It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, May 02, 2016
Friday, December 05, 2008
Harpers Putsch
But now, he told viewers, a coalition of opposition parties is trying to oust him through a backroom deal "without your say, without your consent and without your vote."
Just how valid is Harper's claim that changing governments without a new election would be undemocratic?
"It's politics, it's pure rhetoric," said Ned Franks, a retired Queen's University expert on parliamentary affairs. "Everything that's been happening is both legal and constitutional."
Other scholars are virtually unanimous in their agreement. They say Harper's populist theory of democracy is more suited to a U.S.-style presidential system, in which voters cast ballots directly for a national leader, than it is to Canadian parliamentary democracy.
"He's appealing to people who learned their civics from American television," said Henry Jacek, a political scientist at McMaster University.
In Canada, there's no national vote for prime minister. People elect MPs in 308 ridings, and a government holds power only as long as it has the support of a majority of those MPs.
"We have a rule that the licence to govern is having the confidence of the House of Commons," said Peter Russell, a former University of Toronto professor and adviser to past governors general.
"I'm sorry, that's the rule. If they want to change it to having a public opinion poll, we'd have to reform and rewrite our Constitution."
Such cuts, he added, would be consistent with Harper's long-term goal of reducing the size and scope of government.
"I think that's always been sort of the long-term plan, the way that Stephen was going about it of first depriving the government of surpluses through cutting taxes . . . You get rid of the surpluses and then it makes it easier to make some expenditure reductions."
At a minimum, Flanagan said: "I think there's certainly room for some incremental cuts to useless programs."
The government has already used the economic crisis to put off plans for a national portrait gallery, citing the need for fiscal restraint in uncertain times.
From Flanagan's perspective, the government would do well to scupper a host of grants, contracts and business subsidies and to pare a lot of what he considers wasteful spending on cultural and aboriginal programs.
So wrote Tom Flanagan, one of the deep thinkers of the conservative movement in Canada and a mentor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Flanagan's prescient op-ed piece from August appeared to come to fruition in Thursday's fiscal update when Harper's Conservatives moved to end public financing of federal political parties under the guise of austerity. "There will be no free ride for political parties," Flaherty told the House of Commons in his speech on the update. "Even during the best of economic times, parties should count primarily on the financial support of their own members and their own donors."
Saturday, April 02, 2022
Fri, 1 April 2022
The most potent protest movement in recent French history, the Yellow Vest uprising looked at one point like it might bring a premature end to Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. More than three years after it was smothered, its politicised remnants are counting on their ballots to finish the job.
France’s upcoming presidential election has been described as the least suspenseful in decades, a lopsided contest in which Macron is widely expected to prevail over a motley crew of challengers rejected by a majority of voters.
It’s a prospect 56-year-old Jérôme Batret finds hard to stomach, more than three years after the farmer from rural Auvergne first donned a “yellow vest” in protest at Macron’s government – joining an unconventional insurgency that caught Paris elites napping, rattling the government, baffling commentators, and eventually inspiring copy-cat protests around the world.
Named after the now-famous fluorescent waistcoats that are mandatory in French cars, the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) staged more than 60 consecutive weeks of protests against economic hardship, mounting inequality and a discredited political establishment. They manned roundabouts across the country night and day, took to the streets of towns and cities on every Saturday, and at their peak in December 2018 even stormed the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris, amid scenes of chaos not witnessed since May 1968.
On the day a sea of yellow swarmed the Champs-Elysées, protesters in Batret’s usually tranquil hometown of Le Puy-en-Velay set fire to the local police prefecture with a molotov cocktail. When the French president paid a secretive visit days later to offer shaken officers his support, his vehicle was chased away by angry protesters shouting “Tous pourris” (You’re all corrupt) and “Macron resign”.
Batret was among the very first Gilets jaunes, manning a nearby roundabout non-stop for three weeks. During those heady days, it felt like Macron’s fall was “only a matter of days”, he recalls in an interview with FRANCE 24. Little did he expect the young president would see off the challenge and come back stronger three years later, poised for another mandate.
