ROLAND VINCENT Special Editor, Ecoanimal & Socialism Questions
Except for token measures, expect no real relief for animals from the GOP.
Animal Rights is ALL about politics!
Just as slavery was all about politics!
The same political, social, religious and economic issues drove slavery as now drive animal exploitation. Slavery was defended as commanded by God from pulpits across the country. It was defended by Conservatives (then the Democrats) in state legislatures in the North and South. Powerful agricultural interests predicted economic collapse is slavery were to be abolished!
It is absurd to suggest that slavery would have been defeated by ignoring politics! It took politics, riots and war —with the clash of massive armies—to bring an end to slavery.
It will require more to establish Animal Rights!
Animal Rights is not compatible with politics as usual. We cannot bring about Animal Rights by supporting this Democrat or that Republican! Ridiculously unimportant issues cannot drive our votes or divert our attention.
Stunned hog on the conveyor of death. Who gave us the right?
Animal Rights will require the end of capitalism as we know it. Hardly a conservative position! You won’t find a single Republican who will agree! Nor will most Democrats. But those that will agree are ALL radicals and liberals!
Both Democrats and Republicans can be sell-outs to corporate lobbyists and their bagmen. The difference between the Democratic and Republican parties is simple: Republicans don’t have Liberals!*
And you don’t think Animal Rights is a political issue? If you vote for a Republican you are placing an enemy of animals in a position of power over them! You may be doing the same voting Democrat, but there is an excellent chance you will not be! Read on.
Democrats Can Be Scumbags, Too
For several years I have made it my mission to expose Conservative legislators for the enemies of animals that they are.
The task is not difficult. Their record of acting as enablers and apologists for the animal exploitation industries is public.
Conservative legislators are the mouthpieces for Big Ag, Big Pharma, and Big Oil, which murder billions of animals each year.
Democrat leadership: not the answer
Curiously, there are animal activists who consider themselves to be Conservatives. They may be Conservatives for any number of reasons: Don’t like to pay taxes? Don’t like people of color? Don’t like gay people? Want to carry their guns around? Don’t like abortion? Etc?
Whatever the reasons, they are more important to them than are the animals, because the party and politicians they support are working to hurt animals and to protect those who hurt animals.
A common retort I hear when pointing out these truths, is that Democrats do it, too. And that is their defense? Others are equally reprehensible?
Democrats can be as heartless as Republicans, true.
But Democrats have Liberals, whereas the Republican Party does not.
And it is Liberals, at least those on the Far Left, the real left, who are most likely to oppose business influence in government, business money in politics, business control of regulatory agencies, and business profiting on the exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals.
The Democratic Party is not the answer for animals.
The Left Wing of the Democratic Party —and the Left, in general—is the answer.
____________
* Broadly understood, meaning people who genuinely abhor conservative positions.
George Lakoff on Communication: “Liberals Do Everything Wrong”
Communicating Our American Values and Vision [3], he gives this precis: “Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic.”
_______ The biggest obstacle for liberals is their ignorance—indeed aversion—to the notions of Marxism, which they refuse to study. This guarantees they will grasp little or nothing about the true social engines of most political processes and political actors, as they remain stubbornly uncomprehending about the most elementary rules of class analysis.
_______
Lakoff is affable and generous. In public meetings he greets every question with: “That is an extremely good question.” But he cannot keep the frustration out of his voice: the left, he argues, is losing the political argument – every year, it cedes more ground to the right, under the mistaken impression that this will bring everything closer to the centre. In fact, there is no centre: the more progressives capitulate, the more boldly the conservatives express their vision, and the further to the right the mainstream moves. The reason is that conservatives speak from an authentic moral position, and appeal to voters’ values. Liberals try to argue against them using evidence; they are embarrassed by emotionality. They think that if you can just demonstrate to voters how their self-interest is served by a socially egalitarian position, that will work, and everyone will vote for them and the debate will be over. In fact, Lakoff asserts, voters don’t vote for bald self-interest; self-interest fails to ignite, it inspires nothing – progressives, of all people, ought to understand this.
When he talks about the collapse of the left, he clearly doesn’t mean that those parties have disintegrated: they could be in government, as the Democrats are in the US. But their vision of progressive politics is compromised and weak. So in the UK there have been racist “Go home” vans and there is an immigration bill going through parliament, unopposed, that mandates doctors, the DVLA, banks and landlords to interrogate the immigration status of us all; Hungary has vigilante groups attacking Roma, and its government recently tried to criminalise homelessness; the leaders of the Golden Dawn in Greece have only just been arrested, having been flirting with fascism since the collapse of the eurozone. We see, time and again, people in need being dehumanised, in a way that seems like a throwback to 60 or 70 years ago. Nobody could say the left was winning.
Lakoff predicted all this in Moral Politics, first published in 1996. In it, he warned that “if liberals do not concern themselves very seriously and very quickly with the unity of their own philosophy [4] and with morality and the family, they will not merely continue to lose elections but will as well bear responsibility for the success of conservatives in turning back the clock of progress in America.” Since then, the left has cleaved moderately well to established principles around the politics of the individual – women are equal, racism is wrong, homophobia is wrong. But everything else: a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, the essential dignity of all humans, even if they’re foreign people or young people, education as a public good, the natural world as a treasure rather than an instrument of our convenience, the existence of motives besides profit, the pointlessness and poison of privatisation, the profundity, worth and purpose of pooling resources … this stuff is an embarrassment to centre-left parties, even when they’re in government, let alone when they’re in opposition. When unions reference these ideas, they are dismissed as dinosaurs.
Yet equivalent rightwing positions – that efficiency is all, that big government is inefficient and therefore inherently bad, that nothing must come between a business and its pursuit of profit, that poverty is a lifestyle choice of the weak, that social breakdown can be ascribed to single mothers and immigrants – have been subject to no abatement, no modification, no “modernising”.
If we accept Lakoff’s conclusion, what would it mean to accept his prescription? This is what he believes it would take to refashion the progressive mindset: the abandonment of argument by evidence in favour of argument by moral cause; the unswerving and unembarrassed articulation of what those morals are; the acceptance that there is no “middle” or third way, no such thing as a moderate (people can hold divergent views, conservative on some things, progressive on others – but they are not moderates, they are “biconceptual”); and the understanding that conservatives are not evil, unintelligent, cynical or grasping. Rather, they act according to the moral case as they see it. If they happen to get rich, and make their friends rich in the process, that is just the unbidden consequence of wealth being the natural reward of the righteous, in their moral universe. To accept, let alone undertake, any of this, one would first need to accept the veracity of frames.
