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The militarism and political intolerance displayed in the Bush administration’s response to the September 11th attacks created a natural breeding ground for bigotry and racial harassment. For the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the recent tragedy was God’s condemnation of a secularist, atheistic America. The attacks were attributed to “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists and the lesbians,” according to Falwell, “the ACLU (and) People for the American Way.” Less well-publicized were the hate-filled commentaries of journalist Ann Coulter, who declared: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.”
Similar voices of racist intolerance are also being heard in Europe. For example, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi recently stated that “Western civilization” was clearly “superior to Islamic culture.” Berlusconi warmly praised “imperialism,” predicting that “the West will continue to conquer peoples, just as it has Communism.” Falwell, Berlusconi and others illustrate the direct linkage between racism and war, between militarism and political reaction.
Even on college campuses, there have been numerous instances of the suppression of free speech and democratic dissent. When City University of New York faculty held an academic forum which examined the responsibility of U.S. foreign policies for creating the context for the terrorist attacks, the university’s chief administrator publicly denounced them. “Let there be no doubt whatsoever,” warned CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, “I have no sympathy for the voices of those who make lame excuses for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon based on ideological or historical circumstances.” Conservative trustees of CUNY sought to censure or even fire the faculty involved. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, hundreds of Middle Eastern college students have been forced to return home from the U.S., due to widespread ethnic and religious harassment.
At UCLA, library assistant Jonnie Hargis was suspended without pay from his job when he sent an email on the university’s computers, which criticized U.S. support for Israel. When University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian appeared on television talking about his relationships to two suspected terrorists, he was placed on indefinite paid leave and ordered to leave the campus “for his (own) safety,” university officials later explained. The First Amendment right of free speech, the Constitutional right of any citizen to criticize policies of our government, is now at risk.
Perhaps the most dangerous element of the Bush administration’s current campaign against democratic rights has been the deliberate manipulation of mass public hysteria. Millions of Americans who witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center are still experiencing post-traumatic anxiety and depression. According to the Wall Street Journal, during the last two weeks of September, pharmacies filled 1.9 million new prescriptions for Zoloft, Prozac, and other anti-depressants, a 16 percent increase over the same period in 2000. Prescriptions for sleeping pills and short-term anxiety drugs like Xanax and Valium also rose 7 percent. The American public has been bombarded daily by a series of media-orchestrated panic attacks, focusing on everything from the potential threats from crop dusting airplanes being used for “bio-terrorism,” to anthrax contaminated packages delivered through the U.S. postal service. People are constantly warned to carefully watch their mail, their neighbors, and each other. Intense levels of police security at sports stadiums, and armed National Guard troops at airports, have begun to be accepted as “necessary” for the welfare of society.
We will inevitably see “dissident profiling”: the proliferation of electronic surveillance, roving wiretapping, harassment at the workplace, the infiltration and disruption of anti-war groups, and the stigmatization of any critics of U.S. militarism as disloyal and subversive. As historian Eric Foner has recently noted, “let us recall the F.B.I.’s persistent harassment of individuals like Martin Luther King, Jr., and its efforts to disrupt the civil rights and anti-war movements, and the C.I.A.’s history of cooperation with some of the world’s most egregious violators of human rights. The principle that no group of Americans should be stigmatized as disloyal or criminal because of race or national origin is too recent and too fragile an achievement to be abandoned now.” You cannot preserve democracy by restricting and eliminating democratic rights. To publicly oppose a government’s policies, which one believes to be morally and politically wrong, is expressing the strongest belief in the principles of democracy.
We must clearly explain to the American people that the missile strikes and indiscriminate carpet bombings we have unleashed against Afghanistan peasants will not make us safer. The policies of the Bush administration actually put our lives in greater danger, because the use of government-sponsored terror will not halt brutal retaliations by the terrorists. The national security state apparatus we are constructing today is being designed primarily to suppress domestic dissent and racially-profiled minorities, rather than to halt foreign-born terrorists at our borders.
Last year alone, there were 489 million people who passed through our border inspection systems. Over 120 million cars are driven across U.S. borders every year, and it’s impossible to thoroughly check even a small fraction of them. Restricting civil liberties, hiring thousands more police and security guards, and incarcerating innocent Muslims and people of Arab descent, only foster the false illusion of security. The “War on Terrorism” is being used as an excuse to eliminate civil liberties and democratic rights here at home.