“He didn’t respect the people back then and he doesn’t respect them now,” says Batret, citing Macron’s pledge last year to “emmerde” (piss off) those who reject Covid-19 vaccines. “We have a president who wants to piss off his own people – and yet he’ll win again.”
‘Politicians in Paris don’t give a shit about us’
Like other rural and suburban workers who formed the backbone of the Yellow Vest insurgency, Batret says his spending power has plummeted during Macron’s five years in office – a turbulent term marked by the coronavirus pandemic and now the fallout from the war in Ukraine. Surging energy prices mean most of his earnings are now swallowed up by the fuel he needs to run his car and tractor, and heat his house.
“People in Paris tell me it’s not so bad for them, but out here in the countryside we’ve got no choice,” he says. “My sons work 35 kilometres from home. That’s 400 euros per month in petrol just to get to work.”
The trigger for the Yellow Vest uprising was an unpopular fuel tax, ostensibly designed to finance France’s transition to a green economy – though it soon became apparent that its proceeds would mostly be used to plug a budget deficit widened by the government’s tax cuts for businesses. The levy infuriated motorists in rural and suburban areas starved of public transport and other services, where households are heavily reliant on their cars.
This original association with motor vehicles, cemented by the symbol of the high-visibility vests, allowed some commentators in well-connected cities to dismiss the protesters as recalcitrant, selfish motorists unconcerned by climate change – an image that has largely stuck.
“Politicians in Paris don’t give a shit about us,” says Batret. “They make empty promises come election time and then leave us to rot. They have no respect for the people.”
A longtime conservative voter, the organic farmer says he will no longer vote for career politicians “who’ve never done anything real in their lives”. On April 10 he will cast his ballot in favour of Jean Lassalle, the Occitan-speaking son of Pyrenean shepherds who was fined 1,500 euros in 2018 for wearing a gilet jaune in France’s National Assembly.
“I know lots of people who never voted before but are now interested in the ‘small candidates’, like Lassalle, [trotskyist Philippe] Poutou, and others who never get mentioned in the media,” says Batret. “I also know people who’ll back extremists like [far-right polemicist] Eric Zemmour, but that says more about their state of despair than their true beliefs.”
When voters head back to the polls two weeks later for the second-round run-off, polls suggest they are likely to face a repeat of the 2017 duel between Macron and veteran far-right candidate Marine Le Pen – a prospect Batret is not relishing.
“On April 24 they’ll be telling us to back Macron as the lesser evil, but I don’t think he is,” he says. “If it’s Macron versus Le Pen again, I’ll vote Le Pen. And if it’s Zemmour, I’ll leave the country.”
‘The Gilets jaunes didn’t just evaporate’
Within months of the rioting witnessed on the Champs Elysée in late 2018, the number of Yellow Vests out on the streets had starkly diminished, and Macron could claim to have largely seen off the most formidable challenge to his presidency.
In terms of its material objectives, the movement was only partially successful. It forced the government into a series of crisis measures to prop up purchasing power, for instance by raising minimum pensions, which helped sap support for the movement. So did Macron’s “Great National Debate”, called in response to the protests, which the ubiquitous president soon turned into a town-hall road-show offering him unrivalled media coverage – while the Yellow Vests were kept at bay.
Still, the movement left an indelible mark on France, sending a clear warning to the country’s self-styled “Jupiterian” president and putting neglected swathes of the country back on the map.
“The Gilets jaunes didn’t just evaporate after taking off their vests,” says Magali Della Sudda, a researcher at Sciences-Po in Bordeaux, who has studied the uprising from its inception and continues to monitor its resurgences.
While the Yellow Vests are now a scattered and diminished force, Della Sudda identifies successive “waves of mobilisation”, some coinciding with policies or statements that galvanised protesters, like the introduction of a Covid-19 health pass restricting people’s freedom of movement or Macron’s pledge to “emmerde” anti-vaxxers.
