The
World’s Ingredients:
Injustice, Hypocrisy, And Hope
By James Rothenberg
13 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
One
part injustice. One part hypocrisy. One part hope. Imagine this as the
recipe that makes up our world, with the proportions free to change
but with no part free to vanish. Injustice is a priori the product of
a competitive world. Hypocrisy is the rational response to injustice
by the strong. Hope is the irrational response to injustice by the weak.
The first part of the recipe,
injustice, has a figurative anti-body in the Department of Justice (formalized
in 1870). Its mission statement reads:
To enforce the law and defend
the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public
safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership
in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those
guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration
of justice for all Americans. (emphasis added)
It is said the founders,
mindful of their recent experience, wanted to protect the people from
their government, not protect the government from the people. There
was a rebellion over this, but the establishment will think, once is
funny.
The first line in the mission
statement appears to place the state over the people. If this is so,
and there are some areas where “to seek just punishment for those
guilty of unlawful behavior” would run counter to the “interests
of the United States”, we ought to see justice tilted toward the
state in those cases where the primacy of the state is a matter of focus.
A proto-typical example is
the case of the whistleblower. The kind of treatment a whistleblower
receives when going up-ladder is reflective of the kind of “fair
and impartial administration of justice” that the Department promises
to “ensure”. If a measure of a society’s civilization
can be seen in the way it treats its criminals, a mark of how just we
are can be seen in the way we treat our whistleblowers.
Resistance to the whistleblower
increases at each step up the ladder as the interests of the state come
into conflict with the interests of the people (as represented by the
whistleblower). The catchall trick about the “interests of the
United States” is not that they are ill-defined, but that they
are never defined, indoctrination in this area being so thorough as
to preclude explanation.
Under this kind of cover,
the silencing of whistleblowers spares many the “fair and impartial
justice” (promised for all Americans) that might have befallen
them had not the United States a compelling reason to defend itself
(itself being that construct “instituted among Men, deriving [its]
just powers from the consent of the governed”).
As justification the state
secrets privilege might be invoked. (State secrets, when looked at years
later under declassification, reveal a banal combination of cunning,
criminality, fantasy, and triviality.)
The silencing of whistleblowers
further protects those who can still function for the state, and, issues
of criminality aside, shields some from embarrassment (no little thing).
But the optimum result (from the state’s point of view) of the
aggressive treatment of whistleblowers is that it demonstrates that
the state is completely invulnerable to legal-based attacks of a “don’t
tread on me” variety.
An always timely example
of the second part of the recipe, hypocrisy, is the way in which our
government projects the military. We are to believe that our military
is used solely for defensive purposes, and that all citizens benefit
equally from such use. What if the government leveled with the people
about what our military is really used for? Such an admission might
take the following form:
The history of man is one
of struggle and survival. Until such time as men have lost or transcended
their competitive desire for advantage, there will be those that have
and those that take. Or, to put it another way, those that take and
those that get taken. Would we rather get taken, or would we prefer
to take? And so, with the aid of our military, we take, and this has
brought us a prosperity that has made us the envy of the world. Behind
every overseas market we secure, behind every snatch of foreign labor
and capital, behind every entrée to a foreign resource lies the
bargaining chip nonpareil, the US military. When this bargain is insufficient,
we do not hesitate to demonstrate our will in a more tangible way (wink).
If citizens do not share equally the benefits from our military expenditures,
or have a stake in the country’s prosperity, this is not the state’s
responsibility. Our citizens have advantage over those of every other
country when and if it comes to a fight, and we will thwart their every
attempt to rival our force.
The government does a much
better job of projecting the military than this crude sample above.
Why not tell people what they want to hear? That we are wise, just,
temperate, and reticent to use force. It’s so much easier to get
people to go along that way. Cleaner.
There is another way to look
at this though. The government may have secrets, but not with the American
people. The messages put out to the people of this country are received
as well by the world’s people. Thus, the hypocrisy originally
intended for local consumption, by dint of linked communication, gradually
became gruel for the world to feed on.
Given our advanced-stage
jingoism, Washington’s home hypocrisy level may be set higher
than necessary. We fail to recognize that the ubiquitous American flags
we surround ourselves with are of the same order as those we mocked
bearing images of Stalin, Mao, and Saddam. Never having been encouraged
to think critically about our institutions, we remain in childlike awe
of them. It is childlike insecurity that draws us to the power of the
state. In un-asked for demonstration of fealty, large gatherings of
people openly identify with state power. (What does an F-16 have to
do with a sporting event? If it avoids crashing into the stadium, you
get the result obtained in its absence.)
It is by no means clear that
the leveling admission above would be rejected by this population. In
this sense, anti-militarists can be grateful to the government for sparing
us this truth because hypocrisy presents a softer target than matter-of-factness.
And then there’s always
hope, so the saying goes. The third part of the recipe and the active
state of most of the world’s billions who suffer the injustices
of poverty, oppression, prejudice, hunger, and thirst. Yet it is the
part of which we can say the least precisely because of its irrationality,
that is besides its forward thinking. (We don’t hope for the past.)
All hopers share an imperfect attachment to the present.
The world did not change
that much on 9/11. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq got a new boss.
Here the boss got tougher.
The future cannot be predicted.
(The “futurist” of the group is the last one to guess wrong).
There are possibilities, and the possibilities for justice exist in
the many independence and social movements taking place in the world
today. For now, we’ve got the old recipe.
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