All these nations and city-state societies listed here over the past twenty-five centuries enjoyed obvious hegemonic status or were in direct competition with others that did. They were all in possession of major urban epicenters, a distinctive culture of their own, and–with the exception of Italy during the Renaissance–the military capacity to expand their authority well beyond their borders in order to obtain favorable markets and adequate resources from abroad.  Moreover, as in the case of Rome described by Gibbon, they were all susceptible to decline, and their collapse resulted more from reckless expansionism than the success of their enemies.  In historical terms it can be blamed as much as anything on their bad judgment, their mistaken policies, and, most of all, their obsessive commitment to military and financial aggrandizement.  Again with the exception of renaissance Italy, all of them ceased being hegemonic states when their enlargement could no longer feed on itself.
 
2. American Civilization
 
This brings us to the United States, the latest hegemonic society in the history of Western Civilization.  We became a nation during the Revolutionary War by defeating Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. Before Yorktown, British troops were more than holding their own; afterward they ceased to be much of a military threat.  At the time, however, we were hardly a world power, and in fact our decisive victory at Yorktown was planned, financed, and mostly carried out by the French.  The 1787 Constitution was also largely inspired by the French Enlightenment, and several of our top leadership–Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe, among others–spent a lot of time in France.  Moreover, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase was essentially a gift from Napoleon. In effect our nation was a byproduct of the French effort to defeat England in the New World, thereby contributing to its defeat in Europe.  The French failed in their effort, but the U.S. carried on as a relic of their effort in the western hemisphere.
 
              Our primary collective task over most of the rest of the nineteenth century was the forcible transfer of Indian lands to the possession of settlers from Europe. This effort began as early as King Philip’s War in 1675-76, when most of the Indians in New England were killed, driven away, or sold into slavery.  But it went into high gear during Jackson’s presidency and persisted throughout the nineteenth century.  The Mexican War [more accurately: war against Mexico] was obviously a “grab” of territory from Mexico. The Civil War intervened as a regional war in which slavery provided the excuse for giving northern financial interests dominant economic power at the expense of southern plantations dependent on slave labor. This was followed by the Spanish-American War, which was no less a “grab” than the Mexican War, this time with the capture of the Philippines setting the stage for a more “ambitious” policy with China, Japan, and other Asiatic states.
 
              It was the First World War that first gave our nation its hegemonic advantage on a truly international scale.  The creation of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913-14 under the ownership of New York banks (and thus of those who owned the banks) effectively centralized our nation’s collective financial wealth, among other things providing the funds sufficient for American allies to conduct massive warfare in Europe during World War I.  It was the belated involvement of U.S. troops starting in 1917 that tipped war’s balance to the allies. As a result of the war, European nations inclusive of Germany became heavily indebted to American banks, giving our nation de facto control of the world’s economy.  This reality was confirmed by negotiations at Bretton Woods in 1944, just before victory in World War II, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created and the dollar became the world’s reserve currency.
 
              Hitler’s most useful discovery during the thirties was the value of military expenditures in helping to buttress aggregate demand sufficient to keep factories running, thereby preventing a full-scale depression. Demand levels had plummeted below productive capacity, so military expenditures were used to augment demand as justified by the supposed threat of enemies abroad.  This so-called military Keynesian expedient also helped the United States during World War II, and it helped carry on what seemed an endless Cold War against the Soviet Union.  The beauty of this strategy was that Russians impoverished by combat with Germany were unable to restore their non-military industries because of the heavy military production needed to match American production committed to the struggle against them.  In effect, the United States was suffering from severe over-production and the Soviet Union from severe under-production, so we doubled our advantage by using relentless military competition to augment our economic growth while hurting theirs. As a result our society thrived, theirs suffered. Two costly “wars of choice” can also be mentioned, in Korea and Vietnam, as well as the U.S. subsidization of the Afghan rebellion against the Soviet Union before its tattered economy finally collapsed in the late eighties because of its inability to match the latest U.S. escalation with a star wars strategy devised under President Reagan.
 
With Russia no longer a military threat, some kind of an alternative was needed to supplant the Cold War in stretching aggregate demand.  The first President Bush rose to the challenge by conducting limited wars of choice against both Panama and Iraq in the Persian Gulf, but these ventures were insufficient to prevent a recession just preceding the 1992 election. Bush’s successor, President Clinton, limited military conflict to relatively modest operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia and Sudan. His principal effort, however, was to sustain our economy by means of economic globalization under the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other such trade organizations that would presumably benefit both advanced and developing nations on a win-win basis.  U.S. corporate profits would increase resulting from the export of production (in effect factories) to such countries as Mexico and China in order to benefit from their reduced labor costs and environmental constraints, and no less profitable would be the opportunity for U.S. investors to extract natural resources in other non-western nations restricted by treaty from imposing heavy taxes and export duties. Meanwhile, non-western nations would benefit from sufficient growth subsidized by western investment to provide “takeoff” into truly competitive economies as had been proposed several decades earlier by the American economist Walt Rostow.
 
 However, it soon became obvious that globalization was far more lucrative for Wall Street investors than for the indigenous population of non-western states, and moreover that the pursuit of economic ties in and of itself was insufficient to prevent a major depression in the near future in the United States. At this point deregulation must have seemed a perfectly reasonable means of augmenting our nation’s GDP.  Burdened with the threat of impeachment, President Clinton cooperated with Republicans and Wall Street in deregulating the financial markets first with the 1999 Financial Services Act and then the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, effectively rescinding the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act for bringing Wall Street financial markets under control.  As a neo-liberal, Clinton was willing to loosen up the markets, but not to the extent that was permitted by this legislation.  If he had more time to study it in depth, he would undoubtedly have tightened its application.
 
              A depression nevertheless began to gather momentum soon after the second (and less talented) President Bush came to office.  As to be expected, he resorted to every possible expedient that might help in diminishing its impact. His effort included going to war in both Afghanistan and Iraq as justified by the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center (one excuse sufficing to justify two wars), along with a sharp reduction in taxation, especially for the wealthiest Americans. This was the very first time in U.S. history that full-scale military Keynesianism and large tax reductions were combined to stimulate our economy.  For good measure, Bush also helped to pump up the economy by letting the housing and oil bubbles supplant the defunct dot-com bubble, and he encouraged the further deregulation of industry, banks, and Wall Street speculation.  Not surprisingly, the 2001 depression soon abated, and an artificial surge of prosperity followed until mid-September, 2008, just two months before the election and four months before Bush’s departure from office. This was when Wall Street imploded and Bush’s desperate economic legerdemain was finally over. Extravagant funding provided by the  federal bailout legislation saved the biggest Wall Street banks and brokerages, leaving the rest of our nation to cope what now amounts to a serious depression whose effects can be expected to persist for at least another couple of years.
 
