Socialist Professor Responds

7/8/02 | commieprof

[commieprof]

An open letter to my critics:

Let me please take this opportunity to thank you for your feedback and to clarify a few points that seem to be at issue. Thank you to those who have sent messages of support, and to those of you whose criticisms are based in argument and reasoning, rathern than in name calling and death threats. Thank you to those of you who noticed that I took care in my pledge not to identify with terrorists, suicide bombers, or Islamic regimes, but with the ordinary people around the world, including those here in the United States. And thank you, I guess, to those of you who are praying for my salvation. I tend to see a better world as being possible here on earth and am not waiting for the second coming so that the meek can inherit their due. But at least you aren't threatening my life, and I appreciate that.

To those of you who are sending me hate mail equating me with the enemy, however, let me attempt to make the following clarifications. It is true that the format of a pledge does not allow one to present arguments full-blown. People may have misunderstood my meaning and intent because of the brief and condensed nature of the genre.

I take my freedoms to dissent in this country very seriously. I do not want to live anywhere else in the world, your invitations to exile notwithstanding. I am a citizen with the right to protest what I see as unjust and inhumane policies, both economic and military. You are correct that I am relatively privileged; I would not have the same rights to dissent and protest in countries like Afghanistan, although if I lived there, I would be part of social movements to resist oppression whether in the form of Islamic fundamentalism or U.S. bombs. Activists in the countries I named often stress the importance of critique and dissent here in the belly of the beast. I feel a certain obligation, an obligation that comes with freedom, to speak out alongside of those with less freedom to speak. I pledged solidarity not with any nation's leaders or terrorist organizations, but with the ordinary people, who are not being liberated by U.S. sanctions and bombs or by U.S. support for the Israeli occupation. I see the people in Afghanistan who were bombed as they celebrated a wedding two weeks ago as being as human as those who died in the World Trade Center, for whom I also have tremendous compassion.

I should add that people in developing countries are not being liberated by the opportunites provided by U.S.-dominated world capitalism. I do not have space to go through all the evidence for these claims, but if you have an open mind, I suggest you read some Howard Zinn, especially People's History of the United States and his more recent Terrorism and War. Suffice it to say that if you have read any history you know that the U.S. either put in place or supported with money and guns the very dictators you decry today, including the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. The United States has taken part in the undermining of democratic (defined as supported by the majority of the people, not in terms of the free market) regimes in Latin American and the Carribean almost as a matter of course (Chile, Haiti and the Philippines for example), not to mention in Asia and Africa. The list is too long to recite here.

Those of you who are offended that you might have to fight and die for my freedoms clearly have misunderstood my anti-war stance. I do not want you to be sent to other countries to die or kill, because I think those actions are not in defense of our freedoms; more often it's about protecting oil profits (even Bush Sr. admitted as much about the Persian Gulf War, which resulted in more than a million and a half civilian deaths). I don't want you over there killing civilians in my name, when my freedoms are not what is being defended at all. Neither are yours. Even though you may hate me, I don't want to you die for someone else's profits.

I do not agree with the analysis that "our way of life" offers hope and salvation to those living in other countries under dictators and in poverty. When four percent of the world's population controls more than 60% of the world's wealth, when the nation states that harbor the strongest enterprises defend those interests with force, when U.S. foreign policy and economic policy are designed to drive countries into unsalvageable debt or rubble, it is impossible for me to remain uncritical. Too often, it is not the fault of bad leaders, bad values, wrong religion, or corrupt people in other nations that brings them ruin, but the policies of production for export over meeting human needs, the support of the U.S. for dictators like the former Suharto in Indonesia, who massacred more than 200,000 people but was, according to the state department, "our kind of guy" because he supported Nike and Freeport MacMoran's exploitation of the people there. I could go on. When Madeline Albright said that the deaths of 5,000 children a month in Iraq as a result of U.S. sanctions were a reasonable price to pay for U.S. foreign policy objectives, I reacted with the same level of disgust that you are bombarding me with now.

