Press Action ::: Press Action Hero of the Week: GLEN T. MARTIN

Friday, January 10, 2003

Press Action Hero of the Week: GLEN T. MARTIN

Today’s sketch of the views of Glen T. Martin officially launches a new feature known as Press Action Hero of the Week. Press Action each week will recognize a person who has written, edited, compiled or articulated a work that has advanced the cause of peace, freedom, fun and understanding. Watch here every Friday afternoon for the unveiling of the Press Action Hero of the Week.

In an age in which we cringe upon learning about yet another roundup of Muslim residents unlucky enough to have been born in a blacklisted country and in which we grow ever more pessimistic as we read about the enforcement of increasingly restrictive laws, Glen T. Martin, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Radford University in southwestern Virginia, breaks through the fog of propaganda to become one of the first commentators in the United States to make the dreaded comparison.

In a commentary published in the Jan. 2 Roanoke Times, Martin wrote about how every new piece of security legislation passed by Congress since Sept. 11, 2001 has stripped away a layer of freedom from U.S. residents, moving us too close for comfort to life in Germany under the Nazis.

“But what once separated the United States from Nazi Germany was the protection of civil liberties for American citizens,” Martin wrote. “Today, people of the United States have given up their rights through the ‘Patriot Act,’ the ‘Homeland Security Act’ and the Pentagon’s new system of ‘Total Information Awareness.’ The astonishing thing about this ‘land of the free’ is that most Americans now have no effective rights and do not care.”

Martin says these titles, “Patriot” and “Homeland,” sound all too similar to the language of the Nazis. “A common slogan of the Nazi regime was ‘the highest freedom is a noble slavery of the heart.’ People are free, the slogan meant, when they have enslaved their hearts to the ‘homeland’ in absolute obedience to their government,” Martin wrote. “‘Deutschland, Deckhand, uber alles!’ they shouted. Blind loyalty, patriotism, and emotion must triumph over liberty, reason and sound judgment.”

Martin has written several columns for the Roanoke Times over the past few years, many of which have opened the eyes of the uninitiated in the region. The cities of Radford and nearby Blacksburg, home to Virginia Tech, are college towns with pockets of intellectual independence. But don’t mistake the region for a Berkeley, Cambridge or Chapel Hill. When Martin, a native of upstate New York who earned his college degrees in the 1960s, expresses his opinions on U.S. policy in Radford, they get noticed.

In response to a piece that Martin got published in January 2002 in the Roanoke Times, in which he denounced the U.S. mass media as a “cheering section for our military destruction of other peoples” and railed against government secrecy, some readers raised a stink.

“With the possible exception of Ramsey Clark, you are the most vulgar and venomous anti-American propagandist of our times,” one reader responded in a letter to the editor. “It troubles me to think of you as a professor, crouching like an old dragon over all those young minds, taking advantage of the old adage: ‘If you are 20 and not a liberal, you have no heart.’”

In this age of the World Wide Web, Martin’s writings have attracted a wider audience. Jim Sparkman, editor of the ChronWatch website, a watchdog of the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote after reading Martin’s piece, “It’s getting so that we could fill NutWatch with entries from college professors.”

With all of the noxious attacks against him, Martin, who also serves as president of a group called International Philosophers for Peace, still is able to retain a measure of optimism that the tide will turn. “On the one hand, there are many mainstream people who are becoming very worried and beginning to speak out already,” Martin tells Press Action. “This is a very hopeful sign. Apparently some 30 cities are considering resolutions like the one made by the City Council of San Francisco ordering local police and authorities not to cooperate with federal agents in violations of privacy rights or other constitutional protections.”

On the other hand, Martin says racism remains a very real factor in the United States. “As long as repression is happening to blacks, which has been happening for many years now, or to people of Arab background, most ordinary folks are not likely to care.”

Ordinary Americans, without realizing it, have been schooled in “obedience to authority” for their entire lives, Martin explains. “Public school, teachers, relations with police, with professionals — lawyers, doctors, administrators — all cultivate the habit of obedience without questioning.”

Sept. 11, 2001 was a perfect excuse to elevate the “war on terrorism” to global proportions and to solidify the empire and world domination, Martin explains. “But because of the ‘blowback’ from this drive to world domination, that is, because a vocal minority within the U.S. and within the empire are resisting this, freedom had to be sacrificed at home as well as abroad.”

Martin blames big business for some of the U.S. government’s swashbuckling ways. “The corporations want people to be free to consume, but have never really cared about freedom as such, as their active relationship with Nazi Germany illustrates as well as their willingness to operate in all the brutal regimes worldwide under U.S. puppet dictators, from Somoza in Nicaragua to Suharto in Indonesia,” he says.

In her book, If You Love This Planet, Helen Caldicott shows that the big corporations have spent millions propagandizing the American public. The result, Martin says, is that now many people, including editors and journalists, believe without question that (1) American is good and stands for freedom and human rights in the world and (2) corporate capitalism is the only system compatible with democracy and (3) massive militarism is necessary if we are to remain free and safe.

“The media system is right at the heart of the system of private corporate accumulation of wealth,” Martin says. “Its primary function is to promote this, not to inform, nor raise critical issues, nor get people to think. Indeed, its primary function is to lull people into living in a consumerist world of childish idiocy no matter how bad the world gets with environmental destruction, militarism, population explosion, human rights abuses, or poverty and misery.”

Once again, Martin accents the positive by imagining a scenario in which the current system begins to wilt under pressure from action at the grass roots level. “If people were informed about how bad things are, and about the U.S. role in making them this way, the entire system of mindless consumption would begin to collapse.”

The Internet has helped in loosening the establishment’s control over how people think, Martin argues. “I think the Internet has been a tremendous boon in this respect,” he explains. “Information and critical thought can get out that one would never see in the mainstream media. That may be one of the incentives the rulers have to eliminate freedom. The Internet is having the opposite effect and is stimulating ever greater unrest. That is where we all have important work to do and can really make a difference.”

-- Mark Hand