An Open Letter to Chris Hayes

Chris,

Following the controversy over your remarks about whether automatically calling all soldiers heroes doesn’t get in the way of us having an open and honest conversation of how and when we should use our armies; I was surprised at how upsetting I found many of the chauvinistic, knee-jerk reactions to what you said.

I thought that your remarks where intelligent, meaningful, respectful and necessary. I’m sorry that you felt the need to apologize for them. Let me explain.

I served as a platoon commander in the armored corps of the IDF during the second half of the 90’s. I was repeatedly deployed in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel’s security zone in southern Lebanon. My soldiers and I often talked about the disparity we felt between serving in what was a war zone when at the same time civilians were leading normal lives, often only miles away. We felt this most strongly when coming home to Tel Aviv on weekend furloughs while stationed in southern Lebanon. Many of us asked how could people just go about their daily lives as if nothing is happening while we are getting injured and killed.

I always thought that that was the point of having an army. With universal conscription, everyone (in theory at least) spends three or four years of their lives in the army to protect civilian society so that when they get out of the army, they can live a normal civilian existence. By shouldering the burden of defense for a limited amount of time we where allowing the existence of a vibrant, liberal democracy where people could ask difficult questions about how we should treat our military. I risked my life so that your Israeli counterparts could question why my soldiers and I were being sent to Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. I most definitely did not risk my life so that I could get false respect from macho militarists, most of whom wouldn’t recognize the shooting end of a rifle if was staring them in the face.

On November 23, 1998, during a battle with Hezbollah, my tank was hit by multiple anti-tank rockets and I was injured. For 7 days straight I was in both major daily newspapers, being called every kind of hero. I was thoroughly embarrassed. I didn’t feel like a hero. I just didn’t get out of the way of the rockets in time.

You’re right, when you say that not everyone is made out to serve in the military and that goes double for combat units. It’s physically demanding but then so is working in agriculture or construction, so that doesn’t make us heroes. You need to be able to eat a lot of shit, which certainly doesn’t make you a hero. You spend most of your time bored out of your mind while waiting for something to happen, which doesn’t make you much except for a little twitchy. And you have to love your comrades enough so that you don’t think twice about endangering your life in order to keep them safe. It is that camaraderie that makes serving in a combat unit a privilege rather than a burden.

I’ve found that the people who called us heroes and went out of their way to celebrate our service, were for the most part the same people most enthusiastic to go to war and at the same time the least likely to serve in combat units. The way to honor our troops is by paying them a decent wage, taking care of their families, making sure they have the equipment and the training they need to do their jobs, paying for their college education, giving them citizenship, properly funding VA, healing their injuries (both physical and mental), understanding that our responsibility towards them does not end when they are discharged and continually asking ourselves if the wars we send them to are absolutely necessary.

That is respect. The rest is just so much hot air.

Thank you for your service, Chris. You honor us with the tough questions you ask.

 Bram Spiero

Populist Falacies

Part of what OWS and her sister movements are suggesting is that we rethink the superficiality with which we approach our world. An opportunity to re-imagine how our world should ideally work is not something that comes along every day and should be embraced with hunger, curiosity and maybe a little trepidation. Now that Yair Lapid has pulled the veil off of his political beliefs it becomes evident that these are both superficial and unimaginative. What is most disappointing is not that he entertains these ideas, what can you expect from someone that works so hard at giving offense to so few, but rather that the ideas he espouses are so popular.

Here, like elsewhere we find little more than an ill conceived collection of neo-liberal baubels and populist trinkets. At best there is a sentimental distortion of a past that never existed which all too often resembles just plain old chauvinism.

So, what are these populist fallacies then?

The market can solve problems that the state can not.

There is a tendency to look at how messy politics is, how imperfect the way that decisions are made is, how mediocre the results often are and look with envy at how “successful” businesses are at attaining results. This is, of course, a fallacy. Politics take place in a democracy and is conducted in the public arena when compared to businesses which conduct their affairs behind closed doors and are run by hierarchical organizations. Politics and government exists to serve the wants and needs of citizens, business exists to make a profit.