I think we have to face these hard realities about "our way of life" if we are truly to understand "why they hate us" and to prevent acts of desperation and hatred targeting civilians in the future. I am not defending terrorism (which, if defined as the targeting of civilian life in retaliation for political and economic grievances, would apply to U.S. conduct in every war it has fought). But it seems reasonable to consider that "they" (Iraqis, Palestinians, Muslims in general) might hate the United States for the havoc it has wrought in the Middle East. Some examples: First supporting and arming Hussein when he was fighting our enemies and killing the Kurds, then slaughtering Iraq's civilian population and bombing the country back to the stone age. First supporting and arming Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan when they were fighting "the communist menace," then bombing their civilian population. . . You get the idea. The support for Israel and its wars and occupations against Palestinians against United Nations resolutions and international law doesn't win our government any friends, either. It is always wrong to terrorize civilians in response to such abuses. Yet the history is part of the answer to the question and a change in U.S. foreign policy must be part of the solution.

If you cherish the freedoms of the United States, it would be hypocritical of you to be intolerant of the expression of opinions that differ from yours. I am a well-educated, thoughtful human being. I am well qualified to teach at the University ("universe"-ity), which should be a place for thoughtful and respectful sharing of diverse views. My students get trained in critical thinking: the capacity to take in a number of perspectives and weigh evidence and reasoning on their own, which they would not be able to do if there were not at least a few dissenters among us here. I mean, the business school gets the big bucks and military- and corporate-funded research dominate the campus. It's a rare class where a student would find points of view that challenge the corporate and geopolitical hegemony of the United States. So I feel sorry for the students whose parents would keep them from attending my classes or the University of Texas because of what I wrote. Don't you have faith that your children can think for themselves? Don't you trust them with a range of positions and approaches to knowledge? Haven't you prepared them to defend your family's values? Any viewpoint is welcome in my classes so long as the arguer can provide evidence and reasoning in support of claims. Contrary to popular mythology, I do not routinely fail conservative students; I do welcome their voices in class so long as respect for others and standards of argumentation are sustained. Actually, the smarter conservative students tell me that they enjoy a good challenge, which they take as a sign of respect. And believe me, I am a member of a tiny political minority on campus that is nowhere near acting like the "thought police" envisioned by the hard right. The kind of fear I hear in the emails I am receiving and on the conservative listservs I have been monitoring is based on a complete overestimation of any single professor's influence.

In sum, I am not the enemy of freedom; to the contrary, I am among its staunchest supporters. I think freedoms should be expanded, not curtailed, in this time of crisis. I worry that now with the modified Patriot Act (which allows security agencies to perform warrantless searches, detentions, and wiretaps, among other things) and the new mega- security-intelligence agency consolidation, that we may not have these freedoms to dissent very much longer. I will raise questions about U.S. foreign policy and corporate globalization as long as I can. It is my prerogative, my right, and, as I see it, my responsbility.

A brief comment on patriotism, or nationalism: To me it seems untenable to say that I have more in common with George W. Bush, Martha Stewart, or Kenneth Lay than I do, say, with a teacher in Afghanistan or a student in Iraq or a UPS driver here at home. Likewise, they might share interests with me and have little in common with Saddam Hussein or Al Quaeda. As a socialist (not a Stalinist, and there is a difference), I have a positive vision of international solidarity and struggle against greed, war, exploitation, and oppression on a world scale. In my view, patriotic fervor dehumanizes people around the world so that their deaths or their hunger or their homelessness can be blamed on them and forgotten.

It's not like me to base an argument on the words of the "founding fathers" but let me remind you that it was Thomas Jefferson (leaving aside his fondness for slaves for a moment) who believed that criticism and dissent were at the core of democracy. He even thought that the citizenry should take up arms against a government when they thought it was becoming too tyrannical. It took a revolution to make the democracy you cherish, and in my view it will take another to make real democracy (political and economic) for the majority of the world's population.