“There are signs the movement is picking up again, focusing once again on its original themes of purchasing power and social justice,” she says, pointing to the tentative return of Yellow Vests on roundabouts across the country.
“Of course history never repeats itself quite the same way, but we can expect the movement to gain traction again, in one form or another, in the coming months – for instance if Macron puts his pension reform back on the table,” she adds, referring to an unpopular pension overhaul which the government forced through parliament without a vote and then suspended amid the pandemic.
Della Sudda says this year’s presidential campaign has done very little to address the grievances voiced by the Yellow Vests and their supporters, further fuelling popular resentment of politicians. Having pored over some of the tens of thousands of cahiers de doléances (complaint books) drawn up as part of Macron’s national debate, she points to a glaring gap between the country’s dominant political discourse and ordinary people’s real concerns.
“There is a huge discrepancy between the complaints voiced by the Gilets jaunes and by the broader public and the way political parties and the media fail to address these topics,” she says. “It took a war in Ukraine for candidates and the media to start talking about purchasing power – but the problem of energy and food prices did not start with the war.”
Surveys have consistently placed the cost of living at the top of voters’ concerns, followed by health and the environment – largely mirroring the priorities listed by French citizens in the cahiers de doléances, particularly those from rural areas where hospitals and other public services have shut over the years. And yet prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the presidential campaign was dominated by talk of immigration and Islam, driven by the unrivalled media exposure enjoyed by the likes of Zemmour.
>> Pushing far-right agenda, French news networks shape election debate
The gross inadequacy of the campaign means it is still unclear whether the bulk of the Gilets jaunes will boycott the polls or choose to cast protest votes instead, says Della Sudda, though stressing that the uprising has left a profound imprint on many, politicising citizens who previously shunned the polls. She says there are signs large swathes of the movement will seize on the opportunity to deliver their verdict on Macron’s government.
Toppling France’s ‘presidential monarchy’
The Yellow Vests’ relative inexperience of politics has contributed to generating misconceptions – as with their use of the term “apolitical” to stress their rejection of traditional party politics. Studies carried out at the height of the movement revealed that most participants were first-time protesters with no political or union affiliation. A majority said they didn’t believe in the traditional left-right divide, but theirs was a rejection of partisan politics, not of politics per se.
One of the defining features of the Yellow Vests is their attempt to reclaim politics by wresting it from the control of parties and institutions they see as undemocratic. As Della Sudda puts it, “one can credit the movement with getting the French to show interest in their institutions and constitution – a remarkable feat in its own right.”
Those institutions are failing the people, says 56-year-old Sabine, a primary school teacher from the Montpellier area in southern France, who declined to give her full name. She ranks among the numerous Gilets jaunes who have taken up grassroots politics after years of abstaining from the electoral process.
“I used to boycott the Fifth Republic’s anti-democratic elections,” she says, referring to the presidential regime instituted more than 60 years ago by France’s wartime hero, General Charles De Gaulle. “But after five years of Macron, I’ve decided to use my ballot to stop the rot.”
Sabine likens the Yellow Vest experience to a personal and collective awakening to politics and rampant injustice. She describes its members as “society’s invisible people who have risen up, who have sprung from the earth with their bright jackets, a symbol of alertness and visibility”.
“First there was the uprising, then the movement took root on roundabouts and on social media, and by way of regular meetings and assemblies,” she says. “Over time we were able to elaborate a political thought, in the noble sense of the word, meaning a commitment to improve the society we live in.”
More than three years after they first donned their bright jackets, Sabine and a dozen fellow activists are back on the roundabout they occupied on the outskirts of Montpellier at the start of the movement. After lengthy discussions, most members have agreed to back leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon on April 10.
“There were two main requirements for our choice of candidate: to carry our aspirations and have a chance of beating Macron. Mélenchon is the only one who meets both,” the teacher explains. She points to his pledges to impose a cap on prices, boost wages, bolster public services and convene a constituent assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution and replacing France’s “presidential monarchy”.