Much of cognitive linguistics concerns itself with how we build the mental apparatus to understand everyday situations: a hospital, or a date, or a cash machine. Erving Goffman [5], commonly cited as the most influential sociologist of the 20th century, wrote Frame Analysis in 1974, defining and exploring exactly how this happens. Having built the frames to understand life, we no longer deliberately plug back into it. It is unconscious; what we think of as “common sense” is merely an act or notion that resonates with one of our deep frames.
Lakoff’s work on the conceptual systems around morals and politics (and how they show up in language) has yielded two-dozen metaphors for morality, most of them universal across cultures. Of those, the two key frames informing political judgment involve the idea of government as a family: the strict-father model (conservative) versus the nurturant-parent model (progressive).
I talk to Lakoff when he is invited over to London by Counterpoint, a thinktank with an interest in how ideas can be used to quell the xenophobia and repression that has, of late, swept Europe. In the strict-father worldview, he explains, “The father is the ultimate authority, he knows right from wrong, his job is to protect the family and so he’s the strongest person, and because he knows right from wrong, his authority is deserved. His children are born bad, because they just do what feels good, they don’t do what’s right. They have to be trained out of feelgood liberalism into doing what’s right. You have to punish the kids painfully enough that they’ll start doing what’s right and they’ll get discipline. If they’re disciplined, they go out into the world, and they earn a living. If they’re not earning a living, they’re not disciplined, therefore they can’t be moral and they deserve their poverty.”
To liberals, a lot of conservative thinking seems like a failure of logic: why would a conservative be against equal rights for women and yet despise the poor, when to liberate women into the world of work would create more wealth, meaning less poverty? And yet we instinctively understand those as features of the conservative worldview, and rightly so.
The nurturant-family model is the progressive view: in it, the ideals are empathy, interdependence, co-operation, communication, authority that is legitimate and proves its legitimacy with its openness to interrogation. “The world that the nurturant parent seeks to create has exactly the opposite properties,” Lakoff writes in Moral Politics. As progressives identify failures of logic in the conservative position, so it works the other way round (one of Lakoff’s examples: “How can liberals support federal funding for Aids research and treatment, while promoting the spread of Aids by sanctioning sexual behaviour that leads to Aids?”).
I am accustomed to seeing our current situation as a feature of the past 30 years; a post-ideological landscape, in which the great left-right clashes of the 80s gave way to Blair (and Clinton’s) third way on one side, and the unemotional, rational free market on the other. In fact, Blair conceded ground on the left, but the right didn’t concede any; as things are, free-market rules evaluate human importance based on wealth, and as such are plainly ideological, in a strict-father frame.
Whatever the calamities of the last three decades, however, these two value systems – strict father versus nurturant family – have been clashing for ever. Lakoff says: “After I published Don’t Think of an Elephant! [6] [probably his most celebrated book], a British historian read it and said, ‘In studying the civil war in the 17th century, I see the same thing.’ But this is more than centuries old. This goes back to the Bible. You have two views of God: you have the strict father God and the nurturing God. You have Christ the warrior and Christ the saviour.”
If the two systems are poised in pure opposition, if they are each as moral, as metaphorical, as anciently rooted, as solidly grounded as the other, then why is one winning? “Progressives want to follow the polls … Conservatives don’t follow the polls; they want to change them. Political ground is gained not when you successfully inhabit the middle ground, but when you successfully impose your framing as the ‘common-sense’ position.”
If all political belief originates from one of two wellsprings, if the last thing you should do to propagate your belief is to water it down, if backing it up with facts just weakens it, what would a debate look like, in a world of perfectly understood frames? Say your opposer was Todd Akin [7], the Republican who notoriously opposed abortion even for rape victims, on the basis that proper victims didn’t normally get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”. It is an extreme example, but justifiable, I think: to try to argue against that with a moral case, rather than basic biological realities, would be missing a trick. Lakoff shakes his head: I can see him thinking, “Forget tricks!” Instead, he says: “You have to go up a level, to the moral level. You have to say, this is somebody who’s interested in male domination. That’s what liberals are afraid to do.”
A classic liberal pitfall is the idea that by repeating one of the opposition’s ridiculous lines, you make it look even more absurd. “There was an election in Wisconsin,” Lakoff says, “there was a horrible governor there, and the Democrats were so stupid that they put up billboards all over the state with a picture of him smiling. They had his name in large letters next to the picture, and it says, ‘Why is this man smiling?’ And then in smaller type, it has a list of his positions, all from his point of view? As if everybody will recognise that this is a horrible man. Instead, it is a billboard in his favour. It’s about time progressives got out there and said what’s true about themselves, as well as what’s true of the other side. If you have a strong position, let’s hear it.”
One of Lakoff’s engagements in London was at the TUC, where they proudly showed him a video they had made about welfare, and it fell into all these Wisconsin pitfalls – restating Cameron’s case in order to dispute it, but in reality falling into the trap of trying to dispel welfare “myths”, instead of talking about a social security system of which we should be proud. He took it apart at the seams.
You want to defend the right to have an abortion, you want to stop privatisation, you want to protect the natural world – as Lakoff has often written, these are not three separate arguments, they are all part of the same worldview. But that isn’t to say that he considers them equally important, and the urgency of his speech ramps up as he talks about monetising nature. “What we get from nature is remarkable. And then you get the people who want to monetise that. If it’s valuable, what’s the value? What’s it worth? Which is the wrong question to ask, because, first of all, much of its value has to do with what is visceral to you. What does it mean to you if you hear the birds singing, or the birds all die? Second, as soon as you monetise something in nature, a cost-benefit analysis will come in. Nature always loses, because nature goes on for ever.”
It is, plainly, the longstanding failure to protect nature that powers Lakoff’s exasperation with liberals. “They don’t understand their own moral system or the other guy’s, they don’t know what’s at stake, they don’t know about framing, they don’t know about metaphors, they don’t understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don’t understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they’re miseducated. And they’re proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world.”
The making of Oliver Stone’s brilliant portrayal of journalists amidst a terrifying bloody central American War. Imagine Withnail and I meets Apocalypse Now with not quite so many laughs.
J. Woods as renegade photojournalist Richard Boyle
When Oliver Stone said he wanted to take James Woods, Jim Belushi and acid-fried journalist Richard Boyle to El Salvador to make a film about [a US-suported army and death squads ] fighting a leftist insurgency, few gave him a chance of succeeding. Even fewer gave him a chance of coming back alive.
Who went south of the border to bring you Salvador?
Vietnam vet-turned-maverick filmmaker. Followed screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express with Best Director gongs for semi-autobiographical ‘Nam films Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July. Likes Indians and conspiracy theories. Dislikes the American government and women.
James Woods (Richard Boyle) – Lean American actor famed for his intensity, massive IQ and infamous affair with Sean Young. Oscar nominated for his remarkable turn as journalist Richard Boyle.
