Comment
COMMENT After Sabra and Shatila Consider these dramatically divergent reactions to the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps—both from...
...But lest someone forgot that a few—say, 400—sit at the pinnacle of the socioeconomic pyramid, Forbes demolished another myth—that broad ownership of stock in publicly held corporations spreads wealth across class lines, making ours a "people's capitalism...
...He retains his monopoly on power and, according 10 opposition leaders, keeps more than 40,000 political prisoners languishing behind bars...
...The New Right is exploiting working America's fear that the family is disintegrating, and eventually may succeed in this way to legislate social standards...
...consumers would have no place at all in the ECC...
...Today, Bani-Sadr is again exiled in France and Ghotbzadeh is dead at fortyeight, executed by a firing squad for plotting to overthrow the Khomeini regime...
...COMMENT Accepting the Universe The Left is thinking things over...
...But the world has, indeed, been looking for a rationale to shed that burden of guilt—and by its actions in Lebanon, from the initial invasion to the latest horrors, Israel has provided it...
...We think here of the Transcendentalist ninny Margaret Fuller, who, 140 or so years ago, let it be known that she "accepted the universe...
...Civil libertarians are right to resist the cancellation of the hard-won legal restraints placed on freewheeling police work, but what, as Corliss Lamont has asked, are our civil liberties worth "if our right to life is threatened in our streets and homes...
...Emphasis added...
...Forty-one per cent of upstate residents are afraid to walk downtown at night...
...Gilder, we expect, would only support allotments for conventional two-parent families...
...Well, it turns out reports of New Right dominance were, indeed, greatly exaggerated...
...By thinking hard on crime and coming to terms with the presence of the truly violent in our midst, we can steal some of the Right's thunder...
...The Ayatollah took center stage, Ghotbzadeh later became foreign minister, and Abolhassan Bani-Sadr stepped into the presidency...
...In the inevitable attempt to shield the Israeli government from criticism for even so monstrous an outrage, the accusation has been made that Sabra and Shatila have been "blown out of proportion...
...We have been moving in this direction, day by day and week by week...
...Although these were surely important roadblocks to the latest assaults on personal freedom (and on the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court in the bargain), we believe there is another, fundamental reaCOMMENT son why right-wingers were tripped up: Most Americans do not back conservative social legislation, plain and simple...
...The three returned exiles had realized the triumph they had dreamed about in France— the ouster of the Shah...
...The government's war policies are under challenge in the Israeli press, in the military, and in the Knesset as never before...
...Workers are warned not to advance class interests because the entente "will require a lessening of the adversarial relationship between business and labor...
...Columnists looked agog on a new breed of conservative whiz-kids...
...Israel, whose own citizens are subject to terrorist attack throughout the Mideast and Europe, never deliberately attacks civilians...
...The police...
...The Forbes survey did, indeed, put some myths to rest...
...Of course there are central connections between crime and unemployment and racism, but such socialists as Richard Quinney, who argue that "the only real solution to crime is to be found in the class struggle against capitalism," have nothing useful to say to us...
...Young Progressive readers wouldn't be wasting their time or betraying their values, in our view, in putting off law school or money-getting for a few years and walking a mean-street beat...
...even television anchors were able to figure out that Republicans controlled the U.S...
...They are not, and will not be, an alien occupying force...
...What made it inadequate was not its substance—though it fell far short of meeting Palestinian needs, it went much further than we had any reason to expect from an initial proposal—but its lack of implementation and follow-through...
...aid...
...Thirtyeight per cent feel unsafe in their own neighborhoods at night...
...It was, it turned out, just another Presidential chat— unconnected to anything that preceded or followed it...
...It falls back on the old economic mantra invoked by neoliberals, Cold War Democrats, and Republicans alike: growth, more growth...
...based in France...
...After all, it is said by Israel's bitter-end apologists, there have been many other massacres in the Middle East—most of them committed by Palestinians against Israelis...
...The balanced budget, once the Holy Grail for Republicans and some Democratic Boll Weevils, has now been certified as an official Democratic objective...
...Victors in the social issues contest—those on the amorphous Left—would do well, then, to consolidate their forces while the New Right regroups...
...That way, if the Commander-in-Chief decides the time has come to launch ICBMs or unleash nuclearladen bombers, he must first murder a single human being...
...Genocide is not a word to be used lightly, but in the Middle East, apprehension of genocide seems well founded...
...In a sense, it was inevitable: If you have Vietnam, you have My Lai...
