british citizens?
And if we really are talking about an inclusive and cohesive national community, then why are all the models and 'equivalents' drawn from Europe or America? This is a country with citizens descended from Asian, Africans and Caribbean nations. What about those stories and traditions--the great traditions of uprisings against slavery and struggles against imperialism? Should we not be memorialising them too and learning about traditions of democracy and debate outside Europe? For it is not only false but counter-productive to talk about ideas of liberty and participatory governance as though they were purely European ideas; it encourages false oppositions which each chauvinists on all sides can take refuge in. Until ethnic minorities, including British Muslims, can participate in a 'story' and history which reminds them that they too come from great traditions of debate, dissent and humane thinking, 'Britishness' will continue to be a narrative aimed at outsiders expected to integrate by swallowing its complacent assumptions wholesale - thereby denying their own cultural heritages of tolerance and diversity.
(...) We DO need a debate on national community and common values. But until it is offered as a challenge (for politicians as much as the citizen-subjects) and goal to strive for rather than a given 'story', we will keep circling the wagons and rehearsing the same old divisive cliches. Let's wrest Britishness and citizenship away not only from the right, but from Brownian myth-making as well. Then we'll have something to celebrate.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
blair's greatest hits:
What are the war lies that you will remember Blair for? Here are a few of them:
(...) On Aug 20, 1998, the US bombed the al-Shifa chemicals plant in Sudan, claiming it was a “terrorist base”. The plant turned out to provide 50 percent of Sudan’s medicines; its destruction left the country with no supplies of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria. Tony Blair and the then defence minister, George Robertson, rallied to the cause, claiming that America was justified and defending the apparently unassailable evidence. They were, however, alone in supporting the action and rejecting accusations that Clinton had ordered the attacks as a distraction from the unfolding Monica Lewinsky saga. Noam Chomsky was one of many who pointed out: “One can scarcely try to estimate the colossal toll of the Sudan bombing, even apart from the probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese victims.”
(...) NATO, led by the US and Britain, launched military action knowing that it would provoke a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign by Milosevic. This indeed occurred in stark fashion, with immense consequences, which then enabled NATO leaders to claim they were acting to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe that they had provoked. ... The war was undertaken without UN authorisation and complete with the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the use of cluster bombs. “We will carry on pounding day after day after day, until our objectives are secured”, Tony Blair said two weeks into the bombing in April 1999, revealing the brutal reality of NATO’s supposedly “humanitarian war” over Kosovo.
(...) Tony Blair, Oct 2, 2001: “To the Afghan people we make this commitment. The conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the outside world has so many times before.” ... “When asked whether life was better now than under the Taliban, Fowzea Olomi, 40, the director of the women’s centre [in Helmand], laughs: ‘The Taliban have gone?’ Life now, she says, is worse.” Terri Judd in the Independent, June 13 2007
What are the war lies that you will remember Blair for? Here are a few of them:
(...) On Aug 20, 1998, the US bombed the al-Shifa chemicals plant in Sudan, claiming it was a “terrorist base”. The plant turned out to provide 50 percent of Sudan’s medicines; its destruction left the country with no supplies of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria. Tony Blair and the then defence minister, George Robertson, rallied to the cause, claiming that America was justified and defending the apparently unassailable evidence. They were, however, alone in supporting the action and rejecting accusations that Clinton had ordered the attacks as a distraction from the unfolding Monica Lewinsky saga. Noam Chomsky was one of many who pointed out: “One can scarcely try to estimate the colossal toll of the Sudan bombing, even apart from the probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese victims.”
(...) NATO, led by the US and Britain, launched military action knowing that it would provoke a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign by Milosevic. This indeed occurred in stark fashion, with immense consequences, which then enabled NATO leaders to claim they were acting to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe that they had provoked. ... The war was undertaken without UN authorisation and complete with the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the use of cluster bombs. “We will carry on pounding day after day after day, until our objectives are secured”, Tony Blair said two weeks into the bombing in April 1999, revealing the brutal reality of NATO’s supposedly “humanitarian war” over Kosovo.
(...) Tony Blair, Oct 2, 2001: “To the Afghan people we make this commitment. The conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the outside world has so many times before.” ... “When asked whether life was better now than under the Taliban, Fowzea Olomi, 40, the director of the women’s centre [in Helmand], laughs: ‘The Taliban have gone?’ Life now, she says, is worse.” Terri Judd in the Independent, June 13 2007
the EU's agrofuel folly
Despite growing public concern about the risks associated to agrofuels(1), the European Union (EU) is throwing its weight behind the promotion of these often very harmful crops. In March 2007, a proposal set targets to increase the use of agrofuels in all road transport fuel to 10 percent by 2020. The Commission is also planning to channel large amounts of EU public funds towards the research & development of agrofuel projects.
(...) However, a closer look at agrofuels, reveals a devastating picture; a so-called solution accompanied by a raft of new problems.(2) Agrofuels:
- Compete with food for agricultural resources, and their expansion has already resulted in rising food prices which directly threatens the food security of the world's poorest communities;
- Increase the pressure on land which causes, amongst other things, an increased deforestation rate;
- Are farmed in huge mono-crop plantations, involving intensive use of pesticides and fertilisers, and in many cases with the risk of genetically modified contamination. This threatens biodiversity along with other environmental hazards;
- threaten land rights as they are accompanied by plans for monoculture expansion, which tends to be controlled by big agribusiness and wealthy land owners. This threatens the human rights of small farmers and indigenous peoples across the Global South as they are evicted from their lands or face ill-health, poor working conditions and land conflicts.
(...) Furthermore, to add insult to injury, there is growing evidence that agrofuels are indeed aggravating, not mitigating, climate change.
(...) Was the Commission aware of this before backing agrofuels with a host of policy measures? According to an official Commission impact assessment, completed in 2006, they were.(3) This document mentions that, "increased use of biofuels in the EU will be accompanied by an increased external demand for biofuels and their feedstocks, which is likely to have various effects on developing countries... In addition, there are substantial CO2 losses if grassland is ploughed up or forest cleared. These losses can be expected to outweigh CO2 gains from biofuels for many years." It clearly states that "there will be increasing pressures on eco-sensitive areas, notably rainforests, where several millions of hectares could be transformed into plantations." Among the social effects the paper acknowledges the competition with food, the higher food prices which would hit the poor in developing countries and the pressure on vulnerable communities (to move away or drastically adapt their lifestyles).
(...) The Commission's agrofuel policy has not been driven by the fight against climate change, it has sought to secure energy supply and serve the needs of large farmers and agribusiness, alongside the automotive, oil and biotech sectors, all with a direct interest in maintaining the existing status quo. The Commission has enabled these corporate interests to enter into the policy dialogue and design policy outcomes, by setting up advisory groups with a clear industry bias.
(...) There is a need for a broader public debate at EU level about the risks associated with agrofuels set in the context of the problem they seek to address. This must involve a wider range of stakeholders, including those directly affected in the global South. Furthermore, the process for determining policy through research and development where public money is passed to industry players with a direct interest in a certain outcome has no democratic justification and must be challenged.
(...) The automotive, oil and biotech industries are the most involved in the design of the EU agrofuel research policy and they all have their own reasons to pursue the expansion of agrofuels.
(...) "Road transport accounts for 30% of total energy consumption in the EU, and it is 98% dependent on fossil fuels. The growing transport sector is considered to be one of the main reasons for the EU failing to meet the Kyoto targets.(18) It is expected that 90% of the increase of CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2010 will be attributable to transport.(19) Despite the huge negative impact of road transport in the overall EU greenhouse gas emissions and the threats posed by climate change, the European Commission is not putting the required effort into reducing the volume of transport. Current trends show the reverse with freight transport by road, and private vehicles for personal transport on the increase." (20)
(...) ...the negative impacts already associated with large-scale monoculture containing genetically engineered crops will be exacerbated by the large expansion of agrofuels. GM contamination is likely to increase and become more complex, when food crops are engineered with traits designed for non-food purposes.(27) Currently, GM crops are mainly for animal feed, and the same corporations that control these crops and inputs for animal feed are the ones set to benefit from their use for agrofuels.
(...) According to Berkeley professor Miguel Altieri and Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez, the agrofuel agenda offers biotech companies like Monsanto "the opportunity to irreversibly convert agriculture to genetically engineered crops. Presently 52% of corn, 89% of soy and 50% of canola in the US is genetically modified (GM)." The authors argue that "the expansion of corn genetically tailored for special ethanol processing plants will remove all practical barriers to the permanent contamination of all non-GMO crops."(28)
(...) In the EU consumer resistance has to a large extent kept GM crops out. With agrofuels, the biotech industry has a chance to gain access by the back door, presenting GM crops as energy crops, not food crops. However, the risks of contamination to non-GM crops remain.
(...) Both industry and governments are responding to growing concerns about the large expansion of agrofuels by advocating second-generation agrofuels. Using the whole plant instead of isolated parts, it is claimed can achieve a better CO2 performance and reduce production costs. Furthermore, there is advantage because a wider range of feedstocks can be used, such as trees, plant waste, grass or straw. So for example, using trees instead of food crops is offered as an opportunity to avoid agrofuel's competition with food supplies. Yet, this approach is certainly not without problems. For example, large tree plantations will still compete with food in terms of land and water use. An additional problem of using whole plants is that more is being taken out of the soil as reduced organic matter remains, and this has a negative impact on ecosystems. More fundamentally, irrespective of the pros and cons and risks of individual agrofuels the main problem will still be the scale needed to meet governments' targets. There is no way of avoiding the fact that this means large monoculture plantations, in most cases controlled by big agribusiness firms and wealthy land owners, so is accompanied by the predictable negative environmental and social costs that this way of organising agricultural production brings.
(...) Activist and writer George Monbiot puts it clearly: "It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuels to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless."(33) The reality is that the EU's agrofuel folly, with its corporate bias, will do nothing to stop climate change and will have a severe impact on the global South. "While Europeans maintain their lifestyle based on automobile culture, the population of Southern countries will have less and less land for food crops and will loose its food sovereignty"(34) warned Latin American networks of civil society groups when they asked the EU not to adopt agrofuels mandatory targets.
(...) If the EU is genuinely interested in averting climate change then policies need to reflect opportunities for fundamental change focusing on reducing energy consumption and the EU's global ecological and social footprint. In the meanwhile the only sensible thing would be to establish a moratorium on all EU agrofuel targets.
(...) Large scale expansion of agrofuels creates competition for the use of agricultural resources pitting food production against fuel production. In other words, the over 800 million people suffering from hunger in the world, will compete for food/energy crops with over 800 million motor road vehicles (a figure that is fast increasing), in a highly unbalanced struggle. In reality, world food reserves are already at their lowest for decades, and for several years demand for grains and oilseeds has surpassed supply. Already, expansion of agrofuel production is resulting in rapid food price rises. For example the increasing demand for ethanol in the US has driven maize export price up by 70%. The knock-on effect of this has been a contributory factor to social unrest in Mexico, where tortillas (corn) is a staple diet.
(...) Increased demand for agrofuels in industrialised countries undermines food sovereignty across the globe. Hot-spot countries for agrofuel crop production such as Malaysia or Argentina, are being encouraged to turn land into fuel export zones, rather than concentrate on local, diverse agricultural production for domestic need.
(...) As an attempt to balance up these consequences, agrofuels are presented as an 'opportunity' for the developing world, with many studies taking as given, that they will help rural development and create employment. Yet the development of agrofuels is likely to follow the typical market-led pattern of monoculture expansion controlled by big agribusiness and wealthy land-owners. The connection between mono-agricultural production and the demise of small scale farming systems bringing with it increasing impoverishment is well documented. It leads to 'farming without farmers', where people are evicted by economic pressure (which can involve the use of violence and irregular 'land buying') and poisoning by agrochemicals. In employment terms, people are often replaced by mechanisation or face very poor working conditions. Growing popular resistance to the large-scale expansion of agrofuels in some countries of the South reinforces this case that the poor are not the ones who will benefit.
(...) Optimistic proponents of agrofuels as energy efficiency and CO2 neutral, have not taken into account the massive land use issues thrown up by their production. Nor have they considered the energy inputs involved, mainly derived from burning fossil fuels, in the growing process (fertilizers, pesticides, etc), processing crops into fuel and transporting to their final use point.
(...) A very relevant example for Europe, is the case of palm oil from South East Asia. If the EU is to meet the mandatory targets that it has proposed, a big bulk of the crop for agrofuel use in the EU will be palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia. A study by Delft Hydraulics and Wetlands International(36) reveals that the decomposing of peatland can release 70 to 100 tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year. The report shows that European use of Southeast Asian palm oil would generate up to 10 times more CO2 than the equivalent emissions from burning fossil diesel. Indonesia alone holds 60% of all tropical peatlands, and most of these are predicted to drain, mostly for plantations, in coming years or decades leading to more than 40 billion tones of carbon emissions.(37) This is the equivalent of around six years of global fossil fuel emissions.(38) In spite of the Commission's claims to the contrary, EU imports will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite growing public concern about the risks associated to agrofuels(1), the European Union (EU) is throwing its weight behind the promotion of these often very harmful crops. In March 2007, a proposal set targets to increase the use of agrofuels in all road transport fuel to 10 percent by 2020. The Commission is also planning to channel large amounts of EU public funds towards the research & development of agrofuel projects.
(...) However, a closer look at agrofuels, reveals a devastating picture; a so-called solution accompanied by a raft of new problems.(2) Agrofuels:
- Compete with food for agricultural resources, and their expansion has already resulted in rising food prices which directly threatens the food security of the world's poorest communities;
- Increase the pressure on land which causes, amongst other things, an increased deforestation rate;
- Are farmed in huge mono-crop plantations, involving intensive use of pesticides and fertilisers, and in many cases with the risk of genetically modified contamination. This threatens biodiversity along with other environmental hazards;
- threaten land rights as they are accompanied by plans for monoculture expansion, which tends to be controlled by big agribusiness and wealthy land owners. This threatens the human rights of small farmers and indigenous peoples across the Global South as they are evicted from their lands or face ill-health, poor working conditions and land conflicts.
(...) Furthermore, to add insult to injury, there is growing evidence that agrofuels are indeed aggravating, not mitigating, climate change.
(...) Was the Commission aware of this before backing agrofuels with a host of policy measures? According to an official Commission impact assessment, completed in 2006, they were.(3) This document mentions that, "increased use of biofuels in the EU will be accompanied by an increased external demand for biofuels and their feedstocks, which is likely to have various effects on developing countries... In addition, there are substantial CO2 losses if grassland is ploughed up or forest cleared. These losses can be expected to outweigh CO2 gains from biofuels for many years." It clearly states that "there will be increasing pressures on eco-sensitive areas, notably rainforests, where several millions of hectares could be transformed into plantations." Among the social effects the paper acknowledges the competition with food, the higher food prices which would hit the poor in developing countries and the pressure on vulnerable communities (to move away or drastically adapt their lifestyles).
(...) The Commission's agrofuel policy has not been driven by the fight against climate change, it has sought to secure energy supply and serve the needs of large farmers and agribusiness, alongside the automotive, oil and biotech sectors, all with a direct interest in maintaining the existing status quo. The Commission has enabled these corporate interests to enter into the policy dialogue and design policy outcomes, by setting up advisory groups with a clear industry bias.
(...) There is a need for a broader public debate at EU level about the risks associated with agrofuels set in the context of the problem they seek to address. This must involve a wider range of stakeholders, including those directly affected in the global South. Furthermore, the process for determining policy through research and development where public money is passed to industry players with a direct interest in a certain outcome has no democratic justification and must be challenged.
(...) The automotive, oil and biotech industries are the most involved in the design of the EU agrofuel research policy and they all have their own reasons to pursue the expansion of agrofuels.
(...) "Road transport accounts for 30% of total energy consumption in the EU, and it is 98% dependent on fossil fuels. The growing transport sector is considered to be one of the main reasons for the EU failing to meet the Kyoto targets.(18) It is expected that 90% of the increase of CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2010 will be attributable to transport.(19) Despite the huge negative impact of road transport in the overall EU greenhouse gas emissions and the threats posed by climate change, the European Commission is not putting the required effort into reducing the volume of transport. Current trends show the reverse with freight transport by road, and private vehicles for personal transport on the increase." (20)
(...) ...the negative impacts already associated with large-scale monoculture containing genetically engineered crops will be exacerbated by the large expansion of agrofuels. GM contamination is likely to increase and become more complex, when food crops are engineered with traits designed for non-food purposes.(27) Currently, GM crops are mainly for animal feed, and the same corporations that control these crops and inputs for animal feed are the ones set to benefit from their use for agrofuels.