Ben Franklin wrote that when a nation prioritizes security over liberty, the consequences could be dire for democracy. Contrary to my correspondents, I do not believe that order is the ground from which all liberty springs. History teaches quite another lesson--it took a civil war, for example, to end slavery. And "order" is a god term not of democratic societies but of fascism. Unfortunately, I believe that in this extremely sensitive time people are all too willing to embrace a notion of security--not only against terrorists but also against critical ideas and thoughtful dialogue--over liberty.

I hope that this set of expanded arguments makes for more thinking and fewer personal attacks. Of course, I hoped to provoke a response and I welcome deba†e and dialogue. I do not feel like a victim and I am not complaining about being criticized. However, I hoped to get a *real* response, not just hate and intimidation in the name of freedom.

I encourage activists with views similar to mine to come out into the light of day. The urgency of speaking now far outweighs the flak we will get for standing up.

With best regards,

Dana Cloud

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

but, for the life of me, I cannot understand how you could spend that much time in higher education and still think that the War between the States (Civil War) was about slavery. Lady...You need a real history class!!!!!

While most of her post is drivel, the fact of the matter is that the Civil War was almost entirely about slavery.  And that is according to the southern viewpoint of the time too (The southern secessionist documents are quite clear on this point).  Ironically, the northern viewpoint was not abolitionist.  It was unionist (the same viewpoint which prevailed in VA until after South Carolina started the Civil War).

[Area51]

http://www.utexas.edu/coc/cms/faculty/DCloud/politicalwritings/TalkingPointsonAbortion.htm Talking Points on Abortion Rights
1/17/02

1. Over my year shere at UT, I’ve come out on these steps on many occasions. I’ve come out as a lesbian, as a socialist, as someone who opposes the war in Afghanistan and supports the rights of University staff. Today I’m coming out again--as someone liberated by the right to safe, legal, and accessible abortion....

[Caesar Soze]

Yes, it was the Mujahedin, forerunners of AlQuaeda, not the Taliban, who garned the support of the U.S. during the Cold War.

Some Mujahedin became Al Qaeda, not all. To say that the Mujahedin were the forerunners of Al Qaeda is at best syntactically dubious, at worst intellectually dishonest.

His vision of a bottom-up, democratic socialism (not State socialism) is the tradition I stand in.

I hope you don't oppress prepositions like that in your formal writing. In any case, I must admit I am not terribly familiar with Trotskij's doctrine -- democracy is a form of government, and any government that exists within a land of fixed borders, has a permanent population, and is capable of international relations is, by definition, a state. For socialism to exist democratically, it must be enforced -- and socialism on the national scale must be enforced -- by a state, correct? Where does Trotskij's reasoning deviate from mine?

(Please forgive the un-Western spelling of 'Trotskij.' I just learned the Cyrillic spelling today, and my closer transliteration will help me remember it.)

[Right Wing Professor]

What you're looking at, those three abstracts, is almost the totality of the doctor's professional work, excluding a few book reviews and letters-to-the-editor that she has authored. And excluding her dissertation, which I just don't have the stomach to go and dig up at the moment.

Par for the course in the field of 'Communications Studies', I'm afraid. One of our Comm. Studies faculty wrote a 250 page thesis on 'A Different World', a spinoff sitcom from the Cosby show. Hard to believe this passes for scholarship. This same faculty member writes largely illiterate columns on 'racial issues' for the local lefty fish-wrap. Apparently, sentences with a subject and verb are oppressive, or something.

A few years back I came up with 'Harbison's laws of academe'. I don't remeber them all, but a couple were

• Any field that goes by the name (blank)-studies is the domain of charlatans.
• The easiest way to tell a science major from a humanities major is to see if the student can write in complete sentences. The science major usually can, the humanities major usually can't.
• The lower the objective content a discipline has, the more likely its faculty are leftist.

Things have gotten so much worse recently, I'm considering replacing 'major' by 'professor' in rule 2.

