Author: Slingshot Collective

Progressive and radical thinkers conventionally regard the structures of power as a monolith. The metaphor of resistance imagines a massive force — the collective army of market incentives, state power and social norms — arrayed against a disorganized, disenfranchised and intimidated populace. According to the conventional metaphor, a resistance must be radicalized, assembled and organized in a counter-force sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the colossal momentum of the status quo. This metaphor of resistance, though it calls itself a rejection of the monolith, actually embraces a monolithic strategy. It arrays a new, revolutionary monolith against an old, reactionary one. We cannot build a qualitatively different future if we allow ourselves to be governed by conventional metaphors based on overwhelming force.

I propose a fairly simple and straightforward alternative metaphor — a pyramid or, more accurately perhaps, a cone. In this metaphor, a tiny elite concentrates its power at the head of the cone, supported by a larger though rather less powerful industrial middle class, which in turn rests atop the massively large and vastly less powerful multitude. Unlike the monolith metaphor, this alternative intermingles the oppressed and the oppressors in the same structure, with the flow of power depending as much on the complicity of the masses to release their power upward as on the demands of the elite to appropriate this power.

The powerful monolith of the conventional model is represented in the proposed metaphor by the energy of markets, state and social norms to maintain society’s conical shape. This shape is maintained not by a monolithic force from outside the cone shoving the masses into place, but by a complex system of incentives and threats that operates within the cone, compelling people at all levels of the structure to comply with its requirements. Maintenance of shape holds the highest importance for the elite because the lower strata of the cone serve as the foundation for their advantage. Shapeliness, in this metaphor, becomes the leading political and economic imperative.

Activism

In the conical metaphor, the tactics of activism change dramatically from those suggested by the opposing-monoliths metaphor. In the cone, it is clear that elites and the masses are not opposing forces, but interdependent. Elites depend on the appropriation, or “suck,” of power from the base; and the masses are caught in a dependence on the conical structure itself to provide their work, salary and defense, plus whatever other perks (if any) their station in the cone allows. Over the past three centuries there has been a distinct evolution from the enforcement of this appropriation of power by overt force to a system that has won the multitudes’ voluntary complicity. Cynically, one might describe modern capitalist democracy merely as the elite’s most subtle — and perhaps most effective — means of power appropriation yet devised.

Rather than monolithic, the proposed metaphor depicts the multitudes’ surrender of power as extraordinarily diffuse, occurring at every juncture in the fabric of social relations throughout the body of the cone. This suggests an equally diffuse strategy for social change. Such a strategy would have two components: first, the negative act of not complying with the conical imperative to push one’s power upward through the structure; and second, the positive act of circulating one’s power locally and non-hierarchically.

The failure to comply with the appropriation of power by the elite systemically weakens the conical structure by undermining its shapeliness. The shape of the cone is defined by the consistently upward direction of power. When that direction is subverted, the cone loses its sharpness of definition and begins to ooze at the points where power is no longer flowing upwardly — a threat to elites because they depend on the cone’s structural integrity to remain so heavily at its head. Some seepage of power within the cone is, of course, inevitable. Elites recognize that the system isn’t perfectly efficient and have a certain degree of tolerance for seepage. But if activists succeed in subverting the appropriation of power more broadly, they will eventually attract the angry glare of elites who will use force to stiffen the gooey points within the conical structure that threaten to undermine it.

In addition to cutting off the upward flow of power, the reservoirs of power thus conserved can be used to create and maintain an alternative social infrastructure — the training ground for building the skills of utopian life, and experimental models for “post-revolutionary” institutions. Within modern constitutional guarantees, at least in the developed West, most of the alternative structures are perfectly legal. But, as the seepage of power becomes of increasing concern to elites, a crackdown on non-conical institutions can be expected, and constitutional guarantees denied.

But even before alarm bells start ringing in the elite’s war-room activists incur a fairly substantial opportunity cost. By refusing to cooperate with the conical structure, activists deny themselves whatever upward mobility the structure might otherwise have provided. And in doing so, they violate many social norms. This pressure, a strong feature of the conical design, has a profound destabilizing effect on activist culture, consistently weakening and foreshortening the resolve of individual activists to persist in their work. This explains why activism becomes merely a “phase” for many, or gradually morphs into increasingly mainstream (and therefore conical) activities.

