Robinson Crusoe’s ethics are rooted in his inherent imperialism. Being the only representative of his race and culture for 27 of his 28 years upon the island, and considering both superior to all others, he not only endeavors—regardless if it is applicable, necessary, or even viable—to replicate the society from which he came but, through these means, to reign supreme over his environment. Crusoe is culpable because he acknowledges that he has been freed from socially-defined standards and, more importantly, that such standards might, in themselves, be questionable yet, after rationalizing the ethically justifiable course of action, he frequently opts for a more self-aggrandizing, convenient, or profitable avenue.

For example, he criticizes the Spanish Inquisition as being unjust yet forces a Caribbean native whom he has liberated from being cannibalized—not on moral grounds but in order to obtain a servant—to assimilate to his Anglo-Saxon lifestyle. Crusoe never bothers to ask the native’s given name. Instead, to commemorate the day upon which Crusoe acted so gallantly, “the creature” is nonchalantly dubbed “Friday.” Crusoe then demands that the native be clothed despite Friday being uncomfortable in such adornments and, moreover, the climate not requiring such. Furthermore, Crusoe rarely inquires into Friday’s perspectives, customs, or culture (the latter has to offer them), thus implying that Crusoe believes his ways to be implicitly superior as he proceeds to teach Friday to speak English and convert him to Christianity. It is worthy of note that, when Friday is rescued, he grovels at his liberator’s feet. Crusoe does not lift Friday up but permits him to remain in his subservient position so as to establish the desired hierarchy (he has Friday refer to him as “Master”) as well as to satiate his narcissism. Astoundingly, Crusoe allows this to occur not once but twice. (Similarly, prior to Crusoe’s discovery of humans upon the island, he revels in his “sovereignty” over the island’s fauna, as he observes that he has capricious control over whether it lives or dies.) The epitome of Crusoe’s moral myopia toward Friday resides in Crusoe’s lack of empathy after having once been enslaved himself. Most pointedly, being free of societal customs and beliefs, there is no alibi for why he continues to uphold the institution of slavery, especially considering that, for several years, Crusoe and Friday are the island’s only inhabitants. Granted, he does not literally bind Friday in shackles and chains, however, he treats him as an inferior and in a manner which, if back in Europe, he would by no means apply to a fellow Briton.

It is with such happenstance convenience that Crusoe reinforces his religious views before summarily dismissing them. For instance, after several languid gestures toward reverence, once Crusoe is born-again, he maintains a calendar and observes the Sabbath. Yet, when he loses track of the date, his devotion subsequently subsides. Additionally, when he notices that barley has sprouted near his “castle” (shelter), being unable to reconcile how it arrived there, he attributes its presence to God’s will. He then recalls that he’d discarded several husks which might have contained seeds and dismisses divine intervention as being the culprit. Obviously, Crusoe’s level of devotion is dependent upon need (such as illness or desperation) or occurrences which he cannot readily rationalize and his theological fervor abruptly diminishes once he no longer requires assistance or deduces a non-supernatural cause for previously inexplicable events. Not surprisingly, he considers abandoning his faith in favor of another once he is rescued because doing so would be more lucrative (Catholicism is the reigning religion in Brazil, which is where his tobacco plantation resides).

Even in the wake of society, Crusoe is unable to sever himself from his entrepreneurial tendencies and, however futile, desire for material and monetary possessions. Despite his conjectures that, like Jonah, he might have been cast out for his sins (Crusoe would have never found himself stranded had he not set out to sea to procure more slaves), he produces more food than he can consume only to watch it rot. He practices animal husbandry and agriculture after conceding that the island aptly provides for his needs without having to resort to such labor-intensive activities. He even goes so far as to craft a table and chair. As noted, he has a “castle,” but he also possesses another shelter-cum-estate as well, which he refers to as his “bower.” Even after admitting that money has no intrinsic value in a tender-free existence, Crusoe hordes every coin he finds. Lastly, toward the end of his “reign” upon the island, the self-described “king” begins cataloguing people as possessions: He refers to the island’s inhabitants as his “subjects,” prisoners as “my people,” and even perceives specific (and in his mind, civilized) individuals as being his own, i.e. “the Spaniard” quickly metamorphoses into “my Spaniard.”

Other instances of Crusoe’s moral hypocrisy and logistic incongruity include his consenting that cannibals might well be acting upon political or cultural principles and, as a result, it may not his place to pass judgment upon them. (Friday confirms this when he informs Crusoe that cannibalism is the consequence of warfare and is not a standard practice, as evidenced by 17 stranded Britons currently residing peacefully amongst Friday’s people.) Nevertheless, and despite his newfound religiosity, Crusoe—against his better judgment and moral conscious—proceeds to slaughter cannibals in the name of God. He never reconciles the paradox in his condemnation of the cannibals’ capital punishment and his own country’s like sentence for mutiny.

Not surprisingly, Crusoe hasn’t any friends. Rather, his associations are strictly limited to accomplices, acquaintances, or business partners. (After he is rescued, he does go on to marry but never cites his wife by name.) Every individual’s worth is based upon the person’s utilitarian value as Crusoe refuses to permit sentimentality to intervene in his decision-making. This is best evidenced in his selling of Xury, a Moorish youth who aided Crusoe in escaping enslavement, which Crusoe later regrets—not because he misses the boy (though he does)—but because he is in need of additional labor on his Brazilian plantation. Dauntingly, when he is rescued, Crusoe leaves the island to British criminals without attempting to notify those who have set off to sea in search for help—the aforementioned Spaniard and Friday’s father—that there are new, dangerous inhabitants awaiting them upon their return. These individuals are not even an afterthought in that, in lieu of the maritime risks involved atop the political tension between Spain and Britain, Crusoe never bothers to inform us of the rescue mission’s fate, even after returning to the island years later. This omission is all the more insulting given that the seafarers aided Crusoe in retaining control of the island after mutineers came ashore.

What perhaps best outlines the Crusoe’s Machiavellian nature is his reaction to a single footprint which mysteriously appears on the beach one day. Though, upon his initial appearance upon the island, he longed to be rescued, Crusoe gradually becomes apprehensive of any sign of human life, as seen in him automatically assuming the enigmatic mark to be the sign of a hostile presence. Crusoe’s paranoia stems from fear that his comfortable state of existence and omnipotence might be compromised whereas before, when he was unsure of his ability to survive, he longed for salvation. He fears, not only cannibalistic natives, but also Spaniards. Yet ironically, fellow Britons prove to be his greatest threat (thereby negating Crusoe’s ethnocentricity). His megalomania is exemplified by his inability and unwillingness to admit fault even after he has returned to Europe. Various dates in his calendar are blaringly incorrect and, though a simple pen stroke would eradicate the errors and the reader would be none the wiser (while saying nothing of the intellectual integrity that most authors would insist upon in acknowledging the mistakes so as to better represent the conditions under which they were operating), Crusoe chooses to ignore them.

Though he does possess a few redeeming qualities, such as resourcefulness and determination, Daniel Defoe’s character of Robinson Crusoe is by no means a hero or even an admirable human being. He is an unapologetic racist, imperialist, fickle theist, and megalomaniac par excellence. He continually shirks moral obligation in favor of activities wherein he will profit, be it financially or socially, or which will appease his narcissism. His lethargy is only superseded by potential harm or ennui. He displays little moral development in that he rewards those who were faithful to his financial interests while he was stranded—not out of respect or gratitude—but anxiety and vanity respectively: Fearing that the Inquisition may result in martyrdom, he sells his plantation and donates the proceeds, of which “The world will seldom be able to show the like of.” During his valediction, Crusoe declares that he has since cast off once again, thereby implying that—to our knowledge—he might have committed many of the same moral atrocities on his “new adventure.” And why not? What evidence do we have to the contrary that, after 28 years on a desert island, he is any the wiser since this ten-year voyage opens with his return to the island where (in true capitalistic spirit) he divides “his colony[’s]” land into plots before announcing to its populace that it is not permitted to leave?

Next, we add hand made housing of straw-bale, adobe, log, rammed earth, or other local material, along with attached solar green houses according to many successful contemporary designs. The humans, of course, maintain a stable population and live with a stable biological unit.

Then we add a new human culture based on aiding the life force rather than its consumption and destruction.

Paradise is obviously not a new idea. Richard Heinberg in his book Memories and Visions of Paradise says, ” We are faced with some extraordinary facts. In virtually every culture on Earth we encounter a myth telling how humankind originated in a time of peace, happiness, and miraculous power and, because of some mistake or failure, degenerated to its present condition. Moreover, nearly every tribe and nation reveres the sayings of some ancient prophet who foretold the corrupt human world will one day be consumed in a purifying cataclysm to make way for a renewed Golden Age. And, as if the similarities of these ancient myths and prophecies were not remarkable enough, we are confronted by the additional fact that much of our civilization’s greatest literature and many of its most inspiring theories and experiments seem to derive their vitality and appeal from these mysterious memories and visions of paradise.”

This paradise can be done now. All of these systems have been worked out in the thousands of ecovillages around the planet and in many other similar designs. The above permacultural design has the effect of putting us in biological adaptation to the planet Earth. This is the key and crux of the matter. We as a species must be biologically adapted to the biological energy flows (food chains, biological webs) or we as a species cannot live on the earth. This is not to say that we must adopt a loin cloth and eat roots and berries such as the incredibly successful two million years of our ancestors, but it does mean that we somehow must biologically adapt to the earth. This means that the very foundations of our human culture of materialism must change.

THE CULTURE OF LOOTING

Human agriculture has been one of the most ecologically destructive disasters to hit the planet. When agriculture began and the first plow or digging stick was struck into the breast of Mother Earth, the destruction began. Soil scientists say that it takes between three hundred and a thousand years to accumulate each inch of topsoil in optimum ecologies. This is what agriculture drains from the earth. Surpluses from the life force of the earth is what the civilized are after and have been after for eight thousand years, draining the fertility of the earth through agriculture, overgrazing and deforestation The more surpluses that members of the empire can haul to the capital city, the more their social stature, in a materialistic society. Now that ninety per cent of the large fish in the ocean are gone, we are down to ten per cent of the planetary forest and soil erosion, exhaustion and desertification are racing ahead on all continents, even the unconcerned can see the problem. “Civilization,” since its inception has accomplished its growth by sucking the fertility out of the life force of the planet.

The phrase, “survival of the fittest,” was taken up out of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and made into a violent cultural norm by the British Empire. “Social Darwinism” soon followed. Those who ruled by violence, theft and lies, considered it obvious that they were the ‘best,” and on the forefront of evolution, since they ruled. Those who ruled Babylon in the now ecologically destroyed “fertile crescent, the Han Chinese who ruled a country that was once half covered by a fertile temperate zone forest and those imperial rulers who occupied the once fertile Indus River Valley, no doubt thought they were the “best” – eight thousand years ago. That human culture has descended through the years to the point that “pioneers” on their way to loot the U.S. west, killed thousands of buffalo, took their tongues to market for money and left the carcasses to rot on the plains. This is an appropriate image of the culture of civilization and its ten thousand year project of killing the life force of our planet.

A CULTURE OF ADAPTATION

Another part of Darwin’s theory — that the English ruling class neglected — is the value of biological adaptation. When the banker leans on the farmer, the farmer leans on the soil, for more surpluses. The city dweller eats some of the food and throws the scraps, along with all other organic material in the landfill where its mass becomes an ecological problem. This is a simplified version of the whole of the culture of empire. There is no reward for the upstream supplier of biological energy, there is simply looting.. The ecology that provided the soil is not rewarded with the organic material so as to continue its growth. In many cases the old growth forest that originally provided the topsoil is gone.

In a great cultural turn-around, thousands of ecovillages have sprung up around the planet, pointed toward reversing the civilized cultural values and seeking adaptation to the planetary biology. Biological adaptation is the only way that the human species can be on this planet in perpetuity.

Much concern has been expressed recently about economic collapse, but the big collapse right behind it is what most people in the materialistic society do not see. This is the biological collapse of the life force of our planet. In this late stage of the “crisis of empire,” the only beneficial act one can do is seek biological adaptation in some manner. All other activities are frivolous and pointless.

As the culture of looting crashes in flames, our hope is that some of the thousands of ecovillages around the planet will survive the cataclysm to thrust a new pattern of cultural values, and a new adaptation to the life force, into the future.