(...) According to Berkeley professor Miguel Altieri and Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez, the agrofuel agenda offers biotech companies like Monsanto "the opportunity to irreversibly convert agriculture to genetically engineered crops. Presently 52% of corn, 89% of soy and 50% of canola in the US is genetically modified (GM)." The authors argue that "the expansion of corn genetically tailored for special ethanol processing plants will remove all practical barriers to the permanent contamination of all non-GMO crops."(28)
(...) In the EU consumer resistance has to a large extent kept GM crops out. With agrofuels, the biotech industry has a chance to gain access by the back door, presenting GM crops as energy crops, not food crops. However, the risks of contamination to non-GM crops remain.
(...) Both industry and governments are responding to growing concerns about the large expansion of agrofuels by advocating second-generation agrofuels. Using the whole plant instead of isolated parts, it is claimed can achieve a better CO2 performance and reduce production costs. Furthermore, there is advantage because a wider range of feedstocks can be used, such as trees, plant waste, grass or straw. So for example, using trees instead of food crops is offered as an opportunity to avoid agrofuel's competition with food supplies. Yet, this approach is certainly not without problems. For example, large tree plantations will still compete with food in terms of land and water use. An additional problem of using whole plants is that more is being taken out of the soil as reduced organic matter remains, and this has a negative impact on ecosystems. More fundamentally, irrespective of the pros and cons and risks of individual agrofuels the main problem will still be the scale needed to meet governments' targets. There is no way of avoiding the fact that this means large monoculture plantations, in most cases controlled by big agribusiness firms and wealthy land owners, so is accompanied by the predictable negative environmental and social costs that this way of organising agricultural production brings.
(...) Activist and writer George Monbiot puts it clearly: "It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuels to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless."(33) The reality is that the EU's agrofuel folly, with its corporate bias, will do nothing to stop climate change and will have a severe impact on the global South. "While Europeans maintain their lifestyle based on automobile culture, the population of Southern countries will have less and less land for food crops and will loose its food sovereignty"(34) warned Latin American networks of civil society groups when they asked the EU not to adopt agrofuels mandatory targets.
(...) If the EU is genuinely interested in averting climate change then policies need to reflect opportunities for fundamental change focusing on reducing energy consumption and the EU's global ecological and social footprint. In the meanwhile the only sensible thing would be to establish a moratorium on all EU agrofuel targets.
(...) Large scale expansion of agrofuels creates competition for the use of agricultural resources pitting food production against fuel production. In other words, the over 800 million people suffering from hunger in the world, will compete for food/energy crops with over 800 million motor road vehicles (a figure that is fast increasing), in a highly unbalanced struggle. In reality, world food reserves are already at their lowest for decades, and for several years demand for grains and oilseeds has surpassed supply. Already, expansion of agrofuel production is resulting in rapid food price rises. For example the increasing demand for ethanol in the US has driven maize export price up by 70%. The knock-on effect of this has been a contributory factor to social unrest in Mexico, where tortillas (corn) is a staple diet.
(...) Increased demand for agrofuels in industrialised countries undermines food sovereignty across the globe. Hot-spot countries for agrofuel crop production such as Malaysia or Argentina, are being encouraged to turn land into fuel export zones, rather than concentrate on local, diverse agricultural production for domestic need.
(...) As an attempt to balance up these consequences, agrofuels are presented as an 'opportunity' for the developing world, with many studies taking as given, that they will help rural development and create employment. Yet the development of agrofuels is likely to follow the typical market-led pattern of monoculture expansion controlled by big agribusiness and wealthy land-owners. The connection between mono-agricultural production and the demise of small scale farming systems bringing with it increasing impoverishment is well documented. It leads to 'farming without farmers', where people are evicted by economic pressure (which can involve the use of violence and irregular 'land buying') and poisoning by agrochemicals. In employment terms, people are often replaced by mechanisation or face very poor working conditions. Growing popular resistance to the large-scale expansion of agrofuels in some countries of the South reinforces this case that the poor are not the ones who will benefit.
(...) Optimistic proponents of agrofuels as energy efficiency and CO2 neutral, have not taken into account the massive land use issues thrown up by their production. Nor have they considered the energy inputs involved, mainly derived from burning fossil fuels, in the growing process (fertilizers, pesticides, etc), processing crops into fuel and transporting to their final use point.
(...) A very relevant example for Europe, is the case of palm oil from South East Asia. If the EU is to meet the mandatory targets that it has proposed, a big bulk of the crop for agrofuel use in the EU will be palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia. A study by Delft Hydraulics and Wetlands International(36) reveals that the decomposing of peatland can release 70 to 100 tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year. The report shows that European use of Southeast Asian palm oil would generate up to 10 times more CO2 than the equivalent emissions from burning fossil diesel. Indonesia alone holds 60% of all tropical peatlands, and most of these are predicted to drain, mostly for plantations, in coming years or decades leading to more than 40 billion tones of carbon emissions.(37) This is the equivalent of around six years of global fossil fuel emissions.(38) In spite of the Commission's claims to the contrary, EU imports will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
who should bomb iran first?
You would not know it from this media performance, but in fact there is a second conceivable question: Is the corporate media biased in favour of the state-corporate establishment of which it is a part? But this is one of the great mainstream taboos and is essentially never discussed. Remarkably, then, it turns out that the perennial media focus on the claim that the media is “left-leaning” is itself symptomatic of the reality that the media is anything but!
(...) Last year, John Pilger presented a more sobering picture to an audience at Columbia University: “If we journalists are ever to reclaim the honour of our craft, we need to understand, at least, the historic task that great power assigns us. This is to ‘soften-up‘ the public for rapacious attack on countries that are no threat to us.”
(...) At the top of the emailed version of the June 21 edition of the New York Times, this “advertisement” appeared in large red letters: “Should We Bomb Iran? “Vote in This Urgent Poll”
(...) In the 1,000-word article that followed, the term “al Qaeda” was used eight times. This was a transparent attempt to equate Iraqi insurgents with the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks, much as Bush attempted to associate Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda in the minds of the American public.
You would not know it from this media performance, but in fact there is a second conceivable question: Is the corporate media biased in favour of the state-corporate establishment of which it is a part? But this is one of the great mainstream taboos and is essentially never discussed. Remarkably, then, it turns out that the perennial media focus on the claim that the media is “left-leaning” is itself symptomatic of the reality that the media is anything but!
(...) Last year, John Pilger presented a more sobering picture to an audience at Columbia University: “If we journalists are ever to reclaim the honour of our craft, we need to understand, at least, the historic task that great power assigns us. This is to ‘soften-up‘ the public for rapacious attack on countries that are no threat to us.”
(...) At the top of the emailed version of the June 21 edition of the New York Times, this “advertisement” appeared in large red letters: “Should We Bomb Iran? “Vote in This Urgent Poll”
(...) In the 1,000-word article that followed, the term “al Qaeda” was used eight times. This was a transparent attempt to equate Iraqi insurgents with the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks, much as Bush attempted to associate Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda in the minds of the American public.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
giuliani's ignorance, idiocy, and unqualified stupidity
Telling the audience at a Maryland synagogue that Israelis and Americans are now bound in the same war against Islamic militants, Giuliani stressed the need to be "on offense against terrorism" to warm applause.
(...) "What happened in Gaza is a microcosm of what's going to happen in Baghdad" if the United States withdraws, he said. "It will become something that inflames the entire region."
(...) "I'm not blaming anybody back then," he said. "What I am saying is, I do blame people after September 11. Now you have to get it. Now you have to understand that the terrorists are in a war against us. George Bush is not making it up."
Telling the audience at a Maryland synagogue that Israelis and Americans are now bound in the same war against Islamic militants, Giuliani stressed the need to be "on offense against terrorism" to warm applause.
(...) "What happened in Gaza is a microcosm of what's going to happen in Baghdad" if the United States withdraws, he said. "It will become something that inflames the entire region."
(...) "I'm not blaming anybody back then," he said. "What I am saying is, I do blame people after September 11. Now you have to get it. Now you have to understand that the terrorists are in a war against us. George Bush is not making it up."
the banality of greed
This week’s evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The report, only one of many about Halliburton’s recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad’s super-secure Green Zone. While parent company Halliburton insults U.S. taxpayers by relocating its headquarters to the tax shelter of Dubai, subsidiary KBR has been spun off to focus more directly on the American military contracts that form the core of its operations.
(...) It is claimed by American officials that KBR’s accountability issues are being addressed. In one instance cited, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad—a spiraling enterprise well on its way to becoming a nation-within-a-nation akin to the Vatican in Italy—announced that, as a means of avoiding food theft, its personnel would no longer be allowed to bring large bags into the eating halls. Such sacrifice for the mission of securing Iraqi freedom.
This week’s evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The report, only one of many about Halliburton’s recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad’s super-secure Green Zone. While parent company Halliburton insults U.S. taxpayers by relocating its headquarters to the tax shelter of Dubai, subsidiary KBR has been spun off to focus more directly on the American military contracts that form the core of its operations.
(...) It is claimed by American officials that KBR’s accountability issues are being addressed. In one instance cited, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad—a spiraling enterprise well on its way to becoming a nation-within-a-nation akin to the Vatican in Italy—announced that, as a means of avoiding food theft, its personnel would no longer be allowed to bring large bags into the eating halls. Such sacrifice for the mission of securing Iraqi freedom.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
divide and rule, israeli-style
Whether intended or not, sanctions proved a very effective tool for destroying the internal bonds that held Iraqi society together. Destitution and hunger are powerful incentives to turn on one's neighbor as well as one's enemy. A society where resources -- food, medicines, water and electricity -- are in short supply is also a society where everyone looks out for himself. It is a society that, with a little prompting, can easily be made to tear itself apart.
(...) In place of Saddam, the Americans created a safe haven known as the Green Zone from which its occupation regime could loosely police the country and oversee the theft of Iraq's oil, while also sitting back and watching a sectarian civil war between the Sunni and Shia populations spiral out of control and decimate the Iraqi population.
(...) What did Washington hope to achieve? Pipes offers a clue: "When Sunni terrorists target Shiites and vice-versa, non-Muslims [that is, US occupation forces and their allies] are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one." In other words, enabling a civil war in Iraq was far preferable to allowing Iraqis to unite and mount an effective resistance to the US occupation. After all, Iraqi deaths -- at least 650,000 of them, according to the last realistic count -- are as good as worthless, while US soldiers' lives cost votes back home.\
(...) it [the civil war] eroded the solidarity of ordinary Iraqis, depleting their energies and making them less likely to join or support the resistance to the occupation. The insurgency has remained a terrible irritation to US forces but not the fatal blow it might have been were the Sunni and Shia to fight side by side. As a result, the theft of Iraq's resources has been made easier.
(...) And second, in the longer term, civil war is making inevitable a slow process of communal partition and ethnic cleansing. Four million Iraqis are reported to have been forced either to leave the country or flee their homes. Iraq is being broken up into small ethnic and religious fiefdoms that will be easier to manage and manipulate.
(...) Is this the model for Gaza now and the West Bank later?
(...) It is worth recalling that neither Israel nor the US pushed for an easing of the sanctions on the Palestinian Authority after the national unity government of Hamas and Fatah was formed earlier this year. In fact, the US and Israel could barely conceal their panic at the development. The moment the Mecca agreement was signed, reports of US efforts to train and arm Fatah forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas became a newspaper staple.
(...) By engineering the destruction of the unity government, Israel and the US have ensured that there is no danger of a new Palestinian consensus emerging, one that might have cornered Israel into peace talks. A unity government might have found a formula offering Israel:
- limited recognition inside the pre-1967 borders in return for recognition of a Palestinian state and the territorial integrity of the West Bank and Gaza;
- a long-term ceasefire in return for Israel ending its campaign of constant violence and violations of Palestinian sovereignty;
- and a commitment to honor past agreements in return for Israel's abiding by UN resolutions and accepting a just solution for the Palestinian refugees.
(...) Instead, Hamas' dismal authority over the prison camp called Gaza and Fatah's bastard governance of the ghettoes called the West Bank offer a model more satisfying for Israel and the US -- and one not unlike Iraq. A sort of sheriff's divide and rule in the Wild West.
(...) Just as in Iraq, Israel and the US have made sure that no Palestinian strongman arises to replace Yasser Arafat. Just as in Iraq, they are encouraging civil war as an alternative to resistance to occupation, as Palestine's resources -- land, not oil -- are stolen. Just as in Iraq, they are causing a permanent and irreversible partition, in this case between the West Bank and Gaza, to create more easily managed territorial ghettoes. And just as in Iraq, the likely reaction is an even greater extremism from the Palestinians that will undermine their cause in the eyes of the international community.
(...) The goal will be to increase the strains between Hamas and Fatah to breaking point in the West Bank, but ensure that Fatah wins the confrontation there. Fatah is already militarily stronger and with generous patronage from Israel and the US -- including arms and training, and possibly the return of the Badr Brigade currently holed up in Jordan -- it should be able to rout Hamas. The difference in status between Gaza and the West Bank that has been long desired by Israel will be complete.
(...) The Palestinian people have already been carved up into a multitude of constituencies. There are the Palestinians under occupation, those living as second-class citizens of Israel, those allowed to remain "residents" of Jerusalem, and those dispersed to camps across the Middle East. Even within these groups, there are a host of sub-identities: refugees and non-refugees; refugees included as citizens in their host state and those excluded; occupied Palestinians living under the control of the Palestinian Authority and those under Israel's military government; and so on.
(...) Gaza can now be written off by the international community as a basket case. The Israeli media is currently awash with patronizing commentary from the political and security establishments about how to help avoid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including the possibility of air drops of aid over the Gaza "security fence" -- as though Gaza were Pakistan after an earthquake. From past experience, and the current menacing sounds from Israel's new Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, those food packages will quickly turn into bombs if Gaza does not keep quiet.
(...) at their meeting last week Olmert and Bush revived talk of Palestinian statehood. According to Olmert, Bush "wants to realize, while he is in office, the dream of creating a Palestinian state." Both are keen to make quick progress, a sure sign of mischief in the making. Certainly, they know they are now under no pressure to create the single viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza once promised by President Bush. An embattled Abbas will not be calling for the inclusion of Gaza in his ghetto-fiefdom.
(...) Third, the separation of Gaza from the West Bank may be used to inject new life into Olmert's shopworn convergence plan -- if he can dress it up in new clothes. Convergence, which required a very limited withdrawal from those areas of the West Bank heavily populated with Palestinians while Israel annexed most of its illegal colonies and kept the Jordan Valley, was officially ditched last summer after Israel's humiliation by Hizballah. Why seek to revive convergence? Because it is the key to Israel securing the expanded Jewish fortress state that is its only sure protection from the rapid demographic growth of the Palestinians, soon to outnumber Jews in the Holy Land, and Israel's fears that it may then be compared to apartheid South Africa.
(...) If the occupation continues unchanged, Israel's security establishment has long been warning, the Palestinians will eventually wake up to the only practical response: to dissolve the Palestinian Authority, Israel's clever ruse to make the Palestinian leadership responsible for suppressing Palestinian resistance to the occupation, thereby forcing Israel to pick up the bill for the occupation rather than Europe. The next stage would be an anti-apartheid struggle for one state in historic Palestine.
(...) Convergence requires no loss of Israel's control over Palestinian lives, ensured through the all but finished grid of walls, settlements, bypass roads and checkpoints, only a repackaging of their occupation as statehood.
(...) In other words, Israel looks as if it is dusting off yet another blueprint for how to manage the Palestinians and their irritating obsession with sovereignty. Last time, under Oslo, the Palestinians were put in charge of policing the occupation on Israel's behalf. This time, as the Palestinians are sealed into their separate prisons masquerading as a state, Israel may believe that it can find a new jailer for the Palestinians -- the Arab world.
Whether intended or not, sanctions proved a very effective tool for destroying the internal bonds that held Iraqi society together. Destitution and hunger are powerful incentives to turn on one's neighbor as well as one's enemy. A society where resources -- food, medicines, water and electricity -- are in short supply is also a society where everyone looks out for himself. It is a society that, with a little prompting, can easily be made to tear itself apart.
(...) In place of Saddam, the Americans created a safe haven known as the Green Zone from which its occupation regime could loosely police the country and oversee the theft of Iraq's oil, while also sitting back and watching a sectarian civil war between the Sunni and Shia populations spiral out of control and decimate the Iraqi population.