As the movement for radical social change approaches its objective, the price of remaining active in the movement rises. The strategic function of raising the price, from the elite’s perspective, is to draw activists into a battle of force, a battle social movements are bound to lose most of the time. But even when those movements prevail, their reliance on force to achieve power invariably characterizes their subsequent management of power — yet again, one elite merely supplants another. One might conclude from this consistent pattern in human history that liberatory movements are undermined to the extent that they rely on force to win their objective. If this principle is basically true, as I believe history demonstrates, then activists must find strategies for social change that remain non-complicit with the paradigm of force, even — especially — as the intensity of the state’s violence rises to an unbearable pitch.

Anarchy and Non-Violence

There are two kinds of anarchism, one that is negative and absurd (which I call nihilistic anarchism), and another that represents the highest possible standard of freedom and justice (idealistic anarchism). Nihilistic anarchism, which focuses exclusively on the destruction of the status quo, tends toward violence, while idealistic anarchism focuses on developing the tools, models and strategies for a liberatory society, and tends strongly away from violence. Gandhian non-violence, for instance, unfolded completely, is utterly anarchic in the best sense.

The essence of anarchism lies in the ideal of a non-hierarchical distribution of power — that is, a society where power is not concentrated vertically (as in the cone) but dispersed horizontally and shared freely by all. While this vision often meets with ridicule for its uncompromising idealism, I believe it actually represents the direction toward which human history has always tended and will — given sufficient time — increasingly approach. What’s more, anarchism defines purely how to live beautifully today, no matter how unlikely the realization of a beautiful society may be tomorrow.

Paradoxically perhaps, I would suggest that anarchism is not itself an ideal, but a strategy for approaching a mostly and necessarily undefined ideal. Anarchism is a way of moving through one’s life, and of moving through history. It
represents the political expression of the genius and diversity of human community. Understood in this way, anarchism is the opposite of violence, and provides the principle of non-complicity with force that liberatory movements need in order to overcome the pressure of the conical structure to fight force with force.

Strictly speaking, anarchism is not a movement, either (though, in a broad sense, it’s sometimes useful to speak of it that way) — unless we’re very careful, the language of ‘movement’ taps into the metaphor of opposing monoliths. The anarchic principle might better be described as a contagious tendency toward non-complicity with hierarchies of power, spontaneously expressed and uniquely defined according the specific, local exigencies of the moment. While nothing in anarchism precludes the development of institutions, planning or strategy, its leading characteristic rightly remains a strong sense of local self-determination.

In a fundamental way, the anarchic impulse is not one of struggle (to fight against) but one of relaxation. Ooze in conical lines of power represents a reduction in the effort of pushing. The cone actually relaxes to a degree, much to the anal-retentive horror of elites. But this relaxation cannot under any circumstances be commanded or imposed, for obvious reasons. The anarchic principle suggests instead a dual strategy of modeling non-complicit sharing of power, and inspiring the multitude to imagine a different kind of life. Illuminated by compelling models and inspired idealism, alternative structures can be designed, tested and improved in a diffuse and broadly participatory way.

The relaxation of complicity provides an elusively simple response to power’s effort to match force with force. The more force elites apply to the gooey zones of the relaxing cone (in hopes to stiffen it to a more exploitable shape), the more one should relax. In graphic terms, this means that the flow of power being diverted and circulated non-hierarchically should rarely be concentrated to resist the opposing force of the state, but instead further diffused and more-broadly circulated. In practical terms, we can best respond to efforts by elites to arrest, terrorize and militarize activists by draining resources from the points of conflict established by the state and redirecting them into alternative structures. In short, when power is liquid it can flow toward the common good; only when solid can it be co-opted along a vertical, hierarchical axis. So, when I speak of relaxation I am not suggesting any kind of passivity, but an intensely active, imaginative and collaborative flow of energy. I am referring to a relaxation of form, not action. Just as rivers conquer mountains, there is nothing weak or ineffectual about a liquid erosion of oppressive power structures.

