Roots of anti-US rage

ANGER AT “AMERICANS”

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

September 15, 2012

                Better watch out, you might get what you wish for.  In my last blog post, I wished that the USG and news media ask themselves whether under our law, the video trailer caricaturing Mohammed didn’t constitute a hate crime as surely as the federal prosecution’s position is on Amish beard and hair cutting.  Wow, did I get my wish.  The alleged author of the video has been interviewed by the FBI and is back in court to show cause why his probation shouldn’t be revoked.  The news media are falling all over who these “rioting” Muslim mobs are and why they get upset over one obscure video.  My president and my media are once again showing the world that “Americans” take crime seriously and detest the video, while showing that unlike some countries, we staunchly defend the right of politically and religiously offensive speech.  The message is consistent, and earnest, as in the sadness “Americans” feel over the loss of four of our people (in contrast to people who throw their lives away in suicide bombings), and in the fear we feel that for the first time in this generation, our diplomats have been murdered inside a compound flying our national flag.  And from our president, we expect and appreciate the seriousness with which our president is quietly but firmly bringing all our military and economic might to bear to ensure that no foreign government ever let’s this happen again.  In criminologists’ terms, we are doing all we can to prevent recidivism.

                As luck would have it, just before the invasion of the US consulate, in a post on “criminology as diplomacy,” and in a preceding post on “peacebuilding v. peacemaking,” I proposed that from victim-offender mediation to gang violence, we shift our frame of reference from turning once and future criminals and their young cohorts into model citizens, to mediating among opposing individuals (as in victim-offender mediation) and in groups (horizontally, as in negotiating and maintaining truces between gang leaders by respecting them; or vertically, as between employer and employee, or prisoners and guards).  That is, that we apply the principles of diplomacy rather than of military strategy to violence we call crime by principles diplomats employ as between warring parties.  Now, having gotten my wish that we attend to who is upset by our video and why, I return from diplomacy in the streets to international diplomacy, and wish that US politicians and media would shift from diplomacy that focuses on identifying and bringing individuals on all sides who are guilty to justice, to looking at how on earth that absurd little video trailer could have sparked such an over-the-top response by Muslims from Cairo and Benghazi to Sydney so far.  I think it’s a cop-out to dismiss the scale of the reaction of morally inferior outlaws drawn together by a fanatic willingness to kill over cartoons.  As pioneering family psychologist Virginia Satir proposed in the late sixties that we look beyond treating the “identified patient” like a problem child to treating the child as the equivalent of the canary in the coal mine.  I think characterizing any outpouring of violence as irrational is an irrational way, a self-defeating way, to respond to violence that no one is in a position to stop.

                I see the collective violence against symbols of US government presence as a mini-explosion of pent-up anger and indeed terror of all the “American” suppression, surveillance, and repeated anti-Islamically directed invasions, and of the greatest reign of military against concentrations of Islam since, to borrow President Bush II’s words in a state of the union speech and elsewhere, the last Christian Crusade, where on “American” front lines, Muslims became “towel heads,” where once Filipino and Vietnamese national liberation fighters had been called monkeys and “gooks.”  I can’t stop it, but for years what I see as a US military, cultural and economic war that is to me blatantly built on stereotypes of followers of a religion, despite the fact that from my community through the Mideast to Asia, Muslims keep trying to tell us that Islam means followers of the path of peace, and that those who terrorize “Americans” in the name of Islam are to them as foreign and repugnant as the idea of killing for Christ would be to almost all Christians.

                I won’t bother here to go through another litany of what I consider US military terrorism and willingness to embrace “Muslim” despots for the sake of global hegemony in the name of defending democracy, which through the superiority of US military technology and spending, is gaining mastery of the art of killing anyone the president openly or secretly declares to be on the US most-wanted list, to say nothing of the political culture that gives rise to a furor at the gall and insensitivity of building a Muslim community center near Ground Zero.  In the Geometry of Violence book published in 1991, in a chapter written in 1989, I pointed out that even before the Cold War ended, an axis separating East from West shifting to an access between North and South, where the prevailing differences were between a Christian region dominated by whites, and a Muslim stronghold in a hemisphere dominated by people of color.  I’m not a Muslim, but the prevailing anti-Islamic attitude in my country’s political culture has angered me, especially because it is so absurd for “Americans” to believe that scaring and terrorizing our “enemies” as mightily as we have made “Americans” at home and abroad, as now in Benghazi.  Notice that I keep putting “Americans” in quotes.  We in the US get that name from the first European ship’s captain to set foot in Latin America.  To call our country “America” and ourselves “Americans” connotes what President John Monroe declared in 1815, that the US is and “under God” deserves to be the political and economic center that speaks for the “democratic” interests of both Western Hemispheres.  For those who attack our citizens, property and symbols, calling us “Americans” is a tribute to our international hegemony—all the more dangerous because it is so much more than a little land mass of 4 or 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants.  That is why I refer to my country instead at the US.