[John O]

Right of conquest?

Kind of shorthand for my own idea of how the world should work. If you attack me and I manage to defeat you and take your land, that land is now mine because you attacked me. You don't even get whining rights to it. Likewise Mexico, Cuba, Japan etc should all belong to the US because they (or the nations that owned them) attacked us and lost. If the world would start enforcing this it would pretty much end war. If you attack and lose, you lose your nation.

GSA(P)

[John O]

Perhaps the fact that this thread establishes in her own words that she came out as a lesbian had something to do with it.

[an amused spectator]

actually I do not favor gun control. In a crisis, I don't want the police and the state to be the only ones with guns.

Is this a common sentiment in your milieu, or does it get lonely defending this position at the Academy?

As a follow-up, do you believe that the 2nd Amendment refers to a collective right of the States, or does it protect the individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms (one of the Rights free men and women are born with)?

It will be interesting to see your answer.

[general_re]

Par for the course in the field of 'Communications Studies', I'm afraid. One of our Comm. Studies faculty wrote a 250 page thesis on 'A Different World', a spinoff sitcom from the Cosby show. Hard to believe this passes for scholarship. This same faculty member writes largely illiterate columns on 'racial issues' for the local lefty fish-wrap. Apparently, sentences with a subject and verb are oppressive, or something.

Exactly what we'd expect from an oppressive, phallocentric, man of "science" such as you, privileging the European male experience over other equally valid narratives as you do, don't you? Admit it, sexist, capitalist, pig-dog ;)

It's not grammar that's oppressive - well, it is, if you've seen anything from the MLA over the last twenty years - but rather plain facts that are oppressive, I think. The world is not how a certain segment of academia wishes it to be, so they must wish away some of its more inconvenient aspects.

Ah, well. I think it was Plato who remarked at what an awful lot of money the Sophists seemed to be making back in the day - plus ça change, right? ;)

[Right Wing Professor]

Exactly what we'd expect from an oppressive, phallocentric, man of "science" such as you, privileging the European male experience over other equally valid narratives as you do, don't you? Admit it, sexist, capitalist, pig-dog ;)

Admit it? Hell, I'm proud of it!

Seriously, though, I'm delighted to look at whatever there is of value from other cultures that European males have ignored. Trouble is, I just don't run into very much of it. And when European males really do take what's valuable from other cultures (gunpowder, for example), we get accused of being colonialist.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, so let's just let the natives/feminists/commies revert back to mud huts, female genital mutilation and preventable sexually treansmitted diseases, and come back in 200 years when they've killed each other off.

[Dan(9698)]

"You don't look lesbian "

Actually, she does.

[Madame Dufarge]

that your arguments didn't hold up

What arguments? Wouldn't that involve give and take?

She paraphrased Das Kapital and left.

I'm sure she conducts her "classes" in the same manner.

[general_re]

Seriously, though, I'm delighted to look at whatever there is of value from other cultures that European males have ignored. Trouble is, I just don't run into very much of it.

I think it was Saul Bellow who said "Show me the Proust of the Papuans, and I'll read it," and who was, of course, instantly attacked for his "racism"...

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, so let's just let the natives/feminists/commies revert back to mud huts, female genital mutilation and preventable sexually treansmitted diseases, and come back in 200 years when they've killed each other off.

Sayyyy, I like the way you think. That must go over well at faculty meetings ;)

[Allrightnow]

Ms. Cloud, I apologize for any threats of harm you may have received from my counterparts on Free Republic. Most of us are proponents of the Constitution and respect your right to dissent (regardless of how little we agree with it), so long as you attempt to effect change through democratic process. I personally respect your right to try to achieve this within the United States and do not suggest that you relocate to a foreign nation that would not allow you the right to speak your mind.