Admittedly, this strategy becomes increasingly difficult as the state devotes more and more resources to provoking a violent confrontation. This suggests an extremely unfortunate but, I think, inviolable rule: if a social movement cannot withstand the intensity of violence from elites long enough to replace those elites non-violently, the movement is probably not sufficiently mature to achieve its stated ends.

The struggle-by-relaxation is necessarily iterative. With each attempt, both sides become savvier about methods and consequences. This iterative process could repeat any number of times (as it has on a smaller scale already). But another dynamic will eventually overtake it. Looking long over the past centuries and millennia, the advancing march of this new dynamic can be clearly detected, and it represents the promise of the human experiment. It may be described as the dawning understanding that the oppressed masses actually possess greater power than elites. This is the dynamic of collectivization.

In terms of the conical metaphor, collective power (as opposed to individual power) is represented by the volume of the shape of power. In the massive global cone, obviously the vast majority of volume resides toward the base. Once the people who are represented closer to this base fully grasp their collective power, as opposed to the illusory upward mobility promised but denied by elites, not only will they refuse to yield their power to those elites, but they will collectivize their power on a horizontal basis.

Historically, the first ascendant impulse is to the vertical consolidation of power, where the individual’s ambition trumps the common good. Only later, as it happens, does the second impulse to horizontal sharing of power, where the common good is harmonized with individual aspirations, gain ascendancy. Consolidation comes first because it requires no wisdom; sharing comes second because wisdom combined with experience reveals that everyone is much better off in a cooperative rather than competitive society.

The Revolutionary Impulse

The opposing-monoliths metaphor, the paradigm of force, inspires a lot of talk about revolution. But revolutions, so far, have turned out merely to revolve the cast of characters doing the oppressing and being oppressed. As the proposed metaphor suggests, the more hopeful and realistic path toward a just and free society is probably both evolutionary and, in a limited sense, inevitable. The function of activism, therefore, is not to foment a forceful radicalism but precisely to engender radical non-force; to unleash into political space a creative, liberatory impulse that is already latent and burgeoning. This is, of course, a kind of revolution. But perhaps it might better be described as an anti-revolution — the relaxation of forceful intent, and the nurturing of an organic and authentic relationship to power.

It’s an extraordinary claim to suggest, as I have, that society is inherently utopic. This flies against the dominant strain of cynicism that has captured and paralyzed most of us. We tend to see history making exactly the opposite case — that power always tends toward greater consolidation, and that history merely repeats this pattern over and over again. This encourages, I fear, a violent approach to our radicalism and utopic dreams, because we feel compelled to impose progress on a resistant world. But this compunction is ultimately neither necessary nor fruitful. I suggest we trust that history favors the multitude. Our task is not to reverse its tide, but to learn how to ride its currents more skillfully.

When we approach our activism in this spirit it becomes clear that utopia isn’t locked in some distant future. It happens right now. Utopia ignites in the imagination, and unfolds in the ways of life pursued by those who imagine utopically. It is utopic to withhold power from the upward flow of the conical structure, and utopic to circulate that power horizontally in your neighborhood and community. While this work may seem, in the short-term, to make negligible difference in the lives of the billions of oppressed, in addition to transforming the few it touches directly, our utopic activism opens up myriad worlds of possibility, hastening a brighter future for all.

Corporations have created another ridiculous system, which pretends to offer the benefits of banking to poor and working class people. Touted as an alternative to the high fees of check cashing stores and payday advances, payroll cards really increase the bottom line for corporate interests, allow the government to spy on us and further the abstractions of economy.

The advent of payroll cards further plasticizes the economy, mimicking the transition of government aid like food stamps, from checks to debit cards. Rather than offering workers more protection and flexibility, the system reinforces poverty through encouragement of spending and an increase in liability for theft and fraud.

How They Work (Or Don’t)

Payroll cards were created in the late 1990s as way for corporations to reduce their payroll costs (labor and printing). Payroll managers–banks, credit card companies or independents–contract with corporations to manage low wage payrolls. Employees are issued plastic cards, like debit cards, into which the managers deposit wages. The cards can be used like ATM cards or for purchases. McDonald’s, Sears, Fedex, and Cingular have already implemented new payroll systems.