                I see the wave of anti-US street violence as a brushfire flaring up of anger at US anti-Islamic political, military and economic domination.  And here in the US, we do seem to be determined to remain recognized as being the world’s Number One at whatever we do.

                Many are the ways that US inhabitants choose to serve their country, including those who out of love of homeland gives their lives and limbs for their country.  I speak from an enviable  position of personal safety and privilege.  Perhaps my way of serving my country is a product of my life of luxury and privilege, although I know, and international critics of US policy like Arundhati Roy affirm, that there are many “Americans” who share her resistance to what the world sees as “being American,” especially so in a time of national frenzy over which candidate for president most epitimozes the personal qualities we want the world to see as truly “American,” in the service of “God’s” will.  For my own personal safety’s sake at home and abroad, and to serve what I perceive to be the interests of the people of my country, I want to be as clear as I can to foreigners that I am a radical critic of the politics and fiscal management that prevail in my homeland.  When I do so, I want to be known more for the attention to foreign concerns and knowledge of “their” thinking than for self-condemnation of my people for their xenophobia and chauvinism.  I want them to know that I will not take it personally if any “outsider” criticizes my people any more than I do.  There was a period when I felt deep guilt and shame for being an American.  I think I’m pretty much past taking US violence so personally.  In another positive sense, I do feel responsible for the privileges of US citizenship in where my family and I live and thrive.  When I am a guest abroad, I am wary of coming across as a foreign expert who knows what good for people in other countries, but I do want to be able to talk about violence and peacemaking wherever I am invited or visit outside my country.  At this moment, I want to be known as among those who figure that while publication of the notorious video may be highly improbable, the outpouring of anger it has sparked is understandable.  And to raise among my US neighbors the belief I share that as a nation, from genocide of indigenous “Americans” and enslavement of Africans on, we have a lot of bloodshed and economic exploitation to atone for.  Love and peace--hal

Mohammed caricature a hate crime?

THE VIDEO OF MOHAMMED AS A HATE CRIME

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

September 12, 2012

                I have just listened to US Secretary of State Clinton responding to the death yesterday in Bengazi of the ambassador to Libya, a foreign service officer and to other nationals (Marines I’m guessing) in the US consulate.  The attack there and on the US embassy in Cairo was in protest against a video on the internet caricaturing Mohammed.  Ms. Clinton decries the murder of fellow citizens on US diplomatic territory.  She avoids characterizing the video.

                I’m not a fan of putting criminal labels on acts, but if under US law the killings in Libya were murder, why isn’t the video a hate crime just as much as painting a swastika on a temple and posting a picture on the internet?  Regrettably, the USG is blind to its own racism.  Love and peace, hal

Public Education v. State Indoctrination

PUBLIC EDUCATION v. STATE INDOCTRINATION IN CHICAGO

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

September 11, 2012

                The political fates are with us.  At the very moment that Chicago’s son is scrambling to hold onto his presidency by holding onto labor support, his former chief of staff and now Chicago mayor is trying to continue the process begun by a Democratic mayor’s appointee to be “CEO” of the Chicago school board—who as CEO was appointed to become US Secretary of Education, where the Chicago school privatization initiative has become the “Rise to the Top” standard for federal funding of public education including “public” charter schools…standards for hiring and firing public school teachers and for replacing “failing” neighborhood public schools with publicly funded private (generally for-profit) “magnet” schools for “gifted” children.

                Got it?

Chicago happens to be the third-largest school district in the country.  It is reported that the Chicago public teachers’ strike against state imposition of these educational standards reflects mounting resistance by public school teachers and parents to having these standards imposed upon them.

