Kaleem Omar: Bush’s post-9/11 policies have become enemies of the open society
The United States of America has long prided itself on being a “bastion of freedom” and the world’s “first democracy,” even though many of the actions it has taken against other countries over the last hundred years have been neither democratic in character nor in support of freedom. Internally, true democracy didn’t come to the United States until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s which ended racial segregation in America and ensured that black Americans got the right to vote.
Even today, many southern US states still cling to their old segregationist ways, and large numbers of black Americans and members of other ethnic groups remain impoversished communities.
The long history of the US government’s shameful treatment of Red Indians is the biggest blot on the face of white America, with virtually all the Red Indian tribes still confined to economically backward reservations where they lead lives of quiet desperation – cut off from the American mainstream.
There isn’t a single Red Indian in Congress, and very few, if any, in the state legislatures. A once proud people, who were the original inhabitants of the North American continent and roamed its vast spaces in complete freedom and harmony with nature, have been reduced over the last 150 years to a pale shadow of their former selves due to the rapacious actions of the white settlers and the US government, which confiscated millions of acres of Red Indian lands in the nineteenth century and has broken every treaty it ever made with the Red Indian tribes.
Ever since 9/11, however, even white America has seen its civil liberties eroded under such draconian pieces of legislation as the USA Patriot Act of October 2001 and the Homeland Security Act of January 2002 rammed through Congress by President George W. Bush’s administration under the guise of combating terrorism. The Patriot Act is an assault on constitutional protections so atrocious that legislators in several US states and local officials in more than 200 cities, towns and counties have passed resolutions or ordinances condemning and rejecting its abuse of civil liberties.
More than 25 million Americans live in states or communities that have officially declared that they oppose those parts of the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act that trample on their freedoms. Yet the Bush administration has continued to ignore such protests and has continued to press ahead with an agenda that has had the effect of turning America more and more into a police state.
All of which makes the late Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper’s seminal work “The Open Society and Its Enemies” as relevant today as when it was first published in 1944 at the height of the Second World War.
In his book, Popper contrasts Plato, with his contemptuous, exploitative attitude towards the masses of humanity, and his desire to impose social stagnation, to Socrates, who counseled an open, unflinching search for truth, no matter where it might lead, and an acknowledghement of the inherent dignity and worth of every human being.
Popper’s book is a devastating indictment of the enemies of human thought, who would create class conscious societies to trap the vast majority of humanity into lives of meaningless, dead-ended servitude. It is especially important, in today’s world, to understand how tenuous is human freedom and how inextricably it is linked to the concept of justice, and equal opportunity for every human being, and how devastating and horrific life would become should mankind lose the freedoms granted by an open society.
What Popper means by the “open society” is a democratic society in which citizens reflect and participate, not one in which people are subject to any iron external force, whether a dictator, a permanent bureaucracy, or the so-called “laws of supply and demand”, which has nowadays been dubbed TINA —-There Is No Alternative To The Market, harsh and capricious though it may be. Popper says there IS an alternative, though we have to think, and fight, to bring it about. There is no need to submit to an abstraction such as The Free Market —-the very success of the post-industrial democracies is testimony to their success in democratic social engineering.
Popper’s main critique of Marx is that he, like Plato, was a historicist who believed in a universal history of humanity. “Historicist” is not exactly an everyday epithet. So why did Popper see historicism as dangerous? According to Popper, there are but multiple histories of various aspects of human life. He objects to anyone believing that they have the key to the future, whether that results in social dogmatism, or libertarian dogmatism, or any other form of teleology.
Popper makes this incredibly timely observation about the tendency to treat the history of power politics as universal history: “This,” he writes, “is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder.” Popper closes Volume I of his two-volume book with rousing praise for critical debate, rationalism and pluralism as opposed to “monolithic social ends”. ...
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Even today, many southern US states still cling to their old segregationist ways, and large numbers of black Americans and members of other ethnic groups remain impoversished communities.
The long history of the US government’s shameful treatment of Red Indians is the biggest blot on the face of white America, with virtually all the Red Indian tribes still confined to economically backward reservations where they lead lives of quiet desperation – cut off from the American mainstream.
There isn’t a single Red Indian in Congress, and very few, if any, in the state legislatures. A once proud people, who were the original inhabitants of the North American continent and roamed its vast spaces in complete freedom and harmony with nature, have been reduced over the last 150 years to a pale shadow of their former selves due to the rapacious actions of the white settlers and the US government, which confiscated millions of acres of Red Indian lands in the nineteenth century and has broken every treaty it ever made with the Red Indian tribes.
Ever since 9/11, however, even white America has seen its civil liberties eroded under such draconian pieces of legislation as the USA Patriot Act of October 2001 and the Homeland Security Act of January 2002 rammed through Congress by President George W. Bush’s administration under the guise of combating terrorism. The Patriot Act is an assault on constitutional protections so atrocious that legislators in several US states and local officials in more than 200 cities, towns and counties have passed resolutions or ordinances condemning and rejecting its abuse of civil liberties.
More than 25 million Americans live in states or communities that have officially declared that they oppose those parts of the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act that trample on their freedoms. Yet the Bush administration has continued to ignore such protests and has continued to press ahead with an agenda that has had the effect of turning America more and more into a police state.
All of which makes the late Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper’s seminal work “The Open Society and Its Enemies” as relevant today as when it was first published in 1944 at the height of the Second World War.
In his book, Popper contrasts Plato, with his contemptuous, exploitative attitude towards the masses of humanity, and his desire to impose social stagnation, to Socrates, who counseled an open, unflinching search for truth, no matter where it might lead, and an acknowledghement of the inherent dignity and worth of every human being.
Popper’s book is a devastating indictment of the enemies of human thought, who would create class conscious societies to trap the vast majority of humanity into lives of meaningless, dead-ended servitude. It is especially important, in today’s world, to understand how tenuous is human freedom and how inextricably it is linked to the concept of justice, and equal opportunity for every human being, and how devastating and horrific life would become should mankind lose the freedoms granted by an open society.
What Popper means by the “open society” is a democratic society in which citizens reflect and participate, not one in which people are subject to any iron external force, whether a dictator, a permanent bureaucracy, or the so-called “laws of supply and demand”, which has nowadays been dubbed TINA —-There Is No Alternative To The Market, harsh and capricious though it may be. Popper says there IS an alternative, though we have to think, and fight, to bring it about. There is no need to submit to an abstraction such as The Free Market —-the very success of the post-industrial democracies is testimony to their success in democratic social engineering.
Popper’s main critique of Marx is that he, like Plato, was a historicist who believed in a universal history of humanity. “Historicist” is not exactly an everyday epithet. So why did Popper see historicism as dangerous? According to Popper, there are but multiple histories of various aspects of human life. He objects to anyone believing that they have the key to the future, whether that results in social dogmatism, or libertarian dogmatism, or any other form of teleology.
Popper makes this incredibly timely observation about the tendency to treat the history of power politics as universal history: “This,” he writes, “is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder.” Popper closes Volume I of his two-volume book with rousing praise for critical debate, rationalism and pluralism as opposed to “monolithic social ends”. ...