As far as I personally was concerned, there came a point with the presentation of the so-called evidence, with the moment when Colin Powell sat down at the UN General Assembly and unveiled what he said was cast-iron evidence of things like mobile, biological weapon facilities and the like…

When I saw all of that, I thought, well, ‘We know that Colin Powell is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man. If he believes all this to be the case, then, you know, he’s seen the evidence; I haven’t.’

Now that evidence turned out to be absolutely meaningless, but we only discover that after the event. So, you know, I’m perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked. Yes, clearly we were.¹

Consider the admission that Newsnight’s leading interviewer could respond to government claims clearly intended to supply a pretext for war on what was, even more obviously, the very brink of war: “If he believes this to be the case; he’s seen the evidence, I haven’t.”

Does not government submission of evidence mark the point where serious journalism +begins+ rather than ends? What is the reason for journalism at all, if the responsibility is simply to accept what a US Secretary of Defence says because we “know” he “is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man”?

As Paxman should be aware, the “sceptical” Powell helped whitewash the March 1968 massacre of some 500 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai by troops of the US Americal division. Powell was tasked with investigating a detailed whistleblowing letter from US soldier, Tom Glen, confirming that Americal was guilty of routine brutality against civilians. Among other horrors, Glen reported that Americal troops, “for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.” In his report responding to Glen’s letter, Powell wrote:

“In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”²

It is not true that Powell’s evidence on Iraq was revealed to be “absolutely meaningless” only “after the event”. In fact, it was immediately evident, as we reported in our media alert of February 10, 2003, five days after Powell‘s presentation. See.

We wrote to Paxman on November 4:

Hi Jeremy

Hope you’re well. In your contribution to Coventry University’s ‘Is World Journalism in Crisis?’ event, you commented:

“When I saw all of that, I said ‘we know that Colin Powell is an intelligent thoughtful man, and a sceptical man. If he believes this to be the case; he’s seen the evidence, I haven’t.’

“Now that evidence turned out to be absolutely meaningless but we only discover that after the event. So I am perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked. Clearly we were.”
(http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/536290.php)

And yet you also said the function of the BBC was “finding things out and telling it as straight as you can tell it”.

What was to stop you from checking the credibility of Powell’s claims against independent expert opinion? In his February 5, 2003 presentation to the United Nations, Powell held up a vial of dry powder anthrax. But Professor Anthony H. Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies had already discounted the possibility that Iraqi anthrax produced prior to 1991 could have remained effectively weaponised:

“Anthrax spores are extremely hardy and can achieve 65% to 80% lethality against untreated patients for years. Fortunately, Iraq does not seem to have produced dry, storable agents and only seems to have deployed wet Anthrax agents, which have a relatively limited life.”
(CSIS, ‘Iraq’s Past and Future Biological Weapons Capabilities,’ 1998, p.13)

The vial held up by Powell contained the type of dry, storable anthrax that Iraq did +not+ seem to have produced, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1998.

Former chief UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, Glen Rangwala of Cambridge University, and others, also offered important testimony refuting Powell’s claims – all readily available to you and the BBC at the time. So why did you respond to Powell by thinking merely “he’s seen the evidence, I haven’t”?

Best wishes

David Edwards

We have received no reply.

Despite admitting that he had simply taken Powell at his word on one of the most important issues in modern political history, Paxman repeatedly advocated a far more rigorous approach to journalism. When asked at the Coventry media event what he would change about his profession, he replied: “I’d plea for an unwillingness to believe what you’re told. It seems to me you want to have an instinctive distrust of powerful vested interests.”

When asked to describe the function of the BBC, Paxman commented: “My own view is that it’s to do, to the best of its ability, the ordinary business of journalism, which is finding things out and telling it as straight as you can tell it.”

When asked to supply advice to budding journalists, he said: “Do a bit of finding out. Really, it’s not for you if you’re not interested in discovering how things work and trying to hold people to account.”

And, yet again, when asked what he would choose as an epitaph, Paxman answered: “Well, I don’t really care what’s on my epitaph. I mean, you know: ‘He tried to find things out,’ or something like that.”

Richard Keeble, professor of journalism at Lincoln University, was a member of the audience listening to Paxman. When he challenged this striking cognitive dissonance — taking Powell at his word while repeatedly advising people to be sceptical of vested interests — Paxman replied:

Next time I see a presentation from the American State Department, or the CIA, about, I don’t know, Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, I shall look on it differently to the way that I looked upon their presentation of the so-called presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. At the time I did not have… independent evidence. One merely had the assertion of a murderous dictator on one hand, and one had what +appeared+ to be impartially — not impartially but covertly — gathered intelligence on the other. And I and many others judged that wrongly; we believed it. And clearly it didn‘t stack up in the event.

In fact it is absurd to suggest that Saddam Hussein was the only source for views challenging the credibility of claims made by Powell, Bush and Blair on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. We and our readers at Media Lens sent Paxman reams of credible, referenced information in 2002 and early 2003 of the kind we sent to him again in our recent email. He ignored it then, as he has again now. He commented in his interview:

“Of the stuff that I get sent… it’s [mostly] in textual form. Most of it is giving a very, very partial version of events which consorts with the senders’ political prejudices.”

In 2003, Paxman chose to accept the “very, very partial version of events” supplied by Colin Powell and others — a version that resulted in one of the most devastating wars in modern history, with over one million dead, four million made refugees and a country torn apart.

Paxman’s assurance that “I shall look… differently” on evidence in future was unconvincing. Why did he talk in terms of the future when six years have already passed since Powell’s deception? Why did he not express his increased scepticism by denouncing some of the fraudulent claims made by the US-UK governments since 2003? Certainly, we have seen no evidence of a more challenging approach from Paxman or the rest of the Newsnight team. Paxman’s own comment provided a good example: he referred to “Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.” In fact the existence of that programme is merely +alleged+ by the same governments that hoodwinked Paxman over Iraq.

We asked Richard Keeble what he thought of Paxman’s replies. He responded:

I was not really surprised at Paxman’s responses to my questions. Clearly the BBC as an institution trusts the powers-that-be far too much. The lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was just one period amongst a host of others when their journalists should have been questioning the rhetoric of the politicians and the military. They didn’t and so the lies about WMD went largely unchallenged. Paxman has the reputation of being a rottweiler amongst interviewers — and yet even he admits to being ‘hoodwinked’ by Colin Powell and Co.³

There was no mention of Paxman’s comments in any UK newspaper. A single mention was recorded on the blogosphere at Journalism.co.uk.

As we have often noted, compassion for the suffering of others is a key concern that separates the best dissident writers from their mainstream counterparts. It is not that dissidents care more about the lives of Iraqis and Palestinians than they do about the lives of Americans and Britons — their concern is to do whatever they can to relieve the suffering of people under attack from governments for which they, as democratic citizens, are responsible. Also, the government we are most able to influence is our own, so this should be the focus of attention. It is simply a fact that mass popular activism, as during the Vietnam War, +can+ restrain our government’s actions; whereas there is just not much we can do about the actions of, say, the Chinese or Russian governments.

When Martin Amis recently asked an audience of literary Londoners for a show of hands on the question: “How many of you feel morally superior to the Taliban?” he was missing the point.

The point is that it is a morally inferior position to focus on the crimes of foreign governments when we are responsible for, and far more able to influence, our own government. And it is a kind of moral idiocy to stridently protest the crimes of other governments when we know these protests will be exploited by our government in justifying its own crimes. Yes, there was a moral case for protesting Saddam Hussein’s abuse of human rights in 2002 and 2003 — but not if doing so made the US-UK devastation of Iraq more likely, so piling vastly more suffering on the Iraqi people.

Compassion, then, is the key concern — where best to direct our efforts in the hope of doing something to relieve suffering in the world. Journalism should be honest and rational, but it should not be indifferent or neutral — it should be biased in the direction of relieving misery. Noam Chomsky has gone so far as to suggest that a life without compassion is meaningless:

“So if you decide not to make use of the opportunities that you have; not to try to live your life in a way which is constructive and helpful, you end up looking back and say: ‘Why did I bother living?’”

This position is important because it provides the psychological motivation for challenging vested interests that are keen to reward servility with status, privilege, even power. In the absence of compassion, there is every reason to conform, to toe the line — to perhaps give the appearance of adopting dissenting positions without really rocking the boat. Then journalism is a job like any other — a way of paying the bills. To be sure, Chomsky’s position is an exotic one from the perspective of much mainstream journalism. When asked what he likes about his job as a journalist, Paxman answered:

“It offers you the opportunity to meet all sorts of fascinating people… If you have a curious mind and you like words it’s a wonderful, wonderful occupation.” But the pay is not good, he warned: “The salaries are very poor… There is no job security.” Nevertheless: “It remains a fascinating way to spend your time.”

1. Paxman, ‘Is World Journalism in Crisis?,’ Coventry University online interview, October 28, 2009.
2. Robert Parry and Norman Solomon, ’Behind Colin Powell’s Legend – My Lai,’ The Consortium, 1996.
3. Keeble, email to Media Lens, November 3, 2009.

Whitman has always been viewed as a poet of the people, in contrast to the pretentious dandies from academia who have controlled official American culture for much of our history. He wrote of workmen, farmers, sailors, soldiers, lovers, criminals, and prostitutes.

In the text of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he wrote of himself as, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He had discovered a great secret, one that is known to everyone who is young at heart: that the free individual, always potentially a “kosmos,” stands at a much higher level in the scale of creation than any man-made collective.

Thus was Whitman a hero to the Beatniks of the 1950s who tried to rediscover an authentic American voice in the streets and on the roads and highways of this great land. The spirit of Whitman was surely present through the rebellion of the 1960s, when America’s young men and women rose up and fought the Establishment to stop the Vietnam War and bring civil rights to racial minorities.

The Establishment fought back with a vengeance and, through the most egregious betrayal in history, reduced the world’s greatest industrial democracy to the pathetic shadow of its former self we are today.

The first thing the Establishment did was destroy the industrial job base by shipping millions of good jobs to China and other Third World nations, where slave laborers could be forced to churn out consumer products at a fraction of the cost of similar work done by American workers.

Acting through the CIA and organized crime, the Establishment flooded the cities and college campuses with illegal drugs in order to rot the minds and souls of our youth.

They dumbed down education to the point where young people who graduate today know little and can do less of a practical nature. Vocational training is dead. A high school graduate is worth virtually nothing in the job market, and most college graduates are semi-literate and self-absorbed, without any real backbone, skills, or initiative. Many high school and college graduates are drug addicts or alcoholics.

They turned the economy over to thieves from Wall Street and created a military machine that turns youth into murderers and assassins whose job it is to conquer the world for the fat cats of global capital.

They ruined the arts, literature, and music through crass commercialization, making it almost impossible for any real original creativity to be produced or communicated. The one bright light in this darkness is the internet, which is being threatened by commercial suppression of freedom of expression by the ambitions of big communications companies. Thank goodness too for the rare creative genius like Michael Moore who has the courage to hold up a mirror to this deeply diseased society.

Then they wrecked people’s health with processed food and constant inducements to a sedentary lifestyle while pumping us full of dangerous vaccines and prescription drugs. They drummed it into everyone’s head that we are basically weak, ill, helpless creatures who can only survive by taking pills and making constant trips to doctors, hospitals, and clinics.

They induced us to fight over our possessions and freedoms in law courts with the aid of greedy lawyers in front of rapacious judges who have built up the largest prison population in the world.

They pulled money and credit out of the inner cities and rural areas leaving those segments of the nation and their populations to rot.

The list could go on and on and on.

Today we are in the midst of not just a recession but a terminal depression. Getting the banks to lend again so people can buy homes at what are still over-inflated prices or so they might compete with immigrants to get construction jobs through building of more useless office buildings or military bases is not a recovery. The “greening of America” is a myth. There is no resurgence of alternative energy investment or new public infrastructure apart from a few highway projects.

American family farming is practically dead and is under a new assault from speculators who are undercutting prices and forcing foreclosures. The local manufacturing sector never came back after the calamitous decline produced by the Paul Volcker recession of 1979-1983, when interest rates were deliberately raised to over 20 percent to kill off family-owned businesses so that global corporations could step in and take over. Since then we had the “Reagan Revolution” when the banks took over the economy, the Clinton dot.com bubble of the 1990s which crashed in 2000, and the George W. Bush/Alan Greenspan housing bubble which blew up in 2008. Now Main Street lies shattered and shuttered as a result of the crimes and treacheries of the last 30 years.

