Savaging the Tapestry of the Law

Getting off the bus at Berkeley, my stop is right next to the law building.

I know that is where John Yoo, the torture lawyer, is a professor.

There are over a thousand students and faculty in the law school, who go there all the time.

And everybody knows what John Yoo has done, and that he is in the school there.

So what else would you do but go in?


* * *


Approaching the Berkeley law school, on a massive monumental inscription, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr intones:

When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mightier than she who wrought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-lengthening past --- figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life.

Let us put aside for a moment any potential differences with such a hagiographic description of the State and its judicial apparatus.

Let us merely ask: could there be any more beautiful description of precisely that which Yoo's work has systematically destroyed?


* * *


Entering Boalt Hall, the building housing the school of law, one sees students working hard, lectures in progress, the usual goings-on of an academic paradise.

On bulletin boards are plastered advertisements and posters: for law journals, talks, panels, conferences, classes, and more.

Many of these posters advertise a talk on the obscuranta of the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution: a debate on "Unenumerated rights".

Hardly the best-known amendment, and hardly the sexiest topic.

But the moderator of this debate is none other than John Yoo.

So what else could you do but make a note of it?


* * *


The strategy seems clear: a gradual normalisation of academic presence, testing the waters with esoteric scholasticism.

There is no advertisement of the event online: google searches turn up nothing. Clearly attempting to fly under the radar.

From lower to higher profile events, evidently hoping that, step by gradual step, nobody will remember the dictum from Nuremberg:

The prostitution of a judicial system for the accomplishment of criminal ends involves an element of evil to the State which is not found in frank atrocities which do not sully judicial robes.

Even the dedicated activists of Fire John Yoo have nothing of it at their website.

So what else could you do but notify firejohnyoo.org?


* * *


A protest is held, and press conference given, below the mighty words of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Nonviolently, peacefully, even politely, we march into the school.

Some in jumpsuits, some carrying pictures, some wearing ribbons, the procession enters the library.

Have you ever seen police blocking off access in a public library?


* * *


The room is full, explain the officers, looking a little guilty: someone exits the room even as they say it.

Full minus one equals full --- the officers of the Law now deny arithmetic and the conservation of matter.

There is no sense to it, but Yoo's intentional nonsense wrought far worse.

But with the Law's tapestry so savagely riven, and the architect inside, what could one expect?


* * *


But I looked beyond the Law's tapestry, here represented by automatons under arms, brute force blocking off publicly owned bookshelves.

And I looked at the students all around studying: we had speeches but we kept it quite quiet in the library.

Almost every one refused to make eye contact. Elsewhere I have seen the secret smile, the secret wink, the secret fist, the secret delight in violation of obedient social norms. Not here.

Should we pity the children --- but they are not children! Should we educate them --- but they are highly intelligent!

Should we teach them the law in law school? Is it too confusing to differentiate academic debate from criminal behaviour?

There were some students with us, but the silence spoke to me. It whispered of late Weimar Germany.

Do they have too much work? Stress? Debt? Is protest inherently crazy? I felt like a homeless outcst beggar pleading for change.

But I will plead for change, as long as it is necessary.

Why did it take a peripatetic mathematician, on a research visit, on wanderings preoccupied with symplectic geometry, to instigate this?

The antiwar movement in the large, and measuring it

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/measurenonprofit

I read this article and thought it was interesting. I had some comments on it, which pertain to the antiwar movement at large, so I thought I would share them. Make of them what you will.

1. Measuring is good when possible!

Being a scientist (and a mathematician at that), I like data. Observing and measuring is good. If you can find things to measure, more power to you.

However, I can see some difficulties in the context of the antiwar movement. In particular, some things are hard to measure; and more, some important or essential things that an activist group should be doing, might have completely zero short-term measurable effect. Some details follow.

2. The scale of antiwar goals.

To stop, or even prevent, a single war is a massive, world-historic event. To reduce the US national military budget, say to a level comparable to the rest of the world, even more so: that amounts to a total restructuring of the economy. To stop militarism, more so again: that is a culture and an economic and institutional inertia written deeply into american life. And, to stop jingoistic patriotism --- the insane loyalty to a single geographic region with some arbitrary boundaries denoting the fates of long forgotten kings, emperors and imperialists who once carved up the earth for themselves --- indeed amounts to a complete change of american life: so that every wave of the flag is met with curiosity or stupefaction, rather than with cheers and tears; so that the "american" in american life it more or less ceases to exist, to the extent it denotes anything more than a geographic location.