>> A new Republic: Leftist Mélenchon promises to topple France’s ‘presidential monarchy’
“Mélenchon is not our ideal candidate, he’s not to everyone's taste and we are well aware that there’s no easy fix. But he’s our best option. We’re at a crossroads: either we change course now or we let those in power dismantle our social system,” Sabine adds. “But our struggle won’t end at the ballot box. Whoever wins on April 24, we’ll keep up the fight.”
Anyone but Macron
A veteran leftist who is having his third shot at the presidency, Mélenchon is locked in a battle for second place with his longtime rival Le Pen – and polls suggest he is likely to fall short once again, missing out on the April 24 run-off. Second-round data also looks more encouraging for Le Pen, who has significantly narrowed the gap with Macron since she lost by more than 20 percentage points five years ago.
>> Closing in on Macron: Could Le Pen’s blandest campaign be her most successful yet?
On paper, the narrowing gap means Le Pen is more likely to benefit from the “anyone but Macron” vote than Mélenchon, says Della Sudda, with some supporters claiming that widespread anger could propel her to an unlikely victory over the president.
“It’s an argument I’ve been hearing on the roundabouts, voiced by a minority of Yellow Vests. But it’s not clear it will translate into widespread support for Le Pen,” she says. “Anti-Macronism is just one component of the Yellow Vest vote; and the National Rally doesn’t carry all of their aspirations – far from it.”
Both the National Rally and Mélenchon's La France insoumise (France unbowed) have been cautious in their appeals to the Gilets jaunes, wary of scaring away more moderate voters, says Frédéric Gonthier, a political scientist at the Pacte research centre in Grenoble, who has carried out extensive surveys of the Yellow Vest movement.
“Mélenchon and Le Pen are trying to present themselves as credible alternatives to Macron, by softening the more divisive elements in their platforms and tempering their populist pitch,” he explains. “For candidates who are trying to project an image of respectability, overtly anti-elitist statements aimed at seducing the Yellow Vests would be counterproductive.”
Vying for the working-class vote, the two candidates have focused on the hardship endured by France’s most vulnerable, hoping to draw the Yellow Vests among them without overt appeals.
Mélenchon has had to tread carefully, says Gonthier, noting that many Yellow Vests were deeply suspicious of his longtime membership of the Socialist Party, seeing him as a political “apparatchik”. As for Le Pen, “her party is deeply uncomfortable with the issue of police brutality, which is intimately associated with the Gilets jaunes.”
A tiny window of opportunity
The Yellow Vests’ often violent protests were met with a fierce crackdown that eventually smothered the movement, but not the anger. During the first months of unrest, dozens of protesters, journalists and bystanders suffered shocking injuries – including gouged eyes and hands ripped off – as a result of the rubber bullets and stun grenades used by riot police, while scores of officers were also wounded. The government’s steadfast refusal to question the police tactics, with Macron at one point saying “there is no such thing as police violence”, infuriated the Yellow Vests and further radicalised its diehard members.
Daniel Bodin’s voice breaks into sobs when recalling the violence of those days. The 66-year-old was among the first to man the roundabout near Montpellier, where he and Sabine still don their high-visibility jackets. “We’d never seen anything like it before. They treated us like pariahs,” he says of the “brutal repression” ordered by a president he describes as “authoritarian”.
There is something visceral about the revulsion Macron elicits among many Yellow Vests, who are prone to citing his derogatory comments – such as telling an unemployed man he need only “cross the street” to find a job, complaining about the “crazy money” France spends on welfare, and urging pensioners to “complain less” about their shrinking allowances.
“His comments are proof of his contempt for small folk like us, but it would be foolish to stop at that. It’s the laws he passed that upset me most,” says Bodin, pointing to the Covid-19 health pass and a contentious law extending police powers as evidence of civic freedoms being curtailed under Macron.
Like others in his group, Bodin is routing for Mélenchon in the election. He sees it as the only chance to reverse “the downward slide into neoliberal economics” and “put our politics back into the people’s hands”. He singles out for praise the leftist candidate’s pledge to introduce a so-called “citizen’s initiative referendum”, giving voters the power to initiate policy and revoke their elected representatives.
