Gary Younge (The Guardian): Leaderless on the left

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Guardian Unlimited (London)
Dated Monday August 22

Leaderless on the left
The mood in America is shifting against the Iraq war, but it has found inadequate expression in Congress
By Gary Younge

The myth of Rosa Parks is well known. The tired seamstress who boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white man has become one of the most enduring legends of the civil rights era. Her subsequent arrest started the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement. It transformed the apartheid of America's southern states from a local idiosyncrasy to an international scandal and turned a previously unknown 26-year-old preacher, Martin Luther King, into a household name.

"She was a victim of both the forces of history and the forces of destiny," said King. "She had been tracked down by the zeitgeist - the spirit of the times." The reality was somewhat different. Parks was no victim. The zeitgeist did not track her down; she embodied it. She had a long history of anti-racist activism and had often been thrown off buses for resisting segregation. Far from being a meek lady in need of a foot massage she was a keen supporter of Malcolm X, who never fully embraced King's strategy of non-violence.

"To call Rosa Parks a poor, tired seamstress and not talk about her role as a community leader and civil rights activist as well, is to turn an organised struggle for freedom into a personal act of frustration," writes Herbert Kohl in his book She Would Not Be Moved.

The story of collective struggles is all too often filtered through the experience of an individual. In a bid to render the account more palatable and popular, the personal takes precedence over the political. As a result the story may reach a wider audience; but by the time they receive it, the agendas and the issues involved have often become distorted - to the detriment of both the individual and the movement.

The story of Cindy Sheehan, the 48-year-old woman whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in April 2004, is one such example.

Read more.

[applegrove]

1. Ha ha ha! As if Bush is a leader. He cannot even answer questions.

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Comments

As a progressive, I have doubts that a strong leader is either necessary or desirable.

What I believe in is democracy, and for that I use a substantive definition. Of our Founding Fathers, I'm more likely to take my cue from Thomas Paine than Alexander Hamilton or James Madison; Walt Whitman is as much a political thinker as a great poet. I am probably more likely to be influenced by the ideas of what in the sixties was called the New Left than by traditional liberalism. At times, this results in ideas that sound superficially Goldwateresque: a belief in the virtues of small government and local control, for example. Where it differs from Goldwater conservatism is that it is equally suspicious of large private corporations as a large, centralized government. Large institutions, whether public or private, are remote, inefficient and more likely to stifle innovation than embrace it.

Democracy and empire are as incompatible as democracy and slavery. Both imperialism and slavery presume the right of the elite -- defined by some arbitrary standard such as race, creed, nationality, accumulated wealth, etc. -- to rule over the masses. Slavery presumes the right of a master to take the fruits of labor from the slave and imperialism presumes the right a the mother country to take from the colony its natural wealth. In democracy, there are no elites set apart from the masses. No person has the right to rule another.

Cindy Sheehan -- plain, unadorned and unsophisticated -- is as good a spokesperson for the anti-war movement as there is. She is not what we think of as a leader, but she has better qualities than those who are currently entrusted with that role or most of those who have been so entrusted in the recent past. She is at least honest. She may never be satisfied with an answer she is likely to get from Mr. Bush, but that is because Mr. Bush is far from honest. All she asks him is for what reason we are in Iraq. Given that Mr. Bush has justified the war with whatever reason suits the purpose at any given point in time, she has good reason to be confused.