James Belushi (Dr Rock) – Thinner, less funny brother of John Belushi. A Saturday Night Live regular in the early 80s, Belushi blew his considerable Salvador cache on a succession of sickly family movies.
John Savage (John Cassady) – American leading man with an eclectic, eccentric CV (Do The Right Thing, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather Part III). Role in Salvador loosely based on real-life photo-journalist John Hoagland.
Richard Boyle (co-writer) – Respected investigative journalist and Olympic-level loon. Went to El Salvador in 1980 to cover the civil war for CNN. Accused Stone of failing to pay him his Salvador writer’s fee in full. Likes a drink.
Robert Richardson (director of photography) – A regular Stone collaborator, Richardson received Oscar nominations for his work on Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July.
Gerald Green (producer) – American producer and head of Pasta Productions.
John Daly (producer) – British independent producer and David Hemmings’ partner in Hemdale Films. Helped raise the money for Salvador, Platoon and The Terminator.
people and I love it. Good beer, beautiful women, cheap rent. What more do you want in life?
Oliver Stone: Richard Boyle was a friend of mine. He was always fun for a couple of laughs. He had a manuscript of short stories and incidents that had occurred in El Salvador. He pulled it out of the back seat of his car one day on the way to airport. He said; ‘You never know: there might be something there.’ I read it and I said; ‘This is it: this is the greatest story!’
Elizabeth Stone: Right after [Stone’s eldest son] Sean was born, Oliver put our house in New York on the block to get the money to shoot Salvador.
“El Salvador is a great place with great people and I love it. Good beer, beautiful women, cheap rent. What more do you want in life?”
Oliver Stone: Richard was staying at my house. Elizabeth wanted me to get him out of the house. One morning we woke up and he’d passed out in front of the TV. Elizabeth went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and everything was gone, everything had been drunk, even the baby’s formula was missing. She went back and looked at him and he was holding the baby’s formula. He’d drunk the whole fucking thing. He must’ve been blind drunk and just grabbed whatever was in the can.
Richard Boyle: Who doesn’t enjoy a drink?
Oliver Stone: The original idea was to shoot a semi-documentary in El Salvador starring Boyle as himself and Dr Rock as himself and we were going to get the Salvadorians to put up all their military equipment. Boyle took me down to El Salvador and we partied.
Richard Boyle: We met with [Robert] D’Abusisson’s generals. They liked Oliver because they loved Scarface.
Oliver Stone: These guys were slapping us on the back, drinking toasts to [Scarface’s] Tony Montana. They kept talking about their favourite scenes and acting out the killings. They’d go; ‘Tony Montana, mucho cajones [Lots of balls)! Ratta-tat-tat! Kill the fucking communists!’
Richard Boyle: It would have been great to make the movie in El Salvador, spend some hard currency, help the people out. But then people started dying so we had to think again.
Gerald Green: Oliver went to great lengths to explain that the film wasn’t going to be another Year Of Living Dangerously or Under Fire. I think that pleased everybody.
Oliver Stone: The problem with characters like Sidney Schanberg in The Killing Fields is that they were heroic characters. I found it a bit movie-ish that they no personal flaws. They were dignified, they were liberal and they were noble, whereas Richard Boyle is more of a second-rate with many personal flaws. I liked him because he was a gadfly. He’s such an irritating personality, but he does have this ability to get under your skin. And that’s the kind of character I wanted to do.
James Woods: Hollywood wasn’t hot on the idea of Salvador, but Oliver was: red hot.
Oliver Stone: I intended to make the movie by hook or by crook. I knew up front that Salvador was going to be a very hard sell. I felt we would have to do it independently as best we could. But it was worth it to do it that way, because we were free and we shot a script that no American studio would ever have allowed to be shot. And John Daly, a delightful kind of British rascal, made it easier, as did Gerald Green. Daly saw these two scuzzbags, Boyle and Dr Rock, as funny, almost in Monty Python-esque terms. And Gerald had some tax deal where if he could make his movies in Mexico, he could get them financed. Gerald had this Arnold Schwarzenegger project called Outpost, and Schwarezenegger couldn’t fulfil his obligations, so all during shooting we were called Outpost because we had that slot.
James Woods: I’d heard of Oliver as being this crazy, druggy, gifted writer. I liked him right away. His reputation preceded him, bolstered I have to say by Oliver’s own efforts: he was very good at getting himself in the headlines of people’s minds. But he was never afraid to be who he was.
Oliver Stone: I had very good luck with the script. It was easy to cast. I was just amazed by the co-operation I got from the actors, all of them. In any film, that kind of co-operation is always welcome. In Salvador, it was almost a necessity.
Michael Murphy: Originally, Oliver talked about Richard playing himself but I don’t think that was ever a serious consideration. And besides Boyle didn’t play Boyle as well as James Woods played him.
“Richard was staying at my house. One morning we woke up and he’d passed out in front of the TV, everything had been drunk, even the baby’s formula was missing. He must’ve been blind drunk and just grabbed whatever was in the can.”
James Woods: Oliver wanted me to play Dr Rock but when I read the screenplay, I got excited about the idea of playing the lead because it was such a great role.
Oliver Stone: Richard is much worse than Jimmy. Richard’s a very colourful character. Jimmy didn’t want to play him as raggedy and scummy as Richard really is. Jimmy felt he made Richard more attractive to a larger group of people. People say; ‘That’s attractive?!’ But the real Richard is far worse.
Richard Boyle: So much of this movie’s real. I’m real, Dr Rock’s real, my girlfriend’s real. Major Max is real – we changed his name but he’s real. (The real character-bad character at that—was the arch criminal CIA-connected Col. D’Aubuisson.)
John Savage: My character was based on the photo-journalist John Hoagland. I have a line in the film about capturing the nobility of human suffering and death in these tragic situations. That’s what Cassady’s trying to do.
Oliver Stone: Dr Rock, Boyle’s companion in the film, was a real guy, but he never went to Salvador. I said; ‘Let’s take him to Salvador then and see what happens.’ Take this character who’s freaked out by anything and put him there. And that became the key to making the movie work.
James Belushi: Dr Rock’s a wonderful character – a genuine ’60s throwback. To me, it was like creating a totally fictional character. He was ignorant of Central American issues like most of the American public, so I feel like I was a touchstone for the audience. My character discovers El Salvador as the audience does.
Oliver Stone: I had to do this movie fast because I never knew when the money would dry up.
Gerald Green: It was the toughest movie I’ve made in my life. I’ve done pictures far bigger. We were the co-production company for Dune and that movie was easy compared to Salvador.