...It has not stemmed industrial pollution, diminished racism and sexism, prevented international crises, or even warded off unemployment, as the postboom Depression of the 1930s demonstrated...
...To be sure, not all of the Caucus's ideas were cribbed from the Republicans...
...We find ourselves, as a people, in an intellectual free-fire zone...
...What we know now is this: Those "crazed militiamen" are creatures and clients of the Israeli government, equipped and financed to wage war on the Palestinians and their Lebanese allies...
...For all of Menachem Begin's pathological bluster, he must surely understand that neither Israel's grotesque economy nor its bloated military establishment could last a week without U.S...
...Next, Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf of Chicago, appearing as a guest columnist in the new national daily, USA Today: "I was crushed and terrified by the massacre, but the most terrible thing was that I wasn't surprised...
...We have a deep sense of foreboding about any part of this planet that looks to Washington for succor...
...Spurning the longheld Democratic concern for fullemployment (meaning "low" unemployment), the Caucus chose instead to make inflation its priority, calling it "our most persistent economic problem of the past fifteen years...
...During the Vietnam war...
...Fisher suggests the volunteer carry a butcher knife for the purpose The professor's plan is intended to make mass slaughter palpable: "It's reality brought home...
...And so had we...
...But growth, which is really growth in company profits, has never solved the country's problems...
...The men reputed to be the most powerful right-wing demagogues in the Senate, Orrin Hatch of Utah and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, failed to move school prayer and anti-abortion bills to substantive votes...
...First, the invasion of Lebanon and its shameful consequences have immeasurably strengthened Israel's own peace forces...
...are citizens, citizen police...
...a fancy Kremlin-seeking missile, or an arms control agency...
...It has also provided new fuel for coming generations of enmity between Palestinians and Israelis...
...A starting point for such an alternative might be the proposal of Reagan ally George Gilder, author of Wealth and Poverty, to introduce into American life a Federal child allowance...
...There is still time, then, for progressives to think things through, to be mindful of this judgment: "The Left has turned its back on its proper constituency—the people who cling to family life, religion, the work ethic, and other ostensibly outmoded values as the only source of stability in an otherwise precarious existence...
...Walinsky and company propose that New York state offer full-tuition scholarships to young men and women prepared to serve three years on, say, neighborhood foot patrol in the South Bronx...
...Presumably, it will take some time for the investigative commission finally and reluctantly appointed by the Begin regime to complete its inquiry and issue a report on the mid-September massacre...
...As their plane taxied to a stop, members of the Shah's cabinet were hastily packing their bags, preparing to leave the country...
...this episode no more reflects Israeli policy than My Lai reflected American policy...
...There is a lesson here for all those who would help fashion a new world order: No free society can be forged by despotic means...
...our own neighborhoods...
...Heart isn't a new doctrine of nuclear war craziness...
...Many a Forbes fortune is derived from inherited loot that has hardly been touched by the estate tax collector: Eight of the thirteen wealthiest individuals, valued at a minimum of $1 billion each, owe their status to no greater achievement than choosing the right parents...
...if you have Lebanon, you have Sabra and Shatila...
...President Reagan's plan for a Middle East settlement was a surprising step in the right direction, though an inadequate one...
...Most of those with wealth have, in Forbes's words, "gone underground with it...
...And among the Arabs (including even the PLO) there seems to be a conviction that only the United States can assure the region's stability...
...It took no great leap of imagination to anticipate what would happen if the militia were turned loose in Palestinian camps that had just been stripped of their PLO defenders...
...If the assembly in Albany and the new governor go along with the Walinsky plan...
...What was snuffed out at the two refugee camps, along with those hundreds of lives, was any lingering claim by Israel to a shred of moral superiority over its desperate opponents...
...a "national effort" to move away from a manufacturing economy, coupled with a renunciation of the kind of "monolithic national planning agency" found in Japan...
...But we need not await the results of the probe to venture the judgment that Rabbi Wolf, in concluding that the murders at Sabra and Shatila were an inescapable consequence of Israeli policy, came closer to the truth than columunist Safire, who would have us believe that the Israelis committed, at worst, "a blunder" in allowing access to the camps by Christian Lebanese who turned out to be "crazed militiamen...
...While we also worried about the dark clouds gathering over the Potomac, The Progressive wrote in December 1980 that "the ardent ultraconservatives who have the highest expectations of a Reagan Presidency may soon be the most bitter and frustrated of Americans...
...power has been used in the Middle East not to promote peace but to exacerbate tensions by deviously playing the various sides against each other...
