Respectable Murderers: An Open Letter to Dan Ellsberg
Dear Dan,You and I are getting ready to tape a debate on the question of whether to vote for Obama (in "swing states"). It will air on Lila Garrett's "Connect the Dots" show on KPFK next Monday. I'm looking forward to it, if for no other reason, because I think our public discourse lacks much serious debate between people who respect each other's intentions. I have nothing but respect for you and believe you mean nothing but the best in advocating votes for Obama. You honestly believe I was catastrophically wrong to vote for Jill Stein in Virginia, as I've done, and I honestly believe you are horrendously misguided to be expending your valuable energy trying to get others to vote for Obama. And yet we'll be friends through this and regardless of whether one or both of us ever change our minds.
An hour debate will also be a refreshing change from the usual sound byte simplification of the media, and yet not necessarily sufficient. So, let me tell you a couple of stories.
I wandered over to the Obama campaign office here in Charlottesville, Va., on Wednesday when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was scheduled to visit. She showed up, in fact, and told everyone how terrific Obama is.
I asked Albright whether she still believed that killing a half a million young Iraqi children was "worth it." She said that she very much regretted having made that remark. But did she regret having enacted the sanctions that killed those children? I asked if she opposed the current "crippling sanctions" on Iran, and she said that she did not.
Here's video: http://youtu.be/gdmix60ajmA
I'm not so much troubled by Albright's sanctioning of mass murder, as by the agreement with her on the part of the many people gathered to applaud her comments. Not a single person present expressed the slightest concern over Albright's having taken part in the murder of so many young lives and many more older ones. Not a single person expressed an interest in learning about a history they were perhaps ignorant of. Not a single person offered an argument for what the positive "it" was that could have made such slaughter "worth it." Not a single person offered a claim that George Bush Sr. or Bob Dole would have killed even more children.
I don't mean to give the impression that Albright's audience was comatose. On the contrary, numerous individuals began grabbing me, shouting at me, pushing me, grabbing my camera, twisting my arm, and spitting out the most vicious hatred. In theory they would all, no doubt, agree that in a system of self-governance people should be able to question their elected officials, former elected officials, and at-large mass-murdering former elected officials. But in this case, this official was playing for the Good Team. The proper role, they believed, therefore, was that of cheerleaders, the highest value deferential respect.
Do they believe the wholesale slaughter of human beings, whether by sanctions or bombs, is sometimes justified by some mysterious "national interest"? Do they believe I was a raving lunatic and that Albright would never have hurt a fly? Do they just believe it's most appropriate not to ask, because that would involve disrespect toward someone on the Good Team? No matter which way you slice it, you come back to a room full of well-dressed polite supporters of mass-murder. That's far more worrying to me than the individual sociopath speaking to them.
Now, present in that room were TV cameras and newspaper reporters. The purpose of the event was to generate positive news about the reasons to vote for Obama and the stature of the people supporting Obama's reelection. Clearly, from that point of view, the staffers in the office did the absolute right thing in chasing me out of the building and making sure that not another inconvenient question was posed. As I'm sure you realize, voting for Obama in a swing state as a single secretive individual can hardly be called rational. A single vote makes no difference. To be the rational strategic voter you envision, each person must also strive to recruit others.
On the other hand, you say that you agree with me that independent policy-driven activism is more valuable than elections. You agree that we don't have legitimate elections offering a wide range of choices, that we need a movement to demand changes we cannot vote for, changes to strip out the money, open up the debates and the media, undo the gerrymandering, do away with the electoral college, provide automatic registration, and on and on and on. You probably agree that women did not vote themselves the right to vote, that the labor movement grew when it struggled and sacrificed by striking and has shrunk while funding the Democratic Party asking nothing in return, that major changes for peace and justice and civilization have been driven primarily by independent movements and often movements that have mobilized third and fourth party campaigns before winning over the Big Two. You may agree with Howard Zinn that it's not so much who's sitting in the White House as who's doing the sitting in. You might even agree with Emma Goldman that if elections alone changed anything, they'd be banned. In any event, during certain non-election years, I see you doing as much useful activism for this country and the world as anyone I know.
Presumably you place some value on spreading awareness of what sanctions did to Iraq. Presumably you see what value there could be in halting the sanctions on Iran. But what would you have done in that Obama campaign office in this swing state on Wednesday? You are a remarkable person, but still only one person. Would you have ruined the entire publicity stunt by pressing Albright further on her record of genocide? Or would you have thrown her a softball about what sort of evil lawyer Mitt Romney might be expected to nominate to the Supreme Court? Let's accept that both would have been good questions. But you could not have asked both. There was not time, and asking the first would have negated the purpose of the second -- not to mention getting you thrown out of the event.
