Issue 163 - December 15, 2005 |
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The Harlem Project:
The Weapon That Ended the War by Jonathan David Farley, D.Phil. Guest Commentator |
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The following is a transcript of a tape sent anonymously to the Washington Post, ostensibly from a meeting of high-level US government officials that took place in the resort town of Vonn’s Eye, Pennsylvania. Its authenticity has not been confirmed. VOICE:
…to introduce to you my good friend and a great American, Ike [inaudible]. [APPLAUSE] NEW VOICE:
Thank you, thank you, Dick. Dick
and I go way back. To Nam,
right? We both had to sit that one out. Trick knees, you know. [LAUGHTER] But seriously,
gentlemen – and lady – we’re here to discuss a problem of interest
to us all, indeed the world. It’s
a problem that has been the thorniest, most intractable problem in
international relations any of us have ever known.
The Palestinian problem. It’s
a problem that most of us have wrestled with our entire careers, a
problem that’s been with us since before many of us even finished
school. Now,
I know this will come as a shock.
But what I am about to tell you is not new.
In fact, what I’m here to say is that not only can we
solve the Palestinian problem, the
solution has already been laid out for us.. It’s
already worked: with a different people, and at a different time,
but it’s already been proven effective. Gentlemen
– and lady – I’m here to present to you a complete, and final, solution
to the Palestinian problem. [DISTURBANCE] OTHER
VOICE: [INAUDIBLE] VOICE:
No, no, I guess that was a poor choice of words.
God, I hope no one’s recording this.
No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about something far more devastating:
Integration. Let me
explain. In the
1960s and early 1970s we had a little intifada of our own. Black Panthers were running around toting guns and talking revolution.
How did we stop it? We had the stick, sure, but we also had the
carrot. And we had a King
in our hand. And that’s
the key. We need to make the
Palestinians think there are alternatives to violence.
What we need to do , gentlemen, is create a Muslim Martin Luther
King. How
can we do that? Not directly. We can’t send him to Gaza in an Apache helicopter
with marines for bodyguards, the way we did with Chalabi. That blew up in our faces like an IED. What we need to do is make them think he’s
homegrown, not a CIA stooge. We set
up a contest for the best young orator in Palestine. The grand prize should be a full scholarship to a college in the
United States. It will be
a scholarship named after Martin Luther King, maybe to Stanford, where
he can work with Clay Carson on the Martin Luther King Papers Project.
(You’re friends with him, right?) [INAUDIBLE]
This
guy will then go back to Palestine thinking the way we want him to
think. He won’t be pro-American, he’ll be anti-occupation
all right – you can’t get very far in Palestinian society unless you
are – but he’ll tell them to oppose the occupation the way we want
him to, non-violently. He’ll
lead a couple marches and maybe government soldiers will make some
mistakes and kill a couple people, but that will just make our man
stronger. Just like King in ’63 after the Birmingham
bombings. And once our man
gets the Nobel Peace Prize, he will be the undisputed leader of the
Palestinians. Exactly what we want. But that’s
not enough. In the ’50s, black
people in this country – pardon me, Afro-Americans – didn’t have any
options. You could have a Ph.D. like Dr. Rice here and
not get a job as a shoeshine boy.
Boy, was that dumb of us.
That was real dumb. We got
smarter in the ’60s and ’70s. Some
of us in the conservative movement think that affirmative action was
a mistake from the beginning. But
I’m here to tell you that affirmative action may have just saved this
country as we know it from a Marxist revolution. A young
black kid growing up in Watts or Detroit or Oakland or Harlem in the
late ’60s would have had no choice but to admire the Panthers.
Young, powerful, strong, bold, masculine, sexy,…um…Got a little
off track, sorry. Where was
I? Oh yeah, the Panthers were everything a young
black kid wanted to be. Except
dead. But before the ’70s,
we didn’t give that kid an alternative, did we?
It was join the Panthers and die or don’t join the Panthers
and die. Affirmative
action gave him a choice. He didn’t have to fight us. He could, possibly, just possibly, become president
of Brown University or CEO of Time Warner. He didn’t have to pick up a gun or a suicide belt. You see where
I’m going? In the
’60s, the Great Society was great because we bought off the radicals. Instead of joining the Panthers, they joined
government-sponsored anti-poverty programs.
