IRAQ

Zmag: Whose Standards? by Michael Albert


When a New York Times correspondent indicated on its front page of February 16th 2003, that there were now only two super powers in the world -- the U.S. and public opinion - dissidents everywhere trumpeted the article as recognizing activism's stature and importance. But did we understand the broader implications?

The Times observation indicates what we all should already have known -- that there is a war in the world. It is between an agenda that aggrandizes the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and weak - and a contrary agenda that diminishes differences in income, wealth, and power on the road to equity and self-management. Moreover, it isn't the policies of the disparate heads of state of France and Germany, Italy and Spain, Turkey and India, South Africa and Egypt, Chile and Bolivia, that ultimately matter most to people's daily life prospects. Nor is it the machinations of the separate corporate leaders of competing businesses around the world. What ultimately matters most to people's prospects now and into the future, is the struggle between the world's masters and its aroused citizens.

The conflict between these super powers rages in neighborboods, communities, counties, countries, and regions, and across the whole planet. Advocates of justice are getting stronger, but we cannot yet reverse the rising tides of repression, violence, and impoverishment. We cannot yet win big victories for peace, redistribution, and justice. And so if we go to bed each night measuring our day's labors by whether we have won major victories against the behemoth, then each night we will go to bed weeping over our inadequacy and moaning at the power of the world's centers of power and their ability to ignore our demands. Worse, our weeping and moaning will diminish our energies and make us unattractive to those we seek to reach. We will go to bed dumb as well, because we will be ratifying standards of measurement which stunt and curb our efforts, and which entirely lack reason.

This is the best of times. We have seen, in recent weeks, not only the largest simultaneous peaceful legal demonstrations worldwide in history, but massive civil disobedience, coordinated resistance, citywide, regional, and national teach-ins, protests, and marches, and what is ultimately most important, local outreach in towns, on streets, in schools, and everywhere.

More, the tone and tenor of this upsurge is diversifying. People are seeing the necessity to not only oppose this war, but to oppose all imperial war. People are seeing the need to not only seek peace now, but to seek pervasive and lasting peace, and not just peace but also justice. People are seeing the need to not only reject the barbaric, the colonial, and the domineering, but to propose and advocate positive alternatives to capitalism, patriarchy, and racism.

But this is also the worst of times. We have seen, in recent weeks, despite our activism, not only a gigantic assault on a defenseless country but a celebration of that assault as if it were a major human achievement. On top of missiles, bombers, helicopters, and tanks we have suffered a media that reports war like it was soccer, that obscures context and substance to highlight dismissive details, and that lies and denies and even fabricates news so that it is fit to print in the eyes of the masters.

Mainstream media presents what suits the masters. It obscures what doesn't. Media mystification so swamps the air waves, the sound waves, and the byways, that any person not directly plugged into alternative avenues of thought and not sustained by a community that ratifies true information and analysis, cannot help but to some degree succumb to the fear and loathing and triumphalism screaming forth from every orifice of society, It is no wonder that at least temporarily imperial thoughts occupy many people's minds, not only despite people having a social conscience, but even, amazingly, in pursuit of manifesting such a conscience.

"REVOLUTION NOW"