“But we are neither fans, nor groupies,” he cautions. “And we don’t claim to tell people how they should vote – that’s what political parties do.”
Bodin acknowledges deep divisions within the Yellow Vest movement, between those willing to engage with the electoral process and others who “would rather wait for the system to collapse or a civil war to break out”. “I understand those who are disgusted by politics and don’t want to vote,” he adds. “But we have a tiny window of opportunity and we must give it a try.”
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
How Daniel Ellsberg’s Moral Power Remains Alive
Strange to think that, without Daniel Ellsberg, Watergate might never have happened, Richard Nixon might have remained president, and the war in Vietnam might have taken even longer to end. So many decades later, it’s easy to forget how, in June 1971, when Ellsberg released those secret government documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, and their shocking revelations about that distant war hit the front page of the New York Times, Nixon and crew were determined to move against him – and fast. It mattered not at all that he would be “indicted on 12 felony counts, including theft and violation of the Espionage Act,” and face up to 115 years in prison. That wasn’t enough for them. Nixon wanted to “try him in the press” and turned to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate him.
As it happened, though, Hoover was a buddy of Louis Marx, the father of Ellsberg’s wife and the head of a major toy company that, among other things, made plenty of toy soldiers. (Marx regularly gave Hoover toys that he could turn over to his employees for their kids at Christmas.) So when the FBI chief moved far too slowly on Ellsberg, Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, worrying about those Pentagon Papers revelations (even though they didn’t deal with Nixon’s own nightmarish role in the then-ongoing wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), decided to set up a White House Special Investigations Unit. It came to be known informally as “the Plumbers.”
Its first assignment would be to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in search of damaging information on him. (No luck, as it turned out, but when the judge in Ellsberg’s trial found out about that break-in, he dismissed the case.) Nine months later, that unit’s ultimate assignment would, of course, have nothing to do with Ellsberg. It would be the infamous break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in — yes! – the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. The result was history that would have been inconceivable without – yes! – Daniel Ellsberg.
As TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, makes clear today, Ellsberg led quite a life thereafter before dying in June 2023. Let him rest in peace. (If only the rest of this planet could do the same!) ~ Tom Engelhardt
The Absence – and Presence – of Daniel Ellsberg
by Norman Solomon
On a warm evening almost a decade ago, I sat under the stars with Daniel Ellsberg while he talked about nuclear war with alarming intensity. He was most of the way through writing his last and most important book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Somehow, he had set aside the denial so many people rely on to cope with a world that could suddenly end in unimaginable horror. Listening, I felt more and more frightened. Dan knew what he was talking about.
After working inside this country’s doomsday machinery, even drafting nuclear war plans for the Pentagon during President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Dan Ellsberg had gained intricate perspectives on what greased the bureaucratic wheels, personal ambitions, and political messaging of the warfare state. Deceptions about arranging for the ultimate violence of thermonuclear omnicide were of a piece with routine falsehoods about American war-making. It was easy enough to get away with lying, he told me: “How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we’re superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”
Dan had made history in 1971 by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, exposing the constant litany of official lies that accompanied the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War. In response, the government used the blunderbuss of the World War I-era Espionage Act to prosecute him. At age 41, he faced a possible prison sentence of more than 100 years. But his trial ended abruptly with all charges dismissed when the Nixon administration’s illegal interference in the case came to light in mid-1972. Five decades later, he reflected: “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle.”
That miracle enabled Dan to keep on speaking, writing, researching, and protesting for the rest of his life. (In those five decades, he averaged nearly two arrests per year for civil disobedience.) He worked tirelessly to prevent and oppose a succession of new American wars. And he consistently gave eloquent public support as well as warm personal solidarity to heroic whistleblowers — Thomas Drake, Katharine Gun, Daniel Hale, Matthew Hoh, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Mordechai Vanunu, Ann Wright, and others — who sacrificed much to challenge deadly patterns of official deceit.