James Woods: We were all just nuts. I don’t know why we were nuts but I think it was in the nature of the picture. I’m playing this lunatic and we’re riding fucking burros up in the woods. John Savage is a brilliant, unheralded, unappreciated nutcase great actor. Oliver is a fucking lunatic.
James Belushi: I like Jimmy [Woods] and all but he always has to have the last word in a scene. He would improvise things to call attention to himself. There was this scene where I was explaining some things I felt were pretty important and right in the middle of my fucking speech, Jimmy pulls out a switchblade and clicks it open right into the camera. So they have to cut over to him for a close-up during my speech. I told Jimmy; ‘If you pull that knife again in one of my scenes, I’m going to open the goddamn glove compartment and pull out a gun and start waving it around.’
James Woods: With Jim Belushi, I didn’t know him at all beforehand and we took an instant liking to each other.
James Belushi: There’s a scene where we come out of this armoured personnel carrier and get into the back of an open truck. So Oliver says; ‘Jim Belushi, you come out first and walk in front with your hands over your head and get into the truck, and then Jimmy Woods, you come walking right behind him.’ So we get out and start to walk, and Jimmy literally knocks my arm out of the way, and sort of elbows his way in front of me, and we get into he truck and I’m pissed and Jimmy won’t shut up. He’s improvising all these lines because he knows that as long as he’s talking, the camera has to stay on him. And I finally said; ‘Will you shut up!’ Oliver left it in the movie because it fits, but it’s really just me telling Woods to shut the fuck up!
James Woods: Belushi and I would always tease each other. And the same thing with Savage. I remember when the three of us would be in the same scene, Oliver would say; ‘This will be a struggle to see who’s going to steal the scene.’ But, of course, that situation is what makes for great movie making.
“I intended to make the movie by hook or by crook. I knew up front that Salvador was going to be a very hard sell. I felt we would have to do it independently as best we could.”
Robert Richardson: Jimmy Woods made a decision to go at Oliver, deliberately push him. He pushed Oliver hard, and Oliver ended up pushing back. The two of them just came to that end, ego against ego. As a result, his performance is what it is, and that’s one of the reasons I believe it’s so fine.
Oliver Stone: Jimmy’s like the guy you want to punch out at school, He drove everybody crazy. The crew, me, his fellow actors. Everyone wanted to kill him because we had no money and we really had to depend on his mercy. He was the biggest single star in the entire thing. When someone is always reminding you of that, it becomes tiresome.
James Woods: Oliver and I are great friends now, and were then, but there was a lot of tension between us during the making of the film. At one point, I was strapped down to the street with these squibs running up my legs because I was supposed to get shot, and this Mexican pilot was about to fly this old plane real low right over me. Just before the scene starts, I hear Oliver say; ‘God, I miss combat.’ So I think; ‘You get down here and be wired to the damn street with his screwy plane flying over you then! ‘
John Savage: We teased each other, we played practical jokes on one another. A lot of the time, we did it because we were bored or restless. We were never really nasty to each other but we did take it too far sometimes. I remember, one time, we really pissed off Jimmy Woods and he left the set. He just got up and headed to the airport on foot!
James Woods: I’d got so pissed off with Oliver and John, I left the set. So, I’m in the middle of nowhere in Mexico and I’m hitchhiking. None of the trucks are stopping. I’m going; ‘Why the fuck aren’t they stopping?’ What I don’t realise is that Oliver is at the head of the road waving down the cars, saying; ‘There’s a crazy gringo with a .45. Don’t pick him up because he’ll shoot you!’
Michael Murphy: Jimmy Woods is a great, great actor. That incredible confession scene, that whole scene came straight out of his head.
James Woods: I remember the day we were shooting the Romero assassination scene at the church and Oliver said; ‘Maybe you should do a confession.’ And I said; ‘Oh, really?’ So I asked for the lines, but he said; ‘I don’t want to give you lines. I want you to just look into that dark murky soul of yours and come up with whatever you want. And I said; ‘Okay, fair enough.’ We didn’t even do a rehearsal. What you saw was the first time it came out of my mouth. When I got done, Oliver said; ‘It’s frightening the shit that you think of.’
Oliver Stone: We ran out of funds in Mexico. We had to struggle for every dollar.
Robert Richardson: The crew was union and if you didn’t pay them on time each week, they wouldn’t work. There was a feeling that each day would be our last. Perhaps Oliver drew inspiration from the uncertainty.
Oliver Stone: It was a complicated scam, getting the movie finished. It involved acts of high piracy, buccaneering and skulduggery.
James Woods: One time I got a phone call through to my agent and he said; ‘You haven’t been paid for two weeks so come home.’ And I said; ‘I’m not going to do that to Oliver. Tomorrow’s our biggest day.’ He said they were going to fuck me so I should split.
Oliver Stone: We took over this entire town for a week to shoot the battle of Santa Ana. The mayor was great. He loved movies. We redesigned his office and used it as a whorehouse set, with real prostitutes. He liked the decor so much he kept it that way, red walls and all. Later, he said; ‘Go ahead, blow up the whole fucking City Hall,’ and we blew it to pieces.
James Belushi: We were shooting the battle and Oliver got the idea of having these rebel troops riding in on horseback and charging the tanks. There wasn’t any money in the budget. But Oliver wanted that fucking cavalry. Gerald Green’s saying; ‘We don’t have the money.’ And Oliver says; ‘Then take my salary. I’ve got $25,000 coming, take that and get those fucking horses.’ He didn’t care about the money.
Oliver Stone: I always feel like a little bit of me dies when I finish a movie.
JamesWoods: The film was over. Oliver just sat down on the curb. He had this kind of stunned look, amazed that he’d actually managed to finish the picture. I sat down beside him. I said; ‘You know what? I think you made a great film. And all this stuff I fought about was because I really wanted this film to be like no other.’ And he said; ‘Yeah, everything we did made it better.’
Oliver Stone: We had tremendous battles in the editing room. Daly and I fought on everything. There were moments that were really bristly where I felt like he was going to throw me out.
“We were all just nuts. I’m playing this lunatic and we’re riding fucking burros up in the woods. John Savage is a brilliant, unheralded, unappreciated nutcase great actor. Oliver is a fucking lunatic.”
John Daly: Oliver puts 1000% of himself into a film. It’s all up on the screen. For Salvador, he waived his salary and expenses. I think he would have given up his house. I don’t think he goes and directs a film. I think he lives a film. It’s a rare quality.
Oliver Stone: The feeling was that people in America didn’t know how they were supposed to react to the movie which I found kind of sad. Dr Strangelove was a perfect amalgam of humour and seriousness about a subject that is extremely dark. There’s no reason the subject of Salvadoran death squads has to be solemn.
