Socialist Professor Responds

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.

You know my son went to Ithaca College (yes, in the city of evil! but only for one semester cause he hated it) and took a political science course taught by a very liberal prof. Well, my son has always been conservative, don't know why exactly, well, maybe I do since I voted for Goldwater with my very first vote, anyway he took the prof. to task on almost everything. Said at one point they were shouting at one another. He received an A. So maybe, just maybe, there are some liberals who listen and grade not according to their own world view but on merit. At least there was one that I know of. Just one.

I said on an earlier thread (same subject) that Dana Cloud was a cyberlegend, existing only in the imagination of feminazis and screenwriters. I see on your post a purported photo of Dana Cloud and still have no evidence to change my original opinion. Nobody looks like that and nobody ever earnestly wrote the drivel posted by commieprof. This is a weird, warped kind of fiction. "Israeli occupation," buried deep in commieprof's post, opens a closet to reveal where the looney left has gone -- absorbed in self-loathing and fear to equal their fear and loathing of Jews. What we have here is a movie by the Coen brothers -- and I'm waiting for the punch line.

From your "Theories of Persuasion" Class Curriculum:

"This course is an introduction to persuasion in its various contexts, from political campaigns to advertising campaigns, from the President of the United States to popular music, from the nightly news to used car sales. The goal of this course is to encourage you to receive persuasive messages with an analytical and critical mindset. This is a receiver-oriented class. This means we will be taking apart persuasive messages in order to better understand how influence is wielded in everyday communication settings like interpersonal relationships, television news, popular culture, and political speech.

We will be dealing with some controversial and sensitive political issues such as news coverage of the Gulf War, persuasion about the Holocaust, abortion rhetoric, and contemporary race relations. Our purpose is not to come to conclusions about where to stand in these cases. Instead, let's look at how each public event we study is put together, arranged and structured for popular consumption. We must ask ourselves what we are being asked to do, to believe, and to value by the texts we encounter every day, and how messages are structured to get us to come to those beliefs and values."

Sounds like back to the classroom for you.

I beg to differ with you with regard to my intelligence but think what you like if it makes you feel better when being challenged with new ideas and information.

I also think that it was very courageous of you to post here. Most of the time liberals/socialists/communists just come in here, get confronted with the facts, then call names and run away. But to get to my point...

You mention your challenge of "new ideas and information". But your ideas are nothing new. Communism was responsible for the slaughter of 100 million people over the last century. It does not work, Maoist, Trotskyist, whateverist, it is a system that fails every time it is tried, except for bees and ants, which another FReeper has already stated. You claim your compassion and admiration for the common man. Do you really wish to show this compassion and admiration by treating human beings like insects? Your predecessors have done exactly that, and their kill rates rival those of chemical insecticides that we use in our homes and gardens against insects.

Just wondering...JFK

This is a weird, warped kind of fiction. "Israeli occupation," buried deep in commieprof's post, opens a closet to reveal where the looney left has gone -- absorbed in self- loathing and fear to equal their fear and loathing of Jews.
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She must mention Israel and the "occupation" otherwise she loses standing with her fellow leftists. Self righteous posturing is the key to success in leftist circles in the universities. This is why she mentions she is a Trotskyite, as if this has any meaning at all to 99.99% of Americans.

Hi all. Long time lurker, first time poster.

I found myself compelled to register because of the sheer brilliance of this post. It is at once _exactly_ right on the money (no pun intended) and scathingly funny. Sadly our socialist friend is very likely unable to see the humor and is right this very moment urgently resisting the temptation to pull the race card for reasons she can't quite grasp. It is briliantly illustrative of the core, underlying, overwhelming flaws in liberal philosophy - the same flaws that leave me slack jawed and shaking my head the more they are brought to light.

This is exactly the part of FR that I love. Razor sharp witty insight. Good show!

For those that may be interested.

The Trotskyist Manifesto

Snip......

In vast areas of the planet capitalism has been overthrown, whilst to preserve it elsewhere has cost the lives of tens and even hundreds of millions in localised and world wars; famine continues to claim countless victims in a world where food "surpluses" are burned.

This testifies to the fact that capitalism has long passed from the early phase of its development, when it was a relatively progressive system, to its terminal phase when it has become absolutely reactionary--in short to the epoch in which its death agony takes place.

The question that faces humanity is whether imperialism will drag all classes into a common ruin or whether the working class can lead the exploited and oppressed into a new social order; one where democratically planned production for need based upon common ownership opens up the prospect of a classless, stateless world. The objective pre-requisites for this have long existed: technology, science, the means of production and a multi-millioned world proletariat.

Twice this century, in 1914-23 and 1939-47, capitalism has been thrown into such acute worldwide convulsions that it stared death in the face. Twice, its own rivalries and contradictions have raised up the spectre of its global defeat at the hands of the proletariat. On countless other occasions the proletariat of individual countries has sought to settle accounts decisively with its exploiters.

But, as yet, it has not found, or been able to preserve, a leadership capable of completing the task of the world revolution. Before 1914 the Socialist International did assemble a mass-based world movement of the working class, but this suffered degeneration and betrayal before it could create the centralised leadership necessary for victory in the approaching revolutionary crises.

....snip

I'll bet hopes were high when Slick Willy won in 92

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