Unauthorized Freedom of Speech
Dan often spoke out for freeing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whose work had revealed devastating secret U.S. documents on America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the end of a visit in June 2015, when they said goodbye inside Ecuador’s embassy in London, I saw that both men were on the verge of tears. At that point, Assange was three years into his asylum at that embassy, with no end in sight.
Secretly indicted in the United States, Assange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy for nearly four more years until London police dragged him off to prison. Hours later, in a radio interview, Dan said: “Julian Assange is the first journalist to be indicted. If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last. The First Amendment is a pillar of our democracy and this is an assault on it. If freedom of speech is violated to this extent, our republic is in danger. Unauthorized disclosures are the lifeblood of the republic.”
Unauthorized disclosures were the essence of what WikiLeaks had published and what Dan had provided with the Pentagon Papers. Similarly, countless exposés about U.S. government war crimes became possible due to the courage of Chelsea Manning, and profuse front-page news about the government’s systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment resulted from Edward Snowden’s bravery. While gladly publishing some of their revelations, major American newspapers largely refused to defend their rights.
Such dynamics were all too familiar to Dan. He told me that the attitude toward him of the New York Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize with its huge Pentagon Papers scoop, was akin to a district attorney’s view of a “snitch” – useful but distasteful.
In recent times, Dan detested the smug media paradigm of “Ellsberg good, Snowden bad.” So, he pushed back against the theme as rendered by New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote a lengthy piece along those lines in late 2016. Dan quickly responded with a letter to the editor, which never appeared.
The New Yorker certainly could have found room to print Dan’s letter, which said: “I couldn’t disagree more with Gladwell’s overall account.” The letter was just under 300 words; the Gladwell piece had run more than 5,000. While promoting the “Ellsberg good, Snowden bad” trope, the New Yorker did not let readers know that Ellsberg himself completely rejected it:
“Each of us, having earned privileged access to secret information, saw unconstitutional, dangerously wrong policies ongoing by our government. (In Snowden’s case, he discovered blatantly criminal violations of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy, on a scale that threatens our democracy.) We found our superiors, up to the presidents, were deeply complicit and clearly unwilling either to expose, reform, or end the wrongdoing.
“Each of us chose to sacrifice careers, and possibly a lifetime’s freedom, to reveal to the public, Congress, and the courts what had long been going on in secret from them. We hoped, each with some success, to allow our democratic system to bring about desperately needed change.
“The truth is there are no whistleblowers, in fact no one on earth, with whom I identify more closely than with Edward Snowden.
“Here is one difference between us that is deeply real to me: Edward Snowden, when he was 30 years old, did what I could and should have done – what I profoundly wish I had done – when I was his age, instead of 10 years later.”
As he encouraged whistleblowing, Dan often expressed regret that he hadn’t engaged in it sooner. During the summer of 2014, a billboard was on display at bus stops in Washington, D.C., featuring a quote from Dan — with big letters at the top saying “DON’T DO WHAT I DID. DON’T WAIT,” followed by “until a new war has started, don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war’s worth of lives.” Two whistleblowers who had been U.S. diplomats, Matthew Hoh and Ann Wright, unveiled the billboard at a bus stop near the State Department.
A Grotesque Situation of Existential Danger
Above all, Daniel Ellsberg was preoccupied with opposing policies that could lead to nuclear war. “No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. Or insane,” he wrote in The Doomsday Machine. “The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness.”
It’s fitting that the events set for Daniel Ellsberg Week (ending on June 16th, the first anniversary of when Dan passed away) will include at least one protest at a Northrop Grumman facility. That company has a $13.3 billion contract to develop a new version of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which – as Dan frequently emphasized – is the most dangerous of all nuclear weapons. He was eager to awaken Congress to scientific data about “nuclear winter” and the imperative of shutting down ICBMs to reduce the risks of nuclear war.