“Rise to the Top” is essentially an outgrowth of federal policy that President Clinton brought to the White House in 1993 (for this history in a government report, see http://www.archives.nysed.gov/edpolicy/research/res_essay_clinton_goals2000.shtml),  The heart of the policy is to set nationally comparable statewide student test performance standards for teacher hiring, firing and pay, and which public schools that “fail” can be replaced by charter schools as they are in Chicago.  And the standards for determining satisfactory performance at “grade level” (now beginning in Ohio at the 3^rd grade) are heavily based on textbooks whose content in turn is heavily determined by the Texas school board’s decision as to what schoolchildren will be required to be studied and learned across that state.  By now, all states but one or two accept substantial federal funds for education by promising to base student, teacher and school “merit” on getting the right answers on state “high stakes” tests.  One Chicago chemistry teacher told Amy Goodman yesterday on Democracy Now that his schedule requires him to give his students 5 tests over the course of the semester, in part to as a base for retesting in the spring to see how much better they score after taking his class.  Never mind that teachers across the country keep doing stuff like expelling, suspending or “withdrawing” kids before test day or changing answers afterwards.  The fact remains that successful schools, teachers and students will sit in their seats and do their homework exercises to figure out the right answers on the next test, from where they can master getting the next test right… The more “grit” students and teachers show in doing the hard work of preparing to be tested takes precedence over curiosity and diversion from the 3 Rs.  Our habit of equating education with learning what you are told to know when you are told to learn it is ageless, but when it becomes a matter of repeating back what you are told to know and do when you are told to do so throughout the country, that literally amounts to state socialism, where to paraphrase Mussolini, citizens learn to make the trains run on time, especially when it goes hand in hand with the pledge of allegiance.  I used to lead off my “alternative social control systems” class by telling students that while I didn’t know them yet, I presumed that they were victims of their formal education, where they had been taught that outside of what they were taught, they were left “only” with their “feelings and opinions”—that in this criminal justice class I considered them victims of their educational systems.  And that I hoped that if they did not already do so, their own feelings and opinions WOULD matter to them by the end of the semester, which to me is the foundation of real “democracy.”  In a larger sense, I keep finding myself saying in professional life, “If you think I’m an expert who knows more than you do, how come you don’t agree with me?” or “How come you don’t believe me when I say I don’t know more than you?”  And among senior colleagues until I got promoted, as one put it to me, I like them had no business teaching a class unless I knew what students needed to know.  Regardless of substance, top-down imposition of “knowledge” feeds habits of social passivity and obedience, where questioning authority is a luxury there isn’t even time for.  Such an order is the hallmark of every militarized order.

I join their community supporters and defenders in thanking the schoolteachers of Chicago in dedication to giving our children the means and will to learn in their own right, in their own sequences, at their own pace, what empowers and enriches their own unique lives, and in turn is passed on, in an atmosphere where above all, education replaces indoctrination and the political clichés that go with it.  Love and peace--hal

Criminology as Diplomacy

CRIMINOLOGY AS DIPLOMACY

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

September 8, 2012

                I grew up in a heavily militarized part of the industrial U.S. Midwest during the heart of the Cold War.  Classmates and I in our college freshman dorm were glued to the tv during the Cuban Missile Crisis the fall of 1962.  The atmosphere in my academic household was such that I became fascinated with how people felt about themselves and my country.  I studied Russian in high school.  I listened to Radio Moscow on the shortwave radio I built from a kit.   Soviet and U.S. government foreign policy sounded so much alike to me, as though twins were fighting.  I was the only non-Norwegian in my urban school my last year of high school.  By 1962, I had for some time dreamed of growing up to be a legally trained diplomat, above all to be in a position to bring my government and the Soviets to the bargaining table to cut through the bullshit both sides were locked into and end the damned war.  I got a short but major taste of my dream the summer of 1967 as the US State Department took me on as the sole intern assigned to East Asian legal affairs, which ended my dream of a foreign service career.  By a twist of fate, I became a criminologist instead.  By retirement, I had blended diplomacy and criminology into a study of how to transform violent relations both internationally and intranationally.  I called my theory and practice of how to accomplish that transformation “peacemaking.”