Make no mistake, the antiwar movement has these as goals, and not just in the US, but everywhere. They are not complete goals --- a world with all these achieved might still be one of rank inequality, authoritarianism, and thwarted human life. One might argue they are best pursued alongside others --- perhaps it can only be done along with a restructuring of the rules of international trade, greater international economic and political integration, debt forgiveness, the satisfaction of humanitarian and economic needs and so on; or more radically, the restructuring of the global economy, economic democracy, north-south reparations, finding a better economic alternative to capitalism, etc.

Nonetheless, the broad antiwar goals are goals for the long term. They chart a course for human history. Their time-frame is measured in centuries --- even as the insanity and potential for catastrophe is so great as to demand that they be achieved now. Thus, one expects progress to be slow, even negligible; but one wishes, and needs, it to be done now.

Of course there are more local and immediate goals too, but the big picture must always be kept in mind, where measurable progress can be expected to be indistinguishable from zero even in the best possible case.

3. Sometimes vast changes happen unpredictably --- in the meantime, ideas are important.

Events like the founding of the United Nations and the end of the cold war were world-changing --- and entirely unpredictable a few years beforehand. Nobody would have advocated the second world war, or (say) the invasion of Afghanistan, in order to achieve these goals. The end of the second world war was indeed the impetus for the founding of the UN, but it is a superficial reading of history to regard that as the sole cause. These were not mere elite decisions, not merely the brokering of power by beloved leaders.

The creation of the United Nations built upon a century of pacifist organising and activism, the advocacy of various schemes of international integration, agitation for the outlawing of war (achieved in 1928 by the Briand-Kellogg pact, and today binding on all nations as customary international law), and the work of organisations like the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom. Nobody could have measured any progress whatsoever towards international integration until the first world war led to the League of Nations; and after its demise, again, until the second world war led to the UN. History is unpredictable, but the course of history depends upon the ideas and institutions that are in existence; the power of those ideas; and the balance of forces those ideas and their supporting institutions have at their disposal. By measurability standards the WILPFs and the Bertha von Suttners of the world are clearly zero or close to it. By the standards of history, they are monumental.

The conclusion must be that in political activism, the mere propagation of ideas --- perhaps even the mere existence of active organisations working for those ideas --- is of value in itself. Having an organisation, having people willing to meet regularly, putting time into the cause, in itself is something. Of course, the more people doing it, the wider the ideas spread, and the more clearly they are formulated and powerfully they are expressed, the better. Some of this may be measurable. But much of it surely cannot.

In any case I think, in the activist context, the proposition that no measurable effect implies no political effect is not always true.

4. Sometimes vast changes happen after long struggles --- at the beginning, nothing was measurable.

An insistence on measurability would have stopped people speaking out against the Vietnam war for many years --- as I recall, Kennedy first sent troops in around 1963 but the protest movement did not pick up until the end of the decade. Recall the stories of Chomsky and fellow activists going to speak every weekend, I think at the Boston Common --- with a significant police presence, not to beat up the antiwar protestors (as we see more usually today!), but to protect Chomsky and company from being beaten up by pro-war onlookers. An absolutely hopeless situation --- and disorganised at that --- but without this sort of persistence, the later massive movement could never have arisen.

More generally, the situation for most serious activists --- those antagonistic to power, to received ideology, and not subservient to some faction of power (like the CAP Shwarz refers to) --- almost always seems hopeless. Power is strong by definition, it has legions of unthinking supporters, and no shortage of subservient academics, pundits, and intellectuals. Challenging a political and intellectual hegemony is tough work! The best approach however seems clear: have a realistic analysis, but do what is required for the cause and for the good. As Gramsci put it: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

History shows that it can be done. And, often it is drastic. The pace of change can quicken, dramatically. Ideas can be widespread, and regarded as good, just as impractical. Many people are not prepared to act until they believe that others are prepared to act. Political action is self-referential, at least at first, its philosophy is logically circular, as with much of social life --- but it happens. And it cannot happen without an impetus that is non-measurable up to the instant it occurs, collapsing the nesting of logical brackets, and making a reality of the common knowledge that we think other people think we think they think.

5. The local situation may also make measurability hard.

None of this is to say that measurable effects should not be noted where possible, just that good work may not always have short-term measurable consequences. For campus organising, I can think of some sorts of measurements that could be made. But thinking about it, the same problems seems to apply even to goals local to a single campus. Getting the local war criminal prosecuted would be monumental in US history. Stopping, or placing further institutional limits on, military research would be a massive shift in the direction of the whole university --- one can well argue, at least to a first approximation, that Stanford built itself into a world-class institution precisely by taking government money for military-related research. Moreover, current military research on campus is institutionally protected by white-washed reports and "academic freedom" and runs together with the vast sums of "defence"-related money supporting the economy of not just Stanford, but the entire country --- military Keynesianism.

In addition, arguably the low-lying fruit (no classified research on campus, no ROTC on campus, for example) have already been won by movements long ago (well, the 1970s!).