...A feeble group capable, as a rule, of mustering only a few hundred demonstrators has become a mass movement that can (and did) turn out hundreds of thousands...
...they will be our children...
...So far, U.S...
...In the first months, at least, of the New Order in Iran, Ghotbzadeh and Bani-Sadr were willing to defend the indefensible and take part in the unspeakable—helping to initiate the persecutions to which they themselves eventually fell victim In the West, where they had more credibility than the mullahs, they became the Ayatollah's principal apologists—until the day came when Ghotbzadeh was under arrest and Bani-Sadr fleeing for his life...
...When it comes to economic and social directions, all bets are off...
...This or that centimillionaire "tips waiters 10 per cent," "ran antique shop in Beverly Hills area as a hobby," or "drives beat-up Chevrolet with dog-teeth marks on steering wheel...
...No, the billions stockpiled by DuPonts, Fords, and their less prominent friends showed, again, that there really is a ruling class...
...The House Democratic Caucus, which helps grind out party policy, exposed its habit-ridden ways in September, when it released its economic manifesto, Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity: Turning Point for America's Economy...
...Like Lieutenant Calley and his men at My Lai, the Lebanese murderers needed no direct orders to embark on their bloody work...
...Fortyfive per cent of all New York City residents are afraid to walk downtown at night...
...What with their power to control the flow of capital or, as Forbes put it so poetically, to "create jobs and ever more of the goods and services needed to sustain the average man's lifestyle," there couldn't have been any doubt about who runs America...
...Even when the manifesto authors slip into specifics, the effect is to provide more advantages to the corporate sector...
...They would not say how an ECC might protect the public interest in the transition to a high-tech, information-based economy—how it would compensate for the inevitable social dislocations...
...Wirth, a dabbler in neoliberalism, wove some high-tech emphasis into the statement: increased Federal support for research and technology...
...Few are as unsparing in their critiques of radical doctrine gone astray, but Lasch is not off by himself...
...Ghotbzadeh and Khomeini stepped out, and within days proclaimed an "Islamic revolutionary government...
...Both were sophisticated revolutionaries who believed they could "use'" the ignorant but charismatic figure of the Ayatollah to topple the Shah and seize power in Iran...
...New York City could double the size of its constabulary, to about 30,000 officers...
...and then implanting the capsule near the heart of a volunteer...
...For example, the proposed commitment of 3 per cent of the gross national product to research and development will surely prove a boon to the same weapons makers that now suck billions out of the Treasury...
...That's Christopher Lasch, the unsentimental social critic...
...COMMENT Building the Road to Opportunism One can almost hear the hard breathing of Democratic candidates who, buoyed by Republican blunders, expect to make a strong comeback in this fall's Congressional elections...
...It has that role because it is the one power that exerts decisive influence in Israel as well as among the Arab states...
...Even if the investigation should turn out to be a thorough and honest one—a formidable challenge in the circumstances—it is not likely to answer all of the questions that have been raised...
...Both calls are on the mark, but neither should be mistaken for a vision of how the family might survive these trying times...
...The sensible reply: "What will bring us a police state is the unchecked growth of violence and disorder...
...Certainly it was not our friend's contention, nor is it ours, that Sabra and Shatila should be weighed on a scale of enormity alongside Auschwitz and Buchenwald...
...Caucus members, angling for broad Democratic support, refused to embrace the concept of economic planning...
...Hard and fast views on public policy aren't selling well...
...COMMENT After Sabra and Shatila Consider these dramatically divergent reactions to the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps—both from commentators who, as it happens, decided to invoke the same historic parallel...
...The dictates of American reality are bringing everyone up short—farmers, hairdressers, taxidermists, commentators of all persuasions...
...Encouraged by the anti-Reagan trend in primary balloting, assured of strong support from women and nuclear freeze supporters, and anointed by pollsters and pundits, the Democrats are counting on the death of the Reagan majority...
...Thomas Carlyle, it is reliably reported, said upon hearing of this remarkable pronouncement, "Gad...
...The first field of action" would be Gotham's 440platform subway, "the most dangerous place in New York state...
...The recent Congressional rebuff of conservative social legislation proved that the New Right is spent, at least for now...
...If the self-made tycoon is a thing of the past, so is the conspicuous consumer...
...The chairman of the Democratic task force, Colorado Representative Timothy E. Wirth, thought it was "a significant departure" for the party of Jefferson and Jackson...