              Barack Obama was elected president mostly because of the economic crisis, but as far as can be determined at this point, his measures for dealing with this crisis will probably be insufficient as predicted by the Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman.  Obama has also retained an essentially conservative staff to deal with both the domestic economy and U.S. military policy in Asia. Unfortunately, too many key figures he has brought into his administration are either what might be described as constituency choices or seasoned experts who had themselves played major roles in creating the problems we now confront.  Apropos of talented but relatively ineffectual constituency choices would be the selection of Kathleen Sebelius instead of Howard Dean as the Secretary of Health and Human Services despite Dean’s superior qualifications as a doctor, author, politician and the former governor of Vermont who led the effort to initiate its successful health care program for children and pregnant women. One suspects the principal reason for Dean’s rejection was his hostile relationship with Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff regarding campaign funding, Dean having emphasized a 50-state strategy as opposed to Emanuel’s effort to target the swing states.  However, if true, this feud is insufficient reason for rejecting Dean’s appointment.  One of Obama’s most appealing promises during his campaign was his intention to bring individuals who aggressively disagree with each other into his inner circle in order to benefit from their dialogue.  Having been deprived of Kennedy in the current health reform struggle, it would be a pity if Obama falls short of his goal in health care reform because of the absence of Dean as well from his inner circle. 
 
                Apropos of the economic crisis, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke` played central roles in events leading up to the September crash, yet they have been put in charge of the current recovery effort.  As in the case of Dean, it seems unfortunate that Obama skipped over both Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman from his inner team for dealing with the current economic crisis, apparently because Summers has taken a dislike to them, especially Stiglitz. The collapse of our nation’s economy has been severe enough that all of these economists should be able and willing to work together in the interactive manner earlier suggested by Obama.

And finally, apropos of the transfer of combat from Iraq to Afghanistan, Henry Gates and the two Generals Petraeus and McChrystal played central roles in the misbegotten occupation of Iraq, yet have been put in charge of operations in Afghanistan. True, they can be identified with the apparently successful “surge,” but it remains to be seen if it was truly a success. What seems most needed in Afghanistan right now is an effective occupation force rather than combat troops, and McChrystal in particular seems a dubious choice for this task.  His leadership of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq from 2003 to 2008 featured heavy combat, excessive interrogation techniques, and other such dubious responsibilities that necessarily antagonize the host population under occupation.
 
              It can also be mentioned that Obama has gone along with too many precedents established by Bush.  For example, he has continued Bush’s practice of adding his own “signing statements” to legislation passed by Congress, if not to the same extent, and his first official act as president was to issue an Executive order banning the release of presidential records just as Cheney had done eight years ago to prevent the disclosure of oil corporation executives with whom he had negotiated an energy policy in Iraq.  Obama’s cap and trade legislation also seems as much as anything a capitulation to Republican lobbyists. And why can’t Obama nudge public radio’s Democracy Now into at least balanced reportage if not a liberal bias equivalent to its pro-administration bias during Bush’s term in office.  And why can’t Obama put a stop to the incessant airport orange alerts that blare over the loudspeaker every half hour or so, apparently intended as much as anything to keep air travelers scared, therefore more willing to acquiesce to personal searches. And why is Obama willing to retain too many of Bush’s oppressive policies, especially in homeland security and the imprisonment and mistreatment of prisoners labeled as terrorists into the indefinite future. Despite his election promises, the Guantanamo prison camp continues to hold prisoners who die under suspicious circumstances, for example the individual al-Hashani as reported by Naomi Klein after her recent visit there.  All of this should be stopped.
 
              Admittedly, the multiple tasks that now confront Obama’s administration seem almost insurmountable after the collapse of an economic policy equivalent to the use of steroids for almost seventy years now. Severe deterioration set in well before Obama’s presidency, and he is stuck with cleaning up the mess, so he can and should be given slack in performing his mission.  But when does slack become free rein to abandon most of his campaign promises?  For the current situation requires the best effort from the very best experts and leaders in dealing with it.  It also requires genuine integrity on the part of these individuals rather than the greed and power-hungry gamesmanship that have dominated Washington politics for too many decades now.  Everything is beginning to fall apart, and the question remains whether it is possible to obtain some kind of a “soft landing” least harmful to the American people. 
 
3. The American Economy
 
              Numbers alone are daunting as an indication of our current financial crisis.  Our total Gross Domestic Product (GDP), including all goods and services produced in a single year, is now $14 trillion, almost exactly a quarter of the world’s total GDP.  However, our government’s annual deficit this year will be in the range of $1.75 trillion, having exceeded more than a trillion dollars for the first time; our gross national debt (specifically the total debt of our government alone) is now somewhere between $9 and $12 trillion; and our nation’s total debt including all household, business, financial, and government debt is now in the range of $57 trillion, about a trillion dollars more than the world’s total GDP inclusive of our own. As estimated by our nation’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), $2 trillion is now in the process of being spent to cover the cost of our present economic crisis, and it is estimated that the total cost will eventually amount to $23 trillion.  Incredibly, the total debt of derivatives traded on Wall Street before the September crash was between $600 and $650 trillion dollars–well beyond anybody’s ability to pay.  Moreover, our nation now owes at least a trillion dollars apiece to China and Japan as well as many hundreds of billion dollars to the sovereign wealth funds (SWF) for such nations as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Russia.
 
              Whether intended or not, the dollar has dropped 40 percent of its value compared to the euro over the past five years, effectively reducing our national debt to foreign borrowers by means of inflation just as happened with the collapse of the German mark during the twenties. This likelihood can only be intensified by the Federal Reserve Board having circulated more than a trillion dollars in order to maximize “liquidity” in order to combat depression. The dollar can accordingly be expected to continue its decline, probably setting the stage for its wholesale abandonment as the world’s reserve currency in the relatively near future.  This in turn would result in further and more dramatic losses for our economy as a whole.
 