Even you cannot follow your advice, and you are Daniel Ellsberg. Imagine how hard following your advice is for other people. Most people, to one degree or another, identify with candidates and parties. They talk about "us" winning when their candidate wins. To various degrees they avoid becoming aware of their team's flaws. To various degrees, they censor their opposition to their party or politician, before, during, and after elections. What is your time calculation? Do you prioritize campaigning for a month, six months, a year? How much time out of each four-year period do you sacrifice from independent activism of the sort that has always changed the world? And how much time out of every two-year term of those legislators who Constitutionally are supposed to be running the country?
I'm convinced that you personally do an excellent job of avoiding lesser-evil team cheerleading in between elections. But, most people do not. Our RootsAction petition on "strategic voting" got a response several times lower than any other action we've ever sent to our list. Some people do hold their noses and vote, but they have no idea how tightly they should be holding their noses, and they do not act appropriately post-election. All the activists running around knocking on doors and making phone calls for candidates will not do so for peace or justice in December. They'd look at you like you were crazy if you suggested it. Their work is done. Their energy is drained. Their role as spectators is established. And the promise is contained in any activism that they, or even you, muster: We will attempt to inconvenience you, but we will never ever vote against you.
In between elections, as we move from having voted for the less evil party toward the inevitable contest four years hence between two parties that are both more evil than the time before, our activism is neutered by a system of unions, PACs, and nonprofit clicktivist and media complexes that seek their funding, power, and sense of importance from one half of the government. It has become routine for grassroots or astroturf activist leaders to head into the veal pen and ask the elected officials of the Good Party or of the "Progressive" wing of the good party what they should ask their members to demand. This is an inversion of representative government. You'll recall groups that favored single-payer healthcare forbidding their members from mentioning it, asking instead for a "public option" because so-called public servants had instructed the public to ask for that. The point is not that legislators should never compromise, but that we should leave it to the legislators, because when we pre-compromise, we end up with even less in the end.
When Obama was in Charlottesville, hundreds of people waited in line for hours for the chance to cheer anything he said. Some of us went to talk to the people waiting in line. We wanted to get a sense of how they felt about all the policies that had produced such outrage under Bush and been expanded under Obama. Under Obama, as you may know, wealth is concentrating faster, the environment is deteriorating faster, the military has spread further and cost more, the warrantless spying has spread and been firmly established as without criminal penalty, rendition and torture have become policy choices rather than crimes, imprisonment without charge or trial has been "legalized" (although Obama is still fighting for that power in court), an assassination program has been created and openly advertised, wars have been launched without the courtesy of lying to Congress, the CIA has been given major war powers, "special" forces are in 70 nations on any given day and raiding a dozen homes to kill on any given night, drones have raised to new heights the percentage of war victims who are civilians and the percentage of the people in certain nations who hate our government, secrecy has mushroomed, and retribution against whistleblowers has exploded. You are aware of all of this. We couldn't find a single person in that crowd who had ever heard of any of it. Major news stories that would have put people into the streets in outrage if the president were a Republican did not exist to this crowd.
Sure, you know the facts. But are you devoting every ounce of energy to spreading the word and building resistance? Of course not. You're investing your time in campaigning for Obama votes (in swing states). You may understand that there's been no step back from Bush's policies, that Obama has advanced them further. Yes, Romney could advance them even further even faster than Obama would in the next four years -- even in the face of the public opposition that would likely materialize for a President Romney. But we need a reversal of course, not a slightly slower death, not even a significantly slower death. The environment is collapsing. Weaponry and hostility are spreading. We're dealing with a need for survival, not a desire for utopia. What we need for survival is a credible independent movement.
When a labor union today says "Reform NAFTA and push for the Employee Free Choice Act, or else," the "or else" is empty and everyone knows it. When Bill McKibben says "The tar sands pipeline is your test," nobody believes that when Obama fails the test McKibben will oppose his reelection. Compare this battered-spouse relationship with that of Latinos who posed a credible threat to desert Obama and thereby won some modest immigration rights.
You know that we had a significant (pitiably weak but significant) peace movement in 2005 and 2006. Why? Because opponents of war and opponents of Republican presidents' wars were teamed up together. That fell apart as Democrats took power in Congress in 2007 and as 2008 turned out to be the year of one of those endlessly recurring "most important elections of our lifetime." The movement was temporarily shut down, never to be restored. We went from Mitch McConnell secretly warning Bush to get out of Iraq to Obama getting credit for withdrawing from Afghanistan even as the troops there were double the number deployed when Obama entered the White House.
How in the world can anyone have spent the last many years in the peace movement and not noticed this partisan-based electoral-based collapse? I'm sure you've seen and were likely surveyed during the study done by the University of Michigan's Michael Heaney and Indiana University's Fabio Rojas. They documented this collapse and its partisan basis.