James Woods: I saw the final cut of the film. I watched it with the music for the first time. All of a sudden I thought; ‘My God: I thought it was this little movie. Am I wrong or is this a Great Movie?’ Bob Dylan was there and said; ‘This is the greatest movie I’ve ever seen.’
Oliver Stone: The reviews from the liberal press were often sympathetic, but there was what I call a ‘smothering blanket’ reaction from the conservative press where they don’t take you on, they don’t engage you, they simply ignore you. ‘Time’ completely ignored the movie: it was as if it didn’t exist.
John Savage:Salvador got incredibly mixed reviews. The people that liked it really liked it. But there was a lot of talk about whether Oliver was a communist and whether he loved America and, if he didn’t, why he didn’t just leave and go and live in El Salvador. (The brainwash at work. The idea that our filthy foreign policy represents us.—Eds.)
Oliver Stone: The only reason the picture survived was the video revolution. Salvador did very well on video. People started talking about it and it got nominated for two Oscars, for Best Screenplay and Best Actor. That wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for video.
John Daly:Salvador is a great film. If it had come out after Platoon, it would have had a completely different reception.
Oliver Stone: I worked without pay for a year, but it was worth every single moment of it. It was a tough movie to make, but it has an edge, it has a madness and it has an anarchy, which is good.
James Woods: People always see things from their own point-of-view. The reason I like Salvador is because it shows all sides just as they happened.
Oliver Stone: We were against such odds. I had so many roadblocks to make that picture. And I got enough of what I wanted in there. We shot Salvador the way it looks – hand-held, urgent – I love that movie. It was an ugly duckling. It went after American policy in Central America and it said some things Americans didn’t want to hear.
To Be A Communist In Our Times
By Gaither Stewart (Rome)
Marx: Always insulted and slandered by his enemies but rarely read or understood.
I speak of myself as a Socialist but in my innermost self I think of myself as a Communist. I prefer the Communist name to the beautiful word “Socialist” because the latter has in many places been either altered, weakened, diluted, deformed, its real meaning betrayed by social democrats happy to do capitalism’s bidding, and it has become ambiguous and has been ostracized as in the capitalist homeland, USA. Moreover, as a rule the Socialist designation is qualified in one way or another that detracts from its real meaning: Democratic Socialist, National Socialist, Freedom Socialist, Progressive Socialist, ad absurdum. Anything you want it to mean. Still, although very few Americans want to be known as Socialists, in recent times one hears it used more and more often, as in the organization, Socialists of America.
The term, Left, has also become insufficient since it falls into that same category of politically toxic ambiguity. In my native America many Democrats who behave and vote as rightists like to consider themselves of the Left. In my adopted country of Italy, Left or Center Left comprehends a varied assortment of ex-Christian Democrats, ex-Socialists (rightwing), rightwing labor leaders, populists, ex-Communists now of unidentifiable positions.
Communism is another story. In the West, though less ambiguous, it is simply a bad word. Now, I do not insist that to be genuinely of the Left one must be a Communist … although it helps clarify where you stand. Someone once suggested that maybe I am in reality a Communitarian. Perhaps. Most certainly. However, the majority of the mainline Left will think, “tsk tsk. Naïve! A Communist! And in these times. Another story of mistaken paths. And in these times, since the Fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Communist experiment in East Europe, he still believes that. Tsk, tsk, too bad!”
With an Appendix and Prefatory Note on Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not A Communist
Not only right wingers like to point out Communism’s failures, especially the failures in Soviet Communism (many of them externally triggered), but also the professional anticommunist left, chiefly comprised of comfortable liberals and apostates. The jeremiad is long and tiresome: the ironclad bureaucracy, the corruption inherent in state planning and state ownership, the invasion of the state into the private lives of its citizens, police controls, the supposed horror of the gulags (much amplified by uncorroborated, non-stop Western propaganda, as mentioned by Michael Parenti in his classic essay, The Overthrow of Communism), the one-party system representing only one class (which incidentally also happens in the United States, albeit in America it only represents the infinitesimally small plutocracy and uses two different masks to fool the masses), the dichotomy between privileged Party class and the people (the income inequality between top Soviet politicians and the workers rarely exceeded a factor of 20 or 30, whereas in the West it’s common to find magnates whose incomes represent thousands of times the earnings of average workers; the lack of “democracy” as the non-Communist West understands it. Critics chuckle and indulge themselves before arriving at the conclusion intended from the start: Communism in practice has never worked and will never work. The tragic irony is that many of the criticisms of Soviet Communism today apply to the USA and increasingly to the entire capitalist world.
Thus the necessity to revisit the old question soon arises again: how true is Western criticism of the Soviet experience in Communism? As a rule such outright condemnation of Communism is based on prejudice. Knee-jerk prejudices inculcated into the populace, anti-Socialist/ anti- Communist propaganda infecting the entire lives of most people of the West. Actually more than mere propaganda but hostility deeply engrained in the Western DNA from birth. Prejudices rarely reflect the truth. So what convinced me?
Well, I found in Marxist Socialism an inkling of what I desired: the intention of the deliverance of man from dependence on a rigged system of economics and his eventual victory over inhuman Capitalism which we see now from day to day on its last legs.
Here a few words about Soviet Communism are in order: Communism in twentieth century Russia first of all must be compared with the horrors of the Tsarism it overthrew and replaced. Pre-revolutionary Russia was a country in which the masses consisted chiefly of poor, uneducated and dumbed-down peasants, a society in which inequality and injustice ruled. Communism in Russia had a savage pre-history. Soviet Communism was a very Russian system, the reasons for which date far back into the Russian nineteenth century: the enduring sense of guilt on the part of the educated upper classes and the nobility toward the suffering peoples. Their sense of guilt was, by way of example, much more powerful than white America’s sense of guilt toward its black slaves and ex-slaves, a guilt which affected the real powers in the USA in a minor way as compared to Russia.
Russian revolutionaries had in common a trait absent in the West: a sense of deterministic guilt toward labouring people, especially the peasantry. Communism appealed to the deeply religious Russian masses also because of its common traits with Christianity: the people were deeply linked both to the land and to Russian Orthodoxy. Centuries before the arrival of the Bolsheviks, the world outlook—the famous mirovozreniye—of the masses was already collective—not individual—; they were mentally prepared for the message of Communism.
The educated upper classes felt guilty also because of their divorce from the land and a realization that their lives were based on the exploitation of the people’s labor on the land. The consciousness of the sin of their social position created a great sense of repentance in the upper classes. Greed and selfishness never played the role in Russia as in the USA. Many of the upper classes and nobility felt the loneliness of their guilty position and wanted to reunite with the land and the people.