The employees likely to use payroll cards are part-timers, low-wage workers or anyone without a bank account. Since direct deposit is cheaper for businesses, payroll cards become a sort of poor person’s direct deposit. However, payroll accounts lack the security of both bank accounts and cash under the mattress.

Traditional bank accounts are protected federally by Regulation E, which affords account holders no liability for theft or fraud on their account. Funds must be restored and the banking institution absorbs the costs. Similar liability coverage exists for users of major credit cards, although they are not obliged to offer complete protection. Payroll cards are neither bank accounts nor credit lines, and so they are not specifically protected by any federal regulation. You might say that one relies on the goodness of the issuer to protect the user. Not always so reliable… I came across this issue while reading a state bar journal, and the conclusion was basically that there is no legal precedent to protect users of payroll accounts.

However, beyond this basic drawback, payroll cards are generally more expensive for employees than establishing a regular bank account. While it’s true that check cashers can take up to 25% of a payday advance, many banks now offer accounts with no minimum balance and less than $100 a year in fees. Credits unions usually offer even better deals. Payroll companies can charge fees monthly, for withdrawals, for transactions, and per deposit. Wouldn’t it make more sense to give people bank accounts than rob them with fees, if they must work and bank to live in the present?

Why We Should Be Concerned

The claims that private payroll services and Visa/Mastercard make about the convenience of the cards doesn’t really hold up. If people are interested in saving, then knowing how much cash you have is more helpful than the abstraction of plastic. Practically, how do you pay rent with these things? And, how would they help any of us escape the absurdity of money and commodity and exchange rates. Until we start thinking outside of transaction, we can never truly escape the capitalist paradigm. Self-sufficiency, community resources and a certain amount of luddism would help more than fake bank accounts.

If you must participate, cash is safest. Unless you are shopping online (whatever retail therapy that is…) cash is easier and less time consuming than credit. Cash is usually invisible when we need it to be–leaving no record of your whereabouts or buying habits. The more we use trackable methods of payment, transportation and communication, the closer we come to shackling ourselves with GPS tracking devices. It seems as though convenience is too often tied to surveillance.

Ultimately, payroll cards don’t address the issues of sustenance that poverty presents; they just give a nice, bourgie feel to spending. “Look, we all shop with plastic now.” The motivation for reaching the “unbanked”, as payroll card users are patronizingly called in finace, isn’t to create security, but to profit by inventing need. Some folks who don’t have bank accounts are receiving federal assistance & would lose their aid if they had any bank balance. (I know someone whose disability was cut off because he made “too much money” working part-time at minimum wage.) Instead of offering any kind of stability, which payroll companies present to employers, the system ultimately undermines well-being by creating dependence on ATMs, reducing people’s access to their resources, and encouraging a mentality of corporate paternity. (Some companies offer discounts when purchases are made with the card through their programs.)

Beyond the immediate concerns of hand to mouth life (not that they are trivial), the growth of plastic economy demonstrates our distance from the fundamentals of life. Food comes from grocery stores (or dumpsters), heat from vents, and money, however alienating, comes from automatic tellers. Sometimes death even comes from un-manned machine guns. It’s all part of the video-game anaesthesia that corporate anti-culture sells to us. Do work which is unfulfilling so you can buy things to fulfill you. For this you need credit. Therefore banks, and jobs and economies and exploitation. Payroll cards just bring more people into the fold; more capital to be recycled into offshore bank accounts while most of us live off a ridiculous wage. The absurdity of our economy becomes clear when conveniences cripple us. Payroll cards are just another one of those conveniences.

I’m smoking a cigarette with a coworker on our break and she tells me her period is a week late. I ask her what she is going to do, how long she is going to wait until finding out if she is pregnant or not. Her response is that she will wait four weeks because that’s how long it will take to find out if she’s pregnant.

“That’s not true,” I say. “It took me only a day to realize I was pregnant.” I ask her what she will do if she is pregnant and she says she will have it. I get kind of confused, seeing how young she is and she says that since she is a doula and is gonna have children at some point anyway, then why not now?

