College has
called a "civil society coup," the president of the International Republican
Institute, which is loosely tied to the GOP and is a conduit for Endowment
funds, stated, "Last night, led by every sector of civil society, the
Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy in their country." Speaking
for the U.S. government, presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer stated
that the coup "happened in a very quick fashion as a result of the message
of the Venezuelan people." In fact, the Venezuelan people opposed the coup,
and Chávez, notwithstanding his own repressive tendencies, almost
immediately returned to power.

    More recently Endowment contributions went to groups in Ukraine that
supported presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko, who became president
after fraudulent results engineered by the opposition government candidate
were reversed by popular pressure. In Venezuela, the outcome was the
destruction, however brief, of all democratic institutions, whereas in
Ukraine the outcome was the rescue of democracy; yet in both cases the
integrity of civil society, which depends on independence from governments,
was partially corrupted.

    Something similar was meanwhile happening within the United States. The
Republican Party and its supporters have been the pioneers, creating what
might be called a shadow civil society and seeking to merge it imperceptibly
with the real one. Former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley summarized the
process in a March 30 op-ed in the New York Times: Large donors founded
partisan think tanks more interested in propagandizing than in thinking;
then proceeded to establish seemingly independent but actually politically
subservient news organizations such as FOX News and the Rush Limbaugh show.
Recently, some new wrinkles in the process have emerged: the use of fake
newscasters, pretending to report from an independent news station while
actually working for a department of government, and fake reporters, such as
"Jeff Gannon," the imposter permitted by the White House to ask sycophantic
questions of the President at White House press conferences. There is also
the fake "town meeting" (the very emblem of civil society) with the
President, at which a screened audience asks pretested questions.

    The strategy of faking civil activity has a long tradition in the
foreign sphere. For example, the CIA virtually cut its teeth manipulating
popular and intellectual movements in Europe in the late 1940s and '50s.
(Indeed, historian Allen Weinstein, who was the National Endowment's first
acting president, has commented, "A lot of what we do today was done
covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.") But the domestic practice is
more recent. One of the lesser-known points of origin is the presidency of
Richard Nixon, who once ordered his aide Charles Colson to firebomb the
Brookings Institution, then called it off. But he also had some more
workable ideas. He told Patrick Buchanan, then his communications director,
that he wanted somehow not only to cut off existing "left-wing" foundations
"without a dime" but also to found a right-wing institute that would seem to
be independent but actually be managed by the White House. As Buchanan
commented in a memo, "some of the essential objectives of the Institute
would have to be blurred, even buried, in all sorts of other activity that
would be the bulk of its work, that would employ many people, and that would
provide the cover for the more important efforts." In this matter, as in so
many others, today's Republican Party is the legatee of Richard Nixon.

    Some Democrats want their party to respond in kind. For urgent and
understandable reasons, they want to level the playing field. But the cost
could be high. In such a world, nothing would be what it seemed. Behind
every blogger would lurk the PR spinmeister, behind every reporter would
stand the political hack, behind every charming demonstrator holding her
banner -- rose, orange, purple, or cedar --would lie the cold hand of the
state. In the name of civil society, civil society would be spoiled.

    Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation
Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was
recently published by Nation Books.

Copyright C2005 Jonathan Schell

This article will appear in the next issue of The Nation Magazine.

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posted April 6, 2005 at 7:19 pm
     
             
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