"In retrospect the American sixties seem little more than an extended party dabbling in leftist politics, sex and drugs that rapidly degenerated rightward into the crippling model of identity politics still in force today."

On an early September evening in Paris a small knot of American tourists dodged the busy rotary traffic to take a closer look at the monument at the center of the Place de la Concorde. As they hung over the iron railing consulting their guidebooks for information on the obelisk at the center of the Place, they remarked on the pictorial brass plaque affixed to the obelisk’s pedestal illustrating the machinery and methodology used to remove and transport the monument from Egypt to Paris in 1833.

A short distance away from this group, also leaning over the rails, was a round-faced American girl with thick spectacles, jeans and a bad haircut. As the tourists snapped pictures of the obelisk she leaned over the railing and, pointing to the plaque, exclaimed to her companion in the annoyingly loud tones favored by Americans abroad, “Look, they even show how they stole it!” The tourists shifted uneasily and one of them backed away from the railing in a sort of unconscious consternation.

The year was 1968 and the American blurter was me, fresh from a year of study in the Middle East, still naïve and ignorant to be sure, but having at least a bit of genuine knowledge to show for my stay in the colonies. Although I later learned that the obelisk was not actually stolen but instead a gift to France from Muhammad ‘Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, I stand by the spirit of my original observation. Our travels in the late summer of 1968 had taken us to numerous European museums which we found crammed to the rafters with hundreds of thousands of Egyptian artifacts plundered by the white man.

I came of political age in 1968 during my sojourn in the Middle East whence I had arrived from an utterly provincial background. My earliest brush with what I thought was political sophistication was when I left home three years earlier to attend a large Midwestern state university. In those days this institution was wildly popular with hordes of east coast students attracted by the cheap tuition, low cost of living and first-rate academic reputation. A substantial proportion of these easterners were Jewish and they assumed a visible role in the nascent antiwar movement on campus. I was all admiration as I watched them proclaim eloquently at meetings and protests and doubted that I would ever be able to speak or lead as they did.

Then June 1967 came and I was briefly hospitalized. When I was sprung from the student infirmary I walked smack into a celebratory campus demonstration hailing the Israeli victory in the Six Day War. I peered through the crowd and to my puzzlement saw some of the antiwar personalities I had so admired, their faces contorted with what could only be described as a mixture of elation and hatred. At that time I knew absolutely nothing about Israel or Palestine but I did know something about consistency. This ominous foreshadowing of forces that have hobbled the American antiwar movement to this very day was the beginning of my political education.

For ten years I crisscrossed the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa and mastered spoken Arabic. Largely absent from North America during the upheavals of the so-called “sixties” instead I observed the decade from afar as through a telescope colored by my residency among those oppressed by the U.S. in ways that were open and astonishing to witness. Through such a lens the antiwar activity at home began to appear more and more like an exercise in exuberant self-indulgence.

During a brief stay in Washington DC in 1971 I did catch a bit of the social euphoria and took part in some of the demonstrations there at the time. I was arrested at the Justice Department and spent the night in a DC jail in a tiny cell crowded with more than a dozen other female protestors. The level of discourse that night in the stifling cell was dismally inane and I eventually fell into an irritated silence. My conversations with antiwar activists while in the states or the Middle East had often been frustrating -- particularly when the subject was Palestine or the Middle East -- as my interlocutors had little interest in either the conditions or the history of those particular colonies. Extrapolation from Vietnam to Palestine was nigh impossible for them.

During my residence in the Middle East through the 1970s I had been shut up for hours by curfews listening to the aerial bombardment of nearby Palestinian refugee camps. I had marched in local demonstrations and watched US embassy staff film us openly as we went by. I had witnessed the palpable ballet of imperial control during a peasant uprising in the Akkar district of Lebanon: From the village informer with his white shirt who nervously lurked nearby to eavesdrop on our conversation with traditionally-clad villagers and who then summoned the local feudal landowner who circled us menacingly in his gleaming Cadillac and who in his turn called the government gendarmerie with their US-issue jeeps and weaponry who then obliged us to leave village.

I was questioned late at night in a Spain by members of Franco’s guardia civil, summoned thither by a hotel owner alarmed by my traveling companion’s Arabic language travel document. I cowered on the floor the night Suleiman Franjiyyeh was elected president of Lebanon as celebratory gunfire echoed in the streets outside. My Palestinian hosts deemed it prudent not to exhibit to the goons without the fear we all felt and so they kept the shutters of the first floor flat open but counseled us to sit on the living room floor so as not to provide a tempting “accidental” target to the celebrants.

Such experiences are but pitiful small change compared to what those living under the American-supported jackboot in the third world encounter on a daily basis. But to someone coddled and cosseted in the bosom of the white American fifties they were a revelation. Thus by virtue of experience, language acquisition, emotion and inclination I was gradually alienated from my American indoctrinatory past and found myself becoming a putative third world native. When finally I returned to America for good I found myself a stranger, a feeling that has not changed these thirty years. But I have since then always tried to remain cognizant of what white Judeo-Christian privilege hath wrought not only for me personally but for every non-white, non-western member of the human race.