True, there is a rebellion brewing, including a monetary reform movement that has attacked the power of the Federal Reserve, as well as a few progressive voices that call for a much larger economic “stimulus” than the Obama administration has seen fit to implement.

But is there any practical plan on the part of either political party or organized movement to restore America to what it once was–a place where ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish? The answer is a resounding “No.” Not a chance. And “Change You Can Believe In” hasn’t changed a thing. All it has done has been to produce another financial bubble, this time using huge amounts of public debt through the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds. Business is not growing and jobs are not coming back. The only thing that has gone up has been the meeting of military recruitment quotas.
This latest bubble will fail too, because money created through lending to float the prices of assets is not wealth. Rather wealth consists of goods and services produced by labor applied to natural resources. Those who provide the labor must be recompensed fairly.

So what is to be done? The answer is that nothing can or will be done, if by that you mean whether a political savior is going to come along to rescue our nation and its people from destruction.

In fact, what they are planning is to continue to throttle and enslave us with a predatory financial establishment and a military policy that is preparing the groundwork for World War III. The war will be fought with American troops against Russia and China, after which China will take over as the world’s policeman while this country disappears from the face of the earth. It’s the ultimate plan of the New World Order, the ones American politicians, financiers, military leaders, and academics bow down to.

It is time for each and every individual who values his or her own life along with the creative potential of the human spirit to begin to work with others to create a new nation and world. The government isn’t going to do it for us. Please believe me. This is not a system that can be reformed. It is a system that must be replaced. And it must be replaced by the ordinary working men and women who have been crushed, used, and abused during the past ugly half-century.

Americans, get to work. Call your friends and family together today and begin to figure out what to do. Start with 15 minutes of prayer and meditation. You will be shown the way from within yourselves. My own view is that setting up local currency systems, as many communities are now doing, is a good place to start.

The Bush era antiwar movement has ebbed and flowed a few times since it abruptly materialized just after 9/11 and then exploded into a massive force in the months leading up to President George W. Bush’s unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This was actually the high point of mass activism. A decline began with the invasion and the bipartisan congressional declaration of support for the new war, but the movement remained huge and mounted many large national and local demonstrations for years.

The Democratic victory in the 2006 Congressional election signaled a further erosion of peace activities because of the erroneous assumption that the new Congress would end the wars. Antiwar forces were hardly visible during the 2008 campaign, despite the mayhem in Iraq and Afghanistan, because many efforts we focused on electing Sen. Barack Obama, whom many Democrats considered to be a peace candidate.

The low point was reached earlier this year — a remarkable development during two ongoing wars — about the time President Obama reignited the Afghan war by ordering another 21,000 troops to the battlefield.

The hard core of the movement has remained intact, but is relatively small. The national peace organizations and coalitions are still in place, though most have become less active as their numbers fell off and funding diminished. The left wing and the pacifist sector are engaged and active, now focused on ending the Afghan war, and there will be growth as Obama continues to escalate the war.

But the mass base of the movement that confronted the Bush Administration’s wars — the Democratic voters — are standing on the sidelines, unwilling to publicly criticize the president of their choice. This is despite the fact that opinion polls report a majority of the American people now oppose the Afghan war, including some 70% of Democrats.

Over the last year or so I’ve spoken to a number of local and national peace leaders and many rank-and-file activists about the drop in antiwar numbers. Everybody has felt the decline. As an organizer for the last 15 years in New York State’s Hudson Valley region I have witnessed it close up.

For example, seven years ago in October 2002 our group at the time organized an antiwar demonstration of 2,500 people at Academy Green Park in the small city of Kingston. On the same day several buses full of local activists traveled to Washington to attend the ANSWER Coalition’s big peace rally that drew up to 100,000 people. The war hadn’t even started. It was five months away. This was the beginning stages of the largest “preemptive” antiwar movement in U.S. history.

On Oct. 17 a couple of weeks ago in the same city park, with two wars in progress, 20 co-sponsoring groups and an excellent speaker list— our antiwar rally attracted 100 people. There was no Washington protest to draw crowds away, and the anticipated rain didn’t fall. We knew half the participants by name. There were antiwar actions in some 40 cities that day, but the ones we heard from all had much lower numbers than in the past. The Capital District movement to our north brought out between 200-250 people for a well publicized and organized Albany demonstration, but a couple of years ago they attracted a crowd of over 600.

Here’s one more example. Over the years my co-organizer Donna Goodman and I have arranged for 22 bus trips to bring Hudson Valley activists to distant peace rallies, mostly in Washington. We average between three and five buses. That’s roughly 150 to 250 people. Our biggest success was in January 2003, two months before the Iraq war, when we sent seven buses to DC to join an ANSWER protest that attracted a half-million people.

Six years later this March, as President Obama was expanding the war by deploying another 21,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, we managed to bring 37 people to a demonstration in Washington. Some 10,000 people showed up for a good rally and an exciting march. We were empowered by the rally and proud to have made the effort, but it was dismaying to see how our numbers had dwindled.

In our talks with people about the movement’s decline, the main emphasis always pointed to the fact that the constituency upon which our broad peace movement reposes was disintegrating. At issue is figuring out exactly why, and then how to help rebuild our forces.

The question of “why” isn’t difficult. Since over 85% of our 3,500 Activist Newsletter readers voted Democratic last November, we decided to talk to a number of them, in person and mainly via email, as well as to movement organizers and unwavering activists. The conclusion is that the Democratic voters who have stopped showing up do so for one or more of three reasons: (1) The big majority simply don’t want to publicly oppose a war waged by a Democratic president — especially when he is under strong attack by the Republicans. (2) Some think it is a “good” war. (3) Some believe peace demonstrations “don’t do any good,” and that we’re “just talking to ourselves.” Let’s examine this point by point.

We’ve encountered point number one before. Many Democratic voters were extremely reluctant to criticize President Lyndon Johnson during the first couple of years in which he widened the Vietnam war. But by the end of LBJ’s first full term many Democrats turned on him to the point that he decided not to run for reelection. He was responsible for the passage of progressive domestic legislation far beyond anything Obama will achieve, but his war policy destroyed him.

On the other hand, Democratic voters, with the liberals in the vanguard, stuck with President Bill Clinton during his unjust and illegal bombardment of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999. Clinton learned the big lesson from Vietnam: Launch a short war with few American deaths. He wisely did his dirty work in only three months. And while thousands of Yugoslavs were killed and much of the civilian infrastructure was wrecked, no American died because the war was conducted from the air beyond the reach of anti-aircraft fire. Now, of course, there are American drones assassinating people in western Pakistan. Sometimes they hit their target, sometimes a wedding party.

Bush served two terms despite his long imperialist wars, in part because he kept the U.S. deaths relatively low (the GI death toll in Vietnam was nearly 13 times greater). Bush was reelected in 2004 because the Democratic Party not only refused to oppose the war but candidate John Kerry kept telling the voters he would be much better at winning than blundering Bush. Given the choice between two pro-war candidates, the voters decided not to change war horses in mid-carnage.

There was an active antiwar movement during Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign but most peace people fell in line behind Kerry, as did United for Peace and Justice, the biggest coalition, and most moderate peace groups. ANSWER stood apart and picketed both political conventions, not just the Republican affair in New York. A week after Bush’s depressing reelection we called a local rally to get people up and running again. I opened by remarking that “98% of the American people just voted for war.” A woman in the front row interrupted, “No! We voted for Kerry!” Neither Kerry nor Obama (who made it clear in the campaign that he wanted to fight in Afghanistan) was a peace candidate, but most Democrats seemed to think they were.

The American peace movement has to win back the Democratic voters on the issue of ending the Afghan war, and bring them back into the streets to demand peace. Even if a majority of voters want an end to war, the ballot box is meaningless unless there is a candidate running on a genuine antiwar platform. We respect and support the antiwar members of Congress, such as our region’s Rep. Maurice Hinchey, but they are up against a large pro-war bipartisan majority and always get aced out. Put a million people in the streets on the same day and we’ll begin to get results; do it again and again, and maybe we’ll end a war.

This brings us to point two, the fact that some peace Democrats think the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is a good war. Government and mass media distortions have succeeding in confusing many people. The movement is partly responsible by focusing over the years almost exclusively on Iraq. Now that the Obama Administration is widening the Afghan war it is essential for the peace forces to increase their educational efforts.

We’re trying to do our part in this issue of the newsletter. The two-part article “The U.S. in Afghanistan” contains information that will be useful to our readers in assessing this war, particularly those who think it is just. The article on Afghan Women and the War is important because we’re all worried about their situation, which remains deplorable, but the women quoted in this article perceive two oppressors: the Taliban and the U.S.-NATO occupiers (Check out the CNN video link). Also, the Afghan war article by Bill Moyers (”Bring Back the Draft”) provokes some interesting thoughts.

I’ve heard point three regarding the alleged inefficacy of peace protests, and that we’re talking to ourselves, many times. The Vietnam era was filled with it, and yet — as the Vietnamese government will tell you, the peace struggle in the U.S. was an essential ingredient in ending the war and reunifying the country.

Many people think that because the mass media usually ignores our actions that what we do has no effect. Some say “we demonstrate and nothing happens.” I’ve often been told that all we do is speak to each other. Some say we’re so irrelevant the White House isn’t even listening. All this is wrong, and I’ll try to explain why.

It is important to understand that we are involved in a very long struggle for peace. We are trying to change the policies of history’s most powerful military state, which has been engaged in a hot or cold war, openly or clandestinely, without interruption since it entered World War II, 68 years ago. Many of Washington’s martial actions have been neither legal nor just. The mass media is a virtual adjunct of the government as far as foreign military policy is concerned. The U.S. is a militarist state and spends more money each year on wars past, present and future than the military budgets of every other country in the world combined. It has between 700 and 1,000 military bases circling the globe.

This is a tough nut to crack. Our side, the peace and justice side, often doesn’t win. And when we do win it sure doesn’t happen overnight. Of course the mass media ignores us, but that doesn’t invalidate our efforts. Sure, we often demonstrate and nothing happens. We’re up against big odds. It’s a matter of unceasing struggle, protest after protest, meeting after meeting, leaflet, after leaflet.

Mass demonstrations are essential. They are the collective expression of the opposition of the American people to the aggressive wars conducted in their name by their government, whether in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Yugoslavia and Nicaragua, or Vietnam and Haiti. Our mass protests are acts of public solidarity with the victims of unjust war, and help to strengthen their resistance. And mass protests in Washington, the seat of government and the Pentagon, are necessary to turn attention directly to the warmakers.

Frequently we do speak to ourselves, and it is important to do so. That’s why the great religions have been meeting once a week for thousands of years. It’s what keeps their movement together, and ours as well. In our own experience, we have found that under normal conditions, between 15% and 20% of the people at every rally or bus trip we organize have shown up for the first time, and many come back. At the beginning stages of new wars the proportion is much higher.

It’s untrue that the White House doesn’t listen because we’re irrelevant. All presidents make a show of indifference to our protests. But when we are of mass size they are supplied with detailed reports about the status of our forces. President Nixon made a big point of laughing off the peace movement, but if you read Robert Dallek’s “Nixon and Kissinger” for instance, you will understand he was obsessed with the antiwar movement and carefully calculated its impact.

It is essential for us to keep on protesting against aggressive wars or Washington will run riot with military adventurism. The only significant opposition to a bigger war in Afghanistan will come from that sector of the peace movement willing to confront the power in Washington regardless of who is president. And some members of Congress will speak up, too, and they are strengthened knowing our mass movement is out there.

I believe without doubt that in the cynical and conservative atmosphere choking our country today this movement remains our principal instrumentality against Washington’s unjust wars and imperialist escapades. Without this movement we have no voice! Let us make that voice ever louder as we rebuild the movement and go forward toward the attainment of peace.

Zelaya is a wealthy businessman, a member of the right-wing Liberal Party (PL), a former National Congress Deputy from 1985-1998, a former PL Minster for Investment, and president from January 27, 2006 to when he was deposed on June 28.

