HOW NOT TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE
La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, Friday, 20 April 2007

Kathleen met many old American, English and German friends of ours on her recent working trip to Europe. We all lived at the same time in Frankfurt in the eighties and nineties, and many were members of the same Episcopal parish and choir there.

Some discussion came up about getting together again in the U.S.A. for another reunion with close friends in the coming winter or during 2008. One of the complicating factors, however, is that I refuse at the moment to visit the U.S.A. as a protest against the United States Government’s invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq and the kidnapping, torture and ongoing incarceration of prisoners at Guantanamo.

This apparently has upset some. One of our close friends wrote an email to Kathleen saying in effect that I am anti-American, that I am demonising and stereotyping Americans, that such thinking is destructive, inaccurate and self-serving, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are worthy ideals even if not lived up to, that propaganda and abuse of power are not uniquely American but a result of human nature, and that staying away from friends and family is a questionable response.

That’s pretty heavy! Obviously, I have offended an old friend perhaps to the point of losing her. So, I guess I had better explain myself.

First, if it makes any difference at all, I am closely linked to the U.S.A. through family and friends. My parents emigrated from Canada in 1959 and eventually became naturalised American citizens. My mother still lives in a nursing home in a large American city. I myself lived in the U.S.A. for one year and have been back dozens and dozens of times over the years on both business and pleasure. I have two siblings still living with their children and grandchildren in the States. Indeed, my own three children from a previous marriage are American citizens through their mother. My wife is American and we have close relationships with her family in the U.S.A. too. I am living proof of how close our two countries are.

It is in the nature of a boycott to sacrifice something valuable to oneself as a protest. I deny myself visits to the U.S.A. when I can also see my family and friends. So I hurt myself by my protest though I will interrupt my boycott for family emergencies. I suspect that were I to give up bungee-jumping or skydiving, chocolate milkshakes or apple pie by way of protest that the protest might not have the gravitas required. My children can and do visit me regularly wherever I am living at the time outside of their country – in Canada, in Europe or, currently, in South America - and so do my wife’s parents and occasionally other family members. My protest is to refuse to visit the country simply for business or pleasure.

If it makes any difference, I also refuse to visit the U.K. or any other member of the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” and for exactly the same reasons: the U.S.A. and the U.K. along with its minor spear-carrying allies conspired to attack, invade and occupy a country that had in no way threatened the territorial integrity of the attackers or the lives of their people. They did so without the approval of the U.N. – indeed, the U.S.A. and the U.K. openly snubbed their noses at the U.N. thereby hastening its effective decline as an agent of peace – and despite 99.9% assurances from the U.N. nuclear inspectorate that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The other reasons given as the justification for the war – links to Al Qaida and other anti-American terrorist groupings, for example – have proven equally spurious. That leaves only the argument that Saddam was beastly to his own people; that’s certainly true enough but is that a reason to invade. Beastly to Iraqis has anyway since the invasion taken on new meaning.

Some exculpate the Administration on the basis of “bad intelligence”. Leaving aside the permutations of the word intelligence given the leading lights (well, that’s another problematic term) of the current U.S. and U.K. governments, it has now been pretty clearly established that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Blair had all the right intelligence but were determined to ignore it. Knowing they could provide no acceptable reasons for going to war, they set out to hoodwink Congress, ride roughshod over Parliament, bullshit the U.N. and bamboozle the voters. After all, if you and I and every other aware person at the time knew from public sources like The New Yorker (Seymour Hersh), Harpers, other independent media, Scott Ritter, etc., etc., etc. that we were being lied to, that the reasons for going to war were at best weak and, worse, completely unfounded, that they were not in any case enough to flout the U.N. and world public opinion and certainly not enough to justify such an attack in international law, then surely George W. Bush et alia knew this too. Of course they knew!

So, we and they knew the facts before the war started and invasion was in no way justified. All of this has been repeatedly confirmed since then by those in the know. Certainly it was widely enough known to bring millions out onto the streets in massive protests around the world even before the bombers and cruise missiles went in.

What we did not know then and are still perhaps trying to get a handle on is the U.S. government’s real motivation. The U.K. is perhaps easier to understand: given that Bush et alia were going to attack no matter what, Blair & Co. decided to get extra brownie points for its “Special Relationship”. For the Bush Administration, on the other hand, we’re still guessing. Was it oil that drove the war planning? Or was it long-term strategic chess-playing in the Middle East? Maybe indeed it was even world domination, as the Project for a New American Century proposes. Maybe it was Junior trying to show up Dad. Maybe it was a naïve belief that democracy can be brought to the world at the point of a gun. Or was it a dividend for the government’s corporate clientele?

Just listing them underlines that none of these reasons justifies crimes against peace and crimes against humanity by attacking Iraq, killing thousands of civilians and servicemen and bombing the country “back to the Stone Age”. The question is not, therefore, whether I protest this in my small way, but rather why there is not much more protest even in the U.S.A.