(...) What did Washington hope to achieve? Pipes offers a clue: "When Sunni terrorists target Shiites and vice-versa, non-Muslims [that is, US occupation forces and their allies] are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one." In other words, enabling a civil war in Iraq was far preferable to allowing Iraqis to unite and mount an effective resistance to the US occupation. After all, Iraqi deaths -- at least 650,000 of them, according to the last realistic count -- are as good as worthless, while US soldiers' lives cost votes back home.\
(...) it [the civil war] eroded the solidarity of ordinary Iraqis, depleting their energies and making them less likely to join or support the resistance to the occupation. The insurgency has remained a terrible irritation to US forces but not the fatal blow it might have been were the Sunni and Shia to fight side by side. As a result, the theft of Iraq's resources has been made easier.
(...) And second, in the longer term, civil war is making inevitable a slow process of communal partition and ethnic cleansing. Four million Iraqis are reported to have been forced either to leave the country or flee their homes. Iraq is being broken up into small ethnic and religious fiefdoms that will be easier to manage and manipulate.
(...) Is this the model for Gaza now and the West Bank later?
(...) It is worth recalling that neither Israel nor the US pushed for an easing of the sanctions on the Palestinian Authority after the national unity government of Hamas and Fatah was formed earlier this year. In fact, the US and Israel could barely conceal their panic at the development. The moment the Mecca agreement was signed, reports of US efforts to train and arm Fatah forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas became a newspaper staple.
(...) By engineering the destruction of the unity government, Israel and the US have ensured that there is no danger of a new Palestinian consensus emerging, one that might have cornered Israel into peace talks. A unity government might have found a formula offering Israel:
- limited recognition inside the pre-1967 borders in return for recognition of a Palestinian state and the territorial integrity of the West Bank and Gaza;
- a long-term ceasefire in return for Israel ending its campaign of constant violence and violations of Palestinian sovereignty;
- and a commitment to honor past agreements in return for Israel's abiding by UN resolutions and accepting a just solution for the Palestinian refugees.
(...) Instead, Hamas' dismal authority over the prison camp called Gaza and Fatah's bastard governance of the ghettoes called the West Bank offer a model more satisfying for Israel and the US -- and one not unlike Iraq. A sort of sheriff's divide and rule in the Wild West.
(...) Just as in Iraq, Israel and the US have made sure that no Palestinian strongman arises to replace Yasser Arafat. Just as in Iraq, they are encouraging civil war as an alternative to resistance to occupation, as Palestine's resources -- land, not oil -- are stolen. Just as in Iraq, they are causing a permanent and irreversible partition, in this case between the West Bank and Gaza, to create more easily managed territorial ghettoes. And just as in Iraq, the likely reaction is an even greater extremism from the Palestinians that will undermine their cause in the eyes of the international community.
(...) The goal will be to increase the strains between Hamas and Fatah to breaking point in the West Bank, but ensure that Fatah wins the confrontation there. Fatah is already militarily stronger and with generous patronage from Israel and the US -- including arms and training, and possibly the return of the Badr Brigade currently holed up in Jordan -- it should be able to rout Hamas. The difference in status between Gaza and the West Bank that has been long desired by Israel will be complete.
(...) The Palestinian people have already been carved up into a multitude of constituencies. There are the Palestinians under occupation, those living as second-class citizens of Israel, those allowed to remain "residents" of Jerusalem, and those dispersed to camps across the Middle East. Even within these groups, there are a host of sub-identities: refugees and non-refugees; refugees included as citizens in their host state and those excluded; occupied Palestinians living under the control of the Palestinian Authority and those under Israel's military government; and so on.
(...) Gaza can now be written off by the international community as a basket case. The Israeli media is currently awash with patronizing commentary from the political and security establishments about how to help avoid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including the possibility of air drops of aid over the Gaza "security fence" -- as though Gaza were Pakistan after an earthquake. From past experience, and the current menacing sounds from Israel's new Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, those food packages will quickly turn into bombs if Gaza does not keep quiet.
(...) at their meeting last week Olmert and Bush revived talk of Palestinian statehood. According to Olmert, Bush "wants to realize, while he is in office, the dream of creating a Palestinian state." Both are keen to make quick progress, a sure sign of mischief in the making. Certainly, they know they are now under no pressure to create the single viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza once promised by President Bush. An embattled Abbas will not be calling for the inclusion of Gaza in his ghetto-fiefdom.
(...) Third, the separation of Gaza from the West Bank may be used to inject new life into Olmert's shopworn convergence plan -- if he can dress it up in new clothes. Convergence, which required a very limited withdrawal from those areas of the West Bank heavily populated with Palestinians while Israel annexed most of its illegal colonies and kept the Jordan Valley, was officially ditched last summer after Israel's humiliation by Hizballah. Why seek to revive convergence? Because it is the key to Israel securing the expanded Jewish fortress state that is its only sure protection from the rapid demographic growth of the Palestinians, soon to outnumber Jews in the Holy Land, and Israel's fears that it may then be compared to apartheid South Africa.
(...) If the occupation continues unchanged, Israel's security establishment has long been warning, the Palestinians will eventually wake up to the only practical response: to dissolve the Palestinian Authority, Israel's clever ruse to make the Palestinian leadership responsible for suppressing Palestinian resistance to the occupation, thereby forcing Israel to pick up the bill for the occupation rather than Europe. The next stage would be an anti-apartheid struggle for one state in historic Palestine.
(...) Convergence requires no loss of Israel's control over Palestinian lives, ensured through the all but finished grid of walls, settlements, bypass roads and checkpoints, only a repackaging of their occupation as statehood.
(...) In other words, Israel looks as if it is dusting off yet another blueprint for how to manage the Palestinians and their irritating obsession with sovereignty. Last time, under Oslo, the Palestinians were put in charge of policing the occupation on Israel's behalf. This time, as the Palestinians are sealed into their separate prisons masquerading as a state, Israel may believe that it can find a new jailer for the Palestinians -- the Arab world.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
abunimah on gaza/west bank:
The militias that Hamas took on and defeated in recent weeks were particularly hated in Gaza because they had abducted, tortured and killed many Hamas members and were widely seen as thoroughly corrupt. It so happens that these militias received arms and funding from the United States and had vowed to take on and defeat Hamas in a violent showdown, overturning the result of the election.
(...) And just like apartheid South Africans, who cited "black on black" violence, some Israelis assert that intra-Palestinian fighting proves that Palestinians are incapable of democracy. They hope that all the heat will be off Israel as it entrenches Bantustan-like separation and discrimination against non-Jews under its rule.
The militias that Hamas took on and defeated in recent weeks were particularly hated in Gaza because they had abducted, tortured and killed many Hamas members and were widely seen as thoroughly corrupt. It so happens that these militias received arms and funding from the United States and had vowed to take on and defeat Hamas in a violent showdown, overturning the result of the election.
(...) And just like apartheid South Africans, who cited "black on black" violence, some Israelis assert that intra-Palestinian fighting proves that Palestinians are incapable of democracy. They hope that all the heat will be off Israel as it entrenches Bantustan-like separation and discrimination against non-Jews under its rule.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
the bumbling envoy:
I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being "our" Middle East envoy.
(...) Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle Eastern hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he has a role in the region--he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to absolutely no avail--is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world's last colonial war is simply overwhelming.
(...) Not once--ever--has he apologised. Not once has he said he was sorry for what he did in our name. Yet Lord Blair actually believes--in what must be a record act of self-indulgence for a man who cooked up the fake evidence of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction"--that he can do good in the Middle East.
(...) The Palestinians held elections--real, copper-bottomed ones, the democratic variety--and Hamas won. But Blair will presumably not be able to talk to Hamas. He'll need to talk only to Abbas's flunkies, to negotiate with an administration described so accurately this week by my old colleague Rami Khoury as a "government of the imagination".
(...) Which of "Palestine"'s two prime ministers will Blair talk to? Why, the one with a collar and tie, of course, who works for Mr Abbas, who will demand more "security", tougher laws, less democracy.
I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being "our" Middle East envoy.
(...) Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle Eastern hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he has a role in the region--he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to absolutely no avail--is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world's last colonial war is simply overwhelming.
(...) Not once--ever--has he apologised. Not once has he said he was sorry for what he did in our name. Yet Lord Blair actually believes--in what must be a record act of self-indulgence for a man who cooked up the fake evidence of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction"--that he can do good in the Middle East.
(...) The Palestinians held elections--real, copper-bottomed ones, the democratic variety--and Hamas won. But Blair will presumably not be able to talk to Hamas. He'll need to talk only to Abbas's flunkies, to negotiate with an administration described so accurately this week by my old colleague Rami Khoury as a "government of the imagination".
(...) Which of "Palestine"'s two prime ministers will Blair talk to? Why, the one with a collar and tie, of course, who works for Mr Abbas, who will demand more "security", tougher laws, less democracy.
worker control in argentina:
In the worn out meeting room of worker-run Cerámica de Cuyo, Manuel Rojas runs a rough hand over his face. The mechanic recalls forming the cooperative after the company boss fired the workers in 2000: "We didn't have any choice. If we didn't take over the factory we would all be in the streets. The need to work pushed us to action."
In the worn out meeting room of worker-run Cerámica de Cuyo, Manuel Rojas runs a rough hand over his face. The mechanic recalls forming the cooperative after the company boss fired the workers in 2000: "We didn't have any choice. If we didn't take over the factory we would all be in the streets. The need to work pushed us to action."
ward churchill and academic freedom:
Some would like to apply an ideological litmus test to us academic employees: they might for example suppose that all professors, just to assume their positions in society, ought to agree and actively propagate that the U.S. is the best country in the world, its capitalist system generally admirable (maybe even "the end of history"), its history (while containing some unfortunate aspects) generally inspirational, its wars if sometimes mistaken always undertaken with honorable motives. There are some commentators hostile to us for being disproportionately irreligious, disinclined to believe with the majority of Americans in the literal truth of Bible stories, much more likely to understand science within the matrix of the theory of evolution, far less likely than the population at large to believe the government when it offers its explanation for its wars. But maybe we do that precisely because of our educational backgrounds.
(...) Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, has said it well: "All of us who value academic freedom should now stand in full solidarity with Ward Churchill. The outcome of his case at the University of Colorado is the best litmus test we have to tell whether the right-wing's assaults on learning and liberty will stifle campus life in this country. Never in my lifetime have we in America more needed the sort of vigorous debate and creative controversy that Ward Churchill's distinguished career epitomizes. We all stand to lose if his principled defense fails."
Some would like to apply an ideological litmus test to us academic employees: they might for example suppose that all professors, just to assume their positions in society, ought to agree and actively propagate that the U.S. is the best country in the world, its capitalist system generally admirable (maybe even "the end of history"), its history (while containing some unfortunate aspects) generally inspirational, its wars if sometimes mistaken always undertaken with honorable motives. There are some commentators hostile to us for being disproportionately irreligious, disinclined to believe with the majority of Americans in the literal truth of Bible stories, much more likely to understand science within the matrix of the theory of evolution, far less likely than the population at large to believe the government when it offers its explanation for its wars. But maybe we do that precisely because of our educational backgrounds.
(...) Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, has said it well: "All of us who value academic freedom should now stand in full solidarity with Ward Churchill. The outcome of his case at the University of Colorado is the best litmus test we have to tell whether the right-wing's assaults on learning and liberty will stifle campus life in this country. Never in my lifetime have we in America more needed the sort of vigorous debate and creative controversy that Ward Churchill's distinguished career epitomizes. We all stand to lose if his principled defense fails."
the foreign policy of barack obama:
An adept politician, Obama began emphasizing his "anti-war" stance as the war became increasingly unpopular among Democrats across the country and he began gearing up for the 2008 presidential campaign. Gone was the 2004 equivocating. He had found an issue with which to distinguish himself from Clinton, Edwards, and Biden. Campaigning among grassroots Democrats, Obama sounds like Cindy Sheehan, but his real, far more nuanced views have been laid out for members of the elite Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
(...) Of course, Obama is being dishonest when he pretends that the U.S. government was trying to "ignore the rest of the world" prior to 9/11. Isolationism did not provoke the terrorists. On the contrary, the terrorist attack was partly a result of decades of U.S. intervention overseas--precisely the kind of meddling that Obama euphemistically calls "maintaining a strong foreign policy, pursuing our enemies, and promoting our values around the world." This is the point made by Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), a principled and consistent Iraq War opponent, and it is understood by millions of populist Democrats as well. When you stick your hand in a hornet's nest, you may get stung. Perhaps the action is worth the possible consequence, but don't pretend that the sticking of the hand into the nest had nothing to do with the stinging! The hornets didn't choose to sting someone minding his own business simply because they "hate freedom."
(...) In a second speech, in April 2007, Obama told the CCGA, " I reject the notion that the American moment has passed. I dismiss the cynics who say that this new century cannot be another when, in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. I still believe that America is the last, best hope of Earth. We just have to show the world why this is so. This President may occupy the White House, but for the last six years the position of leader of the free world has remained open. And it's time to fill that role once more." Yes, the dream of Pax America must continue, only under better management--management that is more savvy in handling international public opinion.
(...) In his speech to the internationalists, Obama endorsed the Persian Gulf War of 1991, a bloodletting that had nothing to do with U.S. national security and was opposed by populists as diverse as Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Chuck Grassley: "No President should ever hesitate to use force--unilaterally if necessary--to protect ourselves and our vital interests when we are attacked or imminently threatened. But when we use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others--the kind of burden-sharing and support President George H.W. Bush mustered before he launched Operation Desert Storm."
(...) Notice that Obama has quietly slipped in an endorsement of preemptive war with his wording "imminently threatened." And notice also the use of the Power Elite's favorite foreign policy weasel words: "our vital interests." This is a catch-all phrase that really means the economic and imperial interests of the Fortune 500 and their political deputies. Not shying away from military imagery, Obama said, "In order to advance our national security and our common security, we must call on the full arsenal of American power and ingenuity. To constrain rogue nations, we must use effective diplomacy and muscular alliances."
(...) Not surprisingly, neocon guru Robert Kagan gloated over this speech in a Washington Post column ("Obama the Interventionist," April 29, 2007). Kagan is the man who coauthored the 1996 Foreign Affairs article "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" with William Kristol in which he told us that the "appropriate goal" of U.S. foreign policy is the preservation of "American hegemony" so we can continue to fulfill our "responsibility to lead the world." Kagan's résumé could be considered quintessential for a servant of the Power Elite. All of the usual suspects are found: Yale, Harvard, Public Interest, Washington Post, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, U.S. Information Agency, State Department, George Pratt Shultz, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Council on Foreign Relations, Henry Jackson Society, Project for the New American Century, New World Order, and--appropriately enough--an Alexander Hamilton fellowship at American University. It is no coincidence that Kagan sounds so much like Obama and vice-versa. They share an elite mindset.
An adept politician, Obama began emphasizing his "anti-war" stance as the war became increasingly unpopular among Democrats across the country and he began gearing up for the 2008 presidential campaign. Gone was the 2004 equivocating. He had found an issue with which to distinguish himself from Clinton, Edwards, and Biden. Campaigning among grassroots Democrats, Obama sounds like Cindy Sheehan, but his real, far more nuanced views have been laid out for members of the elite Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
(...) Of course, Obama is being dishonest when he pretends that the U.S. government was trying to "ignore the rest of the world" prior to 9/11. Isolationism did not provoke the terrorists. On the contrary, the terrorist attack was partly a result of decades of U.S. intervention overseas--precisely the kind of meddling that Obama euphemistically calls "maintaining a strong foreign policy, pursuing our enemies, and promoting our values around the world." This is the point made by Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), a principled and consistent Iraq War opponent, and it is understood by millions of populist Democrats as well. When you stick your hand in a hornet's nest, you may get stung. Perhaps the action is worth the possible consequence, but don't pretend that the sticking of the hand into the nest had nothing to do with the stinging! The hornets didn't choose to sting someone minding his own business simply because they "hate freedom."
(...) In a second speech, in April 2007, Obama told the CCGA, " I reject the notion that the American moment has passed. I dismiss the cynics who say that this new century cannot be another when, in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. I still believe that America is the last, best hope of Earth. We just have to show the world why this is so. This President may occupy the White House, but for the last six years the position of leader of the free world has remained open. And it's time to fill that role once more." Yes, the dream of Pax America must continue, only under better management--management that is more savvy in handling international public opinion.