...It is the crime and fear that are now depriving us of freedom, life, liberty...
...Without getting into the grisly and inane business of comparative body counts, we can dismiss such arguments as wholly irrelevant...
...Tough self-evaluation is cropping up in the progressive press, and nowhere is reassessment as bold and healthy as it is in the many new considerations of violent crime and what Americans can do to reclaim their cities and suburbs for civilization...
...What we propose is to liberate people—to help us to free in our cities...
...Government stimulation of high-technology industries...
...But the possibility exists for a constructive American contribution and, paradoxically, the opportunity may well have been enhanced by the recent tragedy...
...Yet the end of Republican hegemony— if we assume that Harris, Gallup, and Caddell are right—will alter the political landscape only superficially...
...We have, however, come across an impressive plan for a revitalized New York City Police Department, "The New Police Corps," drawn up by Adam Walinsky, former chairman of the New York State Commission of Investigation, and other private citizens...
...The official inquiry may ultimately determine to what extent, if any, Israel "had any complicity" in the killings or had foreknowledge of the intention to commit them...
...the Shah himself had already fled...
...Polls have, for instance, noted time and again that a substantial majority support women's right to abortion...
...The Filthy Lucre Register When Forbes magazine published its first annual "Forbes Four Hundred," a survey of America's wealthiest, the authors claimed that the rich have been saddled with a bag of "poisoned" myths spun by "politicians hunting more tax dollars to spend...
...Ronald Reagan would, of course, heartily concur...
...There is still a great deal of gauzy talk of a renewal of family ties, the inculcation of "community" values, and, as always, early public intervention into the lives of the incipient criminal "element...
...We've not yet seen any mature scheme for making the night safe for women, convenience store owners, the very young, or the very old...
...It demonstrated, for example, that after more than sixty years of "progressive" income taxation, vast inequalities in the distribution of wealth still mar American society...
...Among the Arabs, too, there is growing recognition that a perpetual state of siege, punctuated by periodic outbreaks of warfare, will exact a terrible toll...
...We are prisoners of thugs, and the situation is the worst in poor neighborhoods...
...She'd better...
...And justice means recognition and a Palestinian state...
...Perhaps that is an overstatement...
...There's more than a passing chance they could actually do a lot of good, by any political lights...
...The policing of civic order begins with the recognition that in a democracy, the police are neither an alien force nor a corps of mercenaries," asserts the Walinsky report...
...It's a slender hope on which to hang the planet's fate...
...Senate for the first time in a generation...
...For better or worse, the United States has a role to play in determining whether that catastrophe will come to pass...
...The cases of Ghotbzadeh and Bani-Sadr demonstrate that the children are not entirely blameless, however...
...All in the Family Almost two years ago, at the dawning of the Reagan Presidency, many media "analysts" hastily decided that the New Right had seized the nation's political reins, and for good...
...Children of the Revolution Sadegh Ghotbzadeh and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rode the same jet into Tehran that momentous day in February 1979...
...They cannot do for us what we we are not willing to do for ourselves...
...It's the muscular organ, full of blood and life, that Harvard Law Professor Roger Fisher hopes will forestall an American nuclear strike...
...People get mugged in the short term...
...Instead, Khomeini used them—and discarded the two proteges when they would no longer go along with his regressive, repressive rule...
...he says...
...Executive Privilege MAD, SALT, and START aren't likely to prevent their acronymic associates, ICBM and MIRV, from taking to the air during an international crisis, but a heart might...
...The Left is coming to terms with American life as it is lived by the vast majority, whether in the matter of public order or, say, in the problems of people trying to get by in small business...
...If the United States can help bring peace to the Middle East but fails to seize the opportunity, that will be a crime beside which the butchery at Sabra and Shatila will have been but a minor infraction...
...New Rightists blamed the conservative defeats on Republican squabbling, heavy liberal lobbying, and Senate rules permitting interminable filibusters...
...a peace group triggered a nationwide uproar by threatening to execute a single puppy as a symbol of the thousands of men, women, and children who were being slaughtered in Southeast Asia...
...In the deepest sense the police are us...
...on a bloody rampage...
...But it is time to raise some self-doubts about our perfectionist, alarmist suspicion of the police—and the work we ask them to do...
...In the process, we need not give in to primitive, vengeful instincts, acquiesce in state cruelty, or join any repressive crusades...
...Fisher has proposed stuffing into a tiny capsule the secret codes that the President must invoke to initiate a nuclear attack...