              Meanwhile, our nation’s unemployment rate is 9.4 percent pushing 10 percent, underemployment is 16 percent, and the country has lost 6.7 million jobs since December, 2007, many of which will probably not be restored by “improved” productivity levels as well as a permanent decline in our nation’s affluence.  Not surprisingly, income disparities have considerably widened between the rich and the poor.  In 2006, two years before the current depression, the top one percent of U.S. households received 22.9 percent of all pre-tax income, more than double the ratio in the 1970s and by far the biggest concentration of wealth among the most prosperous Americans since 1928.  As reported recently by the Wall Street Journal, corporate executives now account for more than one-third of all salary compensation earned in the U.S.  On the other hand, there was only a 24 percent pay increase for the average worker from 2002 to 2007, less than 5 percent per annum, half of the 48 percent increase for highly paid individuals and less than double the official rate of inflation.  In sum, the income gap has steadily widened between the wealthiest Americans and average and poor Americans, and this is not a healthy trend for the nation as a whole. For this kind of plutocracy does not work in the long run.  Such an imbalance is like being fifty pounds overweight with a pulse of 120, a blood pressure of 180-125, a 300 mg/dL cholesterol level, a PSA of 12 going on 15, and a robust 9 on the Gleason cancer scale. These might seem impressive numbers, but they are anything but healthy.
 
              It should also be of major concern, as explained by Kevin Phillips in his 2008 book, Bad Money, published before September’s financial meltdown, that our economy has shifted in emphasis over the past century from agriculture to manufacturing and to the financial sector led by Wall Street.  Farm production has been brought almost entirely under corporate control, and far too many of our factories have been exported to non-western nations in order to minimize both wages and environmental costs.  Just as junk has become the Port of New York’s principal export, debt as wealth owed by one party to another has become our nation’s principal commodity. According to Phillips, the so-called credit market debt roughly quadrupled from nearly $11 trillion to $48 trillion between 1987 and 2007  (p viii).  As a result, financial services amounted to 20 percent of the GDP in 2005, as compared to manufacturing’s 12 percent of the GDP (Phillips, p. 5).  In effect, the two-to-one ratio favorable to manufacturing as our nation’s principal source of income just three decades ago has almost completely reversed itself.  It should therefore be no surprise that our major banks now wield extraordinary influence unprecedented in the previous history of our nation. As Senator Durbin of Illinois recently explained, banks currently “own” Washington, and this is not a healthy development. According to Phillips, this shift in power from manufacturing to the banking sector often sets the stage for the collapse of modern hegemonic powers just as happened for Spain and England when they ceased to play a dominant role (p. 36).
 
              As to be expected, our current depression resulted from a major breakdown on Wall Street.  Virtually all its major investment banks went bankrupt simultaneously last September.  They were only saved by an enormous federal bailout effort that entailed $700 billion in promised loans by the federal government. Of the funds received so far, the top nine of these banks have as yet paid back only $50 billion while awarding their top executives almost $33 billion in bonuses for the year 2009.  It seems they are confident that the crisis has been eliminated and our economy is on the brink of recovery as indicated by several variables. The Index of Leading Indicators, for example, has risen for the third month in a row with seven of the ten leading indicators having risen in June.  Bank and corporate stocks have improved, and the stock market has shot up, surging 725 points or 8.6% in July.  Even the oil bubble is beginning to expand once again, suggesting that oil speculation has resumed on Wall Street.  On August 22 at Jackson Hole Wyoming, Bernanke has boasted, “The prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good,” as demonstrated by a 7.2 percent jump in home sales in July and a stock market leap of 156 points the same day (perhaps in part because of his announcement).  But he conceded that “cautious confidence” is still appropriate, given unexpectedly weak sales last week, increased unemployment claims, and the likelihood that hundreds more American banks would fail in the next year. And indeed there are many additional problems preventing full recovery in the near future.  In fact, it still seems probable that our nation will undergo what has been described as a “double dip” depression (what might also be described as a “W” depression rather than a “V” or “L” depression). 
 
              As explained by Jack Rasmus in his informative article, “Green Shoots or Stinkweeds?” published in the July 2009 issue of Z Magazine, economic dislocations have been too pronounced for anybody to be too hopeful about an economic reversal.  The job market is worse than it has been in decades, and with every possibility that as many as 22 million workers will go jobless before economic recovery fully happens. Even then, however, it seems unemployment could remain high because of improved productivity levels as well as the transfer of labor costs abroad. Similarly, the foreclosure rate on homes can be expected to rise to 8 million and housing prices to fall another 20 percent in the near future. Pension plans have already dropped a third and will continue to fall, and the simmering credit card crisis will expand even further than the $406 billion losses incurred so far in 2009.  Similarly, auto and student loans are likely to crash the same way sub-prime loans did.  Business expenditures can also be expected to drop at least a quarter more in the near future, and global exports that have fallen by 50 percent in early 2009 cannot be expected to recover soon.  Likewise, state and local budgets deprived of adequate revenue sharing in the May omnibus package will also reach crisis proportions. Last but not least, the 27 percent increase in corporate bankruptcies in 2008 can be expected to be exceeded by the end of 2009 by as much as 35 percent.  Many of these statistics can be reversed with a general rise in the economy, but it is difficult to believe that all of them will, and any three or four in combination just might be sufficient to produce the double-dip depression that worries Obama’s chief economists right now.
 
              Nor can much help be expected toward an effective solution from our government in Washington, D.C.  Congressmen, for example, are almost entirely in the pockets of industries opposed to economic reform that might bear a negative impact on their profits. These elected officials are amazingly unprincipled in their acceptance of hefty campaign contributions in exchange for services rendered, and indeed big business, big banks, big agriculture, big labor, and inclusively anything “big” engages in the practice of paying them off. The amount of these contributions might seem large, but it turns out to be nominal compared to the yield, often more than 100-1 in federal subsidies obtained through earmark legislation and comparable services provided by these congressmen. The few Congressmen unwilling to go along with this arrangement quickly disappear from politics because of inadequate campaign funding. When others more willing to depend on corporate donations finally retire, most find the means to transfer their remaining campaign funds to their own bank accounts and often join the ranks of lobbyists who, like themselves, had first learned the ropes as congressmen. The situation is strictly plutocratic verging on klepto-plutocracy when the law is broken to make it happen. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens have little if any influence except to the extent that they belong to issues-related public constituencies represented by their own variety of lobbyists.

Amnesty International has expressed its alarm: What about the rights of the world’s many detained and degraded human beings?

And yet, is there any reason why basic rights to life and liberty should only be discussed with reference to humanity? Can’t we humans act decently — to human beings and others? Surely, respect should be nurtured in all its forms.

Then again, there’s good reason to look closely whenever rights are considered anew. Will the precedent reinforce or diminish what the human community looks for in basic rights?