Well, that whole conversation set me off to thinking about children, parents, abortions, religion and everything else that comes along…

When I was 16, one of my best friends from high school got pregnant and had an abortion. I remember meeting her to talk over coffee and cigarettes. When she told me, I just hugged her and said, “You’re such a strong woman. I am so proud of you, going through all this alone, without the stupid guy. Are you sure? You seem like you are. If I was the one pregnant I’d have it…” I remember seeing her eyes and her asking me why I’d have it if I was only 16. I used to be one of those people who’d say, “If I ever get pregnant I’ll fucking have it even if I’m 14. It’s a human being.”.

I did not grow up in a Catholic family- my parents were some hippies who hung out with other hippies in Spain, where I grew up—but as you might know, most of the Spanish population is Catholic, so the culture is very Catholic. Even if you don’t want to grow up with those beliefs or ideas, Catholicism is everywhere. So I was kind of a mixed up hippy believer.

I believed if two people made love and one of them got pregnant, then it was meant to happen. I If I ever got pregnant, I would have it. I could not kill a human being or soul that was growing or developing into a child. I knew that raising a child would be really hard but I thought, All a baby needs is love, and I got plenty of love to spare.

And then…I got pregnant. I was 19. Two months after September 11, I took a trip to Ecuador and Peru to get out of the States, find who I was again. During that trip I decided I would go back to the States, go to college, fix my paper status, and travel…

I had a lot of plans for myself, projects for the future—finally I wasn’t confused or lost, I knew what I wanted. And then, one day at the gynecologist’s office, I took a pregnancy test just in case. The boy I had been fooling around with and I had not been as careful as we could have been, so…just in case. I called the gynecologist the next day and this is how the conversation went:

“Hi, I want to know to results of the pregnancy test that I took yesterday.”

“Oh, it’s positive.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am sure. You are pregnant”

“You ain’t kidding me?”

“Of course I am not! Do you want to set up an appointment for a prenatal test?”

I didn’t even know what that meant. “Do you mean an abortion? Can I have an abortion tomorrow?”

“You have to call another number to set up an abortion and no, you cannot do it tomorrow. You have to wait 3 to 4 weeks. If they do it now the fetus would break into pieces and it would damage you, it is too small.”

“Shit…3 or 4 weeks to wait. Ok, I’ll call that number!”

Those first 5 minutes were really intense. I did not think about having the baby but about having an abortion. It was something that I had never thought about and was “against”, but in that moment, the decision came right from my heart—and it was right.

A month and a week of pregnancy is a lot of time to think. The boy and I had long conversations. The idea of having the baby was out there, I told him I thought maybe I could have it and just raise it on my own. He said he would be helping no matter what—but neither of us wanted to be parents. We did not want to be together anymore; we each had our own plans and wanted to live our lives. We realized that if we stayed together and gave up our lives to focus on the baby’s life, we could end up a miserable and unhealthy family. The guy (who’s one of my good friends now) and I would only have been together for the baby, and oh shit poor baby.

Although I have seen tons of young parents out there (and more in the radical scene) who get pregnant and decide to have it, many stay together only so the child can be raised by both of them-but what a fucking pity! Two people who don’t want to be together are together only for the child’s sake? Don’t they realize that the child could grow up realizing that and feeling shitty? I know a lot of young people who got pregnant and decided to have the baby for a number of different reasons. Some not the healthiest: they were against abortion; they grew up catholic; they wanted to keep the other partner; they wanted to feel more whole as a woman or human being; or…boredom. I was just talking to one of my good girl friends a while ago and said I feel really sad about all these young people I know that now feel miserable because they have babies, and how there are tons of babies out there who need parents. I said that so many of us can’t even take care of ourselves, so how are we ready to take care of smaller people, when she told me that she had also had an abortion. She was only 17.

In Spain (and other countries), as well as some of the states in the US, if you are under age 18 and get pregnant, you cannot have a “legal abortion” without a parent’s signature or consent. Let’s say you tell your parents and they are Catholic or anti-choice? They might make you have it or kick you out of the house and disown you. So some women choose not to tell their parents and end up having super-expensive illegal abortions that could totally fuck them up. Or women almost kill themselves by drinking liters of pennyroyal oil. Or they end up keeping the baby because of a fear of Catholicism declaring women dirty if we have sex before marriage, or sinful because we choose not to have it. What gets me the most are three points that my friends brought up to me in a recent conversation: age, money and religion(culture).