(...) In his speech to the internationalists, Obama endorsed the Persian Gulf War of 1991, a bloodletting that had nothing to do with U.S. national security and was opposed by populists as diverse as Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Chuck Grassley: "No President should ever hesitate to use force--unilaterally if necessary--to protect ourselves and our vital interests when we are attacked or imminently threatened. But when we use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others--the kind of burden-sharing and support President George H.W. Bush mustered before he launched Operation Desert Storm."
(...) Notice that Obama has quietly slipped in an endorsement of preemptive war with his wording "imminently threatened." And notice also the use of the Power Elite's favorite foreign policy weasel words: "our vital interests." This is a catch-all phrase that really means the economic and imperial interests of the Fortune 500 and their political deputies. Not shying away from military imagery, Obama said, "In order to advance our national security and our common security, we must call on the full arsenal of American power and ingenuity. To constrain rogue nations, we must use effective diplomacy and muscular alliances."
(...) Not surprisingly, neocon guru Robert Kagan gloated over this speech in a Washington Post column ("Obama the Interventionist," April 29, 2007). Kagan is the man who coauthored the 1996 Foreign Affairs article "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" with William Kristol in which he told us that the "appropriate goal" of U.S. foreign policy is the preservation of "American hegemony" so we can continue to fulfill our "responsibility to lead the world." Kagan's résumé could be considered quintessential for a servant of the Power Elite. All of the usual suspects are found: Yale, Harvard, Public Interest, Washington Post, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, U.S. Information Agency, State Department, George Pratt Shultz, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Council on Foreign Relations, Henry Jackson Society, Project for the New American Century, New World Order, and--appropriately enough--an Alexander Hamilton fellowship at American University. It is no coincidence that Kagan sounds so much like Obama and vice-versa. They share an elite mindset.
FOX News and Venezuela:
Perhaps ironically FOX News should be applauded for giving so much coverage to Venezuela - not necessarily a "popular" story. But unfortunately the highest-rated network so thoroughly butchered the truth, that it is not surprising that many Chavez supporters are becoming conspiracy theorists vis-Ã -vis the US media. In segment after segment, FOX News anchors, along with its main correspondent Adam Housley, told falsehood after falsehood. The issue here has nothing to do with condemning or supporting Hugo Chavez, nor his actions regarding RCTV . This is about how FOX News spread demonstrably false information on several occasions over the course of a week. The manipulation of fact was so extreme, that one has to wonder if it was deliberate.
(...) FOX News viewers, who are not ordinarily connected to Venezuelan news, would likely believe that there is no longer any "opposition" media in that country - or at the most, perhaps one "small cable network" called Globovision. They would think this because FOX's correspondent in Caracas told them this falsehood over and over again. On May 28th, during "Your World" with host David Asman, Adam Housley said that Chavez was "taking over just about every [media outlet] in Venezuela" and added that RCTV was just "the latest." In fact, RCTV is the only media outlet that can arguably said to have been "taken over." The other stations - Televen, Venevision, and Globovision - continue to be privately owned and broadcast opposition voices (though the first two regularly balance them with government spokesmen as well). But this reality didn't stop Housley from saying on the next day's program that RCTV was "the last private and large television station here in the country that was critical of the Chavez administration." If Housely would have just turned on the other stations in the morning (or Globovision at any time of the day) he would have seen opposition members criticizing the Chavez administration. Housley went on to repeat this false characterization of the Venezuelan media landscape on Neil Cavuto's show as well as "Hannity and Colmes."
(...) In a very frustrating exchange on the June 1st broadcast of "Your World" with Neil Cavuto, Charles Barron, a councilman from New York City tried to explain some of these facts, but was rudely told by Housley that he was "full of baloney." After being introduced by Cavuto as "someone who is right there," - thus giving the correspondent undeserved credibility - Housley addressed Barron's contentions: "[Barron] says that there are three private television stations in this country that currently operate. He is absolutely wrong." Well, Barron was absolutely right, and it only takes about thirty seconds of internet research to confirm this (go to www.globovision.com, www.televen.com, and www.venevision.net). Housley then went on to say that Chavez "has shut down the media all across the country." He didn't give any specific examples, probably because to my knowledge, there aren't any.
(...) Perhaps the FOX show with the worst record of "balance" and misinformation in regards to the RCTV issue was "Hannity and Colmes." In four consecutive segments on Venezuela over the course of a week, the guest "experts" were Maria Conchita Alonso, Otto Reich, Roger Noriega, and Alonso again [3]. Alonso is an actress and anti-Chavez activist who admitted on the first segment that she doesn't even follow politics. Otto Reich is a strident anti-Castro and anti-Chavez former member of the Reagan and Bush II administrations. Roger Noriega was recently Bush II's Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Only the liberal Colmes offered any sort of counterpoint, but even he said right from the start that he could no longer defend Chavez for what he described as shutting down the media. In segments that were extraordinary in their removal from reality, Reich claimed that Chavez would likely order the military to kill the protestors, as Reich claimed he has done in the past, and Noriega explained to Hannity that the media is so controlled by Hugo Chavez that Venezuelans can't even see images of the protests. Alonso went on a rant about how defeated presidential candidate Manuel Rosales was in cahoots with Chavez. She also claimed that Venezuela is cursed with racial animosity that would confuse anyone who actually lives in the largely mestizo country, and went on to say that Chavez owns 65% of the media to which Hannity falsely added "Now he owns it all" [4]. Only the first of these statements has any remote basis in fact, and that is only if you accept a declaration of martial law as being equal to an order to kill protestors [5].
(...) Perhaps the most frustrating aspect to this story is realizing that FOX is the most highly rated news station, and yet its hosts and reporters seem unable to do the most basic research. Many of the hosts and correspondents of FOX repeated ad nauseum that Chavez is a "dictator" (Hannity prefers the phrase "brutal dictator") even though he was democratically elected in December by 63% of the people in an election certified by international observers, including the European Union and the Organization of American States [6]. Claims by some prominent members of the Opposition that there was indeed fraud should be respected and reported, but until the claim is backed up with demonstrable evidence, Fox News shouldn't be treating this as the accepted truth. The hosts also constantly asserted that there is hardly any media left in Venezuela that is critical of Chavez, when the reality is that one can turn on the television every day to at least three different stations on the public airwaves and find dissent. Furthermore, most of the major dailies take a strong anti-Chavez editorial line.
Perhaps ironically FOX News should be applauded for giving so much coverage to Venezuela - not necessarily a "popular" story. But unfortunately the highest-rated network so thoroughly butchered the truth, that it is not surprising that many Chavez supporters are becoming conspiracy theorists vis-Ã -vis the US media. In segment after segment, FOX News anchors, along with its main correspondent Adam Housley, told falsehood after falsehood. The issue here has nothing to do with condemning or supporting Hugo Chavez, nor his actions regarding RCTV . This is about how FOX News spread demonstrably false information on several occasions over the course of a week. The manipulation of fact was so extreme, that one has to wonder if it was deliberate.
(...) FOX News viewers, who are not ordinarily connected to Venezuelan news, would likely believe that there is no longer any "opposition" media in that country - or at the most, perhaps one "small cable network" called Globovision. They would think this because FOX's correspondent in Caracas told them this falsehood over and over again. On May 28th, during "Your World" with host David Asman, Adam Housley said that Chavez was "taking over just about every [media outlet] in Venezuela" and added that RCTV was just "the latest." In fact, RCTV is the only media outlet that can arguably said to have been "taken over." The other stations - Televen, Venevision, and Globovision - continue to be privately owned and broadcast opposition voices (though the first two regularly balance them with government spokesmen as well). But this reality didn't stop Housley from saying on the next day's program that RCTV was "the last private and large television station here in the country that was critical of the Chavez administration." If Housely would have just turned on the other stations in the morning (or Globovision at any time of the day) he would have seen opposition members criticizing the Chavez administration. Housley went on to repeat this false characterization of the Venezuelan media landscape on Neil Cavuto's show as well as "Hannity and Colmes."
(...) In a very frustrating exchange on the June 1st broadcast of "Your World" with Neil Cavuto, Charles Barron, a councilman from New York City tried to explain some of these facts, but was rudely told by Housley that he was "full of baloney." After being introduced by Cavuto as "someone who is right there," - thus giving the correspondent undeserved credibility - Housley addressed Barron's contentions: "[Barron] says that there are three private television stations in this country that currently operate. He is absolutely wrong." Well, Barron was absolutely right, and it only takes about thirty seconds of internet research to confirm this (go to www.globovision.com, www.televen.com, and www.venevision.net). Housley then went on to say that Chavez "has shut down the media all across the country." He didn't give any specific examples, probably because to my knowledge, there aren't any.
(...) Perhaps the FOX show with the worst record of "balance" and misinformation in regards to the RCTV issue was "Hannity and Colmes." In four consecutive segments on Venezuela over the course of a week, the guest "experts" were Maria Conchita Alonso, Otto Reich, Roger Noriega, and Alonso again [3]. Alonso is an actress and anti-Chavez activist who admitted on the first segment that she doesn't even follow politics. Otto Reich is a strident anti-Castro and anti-Chavez former member of the Reagan and Bush II administrations. Roger Noriega was recently Bush II's Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Only the liberal Colmes offered any sort of counterpoint, but even he said right from the start that he could no longer defend Chavez for what he described as shutting down the media. In segments that were extraordinary in their removal from reality, Reich claimed that Chavez would likely order the military to kill the protestors, as Reich claimed he has done in the past, and Noriega explained to Hannity that the media is so controlled by Hugo Chavez that Venezuelans can't even see images of the protests. Alonso went on a rant about how defeated presidential candidate Manuel Rosales was in cahoots with Chavez. She also claimed that Venezuela is cursed with racial animosity that would confuse anyone who actually lives in the largely mestizo country, and went on to say that Chavez owns 65% of the media to which Hannity falsely added "Now he owns it all" [4]. Only the first of these statements has any remote basis in fact, and that is only if you accept a declaration of martial law as being equal to an order to kill protestors [5].
(...) Perhaps the most frustrating aspect to this story is realizing that FOX is the most highly rated news station, and yet its hosts and reporters seem unable to do the most basic research. Many of the hosts and correspondents of FOX repeated ad nauseum that Chavez is a "dictator" (Hannity prefers the phrase "brutal dictator") even though he was democratically elected in December by 63% of the people in an election certified by international observers, including the European Union and the Organization of American States [6]. Claims by some prominent members of the Opposition that there was indeed fraud should be respected and reported, but until the claim is backed up with demonstrable evidence, Fox News shouldn't be treating this as the accepted truth. The hosts also constantly asserted that there is hardly any media left in Venezuela that is critical of Chavez, when the reality is that one can turn on the television every day to at least three different stations on the public airwaves and find dissent. Furthermore, most of the major dailies take a strong anti-Chavez editorial line.
mainstream media, NYT:
It’s in the leftmost sections of the nation’s conservative, dominant (so-called mainstream) and corporate media that you best discern where concentrated economic and political power set the outer parameters of permissible discourse.
(...) Is this all perhaps part of the answer to the great supposed mystery of “Why They Hate Us?” Dominant U.S. media’s powerful, opinion-shaping unwillingness and/or inability to acknowledge the victimization of people on the wrong side of our imperial guns is part of a broader devaluation of non-North American and non-white lives in U.S. culture. We are obsessed with the tragic murder of 32 innocent students at Virginia Tech but cannot bring ourselves to focus on routinely larger and daily civilian body counts in occupation-mangled Iraq.
(...) We offer hundreds of thousands of dollars for information about three U.S. soldiers ambushed south of Baghdad last May. We value the life of innocent civilians murdered by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001 at $1.8 million. Meanwhile we give the comparatively tiny sums amounts of $500-$2500 to the surviving family members of innocent civilians we butcher in the name of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan (Mitchell 2007; Engelhardt 2007).
(...) “Our” media has spent more energy mourning the death of a fallen U.S. horse (Barbaro) than it has on the death of untold thousands of children in U.S.-occupied Iraq.
(...) We killed 3 million Indochinese people during the 1960s and 1970s and spent the next three decades agonizing over what the Vietnam War did to us – the real victims.
(...) And who can forget the famous nationally televised comment of the “liberal” Bill Clinton administration’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright regarding the murder of half a million Iraqi children by U.S.-led economic sanctions. It’s a hard choice, she said, but added “we think he price is worth it” (Stahl 1996). The Madame Secretary did not comment on whether the parents of the deceased juveniles agreed with her curious imperial cost accounting.
(...) The U.S. GI deaths in Mesopotamia are terrible of course, but they reflect legitimate resistance efforts by an illegally occupied people who have suffered from the U.S. invasion on a scale that makes American “sacrifice” look minor indeed.
It’s in the leftmost sections of the nation’s conservative, dominant (so-called mainstream) and corporate media that you best discern where concentrated economic and political power set the outer parameters of permissible discourse.
(...) Is this all perhaps part of the answer to the great supposed mystery of “Why They Hate Us?” Dominant U.S. media’s powerful, opinion-shaping unwillingness and/or inability to acknowledge the victimization of people on the wrong side of our imperial guns is part of a broader devaluation of non-North American and non-white lives in U.S. culture. We are obsessed with the tragic murder of 32 innocent students at Virginia Tech but cannot bring ourselves to focus on routinely larger and daily civilian body counts in occupation-mangled Iraq.
(...) We offer hundreds of thousands of dollars for information about three U.S. soldiers ambushed south of Baghdad last May. We value the life of innocent civilians murdered by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001 at $1.8 million. Meanwhile we give the comparatively tiny sums amounts of $500-$2500 to the surviving family members of innocent civilians we butcher in the name of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan (Mitchell 2007; Engelhardt 2007).
(...) “Our” media has spent more energy mourning the death of a fallen U.S. horse (Barbaro) than it has on the death of untold thousands of children in U.S.-occupied Iraq.
(...) We killed 3 million Indochinese people during the 1960s and 1970s and spent the next three decades agonizing over what the Vietnam War did to us – the real victims.
(...) And who can forget the famous nationally televised comment of the “liberal” Bill Clinton administration’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright regarding the murder of half a million Iraqi children by U.S.-led economic sanctions. It’s a hard choice, she said, but added “we think he price is worth it” (Stahl 1996). The Madame Secretary did not comment on whether the parents of the deceased juveniles agreed with her curious imperial cost accounting.
(...) The U.S. GI deaths in Mesopotamia are terrible of course, but they reflect legitimate resistance efforts by an illegally occupied people who have suffered from the U.S. invasion on a scale that makes American “sacrifice” look minor indeed.
for a radical ethics of equality:
The critique of the atomisation of society and the empire of selfishness generated by liberal capitalism has found extremely powerful weapons in the arsenal of leftist thought. However, these weapons have not always been used to further an emancipatory project. They have also been used to justify the forcible homogenisation of society under a political banner. ... In all these cases, only those elements that are “convenient” are taken from leftist ideas, such as the culture of a strong State, the subordination of the individual to the needs of the collective, the critique of liberal democracy, etc. The more clearly emancipatory ideas - equality, self-determination, cooperation, solidarity, and liberty – are left by the wayside.
(...) Alongside this ideological use of leftist ideas, Marxism can sometimes be found being used as an “ideology of modernisation”. Lenin himself argued that Socialism is “soviet power plus electrification”. This use has fed the self-justifying discourse of several dictatorships, from the Chinese elites who headed the restoration of Capitalism, to theoreticians of “African Socialism” such as Julius Nyerere or tyrants of “scientific Socialism” such as the Somali Siyad Barre. Once again, from the wide range Marxist ideas, only those of strong State planning (supported by compulsory unanimity from below), the imperative of developing productive forces, and the critique of the bourgeoisie and of liberalism in the name of an equality (restricted to the purely economic sphere) are taken up.
(...) Finally, there are “inverted” uses of left wing ideas. Instead of using them to justify the homogeneity of society, the scientific dominion of a bureaucratic vanguard, or a strong State, they are used to mask the most radical individualism. Many people or small groups of “anarchists” and “autonomists” (or however you want to call them) take the leftist tradition of rejecting oppression, the State, and authority in general, but only to claim their own personal rights to act according to their own will, being accountable to nothing and nobody. In this case, leftism acts as an “aesthetic” varnish and a “lifestyle” to justify an attitude that is as selfish as that of bourgeoisie, and which is often much more elitist in its disdain for “ordinary” people.
(...) How is it that such sublime ideas coexist with such contradictory uses and effects? How is it that the ideas of the left so often become a path to the practices of the right?
