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Today's
Stories
November 13, 2003
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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November
13, 2003
Confronting the Evangelical
Imperialists
Mr.
Kurtz: the Horror, the Horror
By VIJAY PRASHAD
In mid-October, my email in-box began to receive
forwards from Michael Bednar, a graduate student in the department
of history at the University of Texas, Austin. The subject line
suggested that it was an email joke: "Congress moves to
regulate postcolonial studies."
Thanks to the vigilance of Michael Bednar
many of us now know that the US Congress is poised to transform
the relationship between university and college level international
or area studies and the US government. The study of the world
has been cultivated by federal funds via Title VI legislation,
but the government has, by and large, not been involved in the
career choices of those who take the money, study and then go
forward into their lives. The government, when the President
signs HR 3077 into law, will be now create an International Education
Advisory Board made up of members of the Department of Defense,
the National Security Agency and Homeland Security "to increase
accountability by providing advice, counsel, and recommendations
to Congress on international education issues for higher education."
In other words, the government wants our students to enter a
War Corps, to provide the translators, the intelligence analysts
and others who will do the bidding of this era's Evangelical
Imperialism.
I had barely begun to get over the death
of Edward Said, whom the Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe rightly called
the "lighthouse that navigates us." The assault on
Area Studies it turns out is part of an assault on the legacy
of those such as Edward Said, a long-time obsession of Martin
Kramer's Middle East Forum (and Daniel Pipe's year old Campus
Watch  website). On 19 June 2003,
when the Iraq war had already turned into this disastrous occupation,
the US House of Representative's Subcommittee on Select Education
held a hearing on "International Programs in Higher Education
and Questions About Bias." The lead plaintiff at the hearing
was Stanley Kurtz, a rather well known partisan from the Hoover
Institute and National Review, who makes Bernard Lewis seem a
liberal. Kurtz testimony invoked Said in his claim that most
area studies centers are currently teaching anti-Americanism.
"Said equated professors who support American foreign policy
with the 19th century European intellectuals who propped up racist
colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial theory is
that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign
languages and culture at the service of American power."
Actually this is not a bad summary of Said's argument on culture
and imperialism.
Kurtz recommends a reversal of the Said
claim. Indeed he wants the government to oversee the Title VI
funds given over to universities for the study of the rest of
the world. The House accepted the critique and the recommendations.
They have now written H. R. 3077 that adopts all this language,
they passed it and have sent it along to the Senate (who is expected
to start deliberations on it come the new year).
H. R. 3077 is not a break from US government
policy. It is a reaction to the break made by many scholars within
Area Studies from the goals of US imperialism. The establishment
wants to take back Area Studies programs to the goal of their
origination. Area Studies emerges in the early part of this century
mostly as part of US evangelism: K. S. Latourette at Yale helped
kick-start East Asian studies (his 1929 book is History of the
Christian Missions in China); H. E. Bolton at Berkeley pioneered
Latin American Studies (his 1936 book is The Rim of Christendom:
A biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer);
A. C. Coolidge at Harvard worked out the contours of Slavic Studies
(his big book of 1908 is entitled The United States as a World
Power). In its infancy, the Church and Washington held sway over
Area Studies. Our evangelical imperials of today want to return
to this period.
Toward the end of Orientalism, Said noted
that the US academy had taken over the Orientalist mantle from
the Europeans after World War II and the "area specialist,"
he noted, "lays claims to regional expertise, which is put
at the service of government or business or both." Area
Studies, or the study of the world within the US academy, indeed
has a complex history, much of it mired in an eagerness to please
the powers. University of Chicago's sociologist Edward Shils
said of his secondment to the War Department in the 1940s, that
he was "glad of the vacation from teaching [and] enjoyed
the excitement of proximity to great events and to great authority
as well as to the occasional exercise of power on [our] own."
Such is perhaps a good summary of the intentions of those academics
who want to will themselves to power--venality mixed with a dose
of the luxury afforded to the venal.