My experiences from 1968 and beyond have convinced me that the black, brown and red world, the southern world, cannot expect much in the way of effective support from American progressives. Isolated, comfortable and religiously indoctrinated as they are in the Empire’s heartland they are incapable of committing to the sort of significant action needed to hasten an end to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to boldly target Israel for the war criminal state that it is, or even to work for genuine social and economic justice at home. During the Vietnam War, American antiwar activities did make a material contribution to ending the war albeit in the context of what was often a self-involved personal liberation. But what really delivered the coup de grace to that particular war was a virtual mutiny by the ground troops, many of them black. This weakness was quickly addressed after the war’s end by canceling the all-draft army and targeting recruitment efforts towards white lumpen volunteers, counting on engrained American racism to create an imperial army ready to wreak death and destruction on non-white populations without compunction.

Yes, there were those who sought genuine transformation in 1968 and yes, it was a period of undeniable intellectual ferment world-wide. But in retrospect the American sixties seem little more than an extended party dabbling in leftist politics, sex and drugs that rapidly degenerated rightward into the crippling model of identity politics still in force today. The most genuine developments from 1968 -- the militant Black liberation and Native American struggles -- were quickly brought down by an aggressive state apparatus: They died in a hail of bullets, languished in prison, were fractured with informants or co-opted with cash.

The vast continental isolation of the “wilderness of North America” -- to use Malcolm X’s apt terminology -- coupled with its extraordinary wealth, cultural homogeneity, endemic religiosity, attenuated social ties and a near unanimous acceptance of the triumphal state ideology of personal and economic individualism has a powerful retrograde effect on the entire population, progressives included. Not only do these conditions ensure a quiescent and self-policing population internally they also create an effective prophylactic shield around those who venture outside of the wilderness. The combined weight of these powerful forces contributed to the rapid collapse of 1968’s fleeting promise in America.

Viewing 1968 then from a vantage point atop the stolen obelisks piled up in western coffers it appears to me as a minor historic sidebar with little significant influence; rather what is more important is what came in its wake. By 1972 we were speculating in Lebanon that the “raddi rijaiyyeh” [right wing reaction] which we correctly sensed was coming even then would last 25 years. Alas it has stretched now to forty years and counting; the length and ferocity of its sway due in large part to the abject failure of Western progressives.

It has lasted this long because large portions of the western populace benefit from an America Triumphant, with the white Judeo-Christians among us benefiting most of all. Those internal populations who might establish solidarity with their oppressed brothers outside of America and effect real change internally -- the blacks and browns and reds -- are being carefully attended to by our rulers. The disruptive are segregated residentially and economically, incarcerated in enormous numbers far in excess of the white population in the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex or confined to manual agricultural labor -- the new plantations -- or they are fenced off in grinding poverty on reservations-- the old plantations. These populations have also, by the way, been shut out of the antiwar movement by its white masters and mistresses. The good and obedient among nonwhites are sucked into the system where they provide empire with a valuable cover of faux diversity.

Nevertheless we are now seeing cracks in the foundation of the American empire; both the economy and the infrastructure are beginning to totter. Mumia Abu Jamal -- ever perspicacious from behind the prison walls where he has been unjustly held for so long -- places the phenomenon of Barack Obama in its proper place:

It is a measure of how dire is the hour that they've passed the keys to the kingdom to a Black man. As in many American cities, Black Mayors were let in when the treasuries were almost barren, and tax bases were almost at rock-bottom. With the nation's manufacturing base also a thing of history, amidst the socioeconomic wreckage of globalization, with foreign affairs in shambles, the rulers reach for a pretty, brown face to front for the Empire. [1]

Even with the American empire on the rocks -- which ought to engender effective antiwar organization and action -- the largely white antiwar movement smolders on disgracefully ineffective, the faggots for its self-immolation having been lit by its leadership’s reliance on electoral politics, their deep and abiding inability to incorporate nonwhites into their ranks or to consistently and honestly address the problem of Palestine, which is at the center of the current wars of empire.

The comatose state of the American antiwar movement today in the face of unbounded, gratuitous American violence is a testament to the failure of the promise of 1968 and proof of its inherently tenuous foundation. It was only effective forty years ago inasmuch as the colonies in question at that time were in no way connected to the West spiritually. But when Israel and Islamic countries became involved, the scriptural -- yes, I said scriptural -- education of American and European progressives trumped analysis and exerted its powerful depressive effect on their movement with what results we have seen.

This shameful situation is a natural result of contradictions already apparent in 1968 which were further amplified by a deep American religious solidarity with Judeo-Christianity against a perceived antithetical Islam. Clearly, the black, brown and red world everywhere will have to shake off the American yoke on their own -- without drawing inspiration from 1968, without any real assistance from American progressives -- without relying on anything save their own steadfastness, intelligence and strength.

J.A. Miller is a grandmother activist from the Middle West who spent many years traveling and studying in the Middle East. She has published essays on Counterpunch and DissidentVoice as well as poems in the manner of the Burma Shave highway signs of her youth at www.PoeticInjustice.net, some of which will be included in their upcoming anthology, Poets for Palestine. Miller is currently writing a book on the Protestant origin of the Zionist project. She can be reached at jsec_miller@hotmail.com

Endnotes

1. Abu-Jamal, Mumia, ‘Is Obama’s Victory Ours?’, June 12, 2008.
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3521