If there is something wrong with the way the Trains are run, why is the logical answer to privatize it? If we need to change the way this service is managed, let’s change it. The reason for it’s existence doesn’t need to and shouldn’t change. It exists to provide a service to the public, not to make money. Add to that there is no example that I am aware of where public transportation was privatized and this led to better service, less problems and ultimately less cost.

Not so, says Lapid, trains should be privatized. Let the market take care of it.

You are all middle class.

I keep on thinking about Monty Python’s the Life of Brian when I hear Lapid talk about the middle class. “You are all individuals”, Brian shouts at the masses proclaiming him the messiah, “we’re all individuals”, they answer. You are all middle class, Lapid seems to say, except for them. Them are the Arabs, the ultra-orthodox and the Plutocrats, leeches the lot of them, living off the sweat and toil of the productive middle class.

What is this all encompassing middle class? My very unscientific definition of the middle class would be those people that can afford to buy an apartment, raise their kids and retire without feeling uncertain that they can pay for all of it. Someone who struggles to do the same is part of the working class. Someone who is unsure if he can feed and clothe his family is poor. Someone who can spend his money frivolously is rich. I am most certainly working class by this definition. Lapid is banking on our tendency to identify up and despise down.

Talking in us and them always makes me uncomfortable. Lapid is suggesting pursuing the divisive, niche politics of them and us while at the same time decrying the divisive, niche politics of others. When talking about Shas and Yahadut HaTorah he calls them both free-loaders and also holds them up as role models for how small political parties can exercise disproportionate power. Talking in us and them disenfranchises the them. Does a society belong less to its poor than it does to its working and middle classes? Is Lapid suggesting a democratic society modeled on Athens, with few citizens serviced by many residents?

This place was once decent (when we were running the show)

The most disturbing sentiment is one which is not specific to Lapid but rather seems to be part of a general malaise. There is a longing for a mythical past when things where more clear cut, people knew their place, when “we” were in power and “they” were not. This is what he alludes to when he says that he wants to change the political system so that small parties can no longer exert power over the coalition. He acts as if there is a form of democratic government where these pressures don’t exist.  The whole point of democratic government in general and parliamentary government in particular is that it forces compromise. It does not allow any single political group to impose their will on the rest. This is a good thing.

Things were not better in Israel when it was being run by a single party. Corruption existed, cronyism was everywhere and whole parts of the population had decisions made for them without being consulted. We don’t live in the past, so why are we seeking out solutions that only partially worked then to solve different problems now? The sixties, which so many of us progressives like to hark back to, was not an era of liberty and social justice but rather an era of great strife as a result of tremendous injustice. Perhaps it is better to look to the past in order to avoid making the same mistakes rather than as a model for our future.

There is this Bertrand Russell quote that I saw on someone’s facebook wall the other day:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, wiser people so full of doubts.”

A lot of people liked this and seemed to identify with the sentiment, many of whom are professed liberals, lefties and progressives. It triggered a long conversation about how easy it is to trigger that inner fascist we all have that longs for order and certainty and disdains the messiness of groping towards an uncertain truth. I surprised myself with how, when I thought about it, this seemed like such a chauvinistic sentiment. Whether he knows it or not, Lapid is flogging very similar wares and banking on people voting for sentimental reasons.

Relatively Speaking

Cultural relativism is just another form of not having to smell the poor. Human rights are universal and should be extended to everyone, not just your allies. The fact that they are universal is what should make our transgressions, occupations, invasions and killing a source of trouble to us. If what your society does wrong, and all of our societies do wrong, does not keep you up at night then you are little more than ignorant, cowardly, fascist or all of the above.

Don't Confuse Me with the Facts

Block Black Bloc?

Sometimes there is nothing better than a good disagreement when you want to better understand an idea. Recently Chris Hedges published an article, in which he called Black Bloc the Cancer in Occupy. Hedges, a war correspondent for decades and now a radical social commentator and activist describes in almost religious terms the need to maintain passive civil disobedience as the only effective means for achieving social change. He warns against the use of violence and specifically what he describes as the tactics of Black Bloc as playing into the hands of establishment forces and their attempts to de-legitimize the occupy movement.