In 1951, a Social Science Research Council
report regretted the "woeful lack of area experts, however
defined" and it argued that the best thing for US domination
of the world was "the launching of scores of area programs."
In a moment of candor, the report authored by University of Michigan
East Asia scholar Robert Hall, noted, "We must know if we
are to survive." Much of what Said detested in Area Studies
(particularly the study of the Arabic speaking peoples) is a
result of the policies put in place in the wake of the SSRC report.
The campus struggles during the Vietnam
War and the uprisings of students of color (the Third World Strike)
pushed the academy to rethink Area Studies. As Said notes in
Orientalism, "The Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars (who
are primarily American) led a revolution during the 1960s in
the ranks of East Asia specialists; the African studies specialists
were similarly challenged by revisionists; so too were other
Third World area specialists." (He regrets that such a change
did not come for Arabists and Islamologists--although after his
book such change has been afoot to such a degree that it has
provoked an immense backlash from people like Daniel Pipes, Bernard
Lewis, Martin Kramer and Stanley Kurtz).
With the demise of the Soviet Union,
the assault on Area Studies started afresh. We were told that
all campuses must "internationalize," an idea that
is on the surface very appealing and it drew support from many
Area Studies people (in the mid-1990s the Ford Foundation held
a competition for funds to rethink Area Studies, a competition
that drew most major universities and colleges). All talk of
"internationalization" does not have humanitarian or
liberal instincts, since the recent initiatives are driven principally
by the military and by business.
Stanley Kurtz has used 9/11 and the recent
wars as an excuse to recycle a bill that made its first appearance
in 1992 thanks to Representative David Boren. In the National
Security Education Act of 1992 Congress wished to "produce
an increased pool of applicants for work in the departments and
agencies of the US government with national security responsibilities"
(article 3). The bill would have become law a decade ago had
Newt Gingrich not taken control of Washington and nixed it in
his bid to defund education in general. He probably didn't read
the fine print.
The business implications of internationalization
came to the fore in 1990, when the National Governors Association
bemoaned the lack of international education for college graduates
in a globalized world. "The best jobs, the largest markets
and the greatest profits will flow to the workers and firms that
understand the world around them," said the governors. Their
analysis of recent history led to the assessment that "a
lack of understanding and inability to communicate contributed
to such events as the war in Vietnam, the hostage crisis in Iran,
the OPEC oil crisis and the political consequences of the Bhopal
industrial disaster." The motives of power and profit are
freed of any responsibility for this litany of ills--we are left
with E. M. Forster's dictum, "Only Connect."
Title VI is not a one-dimensional weapon
of imperial domination: it has allowed for the creation of vast
amounts of knowledge mobilized by progressives to help us to
understand the dilemma of our world. Yale historian David Montgomery
writes that we need to review the Cold War experience of Area
Studies and the academy "not only to teach us how the human
imagination has been contained, but also how it has broken through
the veils of secrecy and deception." Area Studies has enabled
us to better understand the creativity of popular social and
left movements, and it has shown us how the theory of the GDP
stifles the liberty of people around the globe. For us to continue
our struggle to breathe life into Area Studies, to make it a
real partisan of radical thought against the dreary deserts of
pragmatism and of domination, we have to resist the new bill
as it wends through Congress.
Michael Bednar asks us to write to our
local representatives. That is always a good idea. Here's another
one. If you are on a college campus, start a student-faculty-staff
group in defense of Postcolonial/Area Studies--and push the administration
to take a position on the issue along the lines of freedom of
speech. If you are not on a college campus, then express your
outrage in the local paper about the government's infringement
on the liberty of intellectual thought. All political groups
should take this seriously: it is not just about the academy,
but also about the attempt by the state to make the academy into
the emissary of Empire.
If you are interested in a campaign against
this Kurtzian offensive, send me an email.
Vijay Prashad
is an Associate Professor and Director of the International Studies
at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His two most recent books are
Fat
Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism and
Keeping
Up with the (Dow) Joneses Prashad can be reached at:
Vijay.Prashad@trincoll.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 8 / 9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
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