Would I object to people voting for a less-evil but still evil candidate if they could continue organizing for justice? Of course not. I do not fail to understand the power of your argument. I'm sure you'll do me the courtesy of not simply repeating it. A more evil candidate is more evil than a less evil candidate. A greater warmonger and bigger destroyer of the environment is worse than a lesser warmonger and lesser destroyer of the environment. I think the case for Obama's superiority to Romney is vastly overblown. I think, in fact, that Obama has been able to get away with much that we would never have allowed McCain to achieve. We stood up against Bush's attack on Social Security. But China is to Nixon as humanitarian goods are to Obama. Let's grant, however, that Obama is better than Romney. Let's grant it because it is not the central argument and may very well be right. That is, if you compare their platforms as presented, guesstimate how much of each is outright lies, and factor in the likely public resistance to each, Obama may come out ahead. My argument is not that he doesn't. My argument is not that he doesn't do so meaningfully. My argument is not that this isn't a question of life and death. And my position involves complete awareness that I will not be the first to die, someone else will.
Here, in contrast, is my actual argument: It is vastly more important that we have an independent movement based on policy changes rather than personality changes. In theory we could have that with lesser-evil-swing-state voting. In reality, we cannot. We cannot build a national movement in the 38 states from which all candidates and journalists have fled, and on the condition that we avoid building it large enough to have any impact whatsoever (which would ruin the whole strategy by transforming a non-swing state into a swing state). We cannot keep a movement from shutting down for each election cycle as long as most people see their jobs as followers of politicians rather than as the true sovereigns of this land.
I don't care about my purity. If I wanted to be pure I would avoid thinking about these matters at all. I wouldn't subject myself to a room full of well-dressed polite backers of mass-murder at all if I wanted to be pure. And I would hold my nose and work with them shoulder-to-shoulder if I thought that would lead to the greater good. I would have voted for Captain Peace Prize if I believed it would save the most lives. I do not. I believe that building an activist movement that depends on rejecting support for a party of mass murderers will save the most lives, and will do so in the relative near term -- or we will all perish.
As
you know, I've spent months trying to avoid this discussion because I believe
that our so-called elections drain energy away from activism. They also serve to
divide us. We all want peace and justice. But we drop everything to debate or,
more often, quarrel with each other over electoral matters -- something the
powers in Washington must have great laughs over. But the election is this week,
and this debate must be had. I enter it with a great deal of respect for that
small group of people on the other side of it who understand the need for a real
mass movement and believe a mass movement is compatible with lesser-evilism. I'm
simply not persuaded.
The election is now just weeks
away, and I want to urge those whose values are generally in line with mine --
progressives, especially activists -- to make this goal one of your priorities
during this period.
An activist colleague recently said
to me: "I hear you're supporting Obama."
I was startled, and took offense.
"Supporting Obama? Me?!"
"I lose no opportunity publicly," I
told him angrily, to identify Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who's
decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone
who's launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite
detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than
all previous presidents put together. "Would you call that support?"
My friend said, "But on Democracy
Now you urged people in swing states to vote for him! How could you say that? I
don't live in a swing state, but I will not and could not vote for Obama under
any circumstances."
My answer was: a Romney/Ryan
administration would be no better -- no different -- on any of the serious
offenses I just mentioned or anything else, and it would be much worse, even
catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran,
Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women's reproductive rights, health
coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.
I told him: "I don't 'support
Obama.' I oppose the current Republican Party. This is not a contest between
Barack Obama and a progressive candidate. The voters in a handful or a dozen
close-fought swing states are going to determine whether Mitt Romney and Paul
Ryan are going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years, or
not."
As Noam Chomsky said recently, "The
Republican organization today is extremely dangerous, not just to this country,
but to the world. It's worth expending some effort to prevent their rise to
power, without sowing illusions about the Democratic alternatives."
Following that logic, he's said to an interviewer what
my friend heard me say to Amy Goodman: "If I were a person in a swing state, I'd
vote against Romney/Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other
choice."
The election is at this moment a
toss-up. That means this is one of the uncommon occasions when we progressives
-- a small minority of the electorate -- could actually have a significant
influence on the outcome of a national election, swinging it one way or the
other.
The only way for progressives and
Democrats to block Romney from office, at this date, is to persuade enough
people in swing states to vote for Obama: not stay home, or vote for someone
else. And that has to include, in those states, progressives and disillusioned
liberals who are at this moment inclined not to vote at all or to vote for a
third-party candidate (because like me they've been not just disappointed but
disgusted and enraged by much of what Obama has done in the last four years and
will probably keep doing).