His 2005 presidential campaign was largely on a law-and-order platform with pledges that, if elected, he’d address Honduras’ crime problem with more police programs against and reeducation ones for violent international and local street gang members.

Zelaya also joined Venezuela’s Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA) based on fair, not one-sided “free” trade; complementarity, not competition; solidarity, not domination; cooperation, not exploitation; and respect for each nation’s sovereign freedom from corporate control.

According to supporters like Alejandra Fernandez, a Honduran student, he also: “raised the minimum wage, gave out free school lunches, provided milk for the babies and pensions for the elderly, distributed energy-saving light bulbs, decreased the price of public transportation, (and) made more scholarships available for students.” In addition, he built roads and schools in rural areas. “That’s why the elite classes can’t stand him and why we want him back. This is really a class struggle.” One the Resistance is detemined to win and hardliners aim to crush.

The Coup d’ Etat

On June 28, dozens of Honduran soldiers stormed Zelaya’s residence at night, arrested him in his pajamas at gunpoint, and exiled him to Costa Rica in violation of the 1982 Constitution that states:

“No Honduran may be expatriated nor delivered by the authorities to a foreign state,” nor may a democratically elected leader be deposed.

On July 3, the Honduran army’s top lawyer, Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, admitted as much in a Miami Herald interview saying: “We know there was a crime there. In the moment that we took him out of the country, in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime. Because of the circumstances of the moment this crime occurred, there is going to be a justification and cause for acquittal that will protect us.”

He meant protection from the Constitution’s Article 239 (crafted by a military government to subordinate civilians to repressive rule) that states: “No citizen that has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.”

Also, Article 374 stating:

It is not possible to reform, in any case, the preceding article, the present article, the constitutional articles referring to the form of government, to the national territory, to the presidential period, the prohibition to serve again as President of the Republic, the citizen who has performed under any title in consequence of which she/he cannot be President of the Republic in the subsequent period.

Zelaya didn’t suggest it or break the law in calling for a simple non-binding June 28 “yes” or “no” referendum on one question:

Do you think that the November 2009 general elections should include a fourth ballot box (the other three being for candidates) in order to make a decision about the creation of a National Constituent Assembly that would approve a new Constitution?

The Honduran Congress and military opposed it. The CSJ illegally ruled it unconstitutional, ordered no distribution of ballot boxes, and threatened those doing it with 8-12 years in prison for “abuse of authority.” The High Court and Congress are stacked with right-wing ideologues. In addition, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs calls the CSJ “one of the most corrupt institutions in Latin America.”

So is the military whose officers from captain on up have been trained for decades at the infamous School of the Americas (SOA), renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISEC), where they’re taught the latest ways to kill, maim, torture, oppress, exterminate poor and indigenous people, overthrow democratically elected governments, assassinate targeted leaders, suppress popular resistance when it erupts, and work cooperatively with Washington to solidify hard-right rule, intolerant of progressive change — familiar tactics since June 28.

The day before, the military set off a chain of events. Reports said Zelaya fired Joint Chiefs Head General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez for refusing to distribute ballot boxes. He denied it. Velasquez may have resigned on his own. So did Defense Minister Edmundo Orellana and several military commanders. Nonetheless, the CSJ and Congress called Velasquez’s dismissal illegal. Military forces deployed around Tegucigalpa, surrounded the Presidential Palace, and took over the airport and borders in advance of the planned coup, made in Washington, of course, like numerous others for decades.

Zelaya, nonetheless, ordered ballot boxes distributed. Congress recommended removing him. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office announced that anyone setting up polling stations or promoting the referendum would be prosecuted. Anti-Zelaya forces urged a boycott.

Right-wing media hype called the vote illegal, a ploy to re-elect Zelaya, a way to shift his conservative Liberal Party far-left, a scheme to solidify his Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) membership and let Chavez make Honduras socialist. In a pro forma June 29 pronouncement, the CSJ reinstated Velasquez. The Catholic Church backed the coup government. Months of terror followed, including:

• imposing military rule, martial law, and a state of siege;
• deploying combat troops on city streets;
• suspending civil liberties, including habeas, the right of assembly, free movement and free expression;
• committing thousands of human rights violations;
• thousands more illegal arrests;
• dozens of killings, beatings, kidnappings, and nationwide intimidation;
• according to the human rights NGO Comite de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared – COFADEH), torturing and sodomizing men and gang-raping women;
• reactivating the infamous Battalion 316, the CIA-created death squads that disappeared, tortured, and exterminated regime opponents in the 1980s;
• silencing the independent media; and
• harassing and arresting Honduran and foreign journalists; at least one was murdered, Gabriel Fino Noreiga on July 3.

Barack Obama ignored the worst of state terror in support of coup d’etat rule — no surprise from a president calling the fraudulent Afghan election “a step forward…to advance democracy, peace and justice… in “the interests of the Afghan people (and) a reflection of a commitment to the rule of law.”

Post-coup on Veneuela’s TV Telesur, Zelaya called his ouster a:

kidnapping. An extortion of the Honduran democratic system. And I will ask the presidents of the Americas, including the US president — I want to hear the US Ambassador Hugo Llorens in Tegucigalpa if they are behind this, and if not, clear it up, because if the US is not behind this coup, they won’t be able to stay there forty-eight hours.

For over 100 years, Washington repeatedly intervened in Central and Latin American affairs — by invasions, bombings, occupations, assassinations, countless episodes of destabilization and election rigging, and numerous coup d’etats against leaders it wished to depose.

Zelaya was the latest, confirmed by the Obama administration’s refusal to cut diplomatic ties, halt military aid, impose sanctions as US law requires, or call the ouster a coup.

Announced Deal

On October 30, New York Times writers Ginger Thompson and Elisabeth Malkin headlined, “Deal Set to Restore Ousted Honduran President.” To what given the agreed on terms. On October 29, AP reported that:

“opposing political factions resumed talks (today in hopes of reaching a deal) to end the power crisis that has paralyzed the country” since June 28. “The two sides returned to the negotiating table a day after visiting US diplomats urged both factions to be more flexible and find a solution (ahead of) scheduled” November 29 presidential, parliamentary, and municipal elections.

Terms of the So-Called Agreement/Accord

Signed on October 30, it’s for Congress and the CSJ to approve it. Titled “Accord for National Reconciliation and the Strengthening of Democracy in Democracy,” it’s as Orwellian as “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Post-coup, The Hill.com reported that the far-right Business Council of Latin America (CEAL) hired former Bill Clinton special counsel, Lanny Davis’ firm, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, to lobby Congress and conduct a supportive PR campaign for its leaders. Lobbyist Bennett Ratcliff was enlisted to work with Davis, and according to an unnamed source in the New York Times, the Micheletti government hasn’t made a move without first consulting him.

These men, their associates, and legal staff prepared the Accord, the way business sectors craft all Washington legislation affecting them.

It begins saying:

We, Honduran citizens, men and women, convinced of the need to strengthen the rule of law, protect our Constitution and the laws of our Republic, deepen democracy and ensure a climate of peace and tranquility for our people, have carried out an intense and frank process of political dialogue to seek a peaceful and negotiated solution to the crisis in which our country has been submerged in recent months.

Terms include:

1. Forming a “National Unity and Reconciliation Government.”

Fact Check

Only hardliners need apply, and if reinstated, Zelaya will finish his term as an impotent puppet head of state.

2. Renouncing “a Call for a National Constituent Assembly and Amending the Unamendable Articles of the Constitution.”

Fact Check

According to Article 5 of the 2006 Honduran “Civil Participation Act,” government officials may hold non-binding inquiries (referenda) to determine popular support for proposed measures. Gauging sentiment for a National Constituent Assembly for a new Constitution is legal. Illegally, Washington and Honduran hardliners stopped it.

3. The coup regime calls on Hondurans to “peacefully participate in the coming general election and to avoid any type of demonstrations that oppose the elections of their results, or promote insurrection, unlawful conduct, civil disobedience or other acts that could result in violent confrontations or transgressions of the law.”

Fact Check

Honduran coup opponents called for an election boycott. On September 15, so did Zelaya saying: “One cannot talk about the elections where there are no guarantees that the will of the people is going to be respected.”

On October 24, 300 members of the two dominant parties, the National Party (PL) and Liberal Party (PL), announced they’ll refuse to participate. Will they now after the Accord was signed?

If some reports are accurate, Zelaya capitulated to coup d’etat terms by calling the Accord a democratic “triumph” – even though trade unionist independent candidate and National Resistance Front member Carlos Reyes and legislative deputy Cesar Ham of the small leftist Democratic Unification (UD) party dropped out of the presidential race on September 9. Most of the remaining PN and PL candidates are conservative hardliners who’ll assure no possibility of democratic change.

The elections will fill 2,896 positions, including the presidency, all 128 National Congress deputies, 20 others to represent Honduras in the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), 298 mayors and another 2,000 municipal officials.

4. The Honduran military and police will be “placed at the disposition of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal from one month before the general elections for the purpose of guaranteeing the free exercise of suffrage, the custody, transport and surveillance of electoral materials and other security aspects of the process.”

Fact Check

Hardline security forces will subvert democratic change. Hondurans will be disenfranchised if they back the charade. In betraying his supporters, Zelaya capitulated, meaning he’ll support coup d’etat authority.

5. The CSJ and Congress will “resolve the issue regarding ‘restoring possession of the Executive Power to its status prior to June 28 until conclusion (of) the current governmental period on January 27, 2010.”

Fact Check

Two hard-right bodies will decide IF Zelaya is reinstated and on what terms. He’ll be impotent by agreeing to the charade.

6. A “Verification Commission” will be created “to verify commitments made under this Accord and those deriving from it… composed of two (coup lackey) members of the international community and two members of the national community, the last two to be chosen, one each, by” Micheletti and Zelaya.

Fact Check

Staunch Washington ally, Ricardo Lagos, former Chilean president, and Obama’s Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis, will represent the international community along with Jorge Eduardo Idiaquez, Zelaya’s UN ambassador, and coup lackey, Arturo Corrales Alvarez. A three to one edge assures no chance for democratic change.

7. The coup regime calls for “Normalization of Relations between the Republic of Honduras and the International Community” to restore the status quo.

Fact Check

The regime wants international recognition for its illegitimacy, continued hardline policies, and apparently will get it.

8. The Verification Commission will handle “differences regarding interpretation or application of this Accord…”

Fact Check

Hardliners want rubber stamp approval. Commission members chosen will assure it.

9. The Accord is effective on signing. The “following calender for compliance” was agreed on:

(1) On October 30, signing the Accord into effect, delivering it to Congress, and having it rule on Point 5, “Regarding the Executive Power.”

(2) On November 2 or no later than November 5, forming the Verification Commission and establishing the “National Unity and Reconciliation Government.”

(3) On January 27, “celebrating the transfer of government.”

The Accord was agreed to by Micheletti and Zelaya representatives, Thomas Shannon, the former US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and Obama’s yet-to-be confirmed ambassador to Brazil. Ostensibly, it will return Zelaya to office in exchange for international support for subverting democracy and continuity under far-right officials taking over in January.

It also assures his impotence. Hardliners will be empowered. Constitutional change will be prohibited. Democracy will be subverted. Zelaya must distance himself from Hugo Chavez. Perhaps other regional center-leftists as well. Coup plotters will get amnesty, and Zelaya may still be tried for treason for ordering a legitimate referendum.

What’s Next?

With elections in a few weeks, hardliners may stall, obstruct, and from what Micheletti advisor, Marcia Facusse de Villeda, told Bloomberg News maintain the status quo until new officials take office in January.

“Zelaya won’t be restored,” she said. Further, “just by signing this agreement we already have the recognition of the international community for the elections.” From Washington for sure according to Thomas Shannon. On November 4, Al Jazeera reported that he: “told CNN en Espanol (on November 3) that the US will recognise the November 29 elections even if the Honduran congress votes against Zelaya’s return to power before the vote.”

No surprise, and according to Micheletti aide, Arturo Corrales, Congress isn’t in session so approving the Accord will come “after the elections.” Yet, according to hondurasthisweek.com, the congressional Executive Committee (Junta Directiva) met on November 3 to evaluate the Accord, but what’s next is anyone’s guess as Congress president, Jose Alfredo Saavedra, hasn’t convened an extraordinary legislative session to decide on reinstatement. Nor has the CSJ ruled, yet the November 5 midnight deadline came and passed.