...Until the two major parties agree to plan for social needs—that is, to substitute the ideal of development for growth—they will continue to produce non-answers...
...Conservative morality is, after all, more than smoke intended to distract the electorate from supply-side failures...
...First, William Satire, writing on the op ed page of The New York Times, where his devotion to the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin is matched only by his zeal to defend the Administration of Richard Nixon: "Reject the accusations that Israel had any complicity in the murders by Phalangists...
...Emphasis added...
...The Ayatollah, of course, forges ahead with his fundamentalist upheaval, nettled now and then by opposition groups such as the People's Mojahedin...
...but his plan could be extended by the Left to make it possible for men and women, single or married, to raise children full-time without incurring economic penalties...
...Indeed...
...The police are us...
...Without endorsing the inequalities of many family structures, the Left must recognize the family's traditional contribution to community life, and advance a scheme to help it survive the decade, changed but strong...
...a "partnership among labor, small business, big corporations, universities, and government"—all notions from the arsenal of neoliberals, none addressing the deeper illness of our irrational economy...
...And if there was no more involved than an Israeli "blunder," it was a blunder that stemmed from Irsaeli contempt for the Palestinians who have become their gooks...
...reporters marveled at the unprecedented strength of right-wing political action committees...
...Military spending has been excluded entirely from the economic prospect because, like the Republicans, the Caucus classifies it a separate "national security" issue...
...Nonetheless, the legislative shunt of the reactionary social agenda will neither bury it nor unnerve those who hope to ride the defense-of-the-family horse across some sort of political finish line...
...They are us...
...It is no news that revolutions tend to devour their children...
...And the number of Americans who avoid the voting booth will continue to grow...
...The "partnership" proposed by the Caucus would take the form of an Economic Cooperation Council (ECC) headed by the President—presumably not the incumbent—but lacking any power to direct private or public investment...
...From the wrong mouths, in the wrong hands, such a framing of the ever more common urban predicament can come off as rank cynicism...
...The remarkable, if unintended, achievement of the Begin government," a friend of ours observed, "has been to relieve the world once and for all of the burden of guilt for the Holocaust...
...Nor did the authors face up to the likelihood that the corporate "partner" would usurp the initiative "to establish our national economic goals," as it has in past collaborations...
...In a tense international showdown, the "heart capsule" could, indeed, compel the President, ensconced in his fortified flying White House, to come face to face with death—not in the remote, anaesthetized form of a missile launched across the continents, but in the immediate sensation of a blade cutting through human flesh...
...No, we can't really be sure of that, because we can't really be sure that either the Israeli or the Palestinian nation will exist for another five decades...
...Thanks to a bounder of a President who is forcing many in the broader population to do the same, there may be time to remake ourselves (and pass on the good news) before the country takes an irreversible right turn...
...The tragedy of Lebanon has made that clear—but it has also strengthened the Palestinians' claim for justice...
...no just society by unjust acts: no peaceful society by cruelty and violence...
...If Arabs and Israelis are determined to continue on their present course, the world may be heading toward a catastrophe of truly incalculable dimensions...
...In short, the Democratic plan offers nothing we have not seen before...
...Yet the Left, with few exceptions, merely points to the immense economic pressures families have faced under Reaganomics, or unmasks the New Right's family orientation as a subterfuge to keep women under an economic and social thumb until the cows—or the men— come home...
...Perhaps Fisher's plan could similarly bring the horror of nuclear war into perspective, Unfortunately, the scheme rests on the dubious proposition that the President would hesitate to kill one human being after deciding to murder millions...
...Not that most of us need to be reminded...
...As they file back into their old House and Senate seats, the Democrats will bring with them few innovative solutions to national problems—and those that appear new will turn out on close inspection to be mere retreads of Republican whimsies or neoliberal revisions of past Democratic failures...
...The self-proclaimed Party of the Opposition is about as bankrupt as the Party in Power...
...The American Left, in its unexamined commitment to positions it believes to be 'anti-authoritarian,' has repeatedly forced the legitimate need for authority, stability, and continuity to find reactionary political outlets...
...Arab attacks that were mounted on Jewish settlements in Palestine more than half a century ago are still part of the Israeli national myth today—and we can be sure that Sabra and Shatila will be part of the Palestinian national myth fifty years from now...
...It's too late for Sadegh Ghotbzadeh to testify to these truths, but feet free to check with Abolhassan Bani-Sadr...
...The Walinsky prospectus asks, Will all these new cops turn us into a police state...
Vol. 46 • November 1982 • No. 11