Fifteen years ago, Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer gathered together a collective of writers to propose basic rights for chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans in a book called The Great Ape Project.² The group promoting the Spanish proposal is connected with Singer’s international volunteer project, inspired by the book. Pedro Pozas Terrados, representing the branch in Spain, welcomed the “historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades” — emphasizing genetic similarities, as the group’s website does.³

Really, we could call any animals on this planet our evolutionary comrades; calculating the gene overlap seems awfully arbitrary. The key similarity is that other apes are conscious; they experience life.

Although genetic similarity is, I believe, the wrong argument (and one that can cut both ways, for scientists are quick to say that slight DNA differences can be significant), expanding our concepts of personhood and decommodifying conscious life is the right path to travel. How refreshing it will be to see our law respect any conscious beings beyond the ones who use lawn mowers and credit cards.

And taking the rights of apes seriously would be a boon to entire forest biocommunities that need us to stop breeding cattle and logging ancient forests and extracting everything we can get our drills into. The best possible outcome from the Spanish resolution would be the start of a robust movement to defend the planet’s untamed places. That would help apes and tree frogs alike, and they all should have the simple right to live as they will.

But is freedom what the Spanish proposal really seeks? Let’s ask now, while it’s still being worked on. Because unless it (a) ensures the phasing out of captivity and (b) protects habitat, Spain’s animal-rights victory will be illusory. Already it’s showing the hallmarks of illusion: While keeping apes for circuses and television spots will be forbidden under Spain’s penal code, keeping some 315 non-human apes in Spanish zoos will remain legal.

As USA Today described them, the resolutions “give great apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, the right to life, freedom from arbitrary captivity and protection from torture.”⁴ Who will decide what captivity is arbitrary? Will human law make zoos a component of “animal rights”? Granted, some zoo directors genuinely want to protect threatened communities of animals. But are we justified in making ourselves other animals’ masters and keepers when we say we’re helping them? What are we doing to release them from reliance on rescue?

Apes who are already captive, and cannot safely return to their lands, should not be exhibited, but should instead be offered private refuge at a sanctuary prepared to meet their needs, and advocate for their rights. In Spain, both the Centro Rainfer of Madrid and Catalonia’s Mona Foundation have been called sanctuaries, but both fall short of the mark. Rainfer engages in captive breeding of primates as well as language experiments⁵; Mona allows public viewing and cognitive research.⁶ To take rights seriously, the influential Homo sapiens of Spain have a responsibility to make the region safe for true refuges — places off-limits to cognitive testing and exhibiting.

Detainees

Challenges to the conception of primates as resources have became a recurring motif in Europe. Britain’s parliament rejected the use of non-human great apes in scientific experiments in 1997; Lord Williams of Mostyn called its end “a matter of morality.”⁷ Now, European advocates are lobbying to stop tests on great apes and any primates taken from their habitats, and to secure a timetable for ending the use of all primates throughout the European Union. And recently, Austrian activists approached the European Court of Human Rights in their quest to have Hiasl, a chimpanzee, declared a legal person.

Uprooted from western Africa for Baxter’s pharmaceutical testing a quarter-century ago, Hiasl now lives at a Vienna animal shelter. The case began when a group called the Association Against Animal Factories sought a court-appointed guardian to help keep support money in Hiasl’s own name and shield Hiasl from being sold. “It’s hard,” said a New York Times editorial, “to see the harm in that.”⁸

Right. Because that wouldn’t be a radical change at all. Martin Balluch, of the Association against Animal Factories, said about Hiasl: “We argue that he’s a person and he’s capable of owning something himself, as opposed to being owned, and that he can manage his money. This means he can start a court case against Baxter, which at the very least should mean his old age pension is secure.”

But a pension does not equal animal rights. Catharine MacKinnon notes the ways we “project human projects onto animals, to look for and find or not find ourselves in them”; whereas the key question for the animal-rights advocate is “what they want from us, if anything other than to be let alone, and what it will take to learn the answer.”⁹ Accordingly, creating non-human rights requires the political insight to identify, to the extent possible, the fundamental interests of the beings involved. This isn’t a matter of contriving palliative responses to the conditions that surround animals already made into objects of trade and study. Other primates don’t come into our society, willingly work, and then retire. Rights would shield them from being brought into our society at all.

Hiasl’s case and Spain’s rights proposal have been followed by reporters the world over. But only the USA continues the large-scale use of non-human apes. And the country that warehouses hundreds of apes for use in biomedical and cognitive experiments is in no hurry to extend justice to them.

The Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection (“CHIMP”) Act of 2000 moved some “surplus” chimpanzees out of US labs, thereby saving money for the government’s whole research enterprise.¹⁰ Although it accepts and codifies the human prerogative to experiment on chimpanzees, this law — and Louisiana-based Chimp Haven’s contract to house apes under it — was condoned by a coterie of U.S. anti-vivisection groups, including Peter Singer’s project. And any apes removed from labs under the law can be used again for “noninvasive behavioral studies” — as though it’s anything but invasive to keep a group of apes’ bodies, daily experiences, and relationships completely controlled by their human keepers.¹¹

Jane Goodall, author of the opening chapter in The Great Ape Project, testified before Congress in support of the CHIMP Act, calling the warehousing agreement a “sanctuary.” Michael Bilirakis, who chaired the hearing, noted that the National Institutes of Health didn’t want a law that would put chimpanzees completely off-limits to researchers.

Goodall said sanctuaries don’t rule out “a small operation” and asserted that “the really cruel thing” would be moving them from a more spacious area into a small cage for testing.¹²

But the really cruel thing is how people made up an ostensibly humanitarian law to hold onto apes as research specimens. What can change the status quo now? Courts should be pressed to consider non-human primates as rightsholders. Meanwhile, the best we can do for them is to release them from the traps our laws have constructed for them. For example, a rulemaking that exempts primates from the federal Animal Welfare Act — based on the point that handling non-human primates for research and commerce is no more appropriate than handling ourselves that way — would bring us a step closer to ending our instrumental use of other conscious beings.

The lawmakers are now considering a Great Ape Protection Act, introduced in the House of Representatives in April. Its text cites the apes’ intelligence and susceptibility to psychological trauma, their genetic relationship to humans, and the expense of keeping them. If enacted, the law would effect a three-year phase-out of invasive research on any chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, orang-utan, or gibbon. Invasive research would include that which might cause injury, distress or fear — but not “close observation of natural or voluntary behavior” of an individual. This suggests that cognitive research, which researchers go to some lengths to portray as voluntary, will be condoned. This likelihood is underscored by the text’s references to the warehousing system established by the CHIMP Act — which does permit cognitive experiments. These laws fail to take apes’ core interests seriously. The objects of “non-invasive” studies are often isolated, and their space and time is never their own. When outside the confines of the lab, apes involved in language studies are walked on leads.¹³ What they’ll do with their days on this Earth, and the relationships that will be made or broken for them, will depend upon what funding becomes available, what diploma needs to be awarded, or what book needs to be written.