Zelaya Reacts

Still holed up at the Brazilian embassy under threat of arrest, Zelaya told Radio Globo: “There’s no sense in deceiving Hondurans.” His negotiator, Jorge Reina, said the Accord is dead because Congress failed to vote by the agreed on date and added:

“The de facto regime has failed to live up to the promise that, by this date (November 5), the national (unity) government would be installed. And by law, it should be presided by the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.” Reina accused Micheletti of arranging “a great electoral fraud this November. We completely do not recognize this electoral process. Elections under a dictatorship are a fraud for the people.”

According to AP: “Shortly before midnight, Micheletti announced that a unity government had been created even though Zelaya had not submitted his own list of members. Micheletti said the new government was composed of candidates proposed by political parties and civic groups.”

In other words, mostly hardliners to solidify coup d’etat rule even though earlier hondurasthisweek.com cited a November 1 Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia report saying Tegucigalpa diplomatic sources told the paper that Thomas Shannon forced Zelaya’s compliance or risk his son, Hector’s, prosecution on drugs trafficking. He lives in America. Zelaya complied, but as of November 6 no longer. Nonetheless, events are fast moving with likely new developments in the hours and days ahead.

At issue is how the international community will react if a fake national unity government is established and elections precede a vote on Zelaya’s reinstatement.

The Organization of American States’ (OAS) Secretary-General, Jose Miguel Insulza, said he’s creating a “mission” to assure compliance, meaning Zelaya must be reinstated once Congress and the CSJ agree. However, no deadlines are set, so hardliners may run out the clock and declare victory. They’ve already won even though The New York Times reported that:

“As news of the agreement spread, residents poured from their homes and workplaces across Tegucigalpa, the capital, to celebrate. Jubilation broke out in streets,” with more likely if Zelaya’s reinstated. It’s not assured. Neither is what’s next if it comes. What if delay and obstruction follow, and what if Venezuelan lawyer, author, and close Chavez confidant, Eva Golinger, is right about more Washington-instigated “coups in Paraguay, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Venezuela, where subversion, counterinsurgency and destabilization increase daily.”

Latin America is being more militarized, the result of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe giving the Pentagon access to seven new military bases with US forces currently on nine others, supplemented by the April 2008’s Fourth Fleet’s reactivation after a 60 year hiatus. Now the Honduran coup suggests other regimes outside the US orbit or not enough in it may be targeted. Add Bolivia to Golinger’s list and still more if center-left regimes take over.

The Honduran Resistance Reacts

In an October 1 interview, National Resistance Front leader, Juan Barahona, said:

“We will not stop. We will continue to be against the coup until the last day they are in power. After the June coup, the level of consciousness has greatly risen. There has been a parting of waters. This is a struggle between classes: on one side the exploited people, and on the other the capitalists, the large capitalists that dominate this country. (It’s a) struggle of the poor against the rich….” Overwhelming public sentiment wants a referendum calling for a National Constituent Assembly to draft a new Constitution.

Will popular resistance demand it? On November 5, two of its leaders appeared in Washington at an event to restore democracy and human rights in Honduras: Bertha Oliva, COFADEH founder, and Jessica Sanchez of the National Alliance of Honduran Feminists in Resistance.

On November 4, a London protest was held at the US Embassy for the same purpose. It also stressed “end(ing) all US economic, political and military support to” the Honduran dictatorship. Speakers included trade unionist leader Tony Burke, other activists, and Jeremy Corbyn MP.

The UK Trades Union Congress (TUC), “the voice of Britain at work (with) 58 affiliated unions representing nearly seven million working people,” called on MP David Miliband, Secretary of State Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, “to increase pressure” on hardliners “to restore democracy and to strongly condemn the series of human rights violations” post-coup.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), representing 170 million workers in 158 countries, unanimously passed a resolution at its recent Berlin General Council meeting calling for:

– suspending Honduran trade preferences and financial aid and cooperation until democracy is fully restored; and

– not cooperating with the bogus November elections by sending observers.

On October 31, the National Resistance Front told Hondurans:

• “We celebrate the upcoming restoration of President Manuel Zelaya Rosales as a popular victory over the narrow interests of the coup oligarchy;”
• the Accord mandates “returning the holder of executive power to its pre-June 28 state (and assuring) a democratic framework in which the people can exercise their right to transform society;”
• the Accord must “be processed in an expedited fashion by the National Congress; we alert all our comrades….to pressure for the immediate compliance;”
• “We reiterate that a National Constituent Assembly is an unrenounceable aspiration of the Honduran people and a non-negotiable right for which we will continue struggling in the streets, until we achieve the re-founding of our society to convert it into one that is just, egalitarian and truly democratic….(After over four months) of struggle, nobody here surrenders!”

One of its leaders, Rafeal Alegria, told Prensa Latina: “The people will not approve the electoral farce the putschists are preparing. The only solution to the conflict is the restitution of democratic legality and the president elected by the people.”

Key now is follow-through, persistence, and staying mobilized for the long haul. Popular victories come only at great cost after years of struggle the way noted journalist IF Stone explained: “The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins…”

It’s for Hondurans and oppressed people everywhere to understand, persevere, and endure, no matter what.

Advertising Age is reporting that, due to its fear of a backlash arising from “parental concerns that [its] advertising and packaging was preying on fears of the H1N1 virus,” Kellogg Company, the billion-dollar-a-year profit engine that peddles Cocoa Krispies and other junk food, is removing preposterous “anti-oxidant” claims from Cocoa Krispies boxes.

Here is Kellogg’s official announcement:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents indicating their desire for more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal.

While science shows that these antioxidants help support the immune system, given the public attention on H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. We will, however, continue to provide the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers.

We will continue to respond to the desire for improved nutrition, and we are committed to communicating the importance of nutrition to our consumers.

Let’s run that through our handy-dandy, unpatented Consumer Trap Marketing-to-English Translator, shall we?

The results:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals. Meanwhile, we won’t tell you here that by “Rice Krispies,” we also mean “Cocoa Krispies.” Including that fact would disclose that we are basically selling candy here.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents‘ indicating their desire for vulnerability to deceptive claims about more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal lives.

While science* shows suggests that these antioxidants may help support the immune system, given the public attention on that we know our vitamin-sprayed sugar crunch doesn’t have a prayer of preventing H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. After all, it would cost us money to remove them now. We will, however, continue to provide spray on the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers continues to provide us with an excuse for passing our product off as [wink, wink, make air quotes] “part of a nutritious breakfast.”

We will continue to respond to ignore both the desire for improved nutrition and the nutritional and economic inferiority of our mega-processed and packaged product to plain old whole-grain bread, and we are committed to communicating the importance suppressing knowledge of nutrition and home economics to among our consumers targets.

Fuck you, and goodnight.

* When science is even conceivably on our side, it is absolute truth. Climate change? Dangers of excessive sugar intake? Needs more research.

That is thanks to the cash handouts generously given out to them by the Goldman Sachs run administration in Washington. The Wall Street regime continues to make monetary policy over the heads of the electorate, devaluing the dollar purposely (in the name of ‘carry trade’ transactions) while bringing the erstwhile American economic powerhouse to its knees. An ailing economy, whose financial system has imploded like the twin towers, is now headed for an Argentinean style default and/or Weimar like hyper inflation. Casino not entrepreneurial capitalism still rules over us but the ideology is morally bankrupt. So gentlemen place your bets “rien n’est va plus” as the croupiers would say on Wall Street.

1989-2009: From the dislocation of Soviet Empire to today’s American decline

What brought down the Soviet was economic morass and industrial paralysis. Along with colonial aveveturim in places like Angola and Afghanistan which drained the national treasury. A bloated bureaucracy and an inefficient gargantuan military industrial complex which also bled the federation’s resources. America today is in a symmetrical situation to the Soviet Union’s predicament in the late 1980s. Hence, 2009 maybe to the U.S what 1989 was to the late and somewhat great U.S.S.R. The U.S is entangled in two endless war of occupation one in the Middle East the other in central Asia.

These costly conflicts at a time of great economic distress which recalls the deprivations of the great depression era, have led to historic budget deficits. During the Bush neo con years ( the neo cons being a ruthless clique driving foreign policy in the White House equivalent to the KGB apparatchiks who were influencing the Kremlin’s actions abroad) the federal government’s spent like there was no tomorrow and big government grew to monstrous proportions. Huge increases in the military spending added to this horrid fiscal nightmare. Barack Obama, the man of the moment or the “Gorbi” of our times, like the last Soviet leader, has inherited a huge mess which requires Herculean, if not superhuman capacity to clean up. And like the last leader of the Soviet empire, Obama enjoys huge popularity aboard, while being practically loathed, ridiculed and derided at home (especially on the radio airwaves). And now after the recent electoral gains of the Republicans in some key states, he’s wounded (perhaps fatally) politically.

Obama: The post modern “sun king” and absolutism American style

Obama’s pseudo or simulated “Glasnost” or the apparent policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions has led ironically to many Americans placing an absolute blind trust in the man who embodies “change”. There is an abdication of reason in the name of “yes we can”. A kind of collective hypnosis hangs over the nation. Meanwhile, there are some “hard core” pockets of dissent, made up of tea party patriots, who are denouncing his “socialist style” health care project. For its part, the zombie like mass media appears to be either asleep at the wheel to all this, or is willingly (in an insidious and complicit manner) allowing a Soviet style personality cult to take shape-mold the minds of millions and enthrall the masses.

The Obama Factor

The president’s inverted version of “perestroika” (that is the restructuring or retooling of the economy) has been fine tuned to meet the need of the oligarchs and corporate barons who support him and prompt him behind the curtains. Obama and his czar –commissars (and his adoring minions of PR spin operatives) have deftly in a brilliant slight of hand in one swift jest, effectively expropriating the entire financial and industrial sectors in America by means of massive taxpayer funded “bail outs”. These ploys have turned the essence of capitalism upside down, by rewarding cronyism and criminal behavior to the point where “crime pays” very handsomely indeed, and enables billionaires, fraudsters and financiers to obtain great gain almost without almost any pain or punishment. These perverse policies are likely to fail. In the end, Gorbachev’s policies although ostensibly well meaning, actually hastened the demise of the Soviet state. This later led to its fragmentation and disintegration of the communist superpower and its Eastern Empire. America’s current plight may lead to a similar outcome.

The Ileana Ros-Lehtinen/AIPAC driven House Resolution 867 boiled down to a call for censorship of the Goldstone Report without “any endorsement or further consideration” from the Obama Administration, rife with inaccuracies and undermines support for the universality of human rights.

It is no surprise that Congress is trying to cover their culpable asses for during the 23 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault were decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza.

One of the few who have been to Gaza, Congressman Baird D-WA, wrote,

H.Res. 867 is very serious business. If, as Goldstone asserts and the evidence I have seen supports, there were in fact gross violations of international law and human rights on all sides, we cannot in good conscience support H.Res. 867.

This is about much more than just another imposed political litmus test that we are all too often asked to perform. This is about whether we as individuals and this Congress as an institution find it acceptable to drop white phosphorous on civilian targets, to rocket civilian communities, to destroy hospitals and schools, to use civilians as human shields, and to deliberately destroy nonmilitary factories, industries and basic water, electrical and sanitation infrastructure. This is about whether it is acceptable to restrict the movement, opportunities and hopes of more than a million people every single day.

At the end of the day, this is also about our own domestic security. If we are seen internationally as condoning violations of human rights and international law, if our money and our weaponry play a leading role in those violations, and if we reflexively obstruct the findings of someone with the credentials, history and integrity of Justice Goldstone, it can only diminish our international standing and our own security.

In a 71-page report released March 25, 2009, by Human Rights Watch, Israel’s repeated firing of US-made white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes.

“Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza,” provides eye witness accounts of the devastating effects that white phosphorus munitions had on civilians and civilian property in Gaza.

“Human Rights Watch researchers found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended in January.

“Militaries officially use white phosphorus to obscure their operations on the ground by creating thick smoke. It has also been used as an incendiary weapon, though such use constitutes a war crime.

“In Gaza, the Israeli military didn’t just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops,” said Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report.

“It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren’t in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died.”