If the upper classes were moved by guilt, the lower classes were moved by honor. All Russians had always felt an aversion to the crass and greedy bourgeoisie and as the 19th century ended revolutionaries felt a dread of the bourgeois stage of Capitalism predicted by Marx, which they hoped to avoid. Insurrection and immediate revolution was the only possibility for such an achievement, contrary to earlier 19th century Socialist theories. So it was not surprising that Tsardom was overthrown so quickly when the Communist-led revolt occurred and the Revolution began.
And no wonder the capitalist world was terrified. Horrified by the words “Socialism” and “Communism”, the combined military forces of the capitalist world first attacked the Russian Revolution while it was underway, then for seventy years it attacked, isolated, embargoed the Soviet Union and still today anything that smacks of Communism.
Yet Russia had enough time—those seventy years—to offer a successful and appealing alternative to Capitalism, as predicted by Socialist theorists. Such background in the birth of Russian Communism and the example it set for much of the world derived from the sacred Russian conviction that Russia was destined to save the world: the dream of the Third Rome of devout pre-revolutionary Orthodox easily mutated into Communist messianism.
Such factors were missing (and historically and socially impossible in Western Communism). When I began maturing socially and politically, the narrative of my more romantic self—my religious upbringing, my working class family, and also my farmer grandfather’s close link to the land—inclined me toward the messianic vision of Russian Communism. However, my Western world outlook and personal experience dictated Western-style Socialism/Communism as the model to be followed. Though models in Russian style revolution are spiritually inspiring, they are largely inapplicable in the West because of a total absence of the above socio-political factors of pre-revolutionary Russia that made that revolution possible. Neither the (penitent) nobility-upper classes nor a communitarian peasantry existed in the West capable of creating the necessary revolutionary energy to hurtle the West toward another revolution, while at the same time the spirit of the English, French and American revolutions had extinguished long ago.
Socialism/Communism is the only force that has thus far been capable of defeating Capitalism in many countries at once and of building new societies on its ashes, the ironic result of a century long battle for social justice, that Christian concept around which the Russian Revolutionary revolved.
Social justice is the aspect of Communism that has appealed most to me personally and that came to appeal to billions of peoples of the world. That appeal has never died. Today many peoples of former Communist East Europe testify that they miss their lifestyle under the social state offered by Socialism/Communism. More and more peoples of East Europe today confirm their belief in the validity of Socialist tenets by voting back into power Communist or Socialist parties chiefly because Socialism has a soul—a social soul—lacking in Capitalism. A secularized soul, yes, originally a rejection of pure religious-inspired spiritualism, but a soul based on the relation of man to man and not of man’s relation with industry or its economic embodiment in institutionalized selfishness. There is a growing realization that behind economic activity stand real people, people who can dissipate the ghostly world of totalitarian capitalist economics. This aspect of Marxism is no longer connected with materialism, but with socialist spirituality.
After having grown up in a fanatically religious environment, I personally am haunted by the missing element in Western society: a deeply engrained sense of social justice. I am personally bewildered, offended, horrified by the inequality in my native America, and now in my adopted Europe. I am outraged by the philosophy that greed is good. That everyone is encouraged to take all of everything one can. Not only the injustice of economic inequality but also the objective lack of equal opportunity. It is untrue that the poor choose to be poor. It is untrue that the riches in the hands of a few and little in the hands of the poor are the proof that the poor deserve their situation and would be forever satisfied with home, car and TV. Nor do I accept that anyone really wants to be dumb, even if many act as if they prefer ignorance.
Universal surveys show that a great majority of Earth’s population believe the major world problem is Capitalism—the ruthless exploitation of human beings, defenseless animals and nature by capital.
For that reason I strongly favor investment of state funds and energies in public schools, free or easily affordable university study, free health care and free public urban transportation. That is, I favor a huge injection of the state into the everyday lives of peoples. Such vital matters in favor of peoples are what Socialism is about.
Still, it would be foolish to deny the influence of Russian Communism—the influence of the Socialist system, not the entire Soviet model—on my socio-political mindset of today. Russian Communism’s messianism and its vision of a future society no longer a slave of economics reflected my Christian religious/spiritual upbringing. It seemed to me—as it did to billions of people of the other world—that the lever to turn the world upside down had been found.
Nor can I deny the strong influence of the Socialism/Communism projected in West Europe where I began to mature intellectually. Europe’s absorption of many aspects of Socialism/Communism is reflected in the European welfare state constructed throughout the twentieth century—Europe’s great modern contribution to mankind—today being undermined and viciously unraveled by the same greedy Capitalism. But the Russian model also plays a role in my case because of my love for that land and for the accomplishments for the rest of the world of its Communism which was born and developed in a manner vastly different from that of the West. Yet Western Communism after all was also born from many aspects of the Russian experience.
So what Russian Communist influences do I have in mind? It has been said that the entire history of the Russian intelligentsia beginning in the early nineteenth century was a preparation for Communism. The model developed in Russia included above all “the thirst for social righteousness and equality, recognition of the working class as the highest type of humanity, aversion to Capitalism and the bourgeoisie, the striving for an integrated world outlook and an integrated relation to life, sectarian intolerance, a suspicious and hostile attitude to the class of the cultured elite, an exclusive this-worldliness, a denial of spirit and of spiritual values, a well nigh religious devotion to materialism.” However I do not accept that my disagreement with the latter two traits, which place me in the Western camp of Communism, distance me from Communism as such.” (This paragraph is in reference to Nicolas Berdyaev)
So again: why do I think of myself a Communist and not simply Leftist? Not even a radical Leftist which people tend to read simply as anarchist or “terrorist” (always a slippery, invidious word, as Churchill himself recognized, your terrorist is someone else’s freedom fighter). I think of myself as Communist to avoid such confusion. I began thinking in this manner because of two principal aspects of Marxism: on the one hand, the fundamental nature of economics which determines a man’s social class that in turn determines his actions and thoughts. On the other hand, the spiritual side of Marxism that at first seems to contradict its economic determinism: the messianic role it assigns to working people—corresponding to the Christian doctrine of the primacy of the role of the meek and the poor—destined to free humanity from slavery. I find sufficient the idealism of Karl Marx to counter the dehumanization in Capitalism which makes man dependent on his own production.
In the USA someone comments, “Oh, then you’re a Democrat.”
“Of course not,” I reply.
In Italy the question is the same: then you’re for the Partito Democratico? My answer is the same: Of course not. Here you don’t know whether you’re voting for ex-Christian Democrats, rightwing Liberals or Republicans, or in the best of cases for an ex-Communist who changed his mind and abandoned core principles. No, I would not feel at home in any of those places.