Let Untamed Beings Be

For too long, animals have been plucked out of their own spaces and stuck in labs, zoos, and roadside shows. And now, people are making labs and zoos out of the habitat itself.

The Great Ape Project hopes to involve Spanish communities with the Jane Goodall Institute in Africa.¹⁴ So what’s the Goodall Institute up to these days? In Uganda, together with the Walt Disney Company and USAID, the Goodall Institute markets forest-dwelling apes by “habituating” them for tourism. The Goodall habituation project is cited in promotional literature from an outfit called Magic Safaris, which also boasts of a rehabilitation site on Uganda’s Ngamba Island where chimpanzees are “fed four times a day and this is a spectacular moment for visitors. Good photo opportunities as well.”

Magic Safari explains that the process involves two years of manipulation. Once habituated, or trained to accept humans, the chimpanzees are subjected to “a continuous day-by-day focus. Problems can occur…” Evidently, not all of these individuals are thrilled to stop living on their terms and be turned into a moving zoo.

Gorillas face the similar intrusions. At a conference sponsored by the U.S. government, Rwanda’s minister of Trade and Industry spoke of gorillas (the Virunga Mountains are home to nearly half of the world’s 700 or so mountain gorillas) as a common resource of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda.¹⁵ There’s money in endangered species; tourism nets Rwanda millions of dollars each year.

Forest-dwelling chimpanzees have also been habituated for research. Some focuses on the effects of logging. But contrast the views expressed when, early this year, an isolated human tribe was reportedly spotted in Brazil. The director of Survival International said such tribes would “be made extinct” if loggers get their land, yet the integrity and privacy of the people is so respected that debate raged even over taking photos of “uncontacted” tribes to prove they exist to stop logging.

When a BBC journalist signed up for a tourist trip to make “first contact” with a West Papuan tribe, Survival’s director Stephen Corry objected, “Tourists could threaten these peoples, especially through the risk of bringing in disease.” If the filmed encounter was real, said Corry, “the tour operator and tourists should be ashamed of themselves.”

If animal rights are to have real meaning at all, no words get nearer to their core than the simple right to be let alone. That very concept arose in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article co-authored by the future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.¹⁶ Troubled by the distress caused by intrusive reporters, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis proposed a new tort: the invasion of privacy. Their aim was to shield the individual from “popular curiosity” and to respect the “inviolate personality” as “part of the more general right to the immunity of the person.”

Almost 40 years later, Justice Brandeis wrote that the Constitution’s framers conferred, against the government, “the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”¹⁷ And surely, at the core of non-human rights is the right to life, to liberty of movement, and to an inviolate personality — the right to be let alone. For other animals, the right’s significance shines with particular intensity. For them, enjoying the most comprehensive of rights would mean regaining the freedom from being subjected to our notions of civilization entirely.

The Way Ahead

The time is ripe for all primates’ rights. In 2005, a panel of 22 scientists, lawyers, and philosophers reported the results of an extended debate over the wisdom of inserting human stem cells into monkey brains, noting the team’s scientists weren’t sure how to ethically separate humans from other primates. And time is of the essence, with nearly half of all communities of primates at risk of extinction due to our hunting and clear-cutting, including for resource-guzzling animal agribusiness. Primates’ rights would project a clear message: Our “go forth and multiply” approach is desperately outdated.

Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, warns that animal rights would “destroy the unique status of man and thus initiate a wholesale transformation of Western civilization.” Seems to me a wholesale transformation is just what’s needed. Only a paradigm shift will have us live in a manner reconcilable with ethics, and the undeniable reality that we are part of a biosphere.

So let’s do it. Let’s allow chimpanzees to live in their lands, rather expect them to have babies in zoos and language labs. Let’s teach our children a bird in the hand’s certainly not worth two in the bush. Let’s leave Chilean Sea Bass in the Chilean Sea. Let’s have peaceable cookbooks. And let’s be careful, as we go, to respect rights. For the world’s free-living beings, that would mean respecting their interest in simply being let alone.

* Lee Hall co-authored the article “From Property to Person: The Case of Evelyn Hart” (showing the constitutional arguments that could be presented in the U.S. court system in support of legal personhood for non-human apes), and also facilitates the project “Great Ape Standing and Personhood” (GRASP) as legal director for Friends of Animals.