During the 23 days of attack on Gaza, the UN Security Council, Amnesty International, International Red Cross, and global voices of protest rose up and demanded a ceasefire, but both houses of Congress overwhelmingly endorsed resolutions to support a continuation of Israel’s so called “self defense” and its collective punishment upon Gaza.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walked on coals poured out of righteous rage in Morocco after her moronic praise for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “reasonable compromise” in which he “proposed a moratorium on new housing units in the West Bank, but would allow building or finishing about 3,000 more units and would exclude East Jerusalem from any building limits.”

All the settlements are illegal under international law and the precedent of US failure to act was well established by 1973, when Ariel Sharon bragged to Winston Churchill III, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”

Back in 2005, top U.S. law enforcement officials attended a briefing organized by the Council for the National Interest regarding how charities “such as B’nai B’rith and Hadassah were in direct control of the World Zionist Organization and directly linked to a massive money-laundering operation…and the settlements are an indirect generator of terrorism against the United States.”¹

It is the American government’s hypocrisy in collusion with Israel’s negation of international law, UN resolutions, and denial of equal human rights for Palestinians which are at the root of the instability in the Middle East.

Beginning in the 1990’s and even more so after 9/11, US politicians blind allegiance to Israel has been furthered by the claim that both states are threatened by Arab terrorist groups and rogue states bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Many Americans see Israel as an ally and Iran and Syria as our mutual enemies. The “war on terror” has become a tactic to infuse fear while it ignores that much of the anger in the Arab world is in response to Israel’s 40+ years of military occupation of Palestine and The Wall where ever it is built on legally owned Palestinian property which is “financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile. The Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families’ sole livelihood for generations.”²

On February 1, 2007, Senator Clinton spoke at an AIPAC Conference, “Both Israelis and Americans know so well, a democracy is far more than just holding elections. Democracy has to spring from an active and open citizenry dedicated to tolerance, to respect for differences, to the rule of law, to policies that lift us up not tear us down as fellow human beings, and to the value of human life…

“We also know that the dangers posed to Israel have been compounded by the rise to power of Hamas…Hamas…leaders have refused to disarm, to reject violence, or even to recognize the right of Israel to exist.”

The Palestinian Authority first agreed in 1988 to recognize Israel and reaffirmed this in 1993 during the Oslo Accords. Hamas has repeatedly issued olive branches of recognition to Israel, but Israel ignores all offers to make peace through justice.

On November 15, 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton stood on the Jerusalem side of The Wall and was quoted in Ha’aretz, expressing support for The Wall because it “is against terrorists” and “not against the Palestinian people.”

After I read Senator Clinton’s inaccurate and insensitive remarks in Ha’aretz, I immediately contacted her through her website. My email bounced back to me, for I am no longer a New York constituent, but I was born and lived my first three years in The Village and came of age in Levittown, Long Island.

I snail mailed Hillary a respectful letter informing her that even a little one such as me, knew all about the many gaps and lack of ’security’ along The Wall that every taxi driver and ANY would be ‘terrorist’ also knew about in order to travel from the West Bank to Jerusalem without having to stop for SECURITY.

I also reminded her that we were in the midst of the UN Decade of Creating a Culture of NONVIOLENCE for all the children of the world. The only response I received from Senator Clinton was to be put on the DNC’s mailing list soliciting funds.

As a Senator, Clinton repeatedly said, “I’ve been a strong supporter of Israel’s right to build a security barrier to keep terrorists out. I have spoken out against the International Court of Justice for questioning Israel’s right to build that fence of security.”

International Law states occupation is to be temporary and maintain the status quo and that the occupiers are not to transfer their population into occupied territory. And what RIGHT has anyone to put a fence up on somebody else’s property?

As a Senator, Hillary said: “I went to see the fence with my own eyes. During a trip to Gilo, a Jerusalem neighborhood, I was greeted by Col. Danny Tirza, who was overseeing the construction of the security fence.

“Col. Tirza’s explanation in his graphic depiction of what was part of the daily life of people living in that one neighborhood, gave me an even greater appreciation for the imperative of the fence and the need to do everything possible to protect Israel against these continuing attacks.”

The truth is that in 2000, before the construction of The Wall began, there were less ‘attacks’ than in 2008 and the Orwellian spun ‘neighborhoods’ are all ILLEGAL colonies for everyone exist on legally owned Palestinian land, NOT on Israeli owned land!

I have seen “the fence” too and it divides Palestinians from Palestinians with 25 to 30 foot high concrete slabs or wire equipped with razor barbs, trenches, sniper towers, military roads, electronic surveillance, remote controlled infantry and buffer zones that stretch over 100 miles wide and deny Palestinians access to their legally owned land, their families, jobs, and resources.

The Wall has eviscerated the sister cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem and will soon completely separate Bethlehem from her sister villages of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. Bethlehem’s significance to and historic ties with Palestinian East Jerusalem and its economic demise caused by The Wall heralded the beginning of what the BBC reported on November 5, 2009:

Palestinians might have to abandon the goal of an independent state if Israel continues to expand Jewish settlements, Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator said, “It may be time for President Abbas to tell his people the truth, that with the continuation of settlement activities, the two-state solution is no longer an option.”

Mr. Erekat also dismissed Netanyahu’s, ‘generous offer’ saying it only opened the door to more settlements in the next two years and that “Israel has the choice, settlements or peace.”

Erekat also said Palestinians made a mistake in the last round of talks by agreeing to negotiate without insisting that Israel settlement building be stopped, and added this time things would be different, meaning the alternative for Palestinians is to “refocus their attention on the one-state solution where Muslims, Christians and Jews can live as equals” as they would in true democracies.

After Clinton met with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, he called for a resumption of talks, “We have to concentrate on the end game and we must not waste time adhering to this issue or that as a start for the negotiations.”

Senator Clinton once said, “It is not enough for us to say the right things; we’ve got to be smart and tough enough to do the right things that will protect American and Israeli interests now and forever.”

Tough and smart would comprehend that America’s best interests and Israel’s security demand justice for Palestine: end the occupation and ensure equal human rights for all. And integrity would have no fear of international law.

1. Grant F. Smith, Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal, (2007, Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Washington D.C.) p. 158.
2. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, p. 43, Jan/Feb. 2007.

Obama told reporters Monday that he had emphasised to Karzai in a phone call to congratulate him on his re-election that there would have to be “a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption” and that “the proof is not going to be in words, it’s going to be in deeds”.

The New York Times reported the day after the Obama-Karzai conversation that the Obama administration wants Karzai to prosecute certain high-profile figures who are known to be involved in corruption. The story referred to the president’s brother, Kandahar warlord Ahmed Wali Karzai, former defence minister Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

And on Wednesday, Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Karzai must “take concrete steps to eliminate corruption”, adding it means “you have to rid yourself of those who are corrupt, you have to actually arrest and prosecute them”.

The new public rhetoric and press stories have given the impression that the Obama administration is now pursuing far-reaching reform of Afghanistan’s system of governance. But the sudden intensification of administration pressure on the issue of corruption is aimed less at far-reaching reform of the system than at avoiding a significant worsening of the problem in the wake of Karzai’s fraudulent re-election.

In return for their pledges to guarantee huge majorities for Karzai in the Aug. 20 election, the Afghan president had to make promises to a number of power brokers or warlords in the provinces. Some of those were promised key ministries in the next government, according to Gilles Dorronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The main concern in Kabul and Washington in the wake of Karzai’s reelection is how many of the warlords to whom Karzai is indebted will be rewarded with ministries when the new cabinet is announced,

“Everybody who supported Karzai now expects their payback,” said Dorronsoro, who spent the entire month of August in Afghanistan.

It is understood that the Obama administration’s pressure on Karzai over the corruption issue is aimed in large part at heading off the nomination of some of the most incompetent and corrupt warlords to key ministries, and that Karzai is aware of this U.S. concern.

It now seems very likely, however, that some lucrative ministries will be given to warlord allies of Karzai.

Dorronsoro believes the administration’s influence on Karzai’s new government is going to be constrained by Karzai’s dependence on provincial and sub-provincial warlords who control the actual levers of power outside Kabul. The U.S. pressure on Karzai “can only work on a few ministries and a few issues”, he told IPS.

It is understood here that administration officials are well aware of the political constraints on Karzai imposed by the power of warlords in the provinces. They understand that reforming the governance system of Afghanistan cannot be achieved simply by leaning on Karzai.

“There is no Afghan government in the way there is an American government,” counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen observed on a panel at the U.S. Institute of Peace last August. “There are only a series of fiefdoms.”

Kilcullen cited those warlord fiefdoms, and the lack of law and order that accompanies them, as the main driver of popular support for the Taliban insurgency.

The power of the warlords, which U.S. policy abetted by providing them with cash, arms and legitimacy in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban regime, poses serious obstacles to any U.S. initiative aimed at reducing corruption.

Although U.S. commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal warned that U.S. ties with regional power brokers have alienated much of the Afghan population from foreign troops, U.S. and NATO military contingents remain heavily dependent on them for provision of perimetre security for their fixed bases and to protect supply convoys, as IPS reported last week.

Even the idea of prosecuting the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai over his role in the drug trade is likely to generate disagreement within the administration, because the CIA’s operations directorate continues to use his paramilitary organisation for intelligence and counterinsurgency operations.

There is no evidence that the administration is moving toward a more aggressive posture toward the warlords in general. Instead, the problem is viewed as one in which U.S. interests in supporting the central government must be balanced with its interests in cooperation with provincial and sub-provincial power holders, IPS has learned.

National security officials tend to believe, for example, that the way to handle the problem of abuses by the militia personnel and police affiliated with individual warlords is not to take on the warlords but to do more to train national police.

Despite the flurry of activity on the corruption issue, the administration still hasn’t decided what approach it should adopt to promote governance and anti-corruption reforms. Several different options are said to be still under discussion.

One of the approaches being proposed by some officials is to get Karzai to agree to a detailed plan of action which would involve both the United States and other states heavily involved in Afghanistan, as reported by McClatchy Monday.

The report referred to the plan as the “Afghanistan Compact” and said the administration had been working with the Karzai government and other allied governments “for months”, according to McClatchy.

But an intelligence official told McClathchy he was doubtful about such a compact, because it would require Karzai to renege on promises he had made to his warlord allies.

A previous “Compact on Afghanistan”, which was agreed to by the Karzai government and 50 other states at a conference in London on Feb. 1, 2006, has been an embarrassing failure.

That document included benchmarks for progress in bringing about the rule of law, human rights, public administration reform and “anti-corruption”, among other areas, by the end of 2010. In those politically sensitive areas, however, the Karzai regime not only did not deliver on the 2006 pledges but has even retrogressed on many of the targets.

Some officials are suggesting that the administration avoid using the term “compact” altogether, because of the well-known fate of the previous effort.

One of the problems associated with trying to get Karzai to do anything about governance and corruption, IPS has learned, is that it has taken months in the past to work out any agreement with Karzai on any politically sensitive issue. There is now a sense in the administration, however, that it may not have that much time to have an impact on Karzai’s behaviour.

      What is happening
      Has not happened,
      And if it has,
      We do not want to know.

      People I worked with yesterday,
      Today are suddenly whisked away;
      No one asks where they go –
      Or even really wants to know.

      There is no blood to show
      For all their disappearance;
      They just are
      Not around any more.

      The signs all
      Read the same –
      On the highways, in the stores,
      On the elevators, in the halls:

      What is happening
      Has not happened,
      And if it has,
      We do not want to know.

The Triad of Change-Loss-Grief and the Tyranny of Corporatism

Since the early 1980’s the tyranny of corporatism in the United States has left in its wake widespread organizational inconsolability and despair. The triad of change-loss-grief characterizes the experience of all the forms of managed social change – except that mourning is short-circuited.

To begin to awaken from our cultural nightmare, it is vital to name and honor those organizational and personal experiences that would otherwise be lost, and unconsciously repressed. In this spirit, I offer three vignettes that typify our Age of Organizational Inconsolability. Following the vignettes, I discuss their broader implications for understanding organizational despair.