>Age. Who’s to say how old we ought to be to have children? The system? The man? A system ruled by Patriarchy? Fuck that shit. So, we gotta tell our parents we don’t want to have a baby because we are only 15 and having fun, it was all a mistake, we gotta tell them so we can have a legal abortion. But oh wait! My parents are super catholic, they’re against abortion. Oh shit..What are we gonna do? Bye bye to my life.

>Money. Fuck bureaucracy and all that crap. My friend had to pay more than $300 because she was a minor and didn’t have health insurance. That is money that most of the population doesn’t have to spare. So, are they fucking privatizing Freedom of Choice as well? What the hell!!. So, let’s say a person is totally broke, or doesn’t have a SSN or any insurance at all, then the best option for them is to bring a baby into this world? Whatttttttt? >Religion. Fuck the Pope and everyone. Fuck the whole Catholicism brain wash piece of shit, making young women feel dirty and bad because they get pregnant or are sexually active early in life, and for teaching generations of people that “killing” a fetus is a “sin.” And who’s to say that, the Pope?..That person there, a male, some one that will never get pregnant (at least not nowadays, maybe later with Genetically Modified Technology), will never have to worry about a late period, will never be treated like a piece of shit for carrying a fetus …Oh please, let the women be.

I think about and give my thoughts to all those strong women in other countries or in jails, cultures and religions where abortion is taboo and women don’t have the privilege or the option of choosing. I also know, even when we can choose, there are
a million pressures from the outside preventing or making women feel guilty for having abortions. I just know that I am damn glad I made the choice I did. I think about what I am doing right now in my life and “a baby” does not fit in that picture at all. It took me a year to get over it, but it was not as dramatic for me as other people often picture it, not even physically painful. I do not regret my choice. I do wish I had known about herbal abortion more but I didn’t, so I had to deal with the hospital shit: I slept through the operation and woke up “un-pregnant.”

I woke up from a dream. I had been stuck to an idea of abortion that I didn’t even understand. Becoming pregnant made me realize that not only is love important and necessary to take care of a little human, there are other issues imperative in the raising of a child. Things like community support, economic support, a stable home and family, and even more important—being ready to have and raise a kid. I do not feel bad about having an abortion, I now have a lot of respect for it and see it as a big challenge that forced me to open my eyes and helped me be more realistic. Now I don’t think that having an abortion is killing a human being, now I realize that it is about being mature, having choices and making choices. I also realize that a fetus is just the beginning, if it’s not wanted then the world will regret it…and I didn’t want that to happen. . *Solidaridad para mis hermanas.

It must be at least weekly, as I’m sitting around with friends in Yemen, that we launch into rants about what situations our governments have put us in; that gigantic American imperial force of wanton destruction and those corrupt, cowardly Arab dictators. Our sessions of socializing turn into rounds of lambasting the situation in the region that seems to only be getting worse.

These conversations are often overshadowed by flurries of “whys.” “Why is it that I, as an Arab, can’t travel outside my country because people are afraid of me?” “Why do the Israelis kill Palestinian children?” “Why does America support Israeli Zionism?” “Why does America kill Iraqis and occupy their land in the name of their liberation?” “Why do the American people let this happen?” “Why don’t our ‘leaders’ stand up to US imperialism and the occupation of Palestine?” “Why is everyone else always telling us how to run our nations?” “What makes Arab leaders think they have the right to stay in power for twenty or thirty years?” “Why are regular people like you and I stuck in the middle of this? We didn’t ask for it!”

As the conversations heat up, we ask each other questions and answer them at the same time, but we are all arguing from the same side, as if against some invisible or unpresent forces far beyond our reach. Hours fly by without our noticing, the fiery passion-fueled-by-injustice tapers off, and in the end silence slowly overwhelms the room. Everyone contemplatively tucks into their arm cushion with the quiet realization that, once more, we haven’t come to a solution.