It sickens to see how much of the mass media in the U.S.A. and Britain slavered for the war. It sickens to realise that the anti-war movement in the U.S.A. and the U.K. is nearly non-existent. It sickens to realise that one president can be impeached simply for schlocky personal behaviour whereas even a Democratic Congress declines to consider impeaching a president, vice-president and leading appointees when, using the standards set at the Nuremberg trials, they should not only be impeached but charged as war criminals.

You can tell me that not visiting the U.S.A. or U.K. is ineffective. You can tell me that boycotts of this nature are blunt instruments. But you cannot call it demonising or stereotyping Americans. Surely in that case I would be refusing to have anything at all to do with Americans just because they are Americans. I am not at all “anti-American”. Do I stereotype all Americans? How could I given my family and friends? But I am critical of the American Government and frustrated that Americans themselves do so little about it. I can only assume that a very large proportion of Americans support the Government. I have learned too much, perhaps, about how the United States operates abroad to be an uncritical cheerleader: just spend a few years in Latin America to focus your historical perspective. But I try to focus my criticisms narrowly on specific actions. In this case, i.e. in the case of Iraq, surely naked aggression is way over the line.

So mine is a protest against the illegal and immoral actions of the American Government. For someone who, I regret to say, did nothing to protest the Viet Nam war years and years ago, my small protest this time seems the least I can do.

Like my friend, I too admire the “narrative” of the U.S.A., the Constitution, the countervailing forces, the Bill of Rights, the judicial system, the free and free-wheeling public media. (The narrative might overlook some inconvenient historical details like slavery, imperial land grabs and sweating of labourers, but let’s assume the narrative is the articulation of ideals rather than a history book.) I am critical but do not protest when I see that these high ideals are frequently ignored at home; that’s the business of the Americans themselves. Were I a foreign black man before 1862, however, – indeed before 1962 - I might also have considered boycotting parts or all of the U.S.A. by way of protest, not to mention personal safety. Because it comes closer to impacting me personally, however, I am more upset when American political ideals so manifestly fail to inform American policy and actions abroad.

But, more horrendous for this discussion however, is the realisation that, individually or together, the great panoply of American institutions has completely failed to come even close to preventing the war crimes or to stopping the ongoing horrendous acts. It might, I accept, have something to do with human nature. But we are not talking about a hurricane, a volcano or a tsunami. Concrete choices were made. And there may even be worse to come: doesn’t talk of nuking Iran make Americans nervous?

Of course, there have been individual acts of courage –Senator Byrd in the Congress, some independent media, some individual protesters such as Scott Ritter, Kathy Kelly, Cindy Sheehan. Their poignant protests only underline that the reality is much worse: the President, his Vice-President and his cabinet, the Congress, the Courts and the media, i.e. all the elements of the vaunted American system, have actually actively conspired to initiate and to support this continuing war. Hell! Even half the voters approved of it in 2004! Still today, the opposition is so weak in the United States that it has not been able to prevent even the serious erosion of the civil rights and liberties of the American people themselves.

And that brings me to the two further points. While there is still much to admire, if Americans themselves can be arrested and incarcerated without the protection of their laws or their courts, then we can surely agree that the “narrative” has been seriously trashed and Americans are living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Carry on with daily life but don’t be surprised when you, your child or your neighbour gets a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

So where does that leave foreigners like me who visit the U.S.A.? What about a foreigner who is perhaps labelled anti-American even by his friends? I don’t seriously suppose I am subversive enough to get the treatment that one foreigner, Canadian as it happens, received while changing planes in New York: innocent of wrongdoing, he was secretly “rendered” by the U.S.A. to Syria, kept in solitary confinement and tortured for two years. That’s only one case. Guantánamo and what other hellholes are full of others. Objectively seen, my public scribblings about, say, Chávez in Venezuela or American policy in Latin American are small potatoes. But, several acquaintances and friends, Americans as it happens, have suggested that, although they agree with me, it is perhaps dangerous these days to be so public in my views. And, surely, if even some of my own American family members and friends admit that they are hesitant or afraid to speak up nowadays, what is a foreigner without any rights whatsoever to think about travelling to the U.S.A.? I would risk it for a family emergency but not for something less.

I am sorry that some of my friends are offended by this position. Maybe they can understand it after reading the above. I assume it was a slip of the pen to say that I demonise or stereotype Americans. I try not to do that. I am too close to Americans not to recognise the diversity within the country. I assume it was also not seriously intended to call my protest “self-serving” either. I am not anti-American. I am not trying to punish Americans personally. I accept even that it is perhaps a small, ineffective, unfocussed and futile protest. It impacts me as well because I should like to see my friends and family perhaps even more than they should like to see me. Nothing would make me happier if I did not feel the need to protest at all. But, in the current situation, only Americans can end the war, reduce the huge war-making machinery and generally get the narrative back on track. (They might want to take better care of each other at home too but that’s their business.) I would be more than happy if my American relatives and friends would make it possible for me to visit them in the U.S.A. again.

Finally, if they are not happy with my protest, perhaps my American friends could suggest another way for me to protest what is happening. Or, better yet, convince me that my protest is not necessary because they have some other way of stopping the carnage, the ongoing catastrophe in Iraq. And soon.