JP/3 /NAGLER

JP/3 /NAGLER

Dissenters are 'locked out' of U.S. public discourse

Self-contained country spells America's tragedy: Nagler

The war in Iraq has led to much soul searching among people of
the U.S.-led coalition. Michael Nagler has worked for peace
causes for more than 40 years, and is the founding professor of
the University of California Berkeley's Peace and Conflict
Studies. He talked to The Jakarta Post's Harry Bhaskara, a
visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Journalism at the
above university. Excerpts of the interview follow:

Question: How do you see the war on Iraq?

Answer: For decades we were locked in this kind of
symmetrical struggle with the Soviet Union, well it wasn't really
symmetrical. Now that the Soviet bloc has been removed, the greed
of these evil people for world domination has reached feverish
level. ...

To achieve world domination, you need to have authoritarian
control at home and you need to be able to project power to such
a degree that nobody will dare resist you. This has never worked
and it never will work.

Through the last 50 years the commercial mass media have been
upgrading this consciousness. In Oakland, teenagers were playing
a video game for a whole day and they went out and murdered
people. And they boasted that they had increased the murder rate
in Oakland. These are not evil people but very diluted people,
their minds have been deformed by these images of violence.

What is the root of the problem?

The modern man in the West doesn't have a purpose for which to
live. If we did, violence and greed would not be appealing.
Because they don't have faith that the human race is making
progress, their sense of their own value is very small. If you
are told that sciences can come and take some of your genes and
stick them together to make a human being, that's very
downgrading. All of these things make you vulnerable to cheap
excitement like money, sex and violence.

You mentioned the lack of faith in human progress ...

They lack faith in human projects as a direction and a
meaning. We are supposed to overcome our separateness and our
animosity and create one big loving family. And we should have
goals like self-realization to be spiritually liberated.

All of these things are tremendously inspiring goals. As a
culture we never give any attention to these higher goals.

But the U.S. is known as "Christian"; if people lack faith in
human progress, has there been something wrong with Christianity?

Yes, but it is a cultural problem. My teacher used to say that
a religion is like a path through the jungle, if someone does not
walk on that path it gets overgrown very quickly.

Instead they pick out what they like out of books and ignore
the rest ... There was a visitor to this country from the Middle
East who said I have never seen a country with so much religion,
and I have never seen a country with so little spirituality.

So there seems to be a misperception in looking at the Iraq
war as a conflict between Christian and Islam.

The idea of being against Islam is something that gives the
war legitimacy in the West. But the war is an attempt to control
people and resources. Now we have this bloody history of the
church against Islam and its view of Islam as paganism, but I
think it is not the real reason.

Would you say Christianity is dead here?

I think that the institution has become somewhat hollow,
because religion does not come alive through institution, it
comes alive through people. The Catholic church, for instance,
has done pretty well in helping spiritual people to flourish in
their organizational fold but the enormous materialism in the
West that became worst in the 16 and 17th century has taken the
spiritual vitality out of our religious life.

Every religion goes through three phases. The first is
revelation, and that's when Prophet Mohammad or Jesus or Buddha
comes forward with a tremendous consciousness and explain where
the road of humanity is, right now. But that person is way beyond
where ordinary human beings can go.

So the second phase is accommodation where you take the
brilliant insights and modify them so that a large number of
people can follow something. This phase lasted about 400 years.

The third phase is coopting -- all you are taking from the
religion is its authority. You are just taking its legitimacy, so
it is exactly the opposite of what the religion taught, like this
horrific war they are waging on Iraq.

That is exactly what Jesus tried to wake us up from and we
could convince ourselves we are doing it in the name of
Christianity which is, unfortunately, in its third phase.

I also believe, although I know much less about it, that to
some degree the worst aspect of Islam is perhaps al Qaeda, a
terrorist movement, and they are also fighting a material battle.
They are offended by many things Western and they want to
overcome them, and they also are pretending that they are
fighting for Islam. Even the little I know about the Koran and
the haditz (the Prophet's sayings) do not justify the killing of
innocent people. It has not justified suicide. And most Muslim
organizations that I am familiar with here are totally opposed to
terrorism. When people go to war they ... pretend that people in
the higher authority is asking them to carry on this war.

So it seems that one element out of many in this conflict
involves a fight between two groups of people who borrowed
legitimacy from religions ... if not to say stole. There may be
some within the Islamic world who are legitimately offended by
what the West is doing toward their religion.

But this war has taken on a kind of apocalyptic struggle
because it is indeed for world domination by the United States.

And everybody knows why the Iraqi people were resisting.
Because they know that if the U.S. troops ruled over them it is
going to continue that rule ... So the whole world is extremely
nervous and unhappy about what Americans' intention are including
a lot of Americans.

Within America there seems to be a sharp division between a
belligerent government and the people against the war. Your
comment?

It is not quite that simple, because there are people in
government literally opposed to this war. We have now the fourth
high-ranking diplomat who tendered his resignation ... And in the
military a lot of people did not want this war. So the government
is not monolithic and the people are even less monolithic.