Vignette 1: Of Downsizing and Disappearance

My first vignette developed from an interview I had with a computer company’s chief financial officer during an organizational consultation. I will first provide some of her narrative:

Am I glad to see you today! Howard, the strangest thing happened Monday. I was off sick Friday. I came in to work on Monday morning and the office next to me was cleared out. There was a desk, a chair, a computer, a couple of file cabinets and bookcases, a wastebasket. And that’s it. Empty. I still can’t believe it, and it’s already Friday. It’s like there’s a big hole in this place. I knew the guy ten years. His name is Don. He was one of our numbers crunchers. A quiet guy, just did his work. It seemed like he was always here, always working. He is a computer whiz anyone in the unit could go to for a computer glitch. We aren’t – maybe I should say weren’t, since he’s gone ‑‑ weren’t exactly friends, but we worked together a lot on projects. He was kind of part of the furniture.

It’s so eerie. I’m numb over it. I keep going next door to look in his office expecting to see him. Maybe I’m imagining that he’s gone, and he’s not. But the place is so empty. I’ve heard of this kind of thing happening other places when people get RIFed. Here today, gone tomorrow. But I’ve not heard of this here. It’s like he disappeared. Like he never was here. Howard, I’m not being sentimental about him. He and I didn’t have something going – if you’re thinking that. I just can’t believe they’d do it – and the way they did it. I asked around the firm, and everybody gave the same story. Because it wasn’t just him. It happened all over the place. About five hundred people RIFed in one day.

I asked around, and nobody knows where Don went. No forwarding address or telephone number. It’s weird, Howard. Like he just disappeared. You wonder if you’re next. You try not to think of it. Work harder, maybe they’ll keep you. It’s ridiculous, because you know it’s not true. But you’ve got to believe that you’re valuable to them.

Events and experiences like this have occurred millions of times in American workplaces since the mid-1980’s. Forms of “managed social change” variously called RIFs (Reductions in Force), downsizing, rightsizing, outsourcing, offshoring, separation, and deskilling, when they occur, give those who are fired no warning or preparation – except perhaps gossip and rumor. They are experienced as terrifying, dehumanizing attacks. Sometimes they occur as unexpected letters of dismissal in the U.S. mail or as e-mail. Sometimes they take the guise of a fire drill, where everyone is supposed to leave the building, and those who are summarily fired are not let back in after the false drill is over.

However the firings are executed, they are designed to maximize surprise and to achieve a “clean break” from those who are cast away. They psychologically terrorize the workplace. People are suddenly and efficiently “disappeared.” There are no metaphoric bodies to see and step over. The carnage is attested to by absence, void. Those who remain are left with only images in mind. The symbolic kill is swift and clean. Work is expected to continue within this empty shell.

Frequently, security guards show up on a Monday morning or a Friday morning all over the plant at the offices and workstations of people who have been designated to be fired. They escort them to the big auditorium over in the corporate conference center. They don’t even tell them why they have to go, except that there is an important announcement. After they walk them in, they leave and lock the doors behind them. The CEO or CFO then enters and delivers a brief speech on how the company has to downsize radically in order to survive and be competitive. He tells them not to take it personally, that it’s just business, and maybe thanks them for their service to the company.

The security police escorts them back to where they worked, helps them clear out their personal belongings, then takes them down to administration to hand over all their keys and receive their last paycheck. The police walk them to their cars, and that’s the last they see of the corporation. They are told not to come back. They virtually disappear. They are rarely talked about. Management often justifies managing the firing this way because those who are about to be fired could not be trusted not to sabotage the computers, or to steal equipment.

Following the firings, employees, managers, and executives try to work at their jobs as if nothing has happened. They rarely speak of those who are now gone; still, they are haunted by their absence. Those who remain are told that they should be grateful they still have a job. They all know that they could be next, so they live in dread of the future, trying to do the job of two if not three people. Admonished to forget the (devalued) past and those who occupied it, many of those who experience themselves as “survivors” of the RIF are afflicted with the survivor syndrome, feel pangs of guilt for having survived, and then attempt to rid themselves of the guilt by finding fault with those who were fired. The thought of randomness is unbearable.

Those who remain behind with jobs often have “survivor guilt,” wondering why they were spared and others fired. Sometimes, survivor guilt is quickly repressed, rationalized, and projected in the form of saying to oneself and to others, “They must have done something to get fired.” And conversely, stories arise about the specialness and value to the organization of those who were temporarily spared. Often those who remain feel like the “living dead.” The sense of individual responsibility, culpability and guilt (“I must not be good enough”; “I must have done something.”) militates against any resistance or other collective action.

Whatever sense of vital and interconnected community existed prior to all the firings and rearrangement of people and tasks, there is little sense of “we” or “us” afterwards. In its place is a collectivity of frightened monads. Those “old timers” who knew whom to contact “to get things done” in the informal system of relationships, and those whose “Rolodexes” of contacts were once seen as the lifeline that kept the corporation going, have long been fired. Life proceeds now impersonally by protocol, “by the book.” Unable to mourn for whom and what all has been lost, those who remain become an inconsolable organization who try through pep-talks, admonitions, threats, and dogged productivity to console themselves.

Vignette 2: A Corporate Pep-talk: The Finger in the Waterbowl

I now offer a vignette of what might seem to be a tiny, discountable incident – but one that goes to the heart of the experience of downsizing and its wake. In 1999, following a presentation I had made about corporate downsizing and reengineering, I spoke with a secretary who had worked for many years for a multinational petrochemical firm that had undergone several waves of firings. First thanking me for validating her own experience during my lecture, she said that she wanted to offer an example of what I had been talking about. A new mid-level manager had arrived and was eager to make his mark on the organization. At a meeting of his supervisees, he admonished them: “We have a lot of work to get done here. Don’t think for a minute that you’re essential to this corporation. Everyone here is dispensable. There are a hundred people out there hungry for your job. And if you leave, your absence will be as noticed as a finger taken out of a bowl of water. They won’t even know that you’d been here.”

She and I both shuddered. We briefly mused on the effect of this meeting for worker morale: inducing, perhaps, identification with the aggressor, and feverish productivity, accompanied by chronic terror, indifference, and deep rage at such humiliation. We also wondered about the new manager’s own sense of vulnerability and expendability, and about the kind of childhood that might have set the stage for such drivenness. Does the conviction of inner worthlessness cultivate, via projective identification, worthlessness – and hopelessness – in others in order for one to feel superior and momentarily invulnerable? Here, a third managerial philosophy – management by terror – supplements the traditional distinction between “carrot” (reward) and “stick” (threat of punishment).

What in the workplace, we wondered, does the threat of symbolic homicide look and sound like? The employees were not only threatened with the loss of their job, but their very dignity and self-respect were also attacked. Even as they labored to increase their productivity to try to create the illusion of indispensability, they were thrown into inconsolable grief over the loss of self. They lived and worked in the knowledge that at any moment they could be made to disappear, and never be missed.

Under these circumstances of psychological assault and the expectation of assault, what happens to the organization and to the remaining people? The organization that remains behind can no longer contain the anxiety, dread, and even terror that management inspires. It becomes what Michael Diamond calls a “defective container.” The workplace is increasingly experienced as persecutory. A “paranoid-schizoid” atmosphere prevails, in which employees experience themselves as a “them” at the mercy of management “us.” An employee is expected to do the work of another who has been “downsized” as well as his or her own, and to do so not only without complaint, but with gratitude for still having a job.

For many employees, where once there was loyalty to a company, there is now the garnering of skills and the readiness to move on to the next job at a moment’s notice. One feels redundant even before he or she is fired. From the stockholder’s obsession with the next quarterly report to the employee’s uncertainty about tomorrow, there is only short-term planning and the palpable presence of symbolic death and loss. Meanwhile, upper management touts slogans of “excellence” and “higher productivity” as evidence of having “turned around” the organization. For middle management and employees, the picture is surreal.

Vignette 3: The Threat at the Christmas Party

My third and final vignette illustrates the nationwide (and increasingly global) psychological terrorizing of managers and workforce into capitulation and dependency upon corporate decision-makers. The process affects blue collar and white collar workers alike. Consider the following:

At one American Great Plains hospital’s mid-1990’s Christmas party, the invited speaker, a physician-administrator, admonished his largely healthcare professional audience to accept managed health care (HMOs, PPOs, etc.) as the inexorable wave of the future. He told the group to make up their minds that it was simply a matter of altering their thinking to conform to the changes that made them primarily responsible to the corporation rather than to the customers (patients). To make his point, he showed a cartoon depicting a steamroller smashing down one doctor in the asphalt, while another wisely sidestepped his destruction. The caption read: “You can become part of the solution or part of the pavement.” The physicians’ response was uncharacteristic of prairie decorum, in which you politely listen to someone with whom you disagree, then go about your business as you had been doing. Instead, several physicians got up in the middle of the talk and walked out in disgust.

A week later, a physician colleague who had been in the audience wrote to me: “Does this [cartoon, presenter’s haughty attitude] not instill a sense of helplessness? A sort of ultimatum? This doesn’t smack of fascism, does it?” What he inquires in the negative, he affirms in the act of asking. It is as if what is not supposed to be happening – in the caring professions, of all places – is in fact happening. It is a matter of trusting – and mistrusting – one’s senses and one’s emotional response. The heavy boot of managed health care promises to crush all opposition. The looming threat, the anxious wait, conspire to create an organizational atmosphere in the medical community at once of dread, rebellion, siege, resolve, and anticipatory, inconsolable grief at the prospect of losing their way of practicing medicine and their very autonomy as physicians.

Increasing numbers of physicians in the United States feel demoralized, robbed of their identity as professionals, and treated as disposable employees. Many become disillusioned, embittered, pulled to be more answerable to medical insurers and healthcare corporations than to their patients. What had begun for many physicians as a “calling” to care for sick people, has turned out to be a grueling job in which seeing as many patients as possible and income generation become the central corporate virtues.

The core value of the physician-patient relationship is replaced by the invisible industrial time-clock according to which each patient merits but 7 ½ minutes. The psychological control of workers studied and advocated a century earlier by Frederick Winslow Taylor triumphs in the practice of medicine. Many physicians feel trapped in their careers and betrayed by their employers. Physicians’ own proud individualism militates against effective collective action in their own behalf.

Discussion of the Three Vignettes

These three vignettes do not prove the existence of inconsolable organizations, but I think that they give the concept a certain plausibility. As illustrations, I think they provide at least preliminary encouragement for “inconsolable organization” as a working hypothesis. They also suggest that inconsolable organizations can occur in a variety of situations of organizational change: downsizing or RIFing, managed health care, and organizational crisis. At the conscious and unconscious level of what these organizations feel like, how they are experienced, and what they are like in the fantasies of their members, they are indeed the same phenomenon in different institutional forms. The vignettes offer support for the concept of inconsolable organization as at least approximating organizational reality.

In the first vignette, the CFO felt the horror of sudden absences that characterize RIFs, restructuring, reengineering, and other forms of radical organizational change. Here, people do not so much leave the organization as they are abruptly severed from it. Loss takes the form of vast holes, gaps, in experience, both in space and time. One day co-workers are present, performing their jobs, taking part in the everyday relationships of the workplace. The next day they are gone. There is no group-sanctioned transition for either those who are fired or those who remain behind. There is neither permission nor assistance to grieve the loss. Only work – productivity – counts. Here the living dead commingle with the haunting presence of those who vanished from sight. The atmosphere is thick with spiritual deadness. The absent ones wander the halls like the characters in Marc Chagall’s paintings. Inconsolable loss is experienced as horror.

The second vignette is the story of another hole in time. If in the first the void consisted of the sudden absence of others, the second is the undisguised threat of one’s own annihilation from institutional memory. The employees addressed in this surreal pep-talk are good only for productivity, and their very existence is already declared to be nonexistence. They are nothings now, and will be nothings if they are fired or leave. They will not be missed; their absence will not even be noticed. It will be as if they never existed. They will not be grieved over, for there is nothing, no one to mourn. Their very existence is already tainted with nonexistence. Their life already embodies the death that is projected into them. Here, someone else is not the hole, but one is the hole oneself. One is thrust into inconsolable, anticipatory grief over the loss of one’s self.