They’re not going to fight the government if they work for
the government. So what we
need to do in Palestine is the same thing.
A massive expenditure – hear me out – a massive expenditure
for jobs programs and non-violence training programs in the disputed
territories. I know
many of you think it was our flooding the ghetto with drugs that killed
the Black Power movement, but that really only came 10 years later. It was affirmative action that killed it. It worked like a charm. Now there’s
one essential difference between Afro-American culture and the Palestinian
culture: the Palestinians have
a culture. They have a language, they have a history.
Afro-Americans have neither.
Slavery took care of that.
Sure, Afro-Americans have their music, but even they do not
describe it as “black” music. They use monikers like urban, inner-city, anything
to avoid calling it black. Which
is a good thing. Because that
allowed people like us – Elvis and Eminem – to take it over. But I digress. How can
we destroy Palestinian culture? We
have to make it a bad thing to be Palestinian.
So when we admit them into mainstream society, as businessmen,
as students, what have you, there have to be sanctions if they in
any way refer to their Palestinian identity.
For example, none of us here treat Dr. Rice as a black woman,
do we? And she wouldn’t have it any other way. Neither would I. So when we give the Palestinians this pressure valve, the possibility
of becoming successful and middle-class without having to blow themselves
up, we need to still leave an enforcement mechanism. We will give you a chance if you renounce your
identity. Maybe you don’t
have to renounce it explicitly, but at least you have to do it subliminally. Here’s
an example: In the December 11, 2002 edition of that left-wing rag
The Nation [HISSES] – I know, I know, why
do I read that tripe? – John Nichols wrote about a black professor
at a Southern university who publicly criticized the founder of the
Ku Klux Klan. Immediately,
a nationwide group of 30,000 individuals forced the university to
sanction the professor, who ultimately had to leave.
Not a single black organization had the spine to defend him. That’s what I mean by a self-regulating enforcement mechanism.
If they cross the line – and that includes defending anyone
who crosses the line – the retribution must be swift and sure.
But for everybody else, there’s the escape hatch, the pressure
valve, the possibility to attain wealth and happiness in our great
society. They won’t, but they’ll
think they can, and that’s what matters. In short,
we want to achieve a situation like the one we have in America today:
Thanks to the pressure valve and the enforcement mechanism, few if
any successful blacks today identify in any way with the radical politics
of their forebears in the ’60s and ’70s.
Hell, many of them even vote with us.
[LAUGHTER] Affirmative action, my friends, was the weapon
that ended the culture war that began in the 1960s. But culture
is not so easily expurgated. Look
at rap, look at jazz. No Afro-American
today can speak a single word of Yoruba, but the culture is still
there. Like a bump in a rug. But we can deal with that too. What weapon do we have in our arsenal that
is so powerful that it can eviscerate an entire culture’s will to
resist? The answer, my friends, is simple. Send
in the clowns. Send
in the gangsta rappers! Their
message is exactly what we want the Palestinian youth
to hear. Faux rebellion without
a trace of a real political message.
Your parents don’t like it?
It’s because they’re not hip.
All that matters is money and ho’s? (If you’ll pardon me.)
Perfect. Then the youth
won’t be worried about history or UN resolutions. We want
to focus on music because it’s one of the non-threatening aspects
of culture. Today, in America, during Black History Month,
all you get regaled by are stories told by, well, story-tellers. And not stories about slave revolts either.
They’re festivals of food and fun, as I heard someone put it
once. Nothing angry. If we
can fuse Arab culture with gangsta hip hop, we can destroy it from
the inside. So what we need to do is what we did with Eastern
Europe. There, we sent in
Coca Cola, so to speak. It
totally undermined the Soviet culture, paving the way for free markets
and prostitutes – I mean, profits.
All this
is just a sketch. We need
to fill in the details. But
hopefully, by 2020, we’ll have solved this most vexing of problems. And if
that doesn’t work we can always infect the blood supply. [APPLAUSE] Prof.
Jonathan David Farley is a mathematician and Science Fellow at Stanford
University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Seed Magazine has named him one of “15 people
who have shaped the global conversation about science in 2005” ([email protected]). |
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