On the Politics of Hatred (la haine idéologique) : From CEIMSA-IN-EXILE (THE CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN
INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS).
4 September 2004
Grenoble,
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Since the beginning of the politics of reaction in the
Today, we are witnessing the continuation of what might appear as ideologically
driven public policies, which serve to organize the masses and discipline
institutions (i.e. introduce self-censorship) such as the media and the
education industries.
However, American scholar Michael Parenti argues in his book, Democracy for
the Few,
that the ideology of Anti-Communism historically served as a political ploy, it was never constructed with the intention to put an end to communism.
Instead, this post world-war-II ideology served to lubricate a virtual cash
cow. This money machine was the military industry, or more precisely the military-industrial
complex, as President Eisenhower called it in 1961. From this perspective,
we can see the logical consistency of law-makers in Washington who voted to
export grain and other commodities to the Soviet Union (to feed
"Communists" in Russia) while at the same time they voted to kill
"Communists" in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc.... The bottom
line was the opportunity for higher profits and greater returns on capital
investments. There was no contradiction between these two
Ideologies, it would appear, are like the clothes we wear. Gabriel Kolko points
out in his book, A Century of War, that
If true, this insight might explain why, in our post-cold-war era, the ideology
of Anti-Terrorism has served to help U.S. policy makers mobilize
killing fields in Afghanistan and in Iraq, while at the same time continuing
very profitable financial and trade relations with Saudi Arabia, the origin of
the 9/11 "surprise attack" against the United States.
For an excellent discussion of the "revolving door" phenomenon in
Washington, D.C. (from-corporate-to-government-back-to-corporate employment),
readers should see Craig Unger's book House of Bush, House of Saud, the
secret relationship between the world's two most powerful dynasties. And
for an historical perspective on what is quickly becomming "America's
Afghanistan", which in the opinion and purpose of U.S. policy-maker
Zbignew Brzezinski, was "Russia's Vietnam" in the 1980s, readers are
directed to what Gilbert Achcar has described as the definitive study of the
history of social movements within Iraq : Hanna
Batatu's book, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of
Iraq.
Manufacturing a cash cow and securing its private ownership by
The conclusion is that ideology serves essential economic interests (and not
the reverse), and the ideology of hatred, as George Orwell
illustrated so well in his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, serves well as an
organizing principle to mobilize populations, so they can be easily controlled
and, if necessary, provided small incentives to collaborate with policies
designed by powerful private interests.
Below, please find the copy of an article recently sent to CEIMSA by several
different sources -both French and American- who are interested in
understanding the many mutations within American institutions. This recent
article by the well-known American entertainer, Garrison Keillor, is a
good example of the capacity of self-awareness inside the
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal Grenoble 3
__________________________
We're
Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
By Garrison
Keillor
copyright In These Times, 26 August 2004
How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt
Gingrich's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man,
whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party.
Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed
spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities
and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were
good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the
paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the
antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a
genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote
Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate
Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated
southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public
service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the
Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and
fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed
flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World
War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate
vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who
rose to power on pure punk politics. 'Bipartisanship is another term of date
rape,' says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. 'I don't want to
abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it
into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.' The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of
hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists,
fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance
racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats,
nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks,
fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil
Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to
diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a
dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular
institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying
to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf,
dumb and dangerous.
Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild
swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining
on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation
to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in
the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the
Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure
sign of Divine Grace.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of
tragedy - the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the
attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a
tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret
even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax
cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render
government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that
was undertaken for the president's personal satisfaction but sold to the
American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is
to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this
country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the
death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived
this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The
omens are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear - fear, the greatest
political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens,
a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and
silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint
bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal
regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn't the Florida recount or the Supreme Court
decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming back to.
It wasn't the 'end of innocence,' or a turning point in our history, or a
cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism
shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was
purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or
getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th
floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W.
Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick,
maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get
some serious nation-changing done in his second term.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as
embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and
communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads.
They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in
the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and
they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
The Union is what needs defending this year.
Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the
same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of
Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax
cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to
know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and
clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of
intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to
hell with anybody who opposes them.
This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people. We have
a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however
we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger.
Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in
time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear
reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than
winning.
-------
Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion, now in its
25th year on the air. This adapted excerpted from Keillor's new book, Homegrown
Democrat (© 2004) is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin
Group (USA) Inc.
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