Self-contained country spells U.S. tragedy

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.

Q: What is the root of the problem?

A: 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.

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

A: 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.

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

A: 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.

Q: Would you say Christianity is dead here?

A: 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.

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

A: 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.

Q: Could you elaborate on the role of the radio?

A: (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.

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

A: 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.

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

A: 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.

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

A: 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.