I do however wonder what solution you might offer to the wasp nest hanging here? You are right when you suggest that our way of life offers no hope to people living under the thumb of dictators. We have made attempts (albeit proportioned toward self interest) to correct this by removing some of the curruption from these nations. The result is typically that the dictator or government we extricate is replaced by another equally vile dictator or government and we wind up in a game of semantics, accusing our incumbent party at home of ineffective policy. The real reason that nothing changes is that the socitial structure of these afflicted nations consistently promotes despots to power and nothing short of occupation, measured in generations not months, will change this manner of thinking.

We have tried throwing money at the situation and know that most charitable institutions pocket the lions share of the support and that direct government aid rarely makes it to the intended recipients. We have also seen at home what happens when you hand people what they need to survive; they fail to learn how to provide for themselves or loose the initiative to change their circumstances.

While we are at it, Socialism and Communism don't seem to be valid solutions so long as human behavior remains unchanged. We can see what happened with the USSR and like it or not, China is slowly moving in the direction of the "Glasnost" environment. Do you think that there will be any tangible deviation from the outcome of the same situation in the Soviet Union? People are inherently greedy Professor, this may not appeal to your sense of fairness but it is the truth and it is not about to change. We want more for ourselves and our families. More possessions, more luxury, more security, and believe it or not, for others not to suffer out of our own want of magnanimity. People are willing to strive to better their situation but if you remove all hope of prosperity, people will not work to obtain it. This is why Communism usually winds up as Totalitarianism and Dictatorship. You need force to compel people to work because otherwise there is no motivation to do so.

And why do you think people go to work in Nike factories overseas when the pay is poor and the working conditions even worse. Could it be because it still provides a better lifestyle than they were accustomed to? Is it possible that the reason they begin complaining about it is that they still want more for themselves? You are quick to point out that you want to fight avarice but in doing so is it possible that you are supporting envy?

[The KG9 Kid]

"... When four percent of the world's population controls more than 60% of the world's wealth [...] it is impossible for me to remain uncritical..."

You should dedicate yourself to improving your critical thinking.

The 'wealth' you cite is created by the same minority of people.

It's not as if an evil gang of capitalists is stealing resources from an previously-untapped African mine full of Microsoft Office XP CD-ROMs, is it? Are they conspiring with third-world dictators to rob his subjects of their natural deposits of k.d. lang albums?

What use has a Kenyan Masai tribesman for a $2.8 million Sun StorEdge 9980 System except to smash the magneto-optical storage discs inside it into tiny bits to fashion necklaces for his whole tribe?

It really is insulting to use an alarmist and thoroughly-unexamined economic non-sequitur in attempting to seed guilt on people that have nothing to feel guilty about in the first place.

Have you ever considered putting down the signs and sloganeering and getting your hands dirty doing the hard work to help the people that you claim to champion?

By the looks of it, you rarely get your fat ass off the couch except to wolf down another box of Dove bars -- yet another overpriced capitalist item that a Masai tribesman doesn't need.

[Madame Dufarge]

There is a greater difference between a democracy and a republic than socialism and Stalinism.

Bingo.

[Madame Dufarge]

Oops.

[spqrzilla9]

Resources aren't scarce. There is enough food produced every year to feed everyone 54 times over--most of it is dumped in the ocean because it wouldn't get a profit on the market. That's our system's sick set of priorities.

Its so much easier to argue by making up "facts" out of whole cloth isn't it? Reality is so inconvenient to socialists.

[InvisibleChurch]

you're right, "argument" should read "bilge"

thanks :)

[nickcarraway]

Please answer me a question: If you are a communist of the Karl Marx persuasion should you really be so active? According to Marx, there is no way to ``speed up'' the dialectical process. Each economic stage rises and declines in it's own time, according to Marx. There is no way humans can have an impact. If, according to Marx, capitalism will decay when it reaches that stage, and not before, why would someone try do the impossible, try to influence the process? Either you won't have any effect at all, or possibly you could prolong the capitalist stage.

[tet68]

Today I’m coming out again--as someone liberated by the right to safe, legal, and accessible abortion....

And lesbians need this because?