Gary Leupp: Appropriate Disillusionment

Tweet This article ends with the only hope I have: "Sheehan's disillusionment need not lead to a dead end. It could be the premise for appropriately deeper radicalization."

"Nancy Pelosi cannot say, [as Cindy Sheehan apparently did] "This is an imperialist war to reconfigure the Middle East, allow the U.S. to control the flow of oil from the region, dot it with huge permanent U.S. military bases, advance Israeli aims in the region, and intimidate all potential rivals for decades. It is wrong, a clear violation of international law." Harry Reid can't say, "The lies of these war planners are so obvious. We need hearings now about the Office of Special Plans. We need to find out who forged the Niger uranium documents and who undercut our intelligence professionals in pushing that completely false case presented by Colin Powell to the U.N. We need to move on impeachment of both Bush and Cheney."

"That sort of honest talk is not normally allowed by the system to the "loyal opposition." Only under circumstances of extraordinary duress, when it feels its very existence threatened, does the system make some concessions to the people it doesn't work for. In the early '70s our outrage over the war in Vietnam, compounded by disgust about the evolving Watergate Affair, forced Congress to cut off war funding (through the Case-Church Amendment passed on June 19, 1973), produced a wave of investigations that exposed the vicious Cointelpro Program, and produced the Freedom of Information Act. We're not yet back to that level of outrage, but the number of people questioning the system itself---the money-driven "Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics"---is growing. As the Democrats drag their feet, ignore their mandate to end the war, and collude with moves against Iran and Syria bound to produce disastrous repercussions, disillusionment will no doubt mount, as it should.

"'To be radical," wrote Marx, "is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man, the root is man himself." In other words, radicalism means thinking clearly about how and why people in general are oppressed by the "money" to which Bacevich alludes. By those who use their unconscionable wealth (= political power) to pursue their boundless "interests"---sacrificing other people's children to do so. But Marx in the same work notes how people oppress themselves with delusional thinking. He refers to religion but might as well be speaking of delusions about contemporary American "democracy" when he writes, "The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions."

"Sheehan's disillusionment need not lead to a dead end. It could be the premise for appropriately deeper radicalization.

From Counterpunch.org