[Dialogue] The Problem Is Empire

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Wednesday, September 3, 2008 by The Nation

The Problem Is Empire

by Tom Hayden

Tom Hayden delivered these remarks to a gathering of activists at the
Democratic National Convention in Denver. It appears as part of the Moral
Compass series, focusing on the spoken word. 

Let me tell you some of my story and lessons I have learned over these past
five decades. I have always tried to improve my country, always trying from
the places around me. 

I was smart and ambitious and athletic, but something never felt right in my
suburb, school and church. I felt more at home with the underdogs and
misfits than with the authorities. I was Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the
Rye against Alfred E. Newman at Mad magazine. 

I editorialized against overcrowded classes in high school. I editorialized
against racist fraternity discrimination at the university. I went to the
Democratic Convention in 1960 and was moved by Martin Luther King and John
Kennedy, and a new student movement. 

I moved to Georgia, became a Freedom Rider, got beaten up for civil rights.
I helped start a movement on campuses called Students for a Democratic
Society that believed in what we called participatory democracy, the right
of everyone to a voice in the decisions affecting their lives. We wanted to
bring the spirit of the Southern movement to the North. 

I left graduate school and became a community organizer in the slums of
Newark for four years. During that time the US government, led by the
Democratic Party, invaded Vietnam with hundreds of thousands of troops after
promising not to. The draft started up, and I was classified IY, the
category for potential troublemakers. 

Watts blew up in 1965. My Newark neighborhood became an occupied war zone in
1967, and that was it for the war on poverty. I wanted to know who we were
really fighting, so I went to North Vietnam in December 1965, my first trip
outside America. I was shocked at the civilian destruction, and the brave
resistance of a small nation of peasants. I came back and immediately
lobbied for a negotiated withdrawal, and got nowhere. 

Now I was living in two worlds, still knocking on doors in Newark and
opposing a war that was ending the war on poverty I believed in. The
contradictions becoming too much, I helped organize antiwar protests at the
Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Nixon, the FBI and even
Lyndon Johnson said we were part of an internationally funded communist
conspiracy. I was still fighting against wrongdoing at home, while my
father's generation thought we were pawns of an enemy abroad. 

I went back to Berkeley set on organizing youth and student communities. I
was yanked away to be indicted by the Nixon government for the street riots
in Chicago. I spent about five years, including five straight months on
trial, living under a cloud, until the courts threw out the case of the
Chicago 8. I really didn't know if we were descending into a police state or
not. During our trial, one defendant, Bobby Seale, was chained and gagged,
and two Panthers working on his legal defense were shot with ninety police
rounds while sleeping in their apartment. 

I went back to mainstream antiwar work trying to defund the Indochina war,
from 1972 until 1976. I supported George McGovern as a peace candidate,
Vietnam veterans against the war like John Kerry, the Berrigan brothers'
civil disobedience, and those who went underground to Canada. I didn't join
them, but I thought the Weather Underground was completely predictable and
understandable. 

After the long radicalizing interruption of the war, I tried to combine
community organizing and electoral politics. I served in the California
legislature for eighteen years, once again returning to local and state
issues. Based on the early vision of participatory democracy, and building
on the progress towards political rights like voting, I helped build a
statewide grass roots campaign for economic democracy, pressuring the great
corporations to become accountable. 

Some of the issues we worked on were these: 

. Protecting the right to local rent control, which saved Santa Monica
residents alone about $500 million over little more than a decade. 

. Stopping a nuclear power plant in Sacramento by a democratic vote of the
people. 

. Stopping a Liquefied Natural Gas terminal on Indian land in Santa Barbara.


. Empowering neighborhoods to bargain effectively with big developers.
Saving the oldest building in LA from the wrecking ball. 

. Saving salmon, stream beds, wetlands, deserts and redwood forests from the
power of developers and special interests. 

. Trying to replace the war on gangs, mass incarceration and
unconstitutional police misconduct, with gang peace processes and employment
opportunities, from LA to El Salvador. 

. Involvement in over fifty political campaigns at local levels, including
some of the earliest elections of feminists, gays and lesbians, renters,
Asian-Americans and former '60s radicals. 

. Getting Hollywood celebrities engaged in supporting political causes and
candidates. 

It was said by Washington consultants that we had the greatest grassroots
organization in the national Democratic Party. But it was also the '80s, and
Ronald Reagan was invading Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and placing
nuclear missiles in Europe. My world of domestic issues became small and
secondary again, like my days in Newark when Vietnam was escalating. And I
noticed that our foreign policy interventions were creating a wave of new
refugees who could be exploited either as cheap labor or scapegoated as my
Irish ancestors were the century before. 

And so it has gone. Even when the Soviet Union collapsed. Even when Bill
Clinton was elected on the strategy of "it's the economy, stupid," we soon
were bombing the Balkans, inventing new doctrines of humanitarian war and
expanding NATO. By carving Kosovo out of the former Yugoslavia, we were
creating an incentive for Georgia to invade South Ossetia--and try to
reignite the cold war. 

Then came 9/11, and a legitimate security crisis was transformed into the
invasion of Iraq along with the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and perhaps
soon Iran. The neocons and hawks applauded and funded Israel's
ill-considered war with Hezbollah and Lebanon, completing a new battlefield
of the war on terrorism to replace the cold war. 