But, the general idea seems fine. Activist groups should have identifiable goals, visions, and so on. And activist groups should not be wasting their limited time and resources by doing things which do not help their cause --- or by not helping their cause as much as they potentially could.

I would just say to be on guard that too much of a focus on short-term measurability could potentially detract from the sort of cultural and ideological change that is, in the long run, central to any antiwar, or anti-imperialist, or pacifist mission, and which seems nigh impossible to measure objectively.

Jeremy and Reyna on CBS!

Stanford Student Speaks Out On Confronting Rice

http://cbs5.com/politics/condoleezza.rice.confronted.2.999686.html

A follow up to their story from Thursday

Stanford Student Confronts Rice On Interrogations
http://cbs5.com/politics/condoleezza.rice.confronted.2.998771.html

War Criminals of Tomorrow

An awesome video by a friend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O2KeDPTh3o

"Condoleezza Rice is back at Stanford University. What does it mean for the Stanford community to accept an alleged war criminal on their campus? What does the pipeline of war criminals to universities mean for students everywhere? Please read about Rice's alleged crimes during the past 8 years: http://www.stanford.edu/group/antiwar/cgi-bin/mediawiki/index.php?title=Condi_coalition_letter_draft and support the movement on Stanford's campus to hold Rice and former Bush administration officials accountable..."

This is your pizza. Go eat it.

I think this is amazingly good --- at least to my own aesthetics. Just the right mix of seriousness and hilariousness, gravity and spirit, light and heavy, yin and yang.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/antiwar/cgi-bin/mediawiki/images/d/da/NoMoreTorture.png

This is your pizza. Go eat it.

Are you allergic to illegal wars? Do you think torture sucks? Can't stomach a dinner with Rice? Well then, come to our

Dinner for Human Rights and International Law

Condoleezza Rice will be having a dinner with students at Roble at the same day & time. This event is meant to peacefully show to the campus that the Stanford community will not ignore evidence that Condoleezza Rice violated international and domestic laws against aggressive war and torture, and that we must confront our own institutional role in enabling and even honoring this behavior. We want accountability!

Why are we having dinner parties with an authorizer of waterboarding in Roble Hall? History will not judge this kindly.

On dinner parties and war criminals

"Oh, your prudery; oh, your squeamish respectability; all the abominations are allowed to *happen*, but no one may mention them. Delicate women must not know anything or say anything about blood and filth... There is nothing indecent about death and killing as far as you are concerned, you well brought up little ladies..."

"[T]he way [respectable] conversation customarily handles a new movement that strives to create a big upheaval: with an expression of prudent doubt and reservation, gentle ridicule, condescending recognition of the noble cause --- and all of that against a background of unmoving, rigid indifference."

--- Bertha von Suttner, 1889

Relevant articles & videos

Some articles and videos of relevance for those interested in peace and justice.

1. San Francisco --- your tax dollars at work.

Footage of police violence at SF antiwar rally last weekend. About 2:50 in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWlSbdCmPcU

"The State is authority, it is force, it is the ostentatious display of and infatuation with Power. It does not seek to ingratiate itself, to win over, to convert. Every time it intervenes, it does so with particularly bad grace. For by its very nature it cannot persuade but must impose and exert force."
-- Mikhail Bakunin


2. Afghanistan escalation

The good and the bad of President Obama's plan for Afghanistan
From Peace Action West
http://www.groundswellonline.org/groundswell/2009/03/the-good-and-the-bad-of-president-obamas-plan-for-afghanistan.html


3. Iran

White House ducks issue of Iran request
The White House has given a cautious response devoid of any real
content to an Iranian call for concrete change in US policy toward
Tehran.
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=89471&sectionid=351020101


4. Sri Lanka

The silent horror of the war in Sri Lanka
Arundhati Roy
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4331986.cms

Shoes ahoy

Pictures now on the wiki.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/antiwar/cgi-bin/mediawiki/index.php?title=Protest_at_Condoleezza_Rice%27s_inaugural_%22public%22_address

Also linked from the main page antiwar.stanford.edu under "Past events".

Wikileaks talk

I thought this talk was very interesting and at times brilliant... I
am not mentioned by name...

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2008/25c3-2916-en-wikileaks.html

Some thoughts on 21st century forms of activism, information, perception and reality, the media worldwide, and social change...

And also for some perspective. If you think it's a bit scary taking on Condoleezza Rice and the Hoover Institution...

Bennis on Iraq Withdrawal

Good analysis by Bennis of the antiwar movement's situation now. From ZNet.

Contested Terrain: Obama's Iraq Withdrawal Plan and the Peace Movement
Mar 08, 2009 By Phyllis Bennis
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3797