And it’s not just with close friends that these discussions come up; it happens nearly every time I meet someone in the Middle East — when I buy something from a shop, when I have a fleeting chat with a street vendor. Still, amazingly, people rarely direct their hostility toward me, an American. They are comforted, however slightly, when I explain to them that many united statians realize ( and care ) about what the American government is doing to destroy their region, sovereignty, and humanity. They are encouraged when I tell them that in San Francisco we virtually shut down the city, if only for a day, when the war started. They are saddened, but grateful, when I tell them stories of people that left the Oakland docks with welts on their backs and faces from being shot by wooden dowels as they attempted to stop weapons from being sent to Iraq. They are amazed to hear about the instances when people in our country wake up, however briefly, and take charge. It helps to know that while tens die in Iraq daily resisting the US occupation and the American government is trying to spread its reign over the region, there are some Americans making some effort, somehow.

Most people that I tell these things to had no previous knowledge of any of it. Some have a faint memory of hearing about demonstrations when the war started, but almost everything else they hear about the United States is the daily, seemingly endless reports of killings and destruction in occupied Iraq (which far exceed the random car bombings reported in Western media). On top of that are the constant reports about what new conditions George Bush has placed on Syria or Iran, assertions that he is bringing democracy to the Lebanese people, and how he will liberate Palestine through the “Road Map to Peace.” Every day, every hour.

And it enrages people. The simplistic rhetoric about freedom and democracy stands next to report after bloody report of devastation in Iraq and Palestine. The same crap that the government and media shove down Americans’ throats reaches people in the Middle East too, but the main difference is that in the Middle East people see the blatant idiocy of what is being said. While many Americans sit back and contemplate whether, however much they may not like it, American intervention actually is better for the region, Arabs living in the Middle East see things falling apart before their eyes at the hands of that same world power that keeps talking about freedom and democracy.

For centuries, the situation in the Middle East has been a boiling pot — ready to spill over — of religious tension, totalitarian dictators, tribal conflicts, and struggles for power. This existed before the US ever entered the region, but when they came in, they not only caused the pot to overflow, they kicked the whole thing over with a big, black leather military boot. While Bush talks about the successes achieved in Iraq and the democracy and freedom of opinion that Iraqis now enjoy, people in the Middle East see the complete chaos that has overwhelmed the country and the absolute deterioration of peoples lives.

A recent report by the United Nations Development Project (UNDP) entitled “Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004,” has shown how the situation has deteriorated at an alarming rate since the US-led invasion in 2003, with huge numbers of people lacking adequate access to basic services and resources such as clean water, health care, water food, electricity, jobs, and sanitation. Rates of child malnutrition have nearly doubled since the 2003 invasion, with 23 percent of children between six months and five years suffering from chronic malnutrition, according to the report.

The death toll of Iraqi citizens now sits somewhere between foreign estimates of around 15,000 and local estimates up to 194,000. The report’s list of “current major problems” includes “lack of health personnel, lack of medicines, non-functioning medical equipment and destroyed hospitals and health centers.” Pediatrician Tala Al-Awqati told the Christian Science Monitor that, despite the ever-increasing number of wounded in attacks by rebels, foreign occupation troops, or Iraqi security forces, “The Health Ministry does not have [enough] money to spend until July. A lot of things have stopped. People are not getting what they need from the health services. Money for disinfectants is not there anymore; sometimes we must buy it ourselves.” Meanwhile, the report states that nation-wide, only 54% have access to safe drinking water and in rural areas 80% of the people are drinking unsafe water. With the unemployment rate now at 70%, and the infrastructure that the US promised to rebuild still sitting in shambles, the talk of Bush and his cronies about their success of bringing democracy to the country is like a slap in the face, not only to Iraqis, but to every person living in the Middle East.

At the same time, people hear Bush talk about how he has also recently brought long-awaited democracy to Lebanon and rid it of the Syrian “occupiers.” (In an interview with the Lebanese TV station LBC before Syria’s withdrawal, Bush justified American orders for Syria to evacuate Lebanon by saying, “I think everybody wants to be free. I think people long to be free and I think people are tired of living under a government which, in essence, is a foreign occupation. (Sounds about right. So how about start with Iraq!) Syria has evacuated and Lebanon is no longer under its thumb, which is what many, and it’s probably safe to say the majority, in Lebanon wanted. Instead of the Lebanese themselves ousting Syria though, Syria was forced out by the United States (with the support of France) which pragmatically means that instead of being under Syrian rule, Lebanon now answers to “international monitors,” i.e. the United States and France. This means that Lebanon is still at the whim of foreign powers, this time a much more powerful one with less at stake regarding the state of the country.