                Now, in retirement, from here and there, I find myself talking and consulting about applying peacemaking in practice by substituting what I call “mediation” for responding to the violence of crime with return violence and coercive force, my version of “restorative justice.”  I find I have trouble conveying why I postulate that mediation is the only thing that cools rather than heats up violence in all social relations, from those of friend to friend through gang homicides to ethnic and international warfare.  I’m thinking that perhaps “diplomacy” might more adequately convey what I mean by peacemaking than “mediation.”  More than a recipe or adherence to formal legal procedures, diplomacy requires careful listening and creativity that honestly conveys respect and dignity to every party, and invites them to assume control of their affairs, as against doing things TO or FOR them (which unfortunately is all too common in what passes for “restorative justice” and “mediation” as others use those labels).  A hallmark of diplomacy is offering confidentiality to all parties. The more threatening the violence, the more important it is to introduce diplomacy.  So for instance, where homicide is seen as a pre-eminent national problem, it is all the more important to intervene diplomatically, that is, through efforts to mediate.  This includes opening channels to make it safe for parties on to volunteer for victim-offender mediation, offender-state mediation, victim= and offender-community support.  Where violence is collective, settlement ultimately entails identifying opposing leaders and bringing them safely to the table whether in Syria, or in a neighborhood haunted by gang shootings—as opposed to trying to destroy the groups by chopping off their leaders’ heads and trying to convert individual group members into cultural assimilation as in juvenile “treatment” programs or homes for aboriginal children.  On the other hand, no interpersonal organizational conflict is too trivial to try diplomacy over fighting or separation.  I have long described peacemaking as an attitude toward social control.  Now I recognize that that attitude amounts to offering diplomacy wherever fighting occurs, wars on and coerced  treatment of crime and criminals included.

                Diplomatic creativity begins by searching for ways that the least powerful voices especially are ensured that they can safely communicate their own feelings and sense of the situation without retaliation.  Child protection investigators face this problem when they ask children to repeat their stories of being “abused”; if they don’t substantiate a child’s story or the story doesn’t hold up in court, the child faces secret retaliation by those s/he has accused.  The same problem for adults has prompted enactment of a law designed to protect whistleblowers (ineffectual as that law often is).  In cases in which I tried to support such children as by testifying in court, I learned that I would never betray a child’s confidence that someone has hurt her or him if I did not think anyone I turned to would believe and protect the child.  Instead, I do what survivors have taught me meant a lot to them when no other help was available: to let them know that I consider what was done to them should not have happened, that I am sorry they are being hurt, that it isn’t their fault no matter what anyone says, and that I am honored they have told me their secret and am always ready to listen and help however I can.  One survivor—a longtime friend--told me and my students told me that a simple look of sympathy from a fifth-grade teacher gave her the strength to endure until she ran away from her father and his cult when she was sixteen.  She was among survivors whom I saw become stronger in themselves and their relations as they shared their stories publicly from year to year.  As a teacher who invited Jeanette Westbrook back to my classes time and again, I was myself as a mediator—a bridge between her violent past and a safe place to live and be valued.  In so doing, I felt I approached her trauma by the same principles I applied in victim-offender mediation and in designing and operating the classes I taught.  When I find myself saying to criminologists and criminal justice practitioners that mediation is my answer to any problem they want “solved.”  To my mind, mediation entails getting parties to make up their own rules of co-existence if needed by bending rules rather than following rules prescribed to them.  I came out of law school hoping to use my training to making up laws that would promote social harmony.  Now I call myself a recovering lawyer.   Who am I, after all, to know better than others what is good for them?

                Criminologists worldwide are not alone in reducing the problem of crime to the problem of the criminal or the oppressor.  Worldwide, national and personal security is reduced to identifying who is at fault for our problems, who our real enemies are.  Individualism turns social problems into handling “the” problem people, or by getting one’s own head and life together.  Whether in the legal system or in the classroom, individualism means that the ones who disrupt social order are those who become its failures.  Talk as we may about distinguishing personal from structural problems, we grow up so carefully taught that problems are someone’s fault that we may even remain individualists when we call ourselves socialists or speak of doing social justice.  Living as we do in a culture of individualizing responses to social problems, I find it hard indeed to get even close and respected criminological friends the idea of forsaking the issue of which conflicts to mediate in favor of thinking how to initiate or support diplomacy in the face of any crime or criminal justice problem.  Maybe substituting “diplomacy” for “mediation” and “peacemaking” will help.  Stay posted.  Love and peace--hal