The article caused a lot of very virulent feedback, most of it angry rants against Hedges, but also some excelent responses that detailed the nuances missed by Hedges.

Susie Cagle quite possibly does the best reporting on Occupy Oakland I have run across. In her piece she calls out Hedges for buying into establishment propaganda as well as berating both him and most other journalists for not bothering to do the leg work. As most of the references to Black Bloc violence in the Hedges piece refer to Oakland, she shows him to be both wrong and lazy.

David Graeber is an American anthropology proffesor, anarchist and one of the early organizers of Occupy Wall Street. In an open letter to Hedges, he explains that black bloc is a tactic and not a movement, the use of anonymity when confronting established power and that Hedges' call for imposing peaceful protest as interpreted by him (or someone else) as a  form of violence.

All three pieces are well worth reading and will leave you better informed on the complexities of a democratic protest movement where pluralism is put to the test, how there is a large gap between what is often reported even by those sympathetic to a cause and what people on the ground experienced as actually having taken place and what anarchy and it's tactics represent when not approached as a the destructive dogma it is often presented as being.

Thank you Chris for starting this fire.

Some Facts Are More Equal Than Others

The problem is not Fox news which is obviously identified with the GOP establishment but rather the rest of the mainstream media which continues to pretend to be neutral.  It is nothing short of childish to claim that all arguments are equal. To equate faux evenhandedness with good reporting is disingenuous. For make no mistake, Fox news may not be guilty of pretending to be neutral but it also wouldn’t know good reporting if it spat in its face. Good reporting should be about revealing a truth. By denying our biases we are obscuring part of the truth, much in the same way that we obscure the truth when we refuse to hear arguments we think are counter to the narrative we want to believe in.

The other week  I witnessed an interesting twitter exchange between a couple of journalist. One, Joshua Holland, was calling out Naomi Wolf on an unsubstantiated piece she had written claiming a conspiracy by police departments across the US to coordinate violent crackdowns on occupations nationwide.  Two other journalists, Allison Kilkenny and Mike Elk, although initially more or less supportive of Wolf, upon rereading her piece and taking some of Holland’s points into consideration agreed that the piece was off. Holland eventually published a piece dissecting Wolf’s claims and showing them to be not much more than hearsay. As conducive as a nationwide police conspiracy against OWS might be  to the worldviews of Holland, Kilkenny and Elk, for neither of these three hide behind “fair and balanced” reporting to camouflage their biases, none of them seem to want to base such claims on flimsy conspiracy theories.

What followed was troubling if not entirely surprising. Holland shared some of the feedback his readers had been giving to this latest piece. Suffice it to say that I now know what an asshat and a douchecanoe are. Holland got called every kind of traitor for pointing out inconsistencies in a narrative that a lot of his readers, few who seem opposed to the OWS movement, want to believe. This is very troubling.

How can we on the one hand rage at the obvious lies being peddled on Fox or wishy-washy excuses for journalism in much of the rest of the mainstream media and at the same time reject criticism of stories that are not backed up by facts, just because we want to believe those stories? If we become fundamentalist about the narrative of our protest movement; if we prefer to spend our time with the timidly likeminded; if we cry foul when we are confronted by our own misdeeds, then we are no better than those we are trying to displace.

All this reminds me of Animal Farm. All facts are equal but some facts are more equal than others. What these critics of Holland are saying is basically that although you can’t trust the right for twisting the truth to their own needs and desires, it is both acceptable and warranted when it is done in the service of a noble cause. What they don’t seem to realize is that the strength of our argument, the reason that our movement has struck such a chord, the source of what has got the ruling elite lashing out nervously, is based on the fact the we are expressing a truth that despite many and varied attempts is very hard to deny. Holland performs a service to that same cause by policing our use of the truth. Wolf and her supporters mistakenly believe that we can only defeat our opponents by lowering ourselves to their tactics. They are mistaken.