Not that my non-support for such parties includes my vote for leftist parties in national elections. Not at all. I have never voted anywhere. Unbelievable to people who still believe in ballots and urns and election campaigns and its promises and financing and all that blather. No, I have never voted in any election. Anywhere. Ever. And I don’t plan to begin voting now. I’m glad Bill de Blasio was elected Mayor of New York City and I would send congratulations to him. But I have no idea of who financed him to get there and what price he must now pay for his funding. According to his PR and also rabid rightists, he ìs of the extreme Left. Very good … if he can change the entire complexion of Manhattan.
So my position is more or less ideological. But Communist? one still wonders. Old-fashioned? Outdated? Tried and failed? Old Marxist stuff you heard about in school? Well, I say, fuck such conditioned reactions and fuck those who do the conditioning. Especially them.
Meanwhile, fuck the Center, too. Above all, fuck the Center. The sense of marketing hype and political spin is only heightened by the fact that we’re told that the Center is allegedly “persuadable”. For, at the same time, it is already the majority. That’s right: we’re told that the “New American Center” constitutes 51% of the electorate. That sounds like a corporate-funded centrist’s dream. So fuck the Center as well as the tamed Left. I’m talking here about the liberaloid left.
Less inspirational are voices that reluctantly acknowledge the status quo because of resistance against big change, certainly against revolution. Desperate jeremiads in America, in times when even our brightest leaders fear ‘apocalypse now’, are commonplace. How the world escaped the global nuclear war calamity that bedeviled my childhood still seems miraculous. Or the equal horror that sprawling Communism would bury us. Reality outsmarts nearly all predictions, dire or otherwise.
Now we have terrorism to re-ignite current fear-thresholds; no mushroom clouds have outdone worldwide genocides since 9/11. The year 2001 sparked a mania. Excluding the Confederate rebellion, our American legacy is so-called evolutionary reforms, not the massive upheavals of revolution. We haven’t had a revolution in centuries. Reform is the Left’s model of change … but what reforms? Reforms for the “worse” —the brand that Barack Obama and corporatized Democrats seem to specialize on. And more such reforms are surely on the way. Still, most of the rest of the world considers the home of global corporate totalitarian Capitalism, corporate democracy and corporate freedom, the good ol’ USA, the rogue super nation of the world. Rogue nation, the term once liberally applied by the USA to the “evil” empire of Communism, the USSR.
Filled with hubris from its inception, the exceptional USA still believes itself exempt from world rules of behavior. The USA, where not only public ethics hardly exist, personal morality is also vanishing at an astonishing pace and few voices remain to confront inequality. Europe too is in fact turning its back on America, despite the enduring European belief in American democracy and capitalistic Europe’s stubborn imitations of America. So, for me, Europe and its dwindling welfare state, are no longer acceptable models either. The question then is, what remains?
Today many Italian Communists are Christians. A paradox. Italian Communists rediscovered the Catholic Church at the same time other Italians were moving away from it. The great majority of Italians today who are not agnostic are simply technical Catholics—baptized at birth, and go to church only for communions and funerals. The Church and the faith mark the beginning and the end of life. All the inbetween is life itself. Because of the powerful presence of the Vatican in Rome, because of the Church’s anathemas and judgments on and invasions into civil issues like divorce and abortion and the hard Marxist-Leninist positions on religion in general, the religious question has always been difficult for Italian Communists. I do not forget one Rome Communist’s summation of the religious question precisely during the time Italian Communists began returning to the Church: “The Pope, his infallibility and his dogmas, the rites, myths, saints, all those millennial customs, and bureaucratic structures are a lot of nonsense. In that sense, Catholicism is the queerest sect of our times. Yet we respect the institution since it is so quintessentially Italian.” Ambiguous, but clearly not in conformity with Lenin who preached that “religion was purely a question of revolutionary conflict” while he summoned men to the “assault of heaven” and opposed any attempt to combine Christianity with Socialism.
Pure materialism is thus a complex question for me. I have to take exception to Christianity’s claim that the human soul is of more value than all the kingdoms of the world, yet I agree that every human being is individual and never to be repeated, a biological individualism which is not to be compared with the personality which belongs to the spiritual world, and which, in the final analysis, is a stumbling block for my Communism. I am not at all hostile to the individual man, the personality, who is more than a member of a social class. I consider myself a member of a spiritual human society which I nonetheless perceive of as an aspired to classless society.
I think there is no reason to dwell on the affirmation that “Capitalism dehumanizes human life”, as per Nicolas Berdyaev. Sometimes seen as a Christian Existentialist, Berdyaev was an early Marxist, who was exiled from Communist Russia in 1922 because of his severe views on Bolshevism. Yet his summation underlines the evangelical truth that man does not live by bread alone and that Communists cannot be condemned for showing that though bread alone is not enough, man still does live by bread and there must be enough of it for all.
Though the individual is a revolutionary, Berdyaev concludes, the masses are conservative.
About the author The Fifth Sun (Punto Press Publishing).
APPENDIX
When Bertrand Russell declared himself an anticommunist
A prefatory note by Patrice Greanville
Apparently, as the essay below indicates, even well-intentioned geniuses like Bertrand Russell can be alarmingly wrong when it comes to communism. Most likely the product of deeply held but unconscious class prejudices (the product of an eccentric aristocratic family, Russell after all was formally a Lord and a distinguished mathematician, and for most of his life he was accorded deferential treatment in Britain and elsewhere) his attacks on communism clearly proceed from a very shallow and invidious perspective, and his cavalier dismissal of Marxism is shameful and shoddy for a professional philosopher. While in his later years Russell—commendably—became a prominent figure in the world struggle against US imperialism and constant war (he was a pivotal founding member of the International War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam, often called the Russell Tribunal)) a few decades before, from the 1930s to the late 1950s, as a hard-to-classify card-carrying anticommunist he was an acerbic critic of communism, even advocating on several occasions the nuclear bombing of the Soviet Union. How could Russell, who incarnated logic and the systematic, impartial acquisition and application of knowledge, square his opposition to American-led Western imperialism with hatred for socialism remains a mystery. The contradiction is perverse when we we realize that he was not oblivious to the ghastly flaws and crimes of the bourgeois order. It was him who memorably said,
“Why I am Not a Communist” by Betrand Russell I n relation to any political doctrine there are two questions to be asked: (1) Are its theoretical tenets true? (2) Is its practical policy likely to increase human happiness? For my part, I think the theoretical tenets of Communism are false, and I think its practical maxims are such as to produce an immeasurable increase of human misery.
I have always disagreed with Marx. My first hostile criticism of him was published in 1896. But my objections to modern Communism go deeper than my objections to Marx. It is the abandonment of democracy that I find particularly disastrous. A minority resting its powers upon the activities of secret police is bound to be cruel, oppressive and obscuarantist. The dangers of the irresponsible power cane to be generally recognized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but those who have forgotten all that was painfully learnt during the days of absolute monarchy, and have gone back to what was worst in the middle ages under the curious delusion that they were in the vanguard of progress.