(...) If the implicit humanism of the ideas of the left has so often been absent in its practices, it is because the left tradition, or at least its hegemonic currents, lacks an ethical dimension. Indeed, any concern for the ethical evaluation of actions has been actively eradicated from its politics. [this is a very massive thesis; and important to note that it forgoes a materialist's analysis of precisely why those movements became totalitarian]
(...) The visceral rejection of ethics by many people on the left never ceases to surprise me. I have seen countless companions become jumpy when, for one reason or another, they hear someone else use vocabulary referring to the universe of moral. If forced to discuss failings in someone’s behaviour they always clarify that “it is not a question of morals”, as if it was not proper for someone on the left to talk about things being “good” or “bad”. Although many people on the left are among the most altruistic, kind and charitable people to be found in this world, most would doubtless be uncomfortable with being considered “good” or “kind” (an adjective that, in the cultural universe of the left, evokes a sense of “weakness”).
(...) This strange contradiction in militant culture came about because the left has rejected the question of moral evaluation of behaviour, reducing ethics, to a mere “logic”. Thus conducts and actions are not guided by what could be considered “good” or “bad”, but by what is “correct” or “incorrect”. The measure of “correctness” is defined not by ethics, but by its correspondence to a given political truth: a correct action is one that follows the correct political line. A political line is established as being “correct”, not through an exercise of ethical evaluation, but based on the knowledge of a truth (for example, the direction in which “Historical Laws” point, the assumed dictates of “revolutionary conscience”, the postulates expressed in this or that canonical text by Marx, Bakunin, etc.) An action that pushes in the correct historical direction – for example, inciting a group of young people to join a direct action, deliberately keeping from them information about its possible consequences – can be considered “correct” independent of whether it is ethically reprehensible. The important thing is not that the action is correct because it is “good”, but because it could be “effective”. [a fair point, in part. at times also a question of being bound to certain political principles, which certainly fosters this sort of ethical stultification/stagnation. but is it not merely a symptom of poor internal democracy, rather than an overarching aversion to ethics?]
(...) Ethics and leftism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, traces of serious consideration of the ethical dimension can be found in the (misnamed) “Utopian Socialism” of the 19th century and in a number of minor currents within Socialist and Anarchist traditions. For Kropotkin’s anarchism, for example, an ethics of a new type, one that was different from religious and metaphysical precepts, was fundamental to “give men an ideal” and to “guide them in action”. Worried by the amorality of the time, derived from liberalism, Darwinism or the ideas of Nietzsche, Kropotkin worked intensively from 1904 until his death in 1921 to write a treatise on ethics. He argued for an ethics of solidarity and sought to demonstrate that it was universal, emanating from the naturally sociable nature of mankind (and animals) and the impulse to “mutual aid”.[iii] Similar concerns can be found in Tolstoy’s “Christian Socialism”, which had become a genuine mass movement by the beginning of the 20th century. From the teachings of a Christ stripped of his divine status, Tolstoy derived general ethical mandates (unconnected with any religiosity) that should not only guide political action, but should also prefigure the world we are aiming for: love thy neighbour, humility, forgiveness, etc.[iv]
(...) However, the Marxist tradition fiercely opposed any ethical discourse. Marx himself dismissed such concerns as irrelevant: in the Communist Manifesto he considers them a distraction that interferes with understanding of the material basis of poverty and social ills, and in The German Ideology he went so far as to argue that “communists do not preach any moral at all”. Students of Marx have recently suggested that his rejection of ethics was simply the result of a “tactical” necessity to mark a difference between his ideas and other debates current at the time, and that Marxism is, in fact, a form of humanism that contains a strong implicit ethics. Nevertheless, even these authors recognise that Marx’s attitude profoundly marked the Marxist tradition, which from that point on maintained hostility towards any ethical discourse (with the exception of a marginal variant of “ethical Marxism”, represented by authors such as Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Henri Lefebvre, or Mihailo Markovic).[v] Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theorist of the Second International, dedicated his book Ethics and the materialist concept of History (1906) to arguing that historical progress obeys laws that have very little to do with moral ideas. Therefore, he argued, Socialists should look to science for guidance in their actions, because “science is always above ethics”.[vi] In his article “Tactics and Ethics” (1919) Lukács agreed with Kautsky in that decisions about political tactics should answer only to the tribunal of history: if they are in accordance with “the sense of world history”, then they are “correct”, and therefore, by necessity “ethical”.[vii] Many other examples can be found.[viii] What is important for our purposes is that this type of reduction of the ethical dimension to a mere problem of “logic” or of understanding what is correct or incorrect in terms of some Laws of historical necessity, was translated in practice – not only among Marxists but also among people on the left in general – into an eradication of all sense of personal responsibility, and the typical principle according to which “the end sanctifies the means”.
(...) In Religion and Socialism, a noteworthy book written in 1907 and now all but forgotten, Anatoli Lunacharski – who would soon form part of the first Bolshevik government – proposed complementing Marxism’s “austere, modest and arid philosophy”, with aesthetics and ethics, a “science of values” of the sort that is lacking today. Essentially, Marx and Engels occupied themselves with “knowing” the world; but the “the complete relationship between man and the world is only attained when the processes are not only known, but also valued”; action “emerges only from knowledge and evaluation”. Science does not occupy itself with questions of the heart: it responds to “how?” and “why?”, but it is not concerned with questions of “good?” or “bad?”. Religion, on the other hand, responds to these questions and reaches a practical conclusion: “it proves the presence of evil in the world” and “attempt to defeat it”. It is taking this function of ethical and aesthetic evaluation into account that Lunacharski argues that Socialism should “imitate” religion (needless to say, forgetting its theological and dogmatic elements) and become a genuine cosmology. [can this complement materialism, which almost necessarily relegates this tussle of ideas?]
(...) It is clear that Socialism is the cause of the proletariat; but is it also good for all humanity from a moral point of view? Lunacharski complains that orthodox Marxists reject that question, because for them it is enough that it be correct for the proletariat alone (they say that Socialism is not a faith that looks to win converts outside the working class). Nevertheless – our author goes on to say–, this is a limited conception: the proletariat needs to achieve “ideological hegemony” if it wants to reach power (something they would not be able to do alone, against everyone else).
(...) Although rejected in theory, an implicit moral world nevertheless exists in the practices of the left, which clearly distinguishes between the “righteous” and “sinners
(...) By guiding its actions in accordance with the mandates of a transcendental Truth (extracted from science, knowledge of supposed historical Laws, or some canonical text), the left makes itself impenetrable to others in two ways. On the one hand, it shuts its ears to the simple “opinions” of the uninitiated (that is to say, those who have not demonstrated a grasp of the Truth), which leads to a conspicuous unwillingness to reach agreements with them; on the other hand, it implicitly rejects any responsibility towards its fellows. Protected by the Truth, the left remains untouchable to the judgements of others. By retiring themselves from the world of equals in this way, leftists often adopt that typical air of self-sufficiency and arrogant condescension towards others, and that vanguardist style that can be found even amongst those who declare themselves opposed to all vanguards (but who nevertheless feel themselves to be “illuminated” by their own Truth). In this way, we end up in the paradox indicated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau more than two hundred years ago, in one of those ironic phrases laden with truth that he liked to shoot against his fellow philosophers. He questioned those who would say they loved Humankind, but only to avoid the obligation of loving any human being in particular. Rousseau’s critique remains useful today to illustrate the tragedy of a left without ethics. [yes. this i fully agree with]
(...) Here let us return to the problem of the left and the ethical dimension that is indispensable if we are to protect it from ideological abuse, and to clearly separate it from right-wing practices. The beginning and end of any anticapitalist politics – and this is the central thesis of this essay – should be a radical ethics of equality.
(...) A radical ethics of equality is, above all, an immanent ethics. Unlike other ethics – for example, that of Kant, that of the Socratic philosophers, or that included in religious principles – that claim to come from some eternal order (rational, natural or divine), ours should be firmly anchored in this world. As with all of social life, the universe of moral criteria should be put within the grasp of real men and women. To say it in another way, the content of this ethics should be the fruit of social agreements that recognise the needs of life in common, from the most universal (that is to say, those that relate to human beings as a species) to the most historical and situational. That an ethical code be something more or less permanent and widely shared does not mean that it should be considered eternal or universal, nor that its authority should be deposited in gods or transcendental Truths. An immanent ethic is an ethic that comes from us.
(...) A radical ethic of equality is also an ethic of dialogue. It recognises that society is not made up of isolated individuals, but nor is it a collective that exists beyond the specific individuals who compose it (to postulate a collective over and above people, as certain leftists do, is to fall once again into the transcendental). Personal existence, as the young Bakhtin knew,[x] is only possible in interaction with the other: it is by the means of the image, the body, the gaze, and the word of my fellows that I exist as a whole person. Social life is nothing more than this ongoing dialogue with our fellows, those who are alive, those who have died, and those who are yet to come. An ethical existence is, therefore, that of people who know themselves to be obliged to be able to answer to the other for what they are, for what they do, and for what they fail to do. An ethics of dialogue therefore requires commitment to our fellows, a personal existence that assumes its responsibility for the other, and which does not look for excuses or alibis nor does it retreat into the monologue or to devotion to a transcendent (be it God, Science, the Nation, the People, Class, the Party or the Individual). An ethical existence without alibis, is one of fidelity to the specific situation and of accountability to others for every act. And it can only be considered a radical ethics of equality if the commitment is to the other just as they are.
(...) This radical commitment to others just as they are does not mean ignoring class differences and the antagonism that shape our society. For we are talking about an ethics of equality, whose raison d’être is precisely that of protecting life in common from those who, under any excuse, attempt to place themselves above others. That is why those who have refused to accept being equals, at all times and in all places have feared dialogic and immanent ethics. It is because the “unequals” cannot be accountable to others, that the justification of their privilege (“private law”) has always rested upon some authority or transcendent. Radical egalitarian ethics is, by definition, power’s fiercest enemy.
(...) What would the specific content of an ethics of equals be? What virtues would it promote? What conducts would it condemn? It would be, firstly and fundamentally, and ethics of caring for the Other, expressed in a codification of virtues and defects that values all that which aims at cooperation, solidarity, empathy, humility, respect for diversity, the capacity for consensus, etc., and which “represses” impulses to competition, selfishness, ambition to power, intellectual arrogance, stubbornness, obsequiousness, or narcissism.
The critique of the atomisation of society and the empire of selfishness generated by liberal capitalism has found extremely powerful weapons in the arsenal of leftist thought. However, these weapons have not always been used to further an emancipatory project. They have also been used to justify the forcible homogenisation of society under a political banner. ... In all these cases, only those elements that are “convenient” are taken from leftist ideas, such as the culture of a strong State, the subordination of the individual to the needs of the collective, the critique of liberal democracy, etc. The more clearly emancipatory ideas - equality, self-determination, cooperation, solidarity, and liberty – are left by the wayside.
(...) Alongside this ideological use of leftist ideas, Marxism can sometimes be found being used as an “ideology of modernisation”. Lenin himself argued that Socialism is “soviet power plus electrification”. This use has fed the self-justifying discourse of several dictatorships, from the Chinese elites who headed the restoration of Capitalism, to theoreticians of “African Socialism” such as Julius Nyerere or tyrants of “scientific Socialism” such as the Somali Siyad Barre. Once again, from the wide range Marxist ideas, only those of strong State planning (supported by compulsory unanimity from below), the imperative of developing productive forces, and the critique of the bourgeoisie and of liberalism in the name of an equality (restricted to the purely economic sphere) are taken up.
(...) Finally, there are “inverted” uses of left wing ideas. Instead of using them to justify the homogeneity of society, the scientific dominion of a bureaucratic vanguard, or a strong State, they are used to mask the most radical individualism. Many people or small groups of “anarchists” and “autonomists” (or however you want to call them) take the leftist tradition of rejecting oppression, the State, and authority in general, but only to claim their own personal rights to act according to their own will, being accountable to nothing and nobody. In this case, leftism acts as an “aesthetic” varnish and a “lifestyle” to justify an attitude that is as selfish as that of bourgeoisie, and which is often much more elitist in its disdain for “ordinary” people.
(...) How is it that such sublime ideas coexist with such contradictory uses and effects? How is it that the ideas of the left so often become a path to the practices of the right?
(...) If the implicit humanism of the ideas of the left has so often been absent in its practices, it is because the left tradition, or at least its hegemonic currents, lacks an ethical dimension. Indeed, any concern for the ethical evaluation of actions has been actively eradicated from its politics. [this is a very massive thesis; and important to note that it forgoes a materialist's analysis of precisely why those movements became totalitarian]
(...) The visceral rejection of ethics by many people on the left never ceases to surprise me. I have seen countless companions become jumpy when, for one reason or another, they hear someone else use vocabulary referring to the universe of moral. If forced to discuss failings in someone’s behaviour they always clarify that “it is not a question of morals”, as if it was not proper for someone on the left to talk about things being “good” or “bad”. Although many people on the left are among the most altruistic, kind and charitable people to be found in this world, most would doubtless be uncomfortable with being considered “good” or “kind” (an adjective that, in the cultural universe of the left, evokes a sense of “weakness”).
(...) This strange contradiction in militant culture came about because the left has rejected the question of moral evaluation of behaviour, reducing ethics, to a mere “logic”. Thus conducts and actions are not guided by what could be considered “good” or “bad”, but by what is “correct” or “incorrect”. The measure of “correctness” is defined not by ethics, but by its correspondence to a given political truth: a correct action is one that follows the correct political line. A political line is established as being “correct”, not through an exercise of ethical evaluation, but based on the knowledge of a truth (for example, the direction in which “Historical Laws” point, the assumed dictates of “revolutionary conscience”, the postulates expressed in this or that canonical text by Marx, Bakunin, etc.) An action that pushes in the correct historical direction – for example, inciting a group of young people to join a direct action, deliberately keeping from them information about its possible consequences – can be considered “correct” independent of whether it is ethically reprehensible. The important thing is not that the action is correct because it is “good”, but because it could be “effective”. [a fair point, in part. at times also a question of being bound to certain political principles, which certainly fosters this sort of ethical stultification/stagnation. but is it not merely a symptom of poor internal democracy, rather than an overarching aversion to ethics?]
(...) Ethics and leftism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, traces of serious consideration of the ethical dimension can be found in the (misnamed) “Utopian Socialism” of the 19th century and in a number of minor currents within Socialist and Anarchist traditions. For Kropotkin’s anarchism, for example, an ethics of a new type, one that was different from religious and metaphysical precepts, was fundamental to “give men an ideal” and to “guide them in action”. Worried by the amorality of the time, derived from liberalism, Darwinism or the ideas of Nietzsche, Kropotkin worked intensively from 1904 until his death in 1921 to write a treatise on ethics. He argued for an ethics of solidarity and sought to demonstrate that it was universal, emanating from the naturally sociable nature of mankind (and animals) and the impulse to “mutual aid”.[iii] Similar concerns can be found in Tolstoy’s “Christian Socialism”, which had become a genuine mass movement by the beginning of the 20th century. From the teachings of a Christ stripped of his divine status, Tolstoy derived general ethical mandates (unconnected with any religiosity) that should not only guide political action, but should also prefigure the world we are aiming for: love thy neighbour, humility, forgiveness, etc.[iv]
(...) However, the Marxist tradition fiercely opposed any ethical discourse. Marx himself dismissed such concerns as irrelevant: in the Communist Manifesto he considers them a distraction that interferes with understanding of the material basis of poverty and social ills, and in The German Ideology he went so far as to argue that “communists do not preach any moral at all”. Students of Marx have recently suggested that his rejection of ethics was simply the result of a “tactical” necessity to mark a difference between his ideas and other debates current at the time, and that Marxism is, in fact, a form of humanism that contains a strong implicit ethics. Nevertheless, even these authors recognise that Marx’s attitude profoundly marked the Marxist tradition, which from that point on maintained hostility towards any ethical discourse (with the exception of a marginal variant of “ethical Marxism”, represented by authors such as Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Henri Lefebvre, or Mihailo Markovic).[v] Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theorist of the Second International, dedicated his book Ethics and the materialist concept of History (1906) to arguing that historical progress obeys laws that have very little to do with moral ideas. Therefore, he argued, Socialists should look to science for guidance in their actions, because “science is always above ethics”.[vi] In his article “Tactics and Ethics” (1919) Lukács agreed with Kautsky in that decisions about political tactics should answer only to the tribunal of history: if they are in accordance with “the sense of world history”, then they are “correct”, and therefore, by necessity “ethical”.[vii] Many other examples can be found.[viii] What is important for our purposes is that this type of reduction of the ethical dimension to a mere problem of “logic” or of understanding what is correct or incorrect in terms of some Laws of historical necessity, was translated in practice – not only among Marxists but also among people on the left in general – into an eradication of all sense of personal responsibility, and the typical principle according to which “the end sanctifies the means”.