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University. “Along the Color Line” is distributed free of charge to over 350 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable’s column is also available on the Internet at www.manningmarable.net.
Similar voices of racist intolerance are also being heard in Europe. For example, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi recently stated that “Western civilization” was clearly “superior to Islamic culture.” Berlusconi warmly praised “imperialism,” predicting that “the West will continue to conquer peoples, just as it has Communism.” Falwell, Berlusconi and others illustrate the direct linkage between racism and war, between militarism and political reaction.
Even on college campuses, there have been numerous instances of the suppression of free speech and democratic dissent. When City University of New York faculty held an academic forum which examined the responsibility of U.S. foreign policies for creating the context for the terrorist attacks, the university’s chief administrator publicly denounced them. “Let there be no doubt whatsoever,” warned CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, “I have no sympathy for the voices of those who make lame excuses for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon based on ideological or historical circumstances.” Conservative trustees of CUNY sought to censure or even fire the faculty involved. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, hundreds of Middle Eastern college students have been forced to return home from the U.S., due to widespread ethnic and religious harassment.
At UCLA, library assistant Jonnie Hargis was suspended without pay from his job when he sent an email on the university’s computers, which criticized U.S. support for Israel. When University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian appeared on television talking about his relationships to two suspected terrorists, he was placed on indefinite paid leave and ordered to leave the campus “for his (own) safety,” university officials later explained. The First Amendment right of free speech, the Constitutional right of any citizen to criticize policies of our government, is now at risk.
Perhaps the most dangerous element of the Bush administration’s current campaign against democratic rights has been the deliberate manipulation of mass public hysteria. Millions of Americans who witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center are still experiencing post-traumatic anxiety and depression. According to the Wall Street Journal, during the last two weeks of September, pharmacies filled 1.9 million new prescriptions for Zoloft, Prozac, and other anti-depressants, a 16 percent increase over the same period in 2000. Prescriptions for sleeping pills and short-term anxiety drugs like Xanax and Valium also rose 7 percent. The American public has been bombarded daily by a series of media-orchestrated panic attacks, focusing on everything from the potential threats from crop dusting airplanes being used for “bio-terrorism,” to anthrax contaminated packages delivered through the U.S. postal service. People are constantly warned to carefully watch their mail, their neighbors, and each other. Intense levels of police security at sports stadiums, and armed National Guard troops at airports, have begun to be accepted as “necessary” for the welfare of society.
We will inevitably see “dissident profiling”: the proliferation of electronic surveillance, roving wiretapping, harassment at the workplace, the infiltration and disruption of anti-war groups, and the stigmatization of any critics of U.S. militarism as disloyal and subversive. As historian Eric Foner has recently noted, “let us recall the F.B.I.’s persistent harassment of individuals like Martin Luther King, Jr., and its efforts to disrupt the civil rights and anti-war movements, and the C.I.A.’s history of cooperation with some of the world’s most egregious violators of human rights. The principle that no group of Americans should be stigmatized as disloyal or criminal because of race or national origin is too recent and too fragile an achievement to be abandoned now.” You cannot preserve democracy by restricting and eliminating democratic rights. To publicly oppose a government’s policies, which one believes to be morally and politically wrong, is expressing the strongest belief in the principles of democracy.
We must clearly explain to the American people that the missile strikes and indiscriminate carpet bombings we have unleashed against Afghanistan peasants will not make us safer. The policies of the Bush administration actually put our lives in greater danger, because the use of government-sponsored terror will not halt brutal retaliations by the terrorists. The national security state apparatus we are constructing today is being designed primarily to suppress domestic dissent and racially-profiled minorities, rather than to halt foreign-born terrorists at our borders.
Last year alone, there were 489 million people who passed through our border inspection systems. Over 120 million cars are driven across U.S. borders every year, and it’s impossible to thoroughly check even a small fraction of them. Restricting civil liberties, hiring thousands more police and security guards, and incarcerating innocent Muslims and people of Arab descent, only foster the false illusion of security. The “War on Terrorism” is being used as an excuse to eliminate civil liberties and democratic rights here at home.
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University. “Along the Color Line” is distributed free of charge to over 350 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable’s column is also available on the Internet at www.manningmarable.net.