The third vignette is yet another surreal experience: a Christmas party that threatens death. Eerily, the “savior” the speaker touts is not the “Prince of Peace” (the Christ Child), but an Angel of Death who threatens to crush anyone in its path. One is “saved” as a physician if one joins the momentum of the steamroller – that is, if a physician, a healer, joins league with the agent of death! Managed care is depicted as an invincible juggernaut. The wave of the future of medical practice lies in identification with the aggressor and a repudiation of those “softer” values and virtues that characterized the covenantal relationship between doctor and patient. Paradoxically, if one chooses to “live,” one also chooses death-in-life. In the Brave New World of corporately managed health care, one loses, gives up, the allegiance to the patient and swears primary fealty to the corporation. Corporate totalitarianism creates and enforces clinical totalitarianism. I have heard many physicians despair over being ever again adequate to relate to their patients and to deliver thorough medical care. Beneath the frenzy of productivity and high “patient volume” and “patient flow” (a borrowing from the hydraulic model of physics) is inconsolable grief, a loss of professional vitality, spiritual death, and all-consuming miasma.

Is There a Way Out of the Tyranny of Corporatism and Organizational Inconsolability?

In order for an organization to get “unstuck” in inconsolable grief and miasma, it is first necessary for executives, manager, employers, and shareholders to acknowledge that something – and many “someones” – has been lost. Those who have been so cavalierly disposed of are not “dead meat” or “dead wood” or “fat to be trimmed” – to cite three widespread euphemisms of managed social change. Those who have been symbolically killed off, together with those who remain behind as survivors to perform the job of two or three people, are vulnerable human beings who are stuck in a miasma of grief and organizational despair.

Transition to a renewed future requires coming to terms with the past. To lessen the traumatic impact of the change, those who are to be fired and those who remain as survivors need to be emotionally prepared for what is going to happen to them. This will help them to feel as human beings rather than as disposable objects, and give them at least some sense of control. To help create a healthier and less haunted workplace, the names and identities of those who have been fired need to be uttered, remembered, honored, and assimilated into the evolving organizational identity. Instead of being told to “suck it up” and “Be glad you still have a job,” employees need to have their fears, dreads, and anticipatory loss acknowledged.

In place of acknowledging that great loss has taken place and collectively mourning it, the organization, from leaders to employees, attempts to negotiate, manage, and fix it through a frenzy of various magical remedies, ranging from frequent, peremptory firings to spasms of restructuring and reengineering. Beneath what Yiannis Gabriel calls the “organizational miasma” lurks an inconsolable organization that creates and sustains the miasma. Until the inconsolable grief can be thought, named, and felt; until the sense of guilt, shame, loss, futility, and hopelessness can be acknowledged, the miasma can only deepen.

To facilitate the recognition and mourning of losses, management and consultant need to create a safe and trusting interpersonal environment for the organization. Genuine organizational renewal does not come through endless waves of “sacrifices” – these only deepen the miasma of despair. Rather it comes about through recognition of the trauma that has been visited on the people who were and are the organization.

Genuine organizational renewal also rests upon group empowerment. This means that individuals would need to have the emotional capacity to make collective decisions rather than act as frightened, isolated monads who hold their heads down hoping they will not be noticed. In our cultural climate this will be difficult if not impossible. American individualism carries with it self-blame and guilt for losing one’s job or for not being able to find a better job. Misperceptions and indoctrinated cliches such as, “I must have done something wrong,” and “There must be something wrong with me,” make it difficult to recognize one’s corporate victimization and traumatization. Certainly, persecutory paranoia can play a role in any perception of victimization. And self-blame is a kind of wresting some sense of power over the acknowledgment of utter powerlessness. Notwithstanding whatever explicatory factors legitimize the RIFs, the beginning of personal, organizational, and cultural resilience is the courage to perceive and accept the reality of corporate traumatization and its decisive role in creating inconsolable organizations.

Suggestions For Further Reading:

Allcorn, Seth, Baum, Howell, Diamond, Michael., and Stein, Howard F. (1996). The Human Cost of a Management Failure: Downsizing at General Hospital. Westport, CT: Quorum Books; Ehrenreich, Barbara. (2006). Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. New York: Henry Holt; Ehrenreich, Barbara. (2009). This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation. New York: Henry Holt; Faludi, Susan. (2000). Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: Harper; Stein, Howard F. (1994). “Change, Loss and Organizational Culture: Anthropological Consultant as Facilitator of Grief-Work,” in National Association of Practicing Anthropologists (NAPA) Bulletin 14, “Practicing Anthropology in Corporate America: Consulting on Organizational Culture,” (1994), p. 66-80. Ann Jordan, Ed. Washington D.C.: American Anthropological Association; Stein, Howard F. (1998). Euphemism, Spin, and the Crisis in Organizational Life. Westport, CT: Quorum Books (Greenwood Publishing Group); Stein, Howard F. (2001). Nothing Personal, Just Business: A Guided Journey into Organizational Darkness. Westport, CT: Quorum Books (Greenwood Publishing Group); Stein, Howard F. (2005). “Corporate Violence,” Chapter 23, in A Companion to Psychological Anthropology. Conerly Casey and Robert Edgerton, Editors. Blackwell. p. 436-452; Stein, Howard F. (2005). Beneath the Crust of Culture. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi; Stein, Howard F. (2008). “Organizational Totalitarianism and the Voices of Dissent,” in Stephen P. Banks, Editor. Dissent and the Failure of Leadership. Cheltenham Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2008. p. 75-96. New Horizons in Leadership Studies; Uchitelle, Louis. (2006). The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences. New York: Knopf.

“Come on,” I laughed as we walked down the dusty Gazan street, the Mediterranean sun beating down hard on our faces, “it couldn’t have been that bad. I mean, we all dislike school to some degree, but it has its nice things too.”

His grave eyes looked wholly unconvinced, “the day I graduated from university was the best day of my life,” he firmly repeated. And then he added, more to himself than to me, “I wish I could erase all my memories of my time in school.”

By 1991 the first Intifada (Palestinian Uprising) was coming to an end. The streets of Gaza slowly emptied of the Israeli soldiers and tanks. The bodies of martyred Palestinians were less often carried to neighborhood graveyards. And in Beit Hanoun, a northern town of Gaza, six-year-old Ahmad began his first day of school.

He enjoyed school. He worked hard and was always the first in his year. Life, one could say, was becoming rather normal in Gaza. And upon finishing middle school in 2000, as a reward for his scholastic achievement, Ahmad received the gift of a lifetime. He, along with 19 other students from Gaza, was selected by the Ministry of Education to join a Seeds of Peace summer camp in the US.

He had a wonderful time in America. What an adventure for the 14-year-old boy! He improved his English. He made new friends. He experienced a whole knew world in that beautiful state of Maine. A world that told him life was open and free and full of opportunity. So he returned to Gaza, after this month-long excursion, full of hope.

But Ahmad was branded a Palestinian at birth. He would now learn to pay that price. The second Intifada irrupted only two months after he returned home from America, at the start of his first year of high school.

“The week before the Intifada started we were in Jerusalem, in Al-Aqsa Mosque. We were praying,” he said, recalling how close he was to being caught amid the initial Jerusalem massacre. The Israeli onslaught quickly spread throughout all the West Bank and Gaza, leaving no Palestinian in peace.

“There was no space,” he told me, trying to explain how the Israeli offensive effected every aspect of personal life for the Palestinian individual. Student life was only one such casualty.

It became dangerous to go to school. It became impossible to have a normal education. In his three years of high school, Ahmad‘s school was shelled by Israeli tanks six times, twice while students were inside.

“Each day we would have demonstrations against the attacks in Gaza and the West Bank because we had so many martyrs… No school. Just demonstrations… You had to go and demonstrate against the horrible attacks against these children and kids everywhere.”

Still, despite all the madness, or perhaps in spite of it all, the students clung as much as they could to their vocation. They would loyally go to school, as much as circumstance allowed. But even this effort was frequently quashed. Too often the students would trek to school only to find it closed. They would ask the reasons for the closures. The answers became the soul-grating refrain of their lives.

Why?
Because Israeli tanks are getting close to the school and there is no school today.
Why?
Because people in our city have been martyred and there are demonstrations so there will be no school today.
Why?
Because the tanks have closed off Beit Hanoun and the teachers cannot come from outside. So we’ll have no school today.

It was in this environment that Ahmad and his classmates (the ones that were not killed) came to their 3rd and final year of high school in 2003. Called Tawjihi, the entire future educational and career life of the student hinges on these end-of-the-year cumulative exams.

“Tawjihi,” Ahmad aptly described, “is like a stage between life.”

Tawjihi year began normal enough. Normal in the Palestinian sense of the word. Normal attacks. Normal shootings. Normal curfews. But the last two months before the exams began the Israeli army laid siege on Beit Hanoun. No one could enter. No one could leave. Everyday there were attacks and explosions. Everyday there were injuries and martyrs.

“We didn’t study, actually,” said Ahmad, “nothing. You cannot study and people are dying,” he explained, as if that needed explaining to me, a girl who had never once even seen a dead body.

And all the while their exams were approaching. The first day of examination was the 9th of June 2003. And the Israeli army was still in Beit Hanoun.

“What do we do?” said Ahmad, “we need to take our exams. So we decided to go to school even though the Israeli tanks were at the doors outside the school.”

So they went. Despite the fact that they hadn’t prepared at all due to the siege and the killings. Examinations went on for a month. Everyday the students went. And everyday the Israeli tanks were at the doors of the school.

It was the worst month, Ahmad told me. All your time in high school you wait to prepare and do well on these final examinations, only, in the last moments, to be prevented from studying because your city is under attack.

The soldiers left after 67 days of siege. And then their exam results came in.

“I passed,” said Ahmad, “my average was 83.5. So very good.”

So that was his high school story. I asked how he felt during those years, as I was unable to comprehend how one could live through such a horror and move on.

“It’s mixed feelings,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t know what you are doing or what’s going on around you. Sometimes it’s fear because you are afraid to lose more friends and more people. And because you are afraid about your family. And you are afraid about your future.

“You don’t know what is going on. You just go and study for a life you’ve been dreaming about. But then you find you can’t have it because of obstacles put up by enemies. And these are horrible obstacles. They’re not just any kind of obstacles that anyone could pass.

“It’s war everywhere. And people are dying everywhere. And you just don’t know. Maybe it’s your turn. I mean, we believe in God, and we know everyone is going to die. But when it goes on so continuously, everyday there is attacks, you just keep worrying about it. So the feeling was, what should I be doing? Should I go fight and resist? Should I go study as a way to resist, as a better way of resistance? Should I just stay afraid, doing nothing, with my family?”

“I started to believe that maybe the power of this education that I will have in the future will be more than the power of a stone against a tank. I asked myself a million times, if I should do the same [and take up throwing stones at the Israeli tanks like some of the Palestinian youth]. Even if it was a little thing.

“Some people say it’s stupid, a stone against a tank. But it’s their will and determination [that counts]. It comes from deep inside. That you are not afraid from anything, whatever it may be. You just want to fight, resist, for your rights. Even if it takes your life, takes everything: [None of that matters because] I believe that its my right and I have to do it.”

That is one way to resist. But Ahmad decided to resist through his education.

“I had to take care of my family. Reach what my parents wanted of me. They wanted us to be educated, get a good life, good jobs, have a good place in the community. They wanted us to help them and help people. So that was the final, or not the final, but a decision that I made.

“You are feeling many things, but you have to go on, to keep going. The only way is to just keep fighting, through your education, and your dreams, and your beliefs. That was the feeling.

“But I never felt like I have to give up. I didn’t find a way that told me ‘you just need to give up now.’ And every time a bad thing happened, or a disaster happened, it gave me more power to continue.

“Because this became the normal life for us. The abnormal life for other people became the normal life for us. So we had to figure out another way of life for us. It’s our reality. We had to face reality, however it was. So it helped us to figure out that life, in spite of all this.

“And all the challenges that we are facing, and all the power that is fighting and destroying everything here in Gaza, we still need to keep going. It’s not going to stop us. Because if we stop, it wont help us. [The Israelis] will keep going. Whether or not we stop, they will try to get what they want. So why give them more chance to get what they want? We need also to continue.”

He paused at the end of this grand soliloquy, “How difficult it was,” he said softly.

But the difficulty continued as he moved on to get his BA in information technology at a university in Gaza.

“I faced troubles when I was in high school because of the Intifada but the troubles increased in university,” Ahmad explained, “Beit Hanoun is the most violent area in Gaza Strip because it is very close to the [