Paradigmatic Conflicts within the American Liberation Movement

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Historians will no doubt write books about the anomaly of liberal support for Likudnik Israeli efforts to destroy the Hamas government of Palestine while simultaneously supporting the Palestinian people who freely elected this government.  This phenomenon of leftist support of rightists exists in every country, and especially in the West, but there are differences in how it works out in different countries.

  In Europe, according to an article critiquing the establishment left by the self-professed Marxist and atheist, Nadine Rosa-Rosso, the left opposes religion because it has always been an instrument of colonialism and therefore opposes Hamas as a religious organization, even though Hamas should be a model of an anti-imperialist national liberation movement.  Another reason, she suggests, why the left supports Israel against Hamas is that the left traditionally has absorbed the Western colonialist view that all non-Europeans are too backward to liberate themselves and therefore must be Westerninzed by abandoning religion before they are ready to join the anti-imperialist front.  This, she says, explains why the left supported the people of Gaza but opposed their legitimately elected government and why it supports Israel in the drive to destroy the people’s choice in Hamas.

  The headline of the French website Res Publica following the mass demonstration in Paris on January 3, 2009, immediately after the land-invasion of Gaza, reads: “We refuse to be trapped by the Islamists of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah!” The article continues: “Some activists of the left and far left (who turned out only in small numbers) were literally drowned in a crowd whose views are at odds with the spirit of the French Republican movement and of the twenty-first century Left.  Over 90% of the demonstrators championed a fundamentalist and communitarian worldview based on the clash of civilizations, which is anti-secular and anti-Republican.” 

  In other words, the clash is viewed by European liberals as between left and right in Western terms.  National liberation movements dominated by Muslims are on the wrong side, namely, with the reactionary right. 

  In America, the clash of left versus right takes the form of paradigmatic conflict between establishment liberalism and paleo-conservativism, which opposes Neo-Conservatism.  The Founders of America, who based the Great American Experiment on faith-based and principled traditionalism rooted in natural law, are considered by American leftists to be rightest, even though they are the most principled force against the true-rightists who hijacked the Republican Party in a drive for power after 9/11.

  A quintessentially American example of the dynamics within the American Liberation Movement is the demonstration planned for April 15, 2009, “Tax Slavery Day,” in front of the Federal Reserve Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.  Move On, which is now a major supporter, is confrontational and negative and wants to “End the Fed” as the source of oppression by the monied elites who have captured the White House.  The generically religious groups, such as the original organizers, the Center for Economic and Social Justice, http://www.cesj.org, and the American Revolutionary Party, http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us, want to reform the Fed and all its related institutions as a key to transforming the American paradigm and policies of global leadership from the drive for power to the search for justice. 

  Rather than abolish the Fed without agreement on a substitute, one moderate and now so-called rightest solution, is to transform the Fed into a fourth branch of government, like the Judiciary, so that it would be less subject to special-interest manipulation.  This would give it the freedom to create money, in accordance with Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, as an asset-backed currency with real value rather only the negative value of debt.  The new fourth-branch Fed would also be free to create money without the burden of interest, which would both stimulate growth and provide freedom to eliminate the existing barriers to the broadening of capital ownership.  This would promote economic justice and reverse the trends toward a rapidly growing wealth gap both within and among nations, which, in turn, may become the major stimulus to worldwide terrorism.

  During the Obama Administration, the conflict in the Holy Land may be sidelined in order to gain domestic support for larger issues of more immediate impact on America, such as the alliance of China and Russia with Iran, Chinese support for Iranian plans to create a new world currency denominated in a basket of real goods, including oil, and an emerging global consensus on the need to support indigenous leaders instead of foreign installed central governments in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.  Unilateral preemption, either military or political, has proved to be inadequate to address these issues.  The alternative is the much more challenging task of promoting peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice based on interfaith understanding and on active cooperation in interfaith solidarity.