(...) In Religion and Socialism, a noteworthy book written in 1907 and now all but forgotten, Anatoli Lunacharski – who would soon form part of the first Bolshevik government – proposed complementing Marxism’s “austere, modest and arid philosophy”, with aesthetics and ethics, a “science of values” of the sort that is lacking today. Essentially, Marx and Engels occupied themselves with “knowing” the world; but the “the complete relationship between man and the world is only attained when the processes are not only known, but also valued”; action “emerges only from knowledge and evaluation”. Science does not occupy itself with questions of the heart: it responds to “how?” and “why?”, but it is not concerned with questions of “good?” or “bad?”. Religion, on the other hand, responds to these questions and reaches a practical conclusion: “it proves the presence of evil in the world” and “attempt to defeat it”. It is taking this function of ethical and aesthetic evaluation into account that Lunacharski argues that Socialism should “imitate” religion (needless to say, forgetting its theological and dogmatic elements) and become a genuine cosmology. [can this complement materialism, which almost necessarily relegates this tussle of ideas?]
(...) It is clear that Socialism is the cause of the proletariat; but is it also good for all humanity from a moral point of view? Lunacharski complains that orthodox Marxists reject that question, because for them it is enough that it be correct for the proletariat alone (they say that Socialism is not a faith that looks to win converts outside the working class). Nevertheless – our author goes on to say–, this is a limited conception: the proletariat needs to achieve “ideological hegemony” if it wants to reach power (something they would not be able to do alone, against everyone else).
(...) Although rejected in theory, an implicit moral world nevertheless exists in the practices of the left, which clearly distinguishes between the “righteous” and “sinners
(...) By guiding its actions in accordance with the mandates of a transcendental Truth (extracted from science, knowledge of supposed historical Laws, or some canonical text), the left makes itself impenetrable to others in two ways. On the one hand, it shuts its ears to the simple “opinions” of the uninitiated (that is to say, those who have not demonstrated a grasp of the Truth), which leads to a conspicuous unwillingness to reach agreements with them; on the other hand, it implicitly rejects any responsibility towards its fellows. Protected by the Truth, the left remains untouchable to the judgements of others. By retiring themselves from the world of equals in this way, leftists often adopt that typical air of self-sufficiency and arrogant condescension towards others, and that vanguardist style that can be found even amongst those who declare themselves opposed to all vanguards (but who nevertheless feel themselves to be “illuminated” by their own Truth). In this way, we end up in the paradox indicated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau more than two hundred years ago, in one of those ironic phrases laden with truth that he liked to shoot against his fellow philosophers. He questioned those who would say they loved Humankind, but only to avoid the obligation of loving any human being in particular. Rousseau’s critique remains useful today to illustrate the tragedy of a left without ethics. [yes. this i fully agree with]
(...) Here let us return to the problem of the left and the ethical dimension that is indispensable if we are to protect it from ideological abuse, and to clearly separate it from right-wing practices. The beginning and end of any anticapitalist politics – and this is the central thesis of this essay – should be a radical ethics of equality.
(...) A radical ethics of equality is, above all, an immanent ethics. Unlike other ethics – for example, that of Kant, that of the Socratic philosophers, or that included in religious principles – that claim to come from some eternal order (rational, natural or divine), ours should be firmly anchored in this world. As with all of social life, the universe of moral criteria should be put within the grasp of real men and women. To say it in another way, the content of this ethics should be the fruit of social agreements that recognise the needs of life in common, from the most universal (that is to say, those that relate to human beings as a species) to the most historical and situational. That an ethical code be something more or less permanent and widely shared does not mean that it should be considered eternal or universal, nor that its authority should be deposited in gods or transcendental Truths. An immanent ethic is an ethic that comes from us.
(...) A radical ethic of equality is also an ethic of dialogue. It recognises that society is not made up of isolated individuals, but nor is it a collective that exists beyond the specific individuals who compose it (to postulate a collective over and above people, as certain leftists do, is to fall once again into the transcendental). Personal existence, as the young Bakhtin knew,[x] is only possible in interaction with the other: it is by the means of the image, the body, the gaze, and the word of my fellows that I exist as a whole person. Social life is nothing more than this ongoing dialogue with our fellows, those who are alive, those who have died, and those who are yet to come. An ethical existence is, therefore, that of people who know themselves to be obliged to be able to answer to the other for what they are, for what they do, and for what they fail to do. An ethics of dialogue therefore requires commitment to our fellows, a personal existence that assumes its responsibility for the other, and which does not look for excuses or alibis nor does it retreat into the monologue or to devotion to a transcendent (be it God, Science, the Nation, the People, Class, the Party or the Individual). An ethical existence without alibis, is one of fidelity to the specific situation and of accountability to others for every act. And it can only be considered a radical ethics of equality if the commitment is to the other just as they are.
(...) This radical commitment to others just as they are does not mean ignoring class differences and the antagonism that shape our society. For we are talking about an ethics of equality, whose raison d’être is precisely that of protecting life in common from those who, under any excuse, attempt to place themselves above others. That is why those who have refused to accept being equals, at all times and in all places have feared dialogic and immanent ethics. It is because the “unequals” cannot be accountable to others, that the justification of their privilege (“private law”) has always rested upon some authority or transcendent. Radical egalitarian ethics is, by definition, power’s fiercest enemy.
(...) What would the specific content of an ethics of equals be? What virtues would it promote? What conducts would it condemn? It would be, firstly and fundamentally, and ethics of caring for the Other, expressed in a codification of virtues and defects that values all that which aims at cooperation, solidarity, empathy, humility, respect for diversity, the capacity for consensus, etc., and which “represses” impulses to competition, selfishness, ambition to power, intellectual arrogance, stubbornness, obsequiousness, or narcissism.
displacing farmers in India:
It was on the cards. With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announcing the formation of a new rehabilitation policy for farmers displaced from land acquisitions, it is now official -- farmers have to quit agriculture.
(...) Ever since the Congress-led UPA Coalition assumed power after an angry rural protest vote threw out the erstwhile BJP-led NDA combination in May 2004, the Prime Minister had initiated a plethora of new policies for the spread of industrialization. After having laid the policy framework that allows private control over community resources – water, biodiversity, forests, seeds, agriculture markets, and mineral resources -- the UPA government finally looked at the possibility of divesting the poor people of their only economic security – a meagre piece of land holding.
(...) At a conference organised by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai a few years back, he [Dr Ismail Serageldin] quoted the World Bank to say that the number of people estimated to migrate from rural to urban India by the year 2015 is expected to be equal to twice the combined population of UK, France and Germany.
(...) The combined population of UK, France and Germany is 200 million. The World Bank had therefore estimated that some 400 million people would be willingly or unwillingly moving from the rural to urban centres by 2015. Subsequent studies have shown that massive distress migration will result in the years to come. For instance, 70 per cent of Tamil Nadu, 65 per cent of Punjab, and nearly 55 per cent of Uttar Pradesh is expected to migrate to urban centres by the year 2020.
(...) Acerbating the crisis are the policy initiatives that promotes privatization of natural resources, take over of farm land, integrating Indian agriculture with the global economy, and moving farmers out of agriculture – in essence the hallmark of the neo-liberal economic growth model.
(...) These companies, if the global experience is any indication, bank upon still more intensive farming practices, drain the soil of nutrients and suck ground water in a couple of years, and render the fertile lands almost barren after four to five years. It has been estimated that the crops that are contracted by the private companies require on an average 20 times more chemical inputs and water than the staple foods.
(...) [contract farming] Sugarcane farmers, for instance, who follow a system of cane bonding with the mills, actually were drawing 240 cm of water every year, which is three times more than what wheat and rice requires on an average. Rose cultivation, introduced a few years back, requires 212 inches of groundwater consumption in every acre. Contract farming will therefore further exploit whatever remains of the ground water resources. These companies would then hand over the barren and unproductive land to the farmers who leased them, and would move to another fertile piece of land. This has been the global experience so far.
(...) I have always warned that agribusiness companies in reality hate farmers. Nowhere in the world have they worked in tandem with farmers. Even in North America and Europe, agribusiness companies have pushed farmers out of agriculture. As a result, only 700,000 farming families are left on the farm in the United States. Despite massive subsidies in European Union, one farmer quits agriculture every minute. Knowing well that the markets will displace farmers, the same agriculture prescription is being applied in India.
(...) A Planning Commission study has shown that 73 per cent of the cultivable land in the country is owned by 23.6 per cent of the population. With more and more farmers being displaced through land acquisitions, either for SEZ or for food processing and technology parks or for real estate purposes, land is further getting accumulated in the hands of the elite and resourceful. With chief ministers acting as property dealers, farmers are being lured to divest control over cultivable land. Food security and food self-sufficiency is no longer the country’s political priority.
(...) The government has very conveniently taken refuge behind an NSSO study that says some 40 per cent of the farmers have expressed the desire to quit farming. After all, what the government is facilitating is to make it easier for the farmers to abandon their land. It believes that a rehabilitation policy for the farmers therefore is the need of the hour. What is however not being seen through is that an agrarian economy like India cannot afford large-scale displacement of farmers. It will lead to social unrest the kind of which has not been witnessed. What India needs desperately is a policy paradigm that restores pride in agriculture, stops take-over of agricultural lands, and ensures sustainable livelihoods for 600 million farmers.
It was on the cards. With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announcing the formation of a new rehabilitation policy for farmers displaced from land acquisitions, it is now official -- farmers have to quit agriculture.
(...) Ever since the Congress-led UPA Coalition assumed power after an angry rural protest vote threw out the erstwhile BJP-led NDA combination in May 2004, the Prime Minister had initiated a plethora of new policies for the spread of industrialization. After having laid the policy framework that allows private control over community resources – water, biodiversity, forests, seeds, agriculture markets, and mineral resources -- the UPA government finally looked at the possibility of divesting the poor people of their only economic security – a meagre piece of land holding.
(...) At a conference organised by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai a few years back, he [Dr Ismail Serageldin] quoted the World Bank to say that the number of people estimated to migrate from rural to urban India by the year 2015 is expected to be equal to twice the combined population of UK, France and Germany.
(...) The combined population of UK, France and Germany is 200 million. The World Bank had therefore estimated that some 400 million people would be willingly or unwillingly moving from the rural to urban centres by 2015. Subsequent studies have shown that massive distress migration will result in the years to come. For instance, 70 per cent of Tamil Nadu, 65 per cent of Punjab, and nearly 55 per cent of Uttar Pradesh is expected to migrate to urban centres by the year 2020.
(...) Acerbating the crisis are the policy initiatives that promotes privatization of natural resources, take over of farm land, integrating Indian agriculture with the global economy, and moving farmers out of agriculture – in essence the hallmark of the neo-liberal economic growth model.
(...) These companies, if the global experience is any indication, bank upon still more intensive farming practices, drain the soil of nutrients and suck ground water in a couple of years, and render the fertile lands almost barren after four to five years. It has been estimated that the crops that are contracted by the private companies require on an average 20 times more chemical inputs and water than the staple foods.
(...) [contract farming] Sugarcane farmers, for instance, who follow a system of cane bonding with the mills, actually were drawing 240 cm of water every year, which is three times more than what wheat and rice requires on an average. Rose cultivation, introduced a few years back, requires 212 inches of groundwater consumption in every acre. Contract farming will therefore further exploit whatever remains of the ground water resources. These companies would then hand over the barren and unproductive land to the farmers who leased them, and would move to another fertile piece of land. This has been the global experience so far.
(...) I have always warned that agribusiness companies in reality hate farmers. Nowhere in the world have they worked in tandem with farmers. Even in North America and Europe, agribusiness companies have pushed farmers out of agriculture. As a result, only 700,000 farming families are left on the farm in the United States. Despite massive subsidies in European Union, one farmer quits agriculture every minute. Knowing well that the markets will displace farmers, the same agriculture prescription is being applied in India.
(...) A Planning Commission study has shown that 73 per cent of the cultivable land in the country is owned by 23.6 per cent of the population. With more and more farmers being displaced through land acquisitions, either for SEZ or for food processing and technology parks or for real estate purposes, land is further getting accumulated in the hands of the elite and resourceful. With chief ministers acting as property dealers, farmers are being lured to divest control over cultivable land. Food security and food self-sufficiency is no longer the country’s political priority.
(...) The government has very conveniently taken refuge behind an NSSO study that says some 40 per cent of the farmers have expressed the desire to quit farming. After all, what the government is facilitating is to make it easier for the farmers to abandon their land. It believes that a rehabilitation policy for the farmers therefore is the need of the hour. What is however not being seen through is that an agrarian economy like India cannot afford large-scale displacement of farmers. It will lead to social unrest the kind of which has not been witnessed. What India needs desperately is a policy paradigm that restores pride in agriculture, stops take-over of agricultural lands, and ensures sustainable livelihoods for 600 million farmers.
choices for black labor:
As we enter the 21st century, Black labor is in disarray. Within the ranks of organized labor, the various institutions that have often spoken on its behalf have ossified. Black caucuses in various unions have stepped back from challenging and pushing the union leaderships and instead have in all too many cases degenerated into social clubs or step-ladders for individuals to get positions in the union structure.
(...) Suffice to say that the economic crisis affecting Black America, a crisis that became very evident in the mid-1970s, cut the ground underneath a major portion of the Black working class. Combined with political attacks on Black America by the Right, we went on the defensive. In organized labor, the declining percentage of workers organized in unions, along with the brutal climate built up during the Ronald Reagan years, worsened the conditions under which struggle could take place.
(...) Yet in my humble opinion what was particularly lost by Black labor leaders was vision. The vision that was articulated beginning in the 1930s with the growth of the National Negro Congress and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and advanced in the 1950s with the National Negro Labor Council and, later, by the A. Philip Randolph-led Negro American Labor Council, and in the 1970s with the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, justifiably emphasized the inclusion of Black workers at all levels of the union movement.
(...) Nationally, the prevailing emphasis, even among many younger activists, is on individual solutions to problems that are mainly collective. Within the Black working class there is a less of a sense that unions are the instruments to deal with the larger problems facing Black America. This does not mean that unions are disregarded, but it does mean that there is little sense that they can or do have an expansive role.
(...) Gaining considerable attention over the last few years has been the growth of anti-immigrant sentiment within Black America, including within the Black working class. The fact that much of this sentiment has been actively fueled by white, right-wing anti-immigrant groups is secondary to the fact that the fear of competition and displacement on the part of the Black working class has made it susceptible to ‘nativist’ arguments. Black labor leadership has, for the most part, failed to engage and rigorously challenge this sentiment with much more than platitudes. As the Black working class faces continued battering, the immigrant—documented and/or undocumented—becomes, for many, the target of convenience for our anger. Rather than understanding the nature of the problem we face as lying within capitalism itself and the search by business for cheaper and more vulnerable workforces, the immigrant becomes the safe and convenient enemy of the moment.
(...) Black labor has historically played an interesting role, something akin to the irritant in the oyster that brings forward a pearl. Whether we organized independent unions when we were refused entry into the American Federation of Labor, or when we and Chicanos became decisive supporters of a new labor movement, as in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s and 1940s, Black labor has little history of passivity. The time has come for Black labor to step back into that role of irritant to the oyster, but with a 21st century frame of reference.
(...) To this should be added that the Black Freedom Movement has nearly always been an essential ally for other efforts to expand democracy and oppose injustice and inequality. This core—the fight for consistent democracy/opposition to injustice and inequality—must remain the guiding principles for Black labor and its challenge to organized labor today. The implications are quite profound in that what is being asked of Black labor—as a contingent of both organized labor and the Black Freedom Movement—is to push for a reconstructed and redefined labor movement that is emphasizing social transformation.
(...) Jobs do not necessarily begin high-wage. They can, however, become high wage through worker organization. This means that organized labor must have a program to organize economically depressed regions—such as our central cities—to transform the jobs. This, again, becomes a community affair.
As we enter the 21st century, Black labor is in disarray. Within the ranks of organized labor, the various institutions that have often spoken on its behalf have ossified. Black caucuses in various unions have stepped back from challenging and pushing the union leaderships and instead have in all too many cases degenerated into social clubs or step-ladders for individuals to get positions in the union structure.
(...) Suffice to say that the economic crisis affecting Black America, a crisis that became very evident in the mid-1970s, cut the ground underneath a major portion of the Black working class. Combined with political attacks on Black America by the Right, we went on the defensive. In organized labor, the declining percentage of workers organized in unions, along with the brutal climate built up during the Ronald Reagan years, worsened the conditions under which struggle could take place.