They have to be persuaded to vote,
and to vote in a battleground state for Obama not anyone else, despite the
terrible flaws of the less-bad candidate, the incumbent. That's not easy. As I
see it, that's precisely the "effort" Noam is referring to as worth expending
right now to prevent the Republicans' rise to power. And it will take
progressives -- some of you reading this, I hope -- to make that effort of
persuasion effectively.
It will take someone these
disheartened progressives and liberals will listen to. Someone manifestly
without illusions about the Democrats, someone who sees what they see when they
look at the president these days: but who can also see through candidates Romney
or Ryan on the split-screen, and keep their real, disastrous policies in
focus.
It's true that the differences
between the major parties are not nearly as large as they and their candidates
claim, let alone what we would want. It's even fair to use Gore Vidal's metaphor
that they form two wings ("two right wings," as some have put it) of a single
party, the Property or Plutocracy Party, or as Justin Raimondo says, the War
Party.
Still, the political reality is
that there are two distinguishable wings, and one is reliably even worse than
the other, currently much worse overall. To be in denial or to act in neglect of
that reality serves only the possibly imminent, yet presently avoidable, victory
of the worse.
The traditional third-party mantra,
"There's no significant difference between the major parties" amounts to saying:
"The Republicans are no worse, overall." And that's absurd. It constitutes
shameless apologetics for the Republicans, however unintended. It's crazily
divorced from present reality.
And it's not at all harmless to be
propagating that absurd falsehood. It has the effect of encouraging progressives
even in battleground states to refrain from voting or to vote in a close
election for someone other than Obama, and more importantly, to influence others
to act likewise. That's an effect that serves no one but the Republicans, and
ultimately the 1 percent.
It's not merely understandable,
it's entirely appropriate to be enraged at Barack Obama. As I am. He has often
acted outrageously, not merely timidly or "disappointingly." If impeachment were
politically imaginable on constitutional grounds, he's earned it (like George W.
Bush, and many of his predecessors!) It is entirely human to want to punish him,
not to "reward" him with another term or a vote that might be taken to express
trust, hope or approval.
But rage is not generally conducive
to clear thinking. And it often gets worked out against innocent victims, as
would be the case here domestically, if refusals to vote for him resulted in
Romney's taking key battleground states that decide the outcome of this
election.
To punish Obama in this particular
way, on Election Day -- by depriving him of votes in swing states and hence of
office in favor of Romney and Ryan -- would punish most of all the poor and
marginal in society, and workers and middle class as well: not only in the U.S.
but worldwide in terms of the economy (I believe the Republicans could still
convert this recession to a Great Depression), the environment and climate
change. It could well lead to war with Iran (which Obama has been creditably
resisting, against pressure from within his own party). And it would spell, via
Supreme Court appointments, the end of Roe v. Wade and of the occasional five to
four decisions in favor of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The reelection of Barack Obama, in
itself, is not going to bring serious progressive change, end militarism and
empire, or restore the Constitution and the rule of law. That's for us and the
rest of the people to bring about after this election and in the rest of our
lives -- through organizing, building movements and agitating.
In the eight to twelve close-fought
states -- especially Florida, Ohio, and Virginia, but also Colorado, Iowa,
Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and
Wisconsin -- for any progressive to encourage fellow progressives and others in
those states to vote for a third-party candidate is, I would say, to be
complicit in facilitating the election of Romney and Ryan, with all its
consequences.
To think of that as urging people
in swing states to "vote their conscience" is, I believe, dangerously misleading
advice. I would say to a progressive that if your conscience tells you on
Election Day to vote for someone other than Obama in a battleground state, you
need a second opinion. Your conscience is giving you bad counsel.
I often quote a line by Thoreau
that had great impact for me: "Cast your whole vote: not a strip of paper
merely, but your whole influence." He was referring, in that essay, to civil
disobedience, or as he titled it himself, "Resistance to Civil
Authority."
It still means that to me. But this
is a year when for people who think like me -- and who, unlike me, live in
battleground states -- casting a strip of paper is also important. Using your
whole influence this month to get others to do that, to best effect, is even
more important.
That means for progressives in the
next couple of weeks -- in addition to the rallies, demonstrations, petitions,
lobbying (largely against policies or prospective policies of President Obama,
including austerity budgeting next month), movement-building and civil
disobedience that are needed all year round and every year -- using one's voice
and one's e-mails and op-eds and social media to encourage citizens in swing
states to vote against a Romney victory by voting for the only real alternative,
Barack Obama.
Daniel Ellsberg is a former
State and Defense Department official who has been arrested for acts of
non-violent civil disobedience over eighty times, initially for copying and
releasing the top secret Pentagon Papers, for which he faced 115 years in
prison. Living in a non-swing state, he does not intend to vote for President
Obama.
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