The vacuum left with the sudden Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon has created grounds ripe for Lebanon’s old civil war leaders to take the stage again and has left Lebanon’s religious sects racing for power. Michel Aoun, a right wing Christian Maronite that once cooperated with Saddam against Syria, returned from fourteen years of exile as soon as Syrian troops left Lebanon and is doing his best to try to take over. Meanwhile, many right-wing Christians in Lebanon ar
e calling for the release of the old warlord Samir Gaegae, who was once a commander of the Phalangist militia, a far-right Christian group whose founder, Pierre Gamayel, created the militia with the “discipline and order” that he saw in his 1936 visit to Nazi Germany. At the rate that things have developed in Lebanon since the US forced Syrian withdrawal, it’s not unlikely that fragile Lebanon, which has hung together despite still simmering tensions, could slip back into civil war.

In Syria, the US seems to have tried everything to justify “cracking down” on the country. Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton’s claims of weapons of mass destruction having been smuggled from Iraq into Syria and random allegations that Al-Qaeda is in the country were never justified and quietly disappeared from Washington’s rhetoric. The focus then switched to Syria’s “occupation” of Lebanon following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which the US all but directly blamed on Syria. Practically the entire Arab world however, accused the US and Israel of plotting the assassination, using it as an excuse to put the heat on Syria. To the surprise of the US government, Syria pulled its troops out of Lebanon on April 26th, negating yet another attempt by the US to clamp down on the sovereign country. Still, they have not given up and are now justifying the continued pressure against Syria under the guise of overturning authoritarian regimes, triggering democracy, and good old anti-terrorism.

Much like the situation was in Iraq before the invasion; it seems that the US is forever moving the goal post that it had no right to set in the first place. True to the style of American foreign policy, they find a wound, a local crisis, and play the doctor that will come and offer a remedy, but end up exploiting the situation to further their own motives. In the end, they rip the wound wide open. Much like the situation was in Iraq, many Syrians secretly despise the dictatorship that they live under.

Several times, while in a private home or a place out of range of Big Brother President Al-Assad’s ears, people have told me under their breath how much they despise their country’s regime, which has been smothering them for decades and how they dream of its demise. I’ve heard countless stories about people that have spent years in political prison for ripping the president’s picture off the wall, appearing too religious, not voting, or just not showing their love for the Assad family enough. They’ve had enough injustice, and aren’t willing to change out one heavy handed regime for a heavy handed foreign power that is going to use them as a pawn for taking control of the region — setting up bases on their land, bringing in foreign companies to take their work, and installing a government that not only doesn’t answer to its people, but it answers to the United States empire. The situation is already bad enough and nobody wants to make it worse.

While sitting in overcrowded cafés in Damascus amidst the sweet apple flavored scent of nargille smoke or in guest rooms looming over cups of thick Arabic coffee, those same, mostly soft spoken friends, have tiraded about the injustice of the American occupation and destruction of Iraq, US funding and support of the Israeli occupation, the rottenness of the capitalism it is smearing across the world, and the way that it is targeting Muslims around the globe. They say that, as much as they may hate it, their government is their own problem, and that if the US military ever set foot in their country, they would immediately pick up arms and defend their land.

One thing that is for certain is if individual people ever did have qualms about going to war against the strongest military in the world, the United States has succeeded in making such an enemy out of itself through unnecessary war, occupation, and military support of corrupt regimes that for most people that hesitation is now gone. For most, it’s no longer even a question of whether or not it’s worth risking their lives; it’s a matter of necessity. The Middle East, like most of the world, has already been subject to colonial powers, and subsequently overthrew them. Like those powers, American presence in the Middle East is not just an unfortunate inconvenience that people need to deal with and is by no stretch of the imagination seen as a welcomed humanitarian mission; it is viewed as a destructive cancer that needs to be purged and resistance will only grow, spread, and utilize any means necessary until that is accomplished.