(...) Yet in my humble opinion what was particularly lost by Black labor leaders was vision. The vision that was articulated beginning in the 1930s with the growth of the National Negro Congress and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and advanced in the 1950s with the National Negro Labor Council and, later, by the A. Philip Randolph-led Negro American Labor Council, and in the 1970s with the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, justifiably emphasized the inclusion of Black workers at all levels of the union movement.
(...) Nationally, the prevailing emphasis, even among many younger activists, is on individual solutions to problems that are mainly collective. Within the Black working class there is a less of a sense that unions are the instruments to deal with the larger problems facing Black America. This does not mean that unions are disregarded, but it does mean that there is little sense that they can or do have an expansive role.
(...) Gaining considerable attention over the last few years has been the growth of anti-immigrant sentiment within Black America, including within the Black working class. The fact that much of this sentiment has been actively fueled by white, right-wing anti-immigrant groups is secondary to the fact that the fear of competition and displacement on the part of the Black working class has made it susceptible to ‘nativist’ arguments. Black labor leadership has, for the most part, failed to engage and rigorously challenge this sentiment with much more than platitudes. As the Black working class faces continued battering, the immigrant—documented and/or undocumented—becomes, for many, the target of convenience for our anger. Rather than understanding the nature of the problem we face as lying within capitalism itself and the search by business for cheaper and more vulnerable workforces, the immigrant becomes the safe and convenient enemy of the moment.
(...) Black labor has historically played an interesting role, something akin to the irritant in the oyster that brings forward a pearl. Whether we organized independent unions when we were refused entry into the American Federation of Labor, or when we and Chicanos became decisive supporters of a new labor movement, as in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s and 1940s, Black labor has little history of passivity. The time has come for Black labor to step back into that role of irritant to the oyster, but with a 21st century frame of reference.
(...) To this should be added that the Black Freedom Movement has nearly always been an essential ally for other efforts to expand democracy and oppose injustice and inequality. This core—the fight for consistent democracy/opposition to injustice and inequality—must remain the guiding principles for Black labor and its challenge to organized labor today. The implications are quite profound in that what is being asked of Black labor—as a contingent of both organized labor and the Black Freedom Movement—is to push for a reconstructed and redefined labor movement that is emphasizing social transformation.
(...) Jobs do not necessarily begin high-wage. They can, however, become high wage through worker organization. This means that organized labor must have a program to organize economically depressed regions—such as our central cities—to transform the jobs. This, again, becomes a community affair.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
what hamas wantsTHE events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.
(...) From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.
(...) Our stated aim when we won the election was to effect reform, end corruption and bring economic prosperity to our people.
(...) Any further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence. Dispassionate observers over the next few weeks will be able to make up their own minds as to each side's true intentions.
(...) From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.
(...) Our stated aim when we won the election was to effect reform, end corruption and bring economic prosperity to our people.
(...) Any further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence. Dispassionate observers over the next few weeks will be able to make up their own minds as to each side's true intentions.
engage with hamas: we earned our support
The Palestinian National Authority apparently joins the list of elected governments targeted or toppled over the past century by interventionism: nations that had the courage to take American rhetoric at face value and elect whomever they would. No doubt some in Washington persist in the fiction that the United States is following a "road map" to democracy for Palestinians, just as others believe the Iraq war has been a sincere exercise in nation-building. Neoconservative strategists have miscalculated, however, and Hamas is stronger than ever.
(...) Some critics raise the red flag of "al-Qaeda" and say that Hamas and parliament are a stalking horse for Salafi jihadists. I defy them to demonstrate one instance in which Hamas's military structure has struck against any force outside the theater of the occupation. The struggle has always been against the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing and conquest. Hamas is a movement of Palestinian liberation and nationalism -- Islamist, yes, but in the sea of contending faiths that is the homeland, where is the sin in loving one's creed?
(...) Likewise, those who demean resistance to the occupation as little more than a proxy for Iran, Syria or Hezbollah are ignorant of history. The long-suffering Palestinians have gratefully accepted assistance from neighbors both near and far, Arab and Western, Muslim or otherwise. Slighting the generosity of those who sympathize with the Palestinians is hypocritical given America's billions of annual aid dollars for Israel, money that has only purchased tragedy.
(...) Yet it remains that Hamas has a world in common with Fatah and other parties, and they all share the same goals -- the end of occupation; the release of political prisoners; the right of return for all Palestinians; and freedom to be a nation equal among nations, secure in its own borders and at peace. For more than 60 years, Palestinians have resisted walls and checkpoints intended to divide them. Now they must resist the poisonous inducements to fight one another and resume a unified front against the occupation.
(...) Allow the Palestinian people to chart their own course, free from the influence of those who seek little more than to perpetuate the status quo. The alternative is unacceptable.
The Palestinian National Authority apparently joins the list of elected governments targeted or toppled over the past century by interventionism: nations that had the courage to take American rhetoric at face value and elect whomever they would. No doubt some in Washington persist in the fiction that the United States is following a "road map" to democracy for Palestinians, just as others believe the Iraq war has been a sincere exercise in nation-building. Neoconservative strategists have miscalculated, however, and Hamas is stronger than ever.
(...) Some critics raise the red flag of "al-Qaeda" and say that Hamas and parliament are a stalking horse for Salafi jihadists. I defy them to demonstrate one instance in which Hamas's military structure has struck against any force outside the theater of the occupation. The struggle has always been against the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing and conquest. Hamas is a movement of Palestinian liberation and nationalism -- Islamist, yes, but in the sea of contending faiths that is the homeland, where is the sin in loving one's creed?
(...) Likewise, those who demean resistance to the occupation as little more than a proxy for Iran, Syria or Hezbollah are ignorant of history. The long-suffering Palestinians have gratefully accepted assistance from neighbors both near and far, Arab and Western, Muslim or otherwise. Slighting the generosity of those who sympathize with the Palestinians is hypocritical given America's billions of annual aid dollars for Israel, money that has only purchased tragedy.
(...) Yet it remains that Hamas has a world in common with Fatah and other parties, and they all share the same goals -- the end of occupation; the release of political prisoners; the right of return for all Palestinians; and freedom to be a nation equal among nations, secure in its own borders and at peace. For more than 60 years, Palestinians have resisted walls and checkpoints intended to divide them. Now they must resist the poisonous inducements to fight one another and resume a unified front against the occupation.
(...) Allow the Palestinian people to chart their own course, free from the influence of those who seek little more than to perpetuate the status quo. The alternative is unacceptable.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
newspeak from the new york times:
Fatah accepts Israel’s existence and wants to negotiate with it over Palestinian statehood. It also accepts the authority of past agreements signed by the Palestinians, including agreements to stop terrorism. Hamas accepts none of these things, and sees no contradiction between its terrorist deeds and its demands that its governing officials be treated like those of any state. [presumes that it's "our" right to decide. would we agree to foreign intervention in american affairs b/c bush is high on the imperial imperative?]
(...) President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel have done everything they could think of to isolate Hamas and far less than they might have to help Fatah’s most important remaining leader, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. [is that so?]
(...) That should include a total freeze on settlement building and expansion, a prompt easing of the onerous, humiliating and economically strangulating blockades on Palestinian movements within the West Bank, and the swift release to Mr. Abbas’s office of all tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinians but still in Israeli hands. [to Mr. Abbas, the choice of the Palestinian people?]
(...) Hamas’s future diplomatic treatment should depend strictly on its own behavior. If it is ever willing to stop engaging in terrorism and live up to the standards expected of law-abiding governments, there will be something for Israeli and American officials to discuss with it. The past few days offer little encouragement in that regard. [evidence of this terrorism?]
Fatah accepts Israel’s existence and wants to negotiate with it over Palestinian statehood. It also accepts the authority of past agreements signed by the Palestinians, including agreements to stop terrorism. Hamas accepts none of these things, and sees no contradiction between its terrorist deeds and its demands that its governing officials be treated like those of any state. [presumes that it's "our" right to decide. would we agree to foreign intervention in american affairs b/c bush is high on the imperial imperative?]
(...) President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel have done everything they could think of to isolate Hamas and far less than they might have to help Fatah’s most important remaining leader, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. [is that so?]
(...) That should include a total freeze on settlement building and expansion, a prompt easing of the onerous, humiliating and economically strangulating blockades on Palestinian movements within the West Bank, and the swift release to Mr. Abbas’s office of all tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinians but still in Israeli hands. [to Mr. Abbas, the choice of the Palestinian people?]
(...) Hamas’s future diplomatic treatment should depend strictly on its own behavior. If it is ever willing to stop engaging in terrorism and live up to the standards expected of law-abiding governments, there will be something for Israeli and American officials to discuss with it. The past few days offer little encouragement in that regard. [evidence of this terrorism?]
selected quotes from the puppet master and co.:
“No one wants to abandon the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the Gaza Strip to the mercies of a terrorist organization,” a White House spokesman, Scott Stanzel, said in Washington.
“We are waiting, watching the situation very closely,” she [Israeli foreign minister] added. “But on the other hand we are going to keep this strategy of dialogue with the moderates and to send some hope for those who support their vision.”
The split between Hamas and Fatah in the government, Regev said, "may open options for us to work with moderate Palestinians."
(...) Some officials hinted that Israel might unfreeze tax revenues worth hundreds of millions of dollars that it has withheld from the Palestinians.(...) "What we have witnessed is a fascist, military coup. Hamas cannot control the Palestinian people with their machine guns. They may have taken a few government buildings but Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation still has the people in Gaza," he [Ziad Abu Ein, a Fatah leader in Ramallah] said. "In a few days there will be a new uprising in Gaza when people discover the truth of Hamas. There will be a big fight."
(...) Salam Fayyad - an economist, MP and former finance minister - is well known in western financial circles following an eight-year stint at the World Bank and six years as the International Monetary Fund's representative to the Palestinian Authority. Born near Tulkarm in the West Bank in 1952, he was educated in Lebanon and Texas, and spent 20 years in the US. He returned to Palestine in 2002 as finance minister, working hard to stamp out official corruption. After Hamas won elections in 2006, he rejected overtures to be prime minister. He returned to the finance ministry this year as part of a Saudi-brokered deal to establish the ill-fated national unity government. He is married with three children.
(...) Barring some dramatic reversal after the latest fighting - such as the improbable survival of the Hamas-Fatah coalition government - 1.4 million Palestinians in what is now being dubbed "Hamastan" will not only be physically cut off from their compatriots in the West Bank but will also be ruled by a movement that advocates armed resistance and is boycotted by Israel and the international community.
(...) "This situation isn't good for Israel. It's actually dreadful," said the veteran Yediot Aharonot analyst Roni Shaked. "The Palestinians are destroying their future with their own hands."
(...) The United States had quietly encouraged Mr. Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian government and dismiss Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, steps that Mr. Abbas announced Thursday, administration officials said. Before the announcement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned Mr. Abbas to reiterate American support for the move, they said.
(...) “President Abbas has exercised his lawful authority as the president of the Palestinian Authority, as the leader of the Palestinian people,” Ms. Rice said.
(...) “Nobody wants to abandon the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the Gaza Strip to the mercies of a terrorist organization,” said the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack. “We’re certainly not going to participate in extinguishing the hopes of a whole swath of the Palestinian population to live in a Palestinian state.”
“No one wants to abandon the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the Gaza Strip to the mercies of a terrorist organization,” a White House spokesman, Scott Stanzel, said in Washington.
“We are waiting, watching the situation very closely,” she [Israeli foreign minister] added. “But on the other hand we are going to keep this strategy of dialogue with the moderates and to send some hope for those who support their vision.”
The split between Hamas and Fatah in the government, Regev said, "may open options for us to work with moderate Palestinians."
(...) Some officials hinted that Israel might unfreeze tax revenues worth hundreds of millions of dollars that it has withheld from the Palestinians.(...) "What we have witnessed is a fascist, military coup. Hamas cannot control the Palestinian people with their machine guns. They may have taken a few government buildings but Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation still has the people in Gaza," he [Ziad Abu Ein, a Fatah leader in Ramallah] said. "In a few days there will be a new uprising in Gaza when people discover the truth of Hamas. There will be a big fight."
(...) Salam Fayyad - an economist, MP and former finance minister - is well known in western financial circles following an eight-year stint at the World Bank and six years as the International Monetary Fund's representative to the Palestinian Authority. Born near Tulkarm in the West Bank in 1952, he was educated in Lebanon and Texas, and spent 20 years in the US. He returned to Palestine in 2002 as finance minister, working hard to stamp out official corruption. After Hamas won elections in 2006, he rejected overtures to be prime minister. He returned to the finance ministry this year as part of a Saudi-brokered deal to establish the ill-fated national unity government. He is married with three children.
(...) Barring some dramatic reversal after the latest fighting - such as the improbable survival of the Hamas-Fatah coalition government - 1.4 million Palestinians in what is now being dubbed "Hamastan" will not only be physically cut off from their compatriots in the West Bank but will also be ruled by a movement that advocates armed resistance and is boycotted by Israel and the international community.
(...) "This situation isn't good for Israel. It's actually dreadful," said the veteran Yediot Aharonot analyst Roni Shaked. "The Palestinians are destroying their future with their own hands."
(...) The United States had quietly encouraged Mr. Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian government and dismiss Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, steps that Mr. Abbas announced Thursday, administration officials said. Before the announcement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned Mr. Abbas to reiterate American support for the move, they said.
(...) “President Abbas has exercised his lawful authority as the president of the Palestinian Authority, as the leader of the Palestinian people,” Ms. Rice said.
(...) “Nobody wants to abandon the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the Gaza Strip to the mercies of a terrorist organization,” said the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack. “We’re certainly not going to participate in extinguishing the hopes of a whole swath of the Palestinian population to live in a Palestinian state.”
fisk on "palestine":
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
(...) No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over?
(...) And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
(...) Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people
(...) All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province). We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal. We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror". Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like our coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.
(...) If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
(...) So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
(...) No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over?
(...) And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
(...) Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people
(...) All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province). We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal. We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror". Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like our coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.
(...) If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
(...) So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
the gaza cage:WHAT HAPPENS when one and a half million human beings are imprisoned in a tiny, arid territory, cut off from their compatriots and from any contact with the outside world, starved by an economic blockade and unable to feed their families?
(...) This week, the experiment showed results. They proved that human beings react exactly like other animals: when too many of them are crowded into a small area in miserable conditions, they become aggressive, and even murderous. The organizers of the experiment in Jerusalem, Washington, Berlin, Oslo, Ottawa and other capitals could rub their hands in satisfaction. The subjects of the experiment reacted as foreseen. Many of them even died in the interests of science.
(...) the Hamas leaders decided that they had no alternative but to destroy the armed organizations that are tied to Fatah and take their orders from President Mahmoud Abbas. The US has ordered Israel to supply these organizations with large quantities of weapons, in order to enable them to fight Hamas. The Israeli army chiefs did not like the idea, fearing that the arms might end up in the hands of Hamas (as is actually happening now). But our government obeyed American orders, as usual.
(...) The American aim is clear. President Bush has chosen a local leader for every Muslim country, who will rule it under American protection and follow American orders. In Iraq, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, and also in Palestine.
(...) Hamas believes that the man marked for this job in Gaza is Mohammed Dahlan. For years it has looked as if he was being groomed for this position. The American and Israeli media have been singing his praises, describing him as a strong, determined leader, "moderate" (i.e. obedient to American orders) and "pragmatic" (i.e. obedient to Israeli orders).
(...) The morale of the fighters and public sentiment are far more important. The members of the Fatah organizations do not know what they are fighting for. The Gaza population supports Hamas, because they believe that it is fighting the Israeli occupier. Their opponents look like collaborators of the occupation. The American statements about their intention of arming them with Israeli weapons have finally condemned them.
(...) After the Palestinian public had patiently waited in vain for Bush to move, it voted for Hamas, in the desperate hope of achieving by violence what Abbas has been unable to achieve by diplomacy. The Israeli leaders, both military and political, were overjoyed. They were interested in undermining Abbas, because he enjoyed Bush's confidence and because his stated position made it harder to justify their refusal to enter substantive negotiations. They did everything to demolish Fatah. To ensure this, they arrested Marwan Barghouti, the only person capable of keeping Fatah together.
(...) The victory of Hamas suited their aims completely. With Hamas one does not have to talk, to offer withdrawal from the occupied territories and the dismantling of settlements. Hamas is that contemporary monster, a "terrorist" organization, and with terrorists there is nothing to discuss. SO WHY were people in Jerusalem not satisfied this week? And why did they decide "not to interfere"?