1. See Martin Roberts, “Spanish Parliament to Extend Rights to Apes,” Reuters (25 Jun. 2008). For earlier news history, see Emilio de Benito, “El PSOE Propone el Fin de la ‘Esclavitud’ de los Grandes Simios,” El País (25 Apr. 2006).
2. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project (first printing 1993 by Fourth Estate, London). The book articulated a goal of obtaining a U.N. declaration welcoming apes into a “community of equals” with humans.
3. See “Sobre el PGS (About the Great Ape Project).” Pedro Pozas Terrados is quoted by Martin Roberts, “Spanish Parliament to Extend Rights to Apes (see note 1).
4. “Activists Pursue Basic Legal Rights for Great Apes,” USA Today (15 Jul. 2008). Emphasis mine.
5. See Boletín de la Asociación Primatológica Española, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Sep. 2002).
6. Research at Mona has included studies meant to help adjust primates to refuge life and studies that use them instrumentally and reinforce the image of humans atop an “evolutionary ladder.” According to Mona’s website (visited 23 Jul. 2008), “Because of their contact with humans, some of Mona’s chimps have leapt up the evolutionary ladder in terms of the skills they have, and so the results of this study could provide answers about the evolution human societies.”
7. For more on the legal history of this issue see Lee Hall and Anthony Jon Waters, “From Property to Person: The Case of Evelyn Hart,” Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal (2000).
8. Adam Cohen, Editorial Observer: “What’s Next in the Law? The Unalienable Rights of Chimps,” New York Times (14 Jul. 2008).
9. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, at 270 (Cass R. Sunstein & Martha C. Nussbaum eds., 2004).
10. Public Law 106-551 (HR 3514); applies to apes used in labs run for U.S. agencies. Chimp Haven (and any private entity which might be awarded a contract under the Act) must provide at least $1 for each $3 of federal funds needed to run the housing system. The law anticipates operating costs up to $30,000,000 annually. Maintaining a great ape in a research laboratory over a 5-year lifespan can cost between $300,000 and $500,000, compared to an approximate cost of $275,000 for care outside that setting, says the text of the proposed Great Ape Protection Act.
11. Singer’s Great Ape Project never opposed this. The group openly supported the bill and only expressed reservations when it was amended, as GAP wrote, “to allow chimpanzees to be removed from the retirement facility” — the same provision Goodall hoped to avoid, as described later in this essay. But at all times the law permitted some types of research, saved money for federal research projects using apes, and accepted the idea that only “surplus” apes were to be moved to the euphemistically termed “retirement” sites.
12. Although the statement is ambiguous, and could be read as endorsing operations for the health of chimpanzees, Goodall’s remark was made in answer to this question from hearing chair Michael Bilirakis: “Dr. Strandberg, from the NIH, is going to testify that the NIH can’t support this legislation because it would make the animals permanently unavailable for study or monitoring. Expand upon that. What is your feeling there? How strongly do you feel about their not being available for invasive research procedures?” Goodall’s immediate response began: “Well, I think the most important thing here is can they be left in the sanctuary and there are certain procedures, even over and above taking blood which could be carried out…” See Statement of Jane Goodall, Ph.D. CBE, Director of Science and Research for the Jane Goodall Institute, before the House of Representatives’ Committee on Commerce, Subcommittee on Health and Environment, hearing on H.R. 3514, Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection Act (18 May 2000). Transcript on file with author and available upon request.
13. See Russell Tuttle, Apes of the World (1986), at 202 (discussing the chimpanzees Roger Fouts used in language studies). See also Francine Patterson and Eugene Linden, The Education of Koko (1981); representative chapter (indicating a leash was needed after infancy for a gorilla in sign-language research) (link last visited 10 Aug. 2008). For a photo of Kanzi, a celebrated bonobo, out of the laboratory setting and held on a leash, see Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, et al., Apes, Language, and the Human Mind (1998), at 7, 33 (discussing the lead as a tool of necessity, but avoided as long as possible, “since the more freedom Kanzi had, the more he encountered and elected to talk about at the keyboard.”).
14. This involves educational collaborations with the Jane Goodall Institute in Congo-Brazzaville; see the March 2007 Spanish-language press release generated by the Great Ape Project in Spain.
15. Martin Tindiwensi, “Rwanda: United States to Support Mountain Gorilla Conservation,” The [Kigali] New Times (22 Jul. 2008).
16. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review (Vol. 4, No. 5; Dec. 1890).
17. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J. dissenting; with reference to the Fourth Amendment).

While members of the opposition to President Teodoro Obiang’s regime are detained and tortured in prison merely for being in opposition, international human rights organizations are denied entry to Equatorial Guinea. While some are set free with neither charges nor trial or else pardoned after a lapse of time, subsequently they are fined and their movement restricted to their hometowns. While the supposed leader of a coup d’état, Severo Moto, is tried in absentia, a handful of associates are left to rely exclusively on the mercy of the court, their fate decided by the Chief Justice of the Nation, who, not by accident, presides over the trial (Art. 86 of Equatorial Guinea’s Fundamental Law).

If someone were to bet 100 Euros that this account referred to events taking place in June 2008 they would lose. The events in question took place in 1997, eleven years ago. An Amnesty International Release on Equatorial Guinea (AI INDEX: AFR 24/07/97), published on October 14th 1997 gives a complete account of the events in question.

It seems the long decade since those events has changed nothing. The failed coup has been repeated with the same protagonist, the regime continues imprisoning and torturing, Obiang continues in power and Amnesty International never fails to publish similar reports year in, year out. However a couple of changes have in fact taken place and for the moment one can say that the first of them is for the worse.

This first change is that Obiang’s political acuity has sharpened. However much one dislikes the fact, he is smarter than one might want to admit. He toys with his equals around the world and with his rivals at home. Without counting the high official posts he held during the precious regime of his uncle Francisco Macias, Obiang has been in power for 30 years. In this time, he has made himself immensely rich and has enriched his family. He occupies an accepted place in the international community. He has wiped out the meagre opposition and the only doubts relating to his future stem from his health and his succession, neither of which are completely under his control.

Amnesty International denounced in their 1997 report that the denial of access for international human rights organizations to the country “contradicts the policy of openness in relation to human rights issues publicly promised by President Obiang in February 1997.”

While Obiang’s policy of broken promises has lasted for more than 10 years, his policy on torture is much older. In 1978 Amnesty International regarded it as a systematic practice to the point that in its March Bulletin of that year it defined Equatorial Guinea as “a huge torture camp whose only exit is the cemetery.” A report published in 1990 with the title Tortures in Equatorial Guinea, collected information for the twenty years from 1968 to 1988.

The Spanish Socialist Workers Party government: the democracy of never-too-much dialogue

Obiang only fools people who let themselves be fooled. Pronouncements made from time by Spain’s Foreign Minister Moratinos on “helping, accompanying, offering incentives and motivating a country like Equatorial Guinea to move forward the process of democratization and defence of Human Rights”, once more display the Kingdom of Spain as a dummy State led by the interests of others and in contradiction to the aspirations of its Constitution.

For years Moratinos has travelled to Equatorial Guinea or received Obiang in Spain. Still, his opinion on “advances in the democratization process” is as valuable today as those of the US entertainment magazine Parade which also observes some progress. It rates Obiang thirteenth in the list of the world’s worst dictators after having placed him eleventh in 2007 and tenth in 2006.

The main difference is that the magazine describes Obiang outright as a dictator and does not propose dialogue about it. Meanwhile, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party seems to be waiting for another decade to pass just so as to be completely sure before uttering the word. Maybe for that reason the magazine has a circulation of 42 million while the Minister’s Press releases are not even read by his own advisors. Nothing else explains really the publication of his “somewhat impassioned” opinion on Obiang’s last visit to Spain.

Obiang has got to where he is by administering dose after dose of broken promises wherever necessary, wrapped up in oil contracts. The result has been murder, torture and other serious human rights violations, but still Moratinos gets all impassioned when he and Obiang meet up. It is true that his counterparts in the US receive Obiang as a “good friend” and in China and other countries they greet him with the red carpet, but that does not make Obiang any less a criminal. Rather it turns those hosts of his into aiders, abettors and accomplices of his barbarism.