Five years ago, several of us from the Institute for Public Accuracy hand-delivered paperbacks of The Doomsday Machine – with a personalized letter from Dan to each member of the House and Senate – to all 535 congressional offices on Capitol Hill. “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years,” Dan wrote near the top of his two-page letter. Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”
Dan’s letter singled out the urgency of one “immediate step” in particular: “to eliminate entirely our redundant, vulnerable, and destabilizing land-based ICBM force.” Unlike air-launched and sea-based nuclear weapons, which are not vulnerable to attack, the ICBMs are vulnerable to a preemptive strike and so are “poised to launch” on the basis of “ten-minute warning signals that may be – and have been, on both sides – false alarms, which press leadership to ‘use them or lose them.’”
As Dan pointed out, “It is in the power of Congress to decouple the hair-trigger on our system by defunding and dismantling the current land-based Minuteman missiles and rejecting funding for their proposed replacements. The same holds for lower-yield weapons for first use against Russia, on submarines or in Europe, which are detonators for escalation to nuclear winter.”
In essence, Dan was telling members of Congress to do their job, with the fate of the earth and its inhabitants hanging in the balance:
“This grotesque situation of existential danger has evolved in secret in the almost total absence of congressional oversight, investigations, or hearings. It is time for Congress to remedy this by preparing for first-ever hearings on current nuclear doctrine and ‘options,’ and by demanding objective, authoritative scientific studies of their full consequences including fire, smoke, nuclear winter, and famine. Classified studies of nuclear winter using actual details of existing attack plans, never yet done by the Pentagon but necessarily involving its directed cooperation, could be done by the National Academy of Sciences, requested and funded by Congress.”
But Dan’s letter was distinctly out of sync with Congress. Few in office then – or now – have publicly acknowledged that such a “grotesque situation of existential danger” really exists. And even fewer have been willing to break from the current Cold War mindset that continues to fuel the rush to global annihilation. On matters of foreign policy and nuclear weapons, the Congressional Record is mainly a compendium of arrogance and delusion, in sharp contrast to the treasure trove of Dan’s profound insights preserved at Ellsberg.net.
Humanism and Realism to Remember
Clear as he was about the overarching scourge of militarism embraced by the leaders of both major parties, Dan was emphatic about not equating the two parties at election time. He understood that efforts like Green Party presidential campaigns are misguided at best. But, as he said dryly, he did favor third parties – on the right (“the more the better”). He knew what some self-described progressives have failed to recognize as the usual reality of the U.S. electoral system: right-wing third parties help the left, and left-wing third parties help the right.
Several weeks before the 2020 election, Dan addressed voters in the swing state of Michigan via an article he wrote for the Detroit Metro Times. Appearing under a headline no less relevant today – “Trump Is an Enemy of the Constitution and Must Be Defeated” – the piece said that “it’s now of transcendent importance to prevent him from gaining a second term.” Dan warned that “we’re facing an authoritarian threat to our democratic system of a kind we’ve never seen before,” making votes for Joe Biden in swing states crucial.
Dan’s mix of deep humanism and realism was in harmony with his aversion to contorting logic to suit rigid ideology. Bad as current realities were, he said, it was manifestly untrue that things couldn’t get worse. He had no intention of ignoring the very real dangers of nuclear war or fascism.
During the last few months of his life, after disclosing a diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer, Dan reached many millions of people with an intensive schedule of interviews. Journalists were mostly eager to ask him about events related to the Pentagon Papers. While he said many important things in response to such questions, Dan most wanted to talk about the unhinged momentum of the nuclear arms race and the ominous U.S. frenzy of antagonism toward Russia and China lacking any sense of genuine diplomacy.
While he can no longer speak to the world about the latest developments, Dan Ellsberg will continue to speak directly to hearts and minds about the extreme evils of our time – and the potential for overcoming them with love in action.
A free documentary film premiering now, “A Common Insanity: A Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg About Nuclear Weapons,” concludes with these words from Dan as he looks straight at us: “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area.
Copyright 2024 Norman Solomon