True, the media and the politicians, who have helped for years to incite the Palestinian organizations against each other, showed their satisfaction and boasted "we told you so". Look how the Arabs kill each other. Ehud Barak was right, when he said years ago that our country is "a villa in the jungle".
(...) They comfort themselves with the thought that it cannot happen in the West Bank. There, Fatah reigns. There Hamas has no foothold. There our army has already arrested most of Hamas' political leaders. There Abbas is still in power. Thus speak the generals, with the generals' logic. But in the West Bank, too, Hamas did win a majority in the last elections. There, too, it is only a matter of time before the population loses its patience. They see the expansion of the settlements, the Wall, the incursions of our army, the targeted assassinations, the nightly arrests. They will explode.
(...) [ehud barak] He came very close to an agreement with Assad the father and escaped at the last moment. He withdrew the Israeli army from South Lebanon, but without speaking with Hizbullah, which took over. He compelled Arafat to come to Camp David, insulted him there and declared that we have no partner for peace. This dealt a death blow to the chances of peace, a blow which still paralyzes the Israeli public. He has boasted that his real intention was to "unmask" Arafat. He was more of a failed Napoleon than an Israeli de Gaulle.
(...) This week, the experiment showed results. They proved that human beings react exactly like other animals: when too many of them are crowded into a small area in miserable conditions, they become aggressive, and even murderous. The organizers of the experiment in Jerusalem, Washington, Berlin, Oslo, Ottawa and other capitals could rub their hands in satisfaction. The subjects of the experiment reacted as foreseen. Many of them even died in the interests of science.
(...) the Hamas leaders decided that they had no alternative but to destroy the armed organizations that are tied to Fatah and take their orders from President Mahmoud Abbas. The US has ordered Israel to supply these organizations with large quantities of weapons, in order to enable them to fight Hamas. The Israeli army chiefs did not like the idea, fearing that the arms might end up in the hands of Hamas (as is actually happening now). But our government obeyed American orders, as usual.
(...) The American aim is clear. President Bush has chosen a local leader for every Muslim country, who will rule it under American protection and follow American orders. In Iraq, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, and also in Palestine.
(...) Hamas believes that the man marked for this job in Gaza is Mohammed Dahlan. For years it has looked as if he was being groomed for this position. The American and Israeli media have been singing his praises, describing him as a strong, determined leader, "moderate" (i.e. obedient to American orders) and "pragmatic" (i.e. obedient to Israeli orders).
(...) The morale of the fighters and public sentiment are far more important. The members of the Fatah organizations do not know what they are fighting for. The Gaza population supports Hamas, because they believe that it is fighting the Israeli occupier. Their opponents look like collaborators of the occupation. The American statements about their intention of arming them with Israeli weapons have finally condemned them.
(...) After the Palestinian public had patiently waited in vain for Bush to move, it voted for Hamas, in the desperate hope of achieving by violence what Abbas has been unable to achieve by diplomacy. The Israeli leaders, both military and political, were overjoyed. They were interested in undermining Abbas, because he enjoyed Bush's confidence and because his stated position made it harder to justify their refusal to enter substantive negotiations. They did everything to demolish Fatah. To ensure this, they arrested Marwan Barghouti, the only person capable of keeping Fatah together.
(...) The victory of Hamas suited their aims completely. With Hamas one does not have to talk, to offer withdrawal from the occupied territories and the dismantling of settlements. Hamas is that contemporary monster, a "terrorist" organization, and with terrorists there is nothing to discuss. SO WHY were people in Jerusalem not satisfied this week? And why did they decide "not to interfere"?
True, the media and the politicians, who have helped for years to incite the Palestinian organizations against each other, showed their satisfaction and boasted "we told you so". Look how the Arabs kill each other. Ehud Barak was right, when he said years ago that our country is "a villa in the jungle".
(...) They comfort themselves with the thought that it cannot happen in the West Bank. There, Fatah reigns. There Hamas has no foothold. There our army has already arrested most of Hamas' political leaders. There Abbas is still in power. Thus speak the generals, with the generals' logic. But in the West Bank, too, Hamas did win a majority in the last elections. There, too, it is only a matter of time before the population loses its patience. They see the expansion of the settlements, the Wall, the incursions of our army, the targeted assassinations, the nightly arrests. They will explode.
(...) [ehud barak] He came very close to an agreement with Assad the father and escaped at the last moment. He withdrew the Israeli army from South Lebanon, but without speaking with Hizbullah, which took over. He compelled Arafat to come to Camp David, insulted him there and declared that we have no partner for peace. This dealt a death blow to the chances of peace, a blow which still paralyzes the Israeli public. He has boasted that his real intention was to "unmask" Arafat. He was more of a failed Napoleon than an Israeli de Gaulle.
reading mark twain on imperialism:
"But what does it amount to?" says Twain, using one of his story's characters, an angel to convey the idea: "nothing at all. You gain nothing. You always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touches them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not shamed of it, but proud."
"But what does it amount to?" says Twain, using one of his story's characters, an angel to convey the idea: "nothing at all. You gain nothing. You always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touches them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not shamed of it, but proud."
open-air prison in gaza:
A good million Palestinians know from experience that if you occupy them militarily, coop them up in 360 square kilometers, destroy and loot their houses, cut off electricity and drinking water, regularly bomb them, make them see they have no future and if finally you blockade their economy and arm the leaders, then the very least that will happen is that they set about shooting at one another.
(...) The United States and its allies occupy that country after having submitted it to thirteen years of economic sanctions as criminal as those imposed on Palestine. They violate at will the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human decency and common sense, while their word-gunslingers, those authoritative editorialists, offer sermons on civil war in the Arab world and the need for action by the UN : "(the Israeli) Prime Minister suggested yesterday the deployment of an International force on the frontier between Gaza and Egypt." What a super idea! Why did they not ask for it during their 40 years of occupation and wars of aggression against their neighbors from their very founding as a State? Why no calls for the UN to deploy Blue Helmets in the military airfields of the United States and Europe so as to prevent the air raids on Iraq? Why no buffer force sent to northern Israel to halt the advance of its tanks into Lebanon? Why does the UN not mount an economic boycott against Israel, responsible for thousands of deaths in the Middle East and for the destruction of Lebanon and Gaza?
(...) How come an editorialist, equipped with a style manual to talk about democracy and social principles, is not led to reflect on the fact that if the Western blockade works to impede the supply of food to Gaza but not of weapons, the Palestinians, rather than invite each other to tea and cakes, will use those weapons for a fratricidal war?
(...) At the same time, the moral condition of the editorialists prevents them from regarding the Palestinians as anything but rats who deserve the fate they suffer, for that reason they take refuge in political, social and cultural pretexts like the terrorist character, factional behavior and the presence of Islamism.
A good million Palestinians know from experience that if you occupy them militarily, coop them up in 360 square kilometers, destroy and loot their houses, cut off electricity and drinking water, regularly bomb them, make them see they have no future and if finally you blockade their economy and arm the leaders, then the very least that will happen is that they set about shooting at one another.
(...) The United States and its allies occupy that country after having submitted it to thirteen years of economic sanctions as criminal as those imposed on Palestine. They violate at will the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human decency and common sense, while their word-gunslingers, those authoritative editorialists, offer sermons on civil war in the Arab world and the need for action by the UN : "(the Israeli) Prime Minister suggested yesterday the deployment of an International force on the frontier between Gaza and Egypt." What a super idea! Why did they not ask for it during their 40 years of occupation and wars of aggression against their neighbors from their very founding as a State? Why no calls for the UN to deploy Blue Helmets in the military airfields of the United States and Europe so as to prevent the air raids on Iraq? Why no buffer force sent to northern Israel to halt the advance of its tanks into Lebanon? Why does the UN not mount an economic boycott against Israel, responsible for thousands of deaths in the Middle East and for the destruction of Lebanon and Gaza?
(...) How come an editorialist, equipped with a style manual to talk about democracy and social principles, is not led to reflect on the fact that if the Western blockade works to impede the supply of food to Gaza but not of weapons, the Palestinians, rather than invite each other to tea and cakes, will use those weapons for a fratricidal war?
(...) At the same time, the moral condition of the editorialists prevents them from regarding the Palestinians as anything but rats who deserve the fate they suffer, for that reason they take refuge in political, social and cultural pretexts like the terrorist character, factional behavior and the presence of Islamism.
the glorious imperial legacy of the papacy and the catholic church:
There are three bulls (edicts, or executive orders, if you will) issued by the Papacy with which we should concern ourselves. The Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, authorized King Alfonso V of Portugal to reduce any "Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and any other unbelievers" to perpetual slavery, thereby ushering in the West African slave trade.
(...) The Romanus Pontifex, also issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1455, sanctioned the seizure of non-Christian lands, and encouraged the enslavement of non-Christian people in Africa and the Americas. Specifically, it gave the green light to "invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed," all for profit, and in the name of Jesus Christ.
(...) The Inter Caetera, signed by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, states, "... we (the Papacy) command you (Spain) ... to instruct the aforesaid inhabitants and residents and dwellers therein in the Catholic faith, and train them in good morals." This papal law sanctioned and paved the way for European colonization and Catholic missions in the New World.
(...) These three edicts opened the floodgates for everything that followed, the raping, pillaging, kidnapping, genocide and enslavement of millions. They established the groundwork for the global slave trade of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Age of Imperialism.
(...) In Brazil, Pentecostalismism is on the rise. There have been efforts to incorporate African rites and drums into Catholic services, in an effort to become more dynamic and more relevant. Yet, in the most African nation outside of Africa, and the world's largest Roman Catholic nation, there are only 11 Black bishops out of 400.
(...) This school of theology, which focuses on social justice and political activism for the poor, challenges people in high places, and views Jesus as liberator of the oppressed, is rejected by the Vatican. In fact, Pope Benedict has devoted his career to eradicating liberation theology and its supporters, which he rejects as Marxist-inspired, and "a threat to the faith of the church."
(...) What we are witnessing is the ancient struggle between imperial religion—the arrogant manipulation of God to endorse the powerful, protect the rich and maintain the status quo—and the use of faith as a force for social change. Look at the Christian Right's endorsement of Bush as "God's President," as he presides over the largest transfer of wealth in the nation's history, turns his back on New Orleans, appoints Christian Right attorneys to suppress the voting rights of African Americans, and sponsors the carnage taking place in Iraq. And on the other hand, remember Gandhi, who used Hindu spirituality and civil disobedience to liberate India from the British Empire. Remember Dr. King, who condemned Jim Crow segregation, poverty at home and an immoral war in Vietnam, as conservative Christians met him with brutality and death threats and moderate Christian clergy urged him to slow down. This is nothing new.
There are three bulls (edicts, or executive orders, if you will) issued by the Papacy with which we should concern ourselves. The Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, authorized King Alfonso V of Portugal to reduce any "Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and any other unbelievers" to perpetual slavery, thereby ushering in the West African slave trade.
(...) The Romanus Pontifex, also issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1455, sanctioned the seizure of non-Christian lands, and encouraged the enslavement of non-Christian people in Africa and the Americas. Specifically, it gave the green light to "invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed," all for profit, and in the name of Jesus Christ.
(...) The Inter Caetera, signed by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, states, "... we (the Papacy) command you (Spain) ... to instruct the aforesaid inhabitants and residents and dwellers therein in the Catholic faith, and train them in good morals." This papal law sanctioned and paved the way for European colonization and Catholic missions in the New World.
(...) These three edicts opened the floodgates for everything that followed, the raping, pillaging, kidnapping, genocide and enslavement of millions. They established the groundwork for the global slave trade of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Age of Imperialism.
(...) In Brazil, Pentecostalismism is on the rise. There have been efforts to incorporate African rites and drums into Catholic services, in an effort to become more dynamic and more relevant. Yet, in the most African nation outside of Africa, and the world's largest Roman Catholic nation, there are only 11 Black bishops out of 400.
(...) This school of theology, which focuses on social justice and political activism for the poor, challenges people in high places, and views Jesus as liberator of the oppressed, is rejected by the Vatican. In fact, Pope Benedict has devoted his career to eradicating liberation theology and its supporters, which he rejects as Marxist-inspired, and "a threat to the faith of the church."
(...) What we are witnessing is the ancient struggle between imperial religion—the arrogant manipulation of God to endorse the powerful, protect the rich and maintain the status quo—and the use of faith as a force for social change. Look at the Christian Right's endorsement of Bush as "God's President," as he presides over the largest transfer of wealth in the nation's history, turns his back on New Orleans, appoints Christian Right attorneys to suppress the voting rights of African Americans, and sponsors the carnage taking place in Iraq. And on the other hand, remember Gandhi, who used Hindu spirituality and civil disobedience to liberate India from the British Empire. Remember Dr. King, who condemned Jim Crow segregation, poverty at home and an immoral war in Vietnam, as conservative Christians met him with brutality and death threats and moderate Christian clergy urged him to slow down. This is nothing new.
believe it or not in the middle east:
The problem, of course, is that these are all extraordinary facts which will not offend anyone. There are no suicide bombers in Ripley, no Israeli air strikes ("Believe It or Not, 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon"), no major casualty tolls ("Believe It or Not, up to 650,000 Iraqis died in the four years following the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq"). See what I mean? Just a bit too close to the bone (or bones).
(...) but I think only the French press - in the shape of Le Monde Diplomatique - was prepared to confront a bit of "Believe It or Not". It recalled vividly - and shamefully - how the world's newspapers covered the story of Egypt's "aggression" against Israel. In reality - Believe It or Not - it was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran and ordered UN troops out of Sinai and Gaza following his vituperative threats to destroy Israel. "The Egyptians attack Israel," France-Soir told its readers on 5 June 1967, a whopper so big that it later amended its headline to "It's Middle East War!".
(...) Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel "is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions - and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called 'terrorism'".
(...) Congolese troops from Belgium's immensely wealthy African colony scored enormous victories over Italian troops in Africa during the Second World War, capturing 15,000 prisoners, including nine generals. Called "the Public Force" - a name which happily excluded the fact that these heroes were black Congolese - the army mobilised 13,000 soldiers and civilians to fight Vichy French colonies in Africa and deployed in the Middle East - where they were positioned to defend Palestine - as well as in Somalia, Madagascar, India and Burma. Vast numbers of British and American troops passed through the Congo as its wealth was transferred to the war chests of the United States and Britain. A US base was built at Kinshasa to move oil to Allied troops fighting in the Middle East. But - Believe It or Not - when Congolese trade unions, whose members were requisitioned to perform hard labour inside Belgium's colony by carrying agricultural and industrial goods and military equipment, often on their backs, demanded higher salaries, the Belgian authorities confronted their demonstrations with rifle fire, shooting down 50 of their men.
The problem, of course, is that these are all extraordinary facts which will not offend anyone. There are no suicide bombers in Ripley, no Israeli air strikes ("Believe It or Not, 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon"), no major casualty tolls ("Believe It or Not, up to 650,000 Iraqis died in the four years following the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq"). See what I mean? Just a bit too close to the bone (or bones).
(...) but I think only the French press - in the shape of Le Monde Diplomatique - was prepared to confront a bit of "Believe It or Not". It recalled vividly - and shamefully - how the world's newspapers covered the story of Egypt's "aggression" against Israel. In reality - Believe It or Not - it was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran and ordered UN troops out of Sinai and Gaza following his vituperative threats to destroy Israel. "The Egyptians attack Israel," France-Soir told its readers on 5 June 1967, a whopper so big that it later amended its headline to "It's Middle East War!".
(...) Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel "is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions - and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called 'terrorism'".
(...) Congolese troops from Belgium's immensely wealthy African colony scored enormous victories over Italian troops in Africa during the Second World War, capturing 15,000 prisoners, including nine generals. Called "the Public Force" - a name which happily excluded the fact that these heroes were black Congolese - the army mobilised 13,000 soldiers and civilians to fight Vichy French colonies in Africa and deployed in the Middle East - where they were positioned to defend Palestine - as well as in Somalia, Madagascar, India and Burma. Vast numbers of British and American troops passed through the Congo as its wealth was transferred to the war chests of the United States and Britain. A US base was built at Kinshasa to move oil to Allied troops fighting in the Middle East. But - Believe It or Not - when Congolese trade unions, whose members were requisitioned to perform hard labour inside Belgium's colony by carrying agricultural and industrial goods and military equipment, often on their backs, demanded higher salaries, the Belgian authorities confronted their demonstrations with rifle fire, shooting down 50 of their men.
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