There is much "unspecific anger". And the belligerent people
in the government know how to capture that anger. So, what this
administration is doing to the Americans is very similar to, I am
afraid to say, to what Hitler did to the Germans.

So, the Americans are very much divided. And things that make
it particularly painful now is the role of the media because the
antiwar faction has almost no access to the mainstream media. And
there's this widespread phenomenon of hate radio that stirs up
much of this unspecific anger used by the government.

Could you elaborate on the role of the radio?

(There are) radio talkshow hosts (who) are very dangerous
because they stir up huge hatred and mostly of narrow-minded
intolerant stuff. A lot of hatred that caused the war in the
former Yugoslavia was done by the government television station.
They stirred up ethnic hatred and the war in Rwanda was
definitely caused by an independent radio station.

When the head of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda begged
the U.S. to jam that radio station, we refused to do so. Had we
done it that massacre could have been prevented.

So you have this kind of paramilitary media to stir up
tremendous hatred. A talk show host in a San Franscisco radio
station has six million listeners. This kind of radio is doing a
terrific damage to this country and it will take a long time for
that damage to be undone.

It isn't necessarily the government that is paying for these
radio stations that are supporting them. But these stations are
doing the work of the government in the sense that it is getting
people so full of hate and violence that when the government
wants to go to war, there is plenty of people who sign up.

They don't need to bring in conscription and there is no
resistance. So you have this very belligerent element which is
carrying out vicious policies all over the world, not at the will
of the Americans. Most Americans would have rejected (the war) if
they knew what was going on.

Why did most people not know what the government was doing?

It is partly a deliberate deception and Noam Chomsky is a good
critic about this. There's a little book, Our Media not Theirs,
which tells you how media distortion has been done very
systematically and with increasing effect over the last 20 to 30
years.

During the first Gulf War, the military hired a publicity firm
to write stories about the Iraqi regime in Kuwait. So the stories
about how the Iraqi soldiers unplugged the incubators of
nurseries and left babies to die was a complete fantasy.

In the early 1980s, there were quite a few Iraqi intellectuals
and progressives who were exiled from Iraq and they appealed for
help against Saddam Hussein. And we never gave it to them,
because the government was supporting Saddam and the media
cooperated -- Americans never knew they were asking for our help.

If they had known they might have said let's help them and
then we would never had the first Gulf war nor the second.

But the government did not pay the media as it did the
publicity firm ...

But they have systematically set out to cultivate right wing
media. So, for example, they identify conservative students and
pay them to go to journalism school, and give them media outlets
when they finished school. So they do the opposite what Orville
is doing here (Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley journalism
school). Orville is trying to counteract this process but they
have been very deliberate and very systematic ... Now we have
created this monster and it is really not easy to see how we are
going to destablish it.

How do you see the role of the media in this war?

They (the government) managed it. A friend of mine in San Jose
Mercury News said that during the Vietnam war they would just go
jump on a helicopter and you could go anywhere. But now they take
you when they want to take you. It is much more manageable. This
is why there is such a huge development of independent media in
the U.S. and around the world. They don't reach as many people
and they don't have the marketing strategy but they have the
truth. And this is a great struggle between the truth and lies.

And what is the level of the awareness of Americans about this
media distortion?

Oh, it's very low. There are parts of the U.S. where the only
kind of radio that you hear is these (above) hate radios. I am
afraid the tragedy of America is that it has been self-contained.
We have everything here that we need and so we lose interest in
the rest of the world. When other countries resent us we get
extremely offended. It doesn't dawn on us.

We are not self-sufficient, we are self-contained. We extract
resources from the rest of the world but we are not aware what
the rest of the world is going through. Americans are as decent,
generous and open minded as others but we have become locked into
this system for a variety of historical reasons.

Some celebrities were censored for their anti-war stance, how
do you see this?

This is an unfortunate case of not learning the lesson of
history because in the McCarthy era (anti communist fever of the
1950s), they did that very systematically to sweep these
Hollywood people and they destroyed people's careers. It wasn't
just censorship, they blackmailed them so they could not work,
they drove people to suicide. There is a film about this, The
Front. We woke up from that period and said, oh my God we should
never have done this. But here it is coming back.

And what about university professors?

The Patriot Act, for example, says that if someone comes into
my office, the FBI could come and ask me about it. And according
to the Act, I have to tell them. I would end up in jail before I
do something like that. So all these new pressures that started
with the Bush administration is like the sword of Democles
hanging over our heads ... I have had some hate mails of course
but the government has not cracked down on me.

I have been a peace activist for 40 years and I have never
felt as locked out of the country as I feel now. Because the
entire government, all three branches and all the mass media,
especially the big commercial mass media, are like a house that I
am locked out of. We have to regroup and reinvent our strategies,
figure out ways of communicating.

Unfortunately, it has not been going well but it's a very
difficult struggle, we have no access to the legitimacy of public
discourse. This is nasty. And there were one or two television
personalities whom you might call somewhat progressive -- one of
them has just lost his job.