If Obiang’s declarations no longer fool Foreign Ministers and Presidents, those of Moratinos fool no one either. Who, outside the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, believes that government policy towards Equatorial Guinea is adequate in the light of the last thirty years? Nonetheless, on May 29th this year, shortly after the rigged elections held in Equatorial Guinea, the government again presented in the Congress of Deputies its routine litany: “our only remedy is to continue insisting on a constructive dialogue”.

The opposition: still waiting for news on Nkrumah, Mandela, Lumumba and Biko

The second change has taken place in the political opposition. The leaders of the Convergence for Social Democracy (CPDS) that held two seats in Equatorial Guinea’s 100-seat parliament — the remainder being taken up by Obiang’s party members — are going through moments of political and personal anguish. Not surprisingly, since they ended up with just one seat, continue to be harassed as usual and have been abandoned by the international community, which prefers oil in the hand to democracy on the wing.

The opposition has shown its desperation and fury via various communiqués from its National Executive over the last month. These offer a mixture of denunciations, laments, meditations after the fact on what happened, vague accusations, unattainable proposals and reflections lacking self-criticism.

The CPDS denounces that “the electoral process of Sunday May 4th 2008 in Equatorial Guinea surpassed all forecasts of the brutality of the fraud prepared by Obiang and his regime, marking a clear regression in the country’s political evolution.”

The CPDS laments the betrayal of the international community, especially Spain and the United States since the elections “were not held in conditions of liberty, transparency and equality as was expected by the Spanish Foreign Affairs Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos or as the United States ambassador in the country intended.”

The European Union is not immune from the attacks since the release of funds (more than Euros 10m) intended for Equatorial Guinea assigned to the ninth European Development Fund to carry out projects in areas like human rights and good governance is regarded by the CPDS as “the strongest insult that could be received”.

The CPDS Executive pauses to meditate on “the unhappy history of Equatorial Guinea that repeats itself cyclically” because in 2002 “when Equatorial Guinea most needed the UN, this body decided to withdraw, as if by chance, the Special Representative for Equatorial Guinea, leaving the population defenceless and at the mercy of the arbitrary will of Obiang. Many of the people arbitrarily detained then have only just been pardoned in June.”

Finally, they offer a very negative judgement on the policy of dialogue. They consider that “the rapprochements (by its bilateral and multilateral partners) made towards the regime that governs Equatorial Guinea are made for other reasons, not expressed in public declarations, perhaps possibly the benefits obtained from the situation of a totalitarian and despotic regime, not respectful of people’s rights, reasons which favour the individuals, institutions or countries that make such rapprochements, which unscrupulously damage the legitimate interests of the people of Equatorial Guinea, their right to live in freedom and to benefit from their natural resources.”

Despite admitting their desperate political situation they still “call on the international community, particularly the multilateral and bilateral partners represented in Equatorial Guinea to recognise that their silence at the repression and all the abuses perpetrated by Obiang and his regime on the people of Equatorial Guinea, along with all the arbitrary abuses inflicted on the opposition and on dissidents in the country seem to amount to complicity in the damage the regime thus inflicts on this people. The CPDS would like to see a pronouncement on what happened in this country on May 4th this year, as well as on the post-election harassment that followed.”

What the CPDS describes is correct. It even understates things. It has received the biggest blow in its history not only for having lost one of its two seats at the hands of its enemies but because it has been abandoned by those it considered its friends. But in that case, why go running to them once more?

It does not matter now that what happened was the chronicle of an abandonment foreseeable beforehand and warned of at the time. But what sense does it make to make new appeals that will themselves also be ignored? It hardly makes any difference now to point out that the international community is an accomplice of the regime against the country’s people. But more than anything, it does nothing to lift the population of Equatorial Guinea out of their shameful situation.

The May 2008 elections have confirmed, if any further confirmation was necessary, that the political game played so far with such poor cards by the CPDS against experienced criminals, bought judges and with an audience of observers watching out for their own interests, is over.

It is not the moment for lament or roundabout accusations. If the CPDS is not faithful to the logic of its own analysis of the situation and gets caught up in absurd reproaches and threats that show up its weakness even more, not only will it be finished but, as its own National Executive says of other actors involved, it runs the risk of being an accomplice in Obiang’s game.

The struggle for the rights of Africans in Africa has not been achieved mainly or even most importantly in the sessions of corrupt parliaments or in meetings in offices in Madrid or Washington with diplomats concerned about the people of Equatorial Guinea in words but not in fact. Nor, obviously, has the struggle advanced by repeating over and over again to people who have not the least idea of the suffering of people in Equatorial Guinea that “the CPDS is the only democratic opposition and seeks political change by peaceful means…”

The political strategy faced with murderers, their accomplices and look-outs cannot consist of touring Europe and the United States to complain to people without the least intention of losing their own benefits so as to promote the rights of others. Political action cannot base itself on making speeches day after day in a parliament lacking legitimacy to deputies who only heed to the person that pays them.

To design a new political action it is more useful to consider the pantheon of African leaders. Nkrumah based his political struggle on organizing the masses, which cost him repeated spells in detention. Mandela directed a political transition but not without first insisting on the right to self-defence of the oppressed (what Western politicians call violence) to the Supreme Court in Pretoria in 1964, for which he was condemned to life imprisonment. Lumumba was assassinated by the CIA, the armed wing of the United States government that specialises in murdering popular leaders the world over for their opposition to imperialism. Biko managed successfully to mobilise the inhabitants of South African cities before being assassinated in police custody.

Conclusion: Neither dialogue with Obiang nor political tours by the opposition will bring human rights to Equatorial Guinea

It is told that years ago an old Equatorial Guinean, unhappy at his country’s evolution on which a Spanish person was talking asked, “Hey, this independence stuff, how long does it last?” One has to suppose that the passage of time has given him the answer, although doubtless thousands of Equatorial Guineans are asking the same question now about this democracy stuff.

Democracy does not exist in Equatorial Guinea nor will it under the current dictatorial circumstances prolonged by external help from powerful economic interests in exchange for oil.

Once the political game is exhausted, or what is no more than the trappings of a democratic system, for Equatorial Guineans to be able to see human rights respected, requires a resistance struggle to be carried through against the individuals who violate people’s rights and those who abet them.

In other words, rights are taken, not given. That most likely means dropping certain useless friendships and support, working more in the street and in villages than in Parliament and abandoning the parody of democracy for the drama of popular struggle.

It is essential not to compromise the enduring right of peoples and individuals to a life of liberty, justice and peace via a political slogan to the liking of corrupt leaders like “a peaceful political alternative” — fine for the oppressor, not so great for the oppressed.

