Faking Civil Society
By Jonathan Schell
TomDispatch/The Nation Magazine Go
to Original
Wednesday
06 April 2005
Perhaps
the most beautiful achievement of political life in the late twentieth century
was the international movement for democracy that brought down several dozen
dictatorships of every possible description -- authoritarian, communist,
fascist, military. It happened on all continents, and it happened peacefully. It
began in the 1970s, with the collapse of the Greek junta and of the right-wing
regimes in
Portugal
and
Spain
; it continued in the 1980s, mysteriously jumping the Atlantic, with the
collapse of dictatorships in
Argentina
,
Chile
and
Brazil
; then, vaulting the Pacific, it claimed the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in
the
Philippines
. Finally, in the early '90s, it spread to
South Africa
, where the white apartheid regime yielded to majority rule, and returned to the
Eurasian continent where the great Soviet empire itself shuffled off history's
stage.
The
actors in this benign contagion acquired a name: civil society.
"Civil": they were peaceful, meaning that the bomb in the cafe, the
assassination of the local official, the paratrooper invasion of the Parliament
building, were not their tactics. "Society": they expressed popular
will, not the will of governments. The movement broke or made governments. It
was their master.
Recently,
however, the movement has undergone a change both at home and abroad. Civil
society groups in the more prosperous societies began to lend welcome assistance
in poorer ones. But governments also joined in. Unlike private civil groups,
governments are in their nature interested in power, and the civil society
movements clearly exercised it. Here in
America
, the National Endowment for Democracy was created in the early eighties. Funded
by Congress and governed by a board that includes active and retired politicians
of both parties, it nevertheless calls itself a "nongovernmental"
organization. Its declared mission was to support democracy per se, not any
political party, but the distinction was soon lost in practice. Most of the
$10.5 million handed out in
Nicaragua
during the elections of 1990 went to the opposition to the Sandinistas, who
were duly voted out of power. In 2002, the Endowment funded groups in
Venezuela
that backed the briefly successful coup against President Hugo Chávez, in
which the Venezuelan Parliament, judiciary and constitution were suspended.
The
day after the overthrow, which Omar Encarnación of Bard College has called a
"civil society coup," the president of the International Republican
Institute, which is loosely tied to the GOP and is a conduit for Endowment
funds, stated, "Last night, led by every sector of civil society, the
Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy in their country." Speaking
for the
U.S.
government, presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer stated that the coup
"happened in a very quick fashion as a result of the message of the
Venezuelan people." In fact, the Venezuelan people opposed the coup, and Chávez,
notwithstanding his own repressive tendencies, almost immediately returned to
power.
More
recently Endowment contributions went to groups in
Ukraine
that supported presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko, who became president
after fraudulent results engineered by the opposition government candidate were
reversed by popular pressure. In
Venezuela
, the outcome was the destruction, however brief, of all democratic
institutions, whereas in
Ukraine
the outcome was the rescue of democracy; yet in both cases the integrity of
civil society, which depends on independence from governments, was partially
corrupted.
Something
similar was meanwhile happening within the
United States
. The Republican Party and its supporters have been the pioneers, creating what
might be called a shadow civil society and seeking to merge it imperceptibly
with the real one. Former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley summarized the process
in a March 30 op-ed in the New York Times: Large donors founded partisan think
tanks more interested in propagandizing than in thinking; then proceeded to
establish seemingly independent but actually politically subservient news
organizations such as FOX News and the Rush Limbaugh show. Recently, some new
wrinkles in the process have emerged: the use of fake newscasters, pretending to
report from an independent news station while actually working for a department
of government, and fake reporters, such as "Jeff Gannon," the imposter
permitted by the White House to ask sycophantic questions of the President at
White House press conferences. There is also the fake "town meeting"
(the very emblem of civil society) with the President, at which a screened
audience asks pretested questions.
The
strategy of faking civil activity has a long tradition in the foreign sphere.
For example, the CIA virtually cut its teeth manipulating popular and
intellectual movements in
Europe
in the late 1940s and '50s. (Indeed, historian Allen Weinstein, who was the
National Endowment's first acting president, has commented, "A lot of what
we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.") But the
domestic practice is more recent. One of the lesser-known points of origin is
the presidency of Richard Nixon, who once ordered his aide Charles Colson to
firebomb the Brookings Institution, then called it off. But he also had some
more workable ideas. He told Patrick Buchanan, then his communications director,
that he wanted somehow not only to cut off existing "left-wing"
foundations "without a dime" but also to found a right-wing institute
that would seem to be independent but actually be managed by the White House. As
Buchanan commented in a memo, "some of the essential objectives of the
Institute would have to be blurred, even buried, in all sorts of other activity
that would be the bulk of its work, that would employ many people, and that
would provide the cover for the more important efforts." In this matter, as
in so many others, today's Republican Party is the legatee of Richard Nixon.
Some
Democrats want their party to respond in kind. For urgent and understandable
reasons, they want to level the playing field. But the cost could be high. In
such a world, nothing would be what it seemed. Behind every blogger would lurk
the PR spinmeister, behind every reporter would stand the political hack, behind
every charming demonstrator holding her banner -- rose, orange, purple, or cedar
--would lie the cold hand of the state. In the name of civil society, civil
society would be spoiled.
--------
Jonathan
Schell, author of The Unconquerable World,
is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan
Schell Reader was recently published by
Nation Books.
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