There are signs that in course of time the Russian régime will become more liberal. But, although this is possible, it is very far from certain. In the meantime, all those who value not only art and science but a sufficiency of bread and freedom from the fear that a careless word by their children to a schoolteacher may condemn them to forced labour in a Siberian wilderness, must do what lies in their power to preserve in their own countries a less servile and more prosperous manner of life.
There are those who, oppressed by the evils of Communism, are led to the conclusion that the only effective way to combat these evils is by means of a world war. I think this a mistake. At one time such a policy might have been possible, but now war has become so terrible and Communism has become so powerful that no one can tell what would be left after a world war, and whatever might be left would probably be at least as bad as present -day Communism. This forecast does not depend upon the inevitable effects of mass destruction by means of hydrogen and cobalt bombs and perhaps of ingeniously propagated plagues. The way to combat Communism is not war. What is needed in addition to such armaments as will deter Communists from attacking the West, is a diminution of the grounds for discontent in the less prosperous parts of the non-communist world. In most of the countries of Asia, there is abject poverty which the West ought to alleviate as far as it lies in its power to do so. There is also a great bitterness which was caused by the centuries of European insolent domination in Asia. This ought to be dealt with by a combination of patient tact with dramatic announcements renouncing such relics of white domination as survive in Asia. Communism is a doctrine bred of poverty, hatred and strife. Its spread can only be arrested by diminishing the area of poverty and hatred.
Ron Wyden: supposedly opposed to the NSA program, but he won’t break with the establishment to defend Snowden or Manning.
Amid escalating denunciations and threats against both Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency (NSA) contractor-turned whistle-blower, and Russia, which granted Snowden temporary asylum on Thursday, the Obama administration on Friday issued a “global travel alert,” closing US embassies in Tripoli, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Baghdad, Riyadh and Doha based on supposed threats of Al Qaeda attacks.
In total, 22 embassies and consulates are to be closed, and a terror alert has been issued covering the entire Middle East. Official statements have asserted that a contact from Yemen—a country that has been under bombardment from US drones for years—gave information raising the possibility of terror attacks against US embassies.
All three major television networks led their evening news reports with the government’s claims, reporting them uncritically despite the lack of any substantiation or any specific purported threats. Terrorism “experts” were trundled out in the usual fashion to stoke up public alarm.
[pullquote] As long as the mainstream media remain stenographers to power, and unquestioningly repeat what official sources proclaim, huge propaganda campaigns designed to support the terror rationale will be mounted with impunity. [/pullquote]
None of the government’s claims should be taken for good coin. They follow more evidence of broad popular support for Snowden, whom the Obama administration is witch-hunting and targeting for prosecution—or worse—for leaking details of secret surveillance programs that invade the privacy and violate the rights of every American and millions more people around the world.
On Thursday, a Quinnipiac poll was released showing that 55 percent of Americans believe Snowden is a whistle-blower, versus only 34 percent who buy the government line that he is a spy or traitor. Weeks of official statements from Obama, top intelligence officials and politicians of both parties claiming that the spying operations are needed to combat terror threats have obviously fallen flat with the public. There is every reason to believe that Friday’s terror scare was launched in an attempt to sow disorientation and dissipate opposition to the illegal and unconstitutional spying programs.
The Obama administration has threatened to cancel a planned meeting between Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow following the upcoming G20 summit in St. Petersburg. This would be one form of retaliation for Moscow’s granting of temporary asylum to Snowden.
Russia’s decision to allow Snowden to leave the Moscow airport to which he had been confined for over a month and settle in Russia for at least a year provoked furious denunciations from the American political establishment. “Obviously this is not a positive development,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Thursday. “We are evaluating the utility of a summit.”
Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York called Snowden a “coward” and denounced Russia for “stabbing us in the back.” Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said Snowden was a “traitor to our country.”
“Any time our president is seen to be disrespected, it’s not good,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said in an interview. “Our foreign policy is not working. This is an example of it not working.”
Lon Snowden, father of Edward, told CBS in regard to the asylum decision, “It’s the honourable thing to do, and as not just a citizen of the United States, but a global citizen of this planet, an occupant of the Earth, I am so thankful for what they have done for my son.”
“As you know, he is receiving threats from the United States government every day,” said Anatoly Kucherena, the Russian lawyer who facilitated Snowden’s asylum request. “The situation is heating up.”
“The personal safety issue is a very serious one for him,” Kucherena added. Security concerns will constrain Snowden’s movement, according to Kucherena, who said that he “can’t go for a walk on Red Square or go fishing.”
Friday’s terror alert comes in the midst of a public relations campaign by the administration to portray the spying programs as legal and carefully monitored by Congress. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to take testimony from top officials of the NSA and the Justice Department concerning the programs. Amid talk of the need for “transparency” and “accountability” from some of the senators on the committee, the hearing only underscored the absence of any serious or principled opposition in Congress and the complicity of both parties, the Congress and the courts in the buildup of the apparatus of a police state.
Congress was fully informed about the NSA programs for years before the Guardian published Snowden’s leaked documents. Democratic Senators Mark Udall of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon have been trumpeted as adversaries of the NSA surveillance and defenders of civil liberties. In fact, they make no serious challenge to either the programs or the spy agencies that carry them out.
Their supposed opposition is two-faced and cowardly. Neither of them even voted against the confirmation this week of a former Bush Justice Department official and supporter of torture and the NSA spying programs as the new Federal Bureau of Investigation director.
They propose token measures to provide a fig leaf of legality and constitutionality to programs that directly violate the Bill of Rights. In a recent meeting between congressional would-be opponents of surveillance and President Obama, Wyden proposed the addition of a “privacy and civil liberties advocate” to the secret court that reviews surveillance requests.
He claims to oppose NSA programs that collect the records of all US telephone calls, but adds caveats that would allow the government to continue to shred the Fourth Amendment’s ban on warrantless searches and seizures. “I am open, for example, on areas like these emergency authorities to make sure that our government is in a position to get information needed to protect the public,” Wyden said after the meeting with Obama.
Neither Wyden nor any of the other congressional “critics” of the spying programs defend Snowden or other whistle-blowers who have exposed US government crimes, such as Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.
Meanwhile, virtually every day brings new revelations of pervasive spying programs. A CNET report released Friday stated that the FBI has been pressuring telecommunications providers to install “port reader software” that enables real-time interception of internet metadata, including IP addresses, e-mail addresses, identities of Facebook correspondents, and sites visited by government surveillance agencies. As CNET wrote: “The US government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies’ internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.”