So there you are. We will have to go back to the lessons Roman and British
empires to learn the painful lessons of imperial overextension. The lessons
in blood bravely shed in lost or dubious causes. The lesson of a weakened
capacity to fund healthcare, education, our children's futures. The lesson
that democracy is diminished as the secrecy of the warmaking state expands.
The lesson of being hated in a world where alliances are a necessity, not a
choice. 

For too long we have divided our movement labor between domestic and foreign
policy issues. Sometimes there are contradictions, for example, when the
cold war liberals--today's humanitarian hawks--believed we could have both
guns and butter, the world's most massive arsenal, fueled by oil, combined
with robust domestic initiatives on healthcare or the environment or inner
city jobs. It just hasn't worked out that way. The richest country in the
world still lacks a national healthcare program, still is pockmarked by
ghettos and barrios, still has massive school drop out rates combined with
the largest incarceration rate in the whole world. 

And despite any evidence of significant success, the wars go on, the war on
terror, the war on drugs and the war on gangs. 

Despite the evidence, the organized peace movement is weaker than any other
social movement, or network of NGOs, in America. The peace movement is a
mainly voluntary expression of antiwar feeling that rises and falls
depending on the body counts and media coverage. The peace movement is not
institutionalized, not in comparison with the labor movement, the civil
rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement. It is not
funded by the great liberal foundations nor by the wealthy liberals of
Hollywood or other moneyed circles. 

The point I am making is that our progressive priorities are wrong. Any hope
for transformational domestic change depends on reversing the entrenched
interests driving the dual agenda of military and corporate empire,
including the Pentagon and the oil industry and the narrow elitist thinking
of most national security and economic experts. 

The battle is between the empire, or whatever euphemism by which is goes,
and participatory democracy. 

Our adversaries, who once favored monarchy and then white supremacy, have
done a successful makeover and attempted to steal the banner of democracy.
For example, they are exuberant about imposing democracy by force across the
Middle East and to the borders of Russia, but they show no enthusiasm for
the democratic process sweeping away the former dictatorships that our
government backed in Latin America. Our government is opposed to democracy
on our borders if those democracies reject our military bases, our special
forces and our corporate dominance over their resources and services.
Venezuela, Bolivia and, of course, Cuba are being targeted for isolation and
subversion, while Colombia is the American spear in the Andes. 

Latin America is the brightest democratic spot on the planet today. But its
democratic revolution is not enough; an enormous shift in global finance,
investment and trade policies is needed to address underdevelopment and
poverty. The resources to build a movement here against military
intervention in Latin or Central America are sorely needed. An alternative
to the Monroe Doctrine is sorely needed. An alternative to the top-down
secretive WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA and FTAA models is sorely needed. The movement
for immigrant rights and labor rights is where domestic policy and Latin
American policy should meet. 

I am campaigning for and voting for Barack Obama not because I agree with
him on every foreign policy issue but because I think we need to unleash the
energy of those who fight for justice and housing and healthcare and jobs
and the environment here at home. The Obama movement is registering and
mobilizing millions of new voters, young people, working class, people of
color and poor. The mere fact of their being mobilized will create a
pressure for new priorities on the economic home front against the present
priorities of militarization abroad. The fact that Obama rose to his present
position on the tide of antiwar sentiment forces Obama and the Congressional
Democrats to pay greater attention to our needs at home or pay a political
price. If he expands the quagmires in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we will have
to oppose those wasteful wars as well. 

So I am saying that domestic groups--organized around issues from civil
rights to the environment--cannot afford to leave peace simply to the peace
movement. And the peace movement has to point every day to the domestic
costs, including energy costs, of the Iraq War and the larger empire. And we
must define an alternative vision to the undemocratic structures of
corporate and military power that promise security but bring us war, that
promise jobs but lower our standard of living. We need a new model of
political economy that is equitable and sustainable, not one that expects
every country in the world to meet our needs, including our appetite for
their resources. And finally, we must build a progressive movement inside
and outside the Democratic Party, one that respects the autonomy of
single-issue movements, that brings our community organizing experiences to
bear on this frustrating political process, that can build and strengthen a
progressive power base that can fight everyday for our needs, not the
empire's needs. 

It is not enough to liberalize the empire; the task is to peacefully and
steadily bring it to an end, making democracy safe for the world as some
organizers said fifty years ago. In place of empire, we need to understand
the world as a multipolar one, and drive it towards participatory democracy
through social movements. Those social movements will not only pressure
their existing governments but energize a global civic society that can
achieve enforceable new norms on human rights, a global living wage and
corporate accountability, a healthy environment instead of global warming,
and the steady reduction of nuclear weapons. 

Copyright C 2008 The Nation

Tom Hayden is the author of The Other Side
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000H57LFA?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&
linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B000H57LFA&adid=1MZ585BYFM53RHGAMSZV&>  [1] (1966,
with Staughton Lynd), The Love of Possession Is a Disease With Them
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000LRT5NA?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&
linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B000LRT5NA&adid=1AA29T0S2N7EFQRY7BZ0&>  [2]
(1972), Ending the War in Iraq
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1933354453?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&
linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1933354453&adid=0SP24BHJTPF777EP39EA&>  [3] (2007)
and Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/0872864618?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&
linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0872864618&adid=1FQ3G3JE3YP2T6J6MKPY&>  [4]
(2008).

  _____  

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/03-3

 

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