I had a chance to reflect on this curious situation en route to Venezuela when, on a twelve hour lay over, I left the moderately warm, air-conditioned Miami airport for the steamy outdoors and waited for a ride to my hotel room. When the shuttle arrived, I boarded with two other men, who turned out to be Spaniards, deeply engaged in a conversation about Latin America. The younger man, perhaps twenty years younger than I, was coming from Brazil and the elder man, perhaps fifteen years my senior, although he looked twenty years older, was coming from Nicaragua. During a brief lull in the conversation I asked the elder man, in Spanish, how things were going in Nicaragua. He glanced down his nose at me to size me up and, in that moment, I don’t think he noticed the image of Sandino on my t-shirt. “Very well,” he replied, in his native tongue,” especially since no one suffers hunger any more.”

“Oh really?” I asked, incredulously, “I didn’t think Nicaragua had ever been free of hunger.”

No really, the man insisted, things were great in Nicaragua. I nodded. “It’s not like in Venezuela with that pinche Chavez, who’s ruined his country.”

While not overly eager to attack Daniel Ortega, even while I’m never hesitant to hide my disgust for the former revolutionary-turned-pro-life-neoliberal, I couldn’t let this pass.

“I suppose that’s a matter of opinion,” I said. Both men glared at me. I think the younger man now noticed my t-shirt. The elder man’s face turned slightly red.

“No. It’s not a matter of opinion. I’ve had two friends whose businesses were ruined by that Chávez. His policies are ruining the country.”

“I suppose there are winners and losers in every process, and most of my friends who are at the bottom seem better off,” I said.

The old man continued for a few minutes as the shuttle made its way to the airport and then, as I ceased to respond, the old man turned his attention back to the young man and began talking about what good things Lula had done for Brazil.

“It’s all about education, preparation of the people. With an apolitical education. That’s the problem. Like in Venezuela, where the education is all politicized,” the old man said. The young man readily agreed.

I thought of pointing out that all education is politicized; that what these two dinosaurs of the Spanish Empire seemed to find objectionable would be the education that enables students to see that their neoliberal agendas only work for the empire, be it Spanish or U.S.; I considered pointing out that the neoliberal “left” of Spain might be better off moving into the twenty-first century and reexamining its admiration for Daniel Ortega, who former Sandinista Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal called a “dictator,” the repentant revolutionary, now neoliberal president heading a party (Sandinista) which recently criminalized abortion and cut a deal with the corrupt Arnoldo Alemán of the Liberal Party so as to return to power in Nicaragua. But instead I just let it go, dropped out of the conversation and slid inconspicuously back into my seat.

As the two Spaniards continued their conversation, I mused on the UPI story once again, mystified by how a supposedly “left” government in Spain, and people who support it, could be so anti-Chavista. But after visiting Spain in 2006 and touring the three main cities of the Basque country, a few of the smaller towns and witnessing how the “progressive” Zapatero government treated the Basques who lived in a terror reminiscent of Central America in the 1980s, I came to believe that “progressive” doesn’t always imply “anti-imperialist.”

I remember clearly that morning in the Basque city of Vitoria, when I got into a conversation in the main library with the very kind librarian, working solo at the main desk. He whispered, as he looked around him to make sure no one was listening, about the measures the Spanish government had taken to repress any discussion about Basque independence. When I mentioned that I’d like to interview someone in Batasuna, he shook his head, his eyes filled with alarm. “It’s illegal to meet with Batasuna party members. You can be imprisoned even for being in the same room with them, if you know they’re Batasuna,” he told me. Batasuna is the peaceful wing of the Basque independence movement, but it, too was, and is, outlawed under Zapatero’s government. Someone at Askapena, a Basque solidarity organization which defends imprisoned independentistas, explained it this way: “When the Spanish police pick you up on suspicion of being an independentista, they torture you. That’s routine and universal. After they torture you, if you denounce the torture, you are, de facto, part of ETA (the illegal armed wing of the Basque independence movement) because ETA has a policy of denouncing all torture. And, according to the Spanish legal system, anyone who advocates any ETA policy is de facto a member of ETA. And so there are people imprisoned in Spain as ETA ‘terrorists’ simply because they were picked up, tortured and denounced the torture.”

I thought this imperial “zero tolerance” for dissent from the subjects of Spain, specifically, from the Basques, might explain the widespread hatred for Chavez in that country. Perhaps he’s seen as a “difficult child” by the Spanish government, one who talks back at the King when told to shut up. But Marc Villá, the Venezuelan documentary filmmaker, had another take on the situation.

“During the Franco dictatorship, the Acción Democrática (AD) supported the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE),” he explained to me one afternoon as we drove around Barinas last summer. The AD, for all practical purposes, a now-defunct political party which ruled Venezuela for fifty years, trading power from election to election with the Christian Democrat COPEI (also now practically defunct). AD was, and is, a member of the Socialist International, and it was one of the few “socialist” parties the U.S. tolerated in Latin America through those Cold War years, perhaps because it bore very little resemblance to socialism — much like the PSOE and most European “socialist” parties today.
Nevertheless, AD threw money at the arts and subverted leftist intellectuals in Venezuela and the world with generous gifts and grants handed out freely to the likes of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the PSOE.

“The PSOE incurred a great moral debt to Venezuela’s AD which it continues to pay off to this day in its media as it continues to look for any opportunity to slam Chavez and align itself with the AD, now in the U.S. backed Venezuelan opposition. Really, the Spaniards know very little of what’s happening here but they’re like so many Venezuelan “leftists” who oppose Chavez and the Bolivarian Process: they’ve lost out and a new left has come to power. People like Teodoro Petkoff (editor of the weekly newspaper Tal Cual) and others, who were communists or socialists and who actually benefited under the AD governments and were left alone under the COPEI governments, no longer have the prestige and positions they once had under the AD. And they can’t stand it.”

The old “New Left” that limped through the collapse of the USSR and watched China gleefully celebrate an eternal capitalist Christmas even while guided by the Chinese Communist Party, seems to continue its life in the geriatric arms of the PSOE and the European neoliberal left. It may even find life in the neoliberal liberalism of Obama in the U.S. (unless it finds its backbone and, indeed, becomes a “left”), but Venezuela is continuing to define itself along new lines, directly challenging capitalism and experimenting with new models of socialism. Chávez and his in-your-face anti-imperialism, no matter what Spaniards may think, continues to be a household name in a world that can’t quite remember who Zapatero is or what, if anything, he stands for. Perhaps that’s what the Spaniards in my shuttle hated the most about “politicized education.”