[Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime> Richard Stallman: Thousands dead, millions deprived of civil liberties?

["Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>]

Steve Cisler wrote:

> Is Stallman's plea the voice of someone out of touch with the rest of
> the world or is he justified in his worries (or both)?

Stallman is correct.  The very purpose of this war is to curtail civil
liberties and to militarize society.  Turning Woodrow Wilson's phrase on its
head, this is a "war to make democracy safe for the world."

For the past fifty years, a consensus has been emerging at the highest
levels of US policy-making that the political liberalism embodied in the US
Constitution is obsolete, and that the world's capitalist democracies in
general are becoming "ungovernable."  A comprehensive, but by no means
unique, illustration of this thesis may be found in the works of Samuel P.
Huntington, the Harvard-based author of the notorious, anti-Islamic 1993
"Clash of Civilizations" thesis and long one of the most influential and
well-connected national security advisors in the United States.

In 1957, Harvard published a Huntington book called "The Soldier and the
State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations".  In the
preface, he claims that the American conception of civil-military relations
"is obsolete in that it is rooted in a hierarchy of values which is of
dubious validity in the contemporary world."  These values, which he labels
"business pacifism", are those which triumphed with the North's defeat of
the South in the US Civil War:  "worship of work and the stress on the moral
value of economic productivity" and "an optimistic belief in human nature,
reason and progress."

Against these values, which he believes are dangerously hostile to the
martial virtues, Huntington advocates a culture based on an ethic of
"military professionalism" which he identifies with the defeated South:
"glorification of violence, chivalry, and the martial ideal", "admiration
... for the English ideal of the 'gentleman,'", and "respect for history and
society as against progress and the individual."  He goes on to praise
(then-recent) early-50s works of American popular culture that glorify "the
beauty, appeal and meaning of the military life, its rewards and richness",
and concludes with the slogan "America can learn more from West Point [US
Military Academy] than West Point from America."

Huntington took these views to a new level in 1975, when he appeared as
co-author of a report published by New York University entitled "The Crisis
of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies."  This report
concludes that democracy is inherently dysfunctional, and can survive only
by being weakened.  Huntington claims that the "arenas where democratic
procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited" and that the
marginalization of some groups, such as "the blacks", from the political
process "is inherently undemocratic, but it has also been one of the factors
which has enabled democracy to function effectively."  He concludes his
contribution with the words "We have come to recognize that there are
potentially desirable limits to economic growth. There are also potentially
desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy."

In 1996, Huntington turned to a mass audience and published "The Clash of
Civilizations."  In this book, he identified the West's post-Communist enemy
as an "Islamic-Confucian" cultural axis which he argues is demonstrably
prone to autocracy, wars of conquest and terrorism.  In more ways than one,
the subtext of this cynical and potentially catastrophic manipulation of the
public is Walter Lippmann's 1922 work "Public Opinion", which Huntington
summarizes accurately in his 1957 book as expressing "grave doubts as to the
ability of unguided popular democracy to conduct public affairs."  In its
place, Huntington (like Lippmann) posits an armed "power morality" that
imposes upon the world an "absolute moral code" that trumps not only
democracy, but all forms of national sovereignty.

This morality, of course, is claimed by its proponents to represent
"universal human values."  However, it is actually the defense of vested
interests (in Veblen's sense) against the truly liberating forces of
science, trade, free inquiry and free information, forces which are valuable
precisely to the extent that they are "value-free." Having reached this
point, I think it's appropriate to thank Richard Stallman for his
comprehensive understanding of what freedom means in today's world, and for
waging so effective a public struggle on so many fronts against those who
would deprive us of it.

Kermit Snelson
ksnelson@gmx.de

References
==========

	1. 	Crozier, Michel; Huntington, Samuel P; Watanuki, Joji, and Trilateral
Commission. The crisis of democracy report on the governability of
democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York: New York University
Press; 1975. 220 p  (The Triangle papers; 8).
Notes: LC Control Number: 75027167
Includes bibliographical references

	2. 	Huntington, Samuel P. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of
world order. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1996. 367 p .
Notes: LC Control Number: 96031492
Includes bibliographical references and index

	3. 	---. The soldier and the state the theory and politics of
civil-military relations. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press; 1957. xiii, 534 p .
Notes: LC Control Number: 57006349
Bibliographical references included in "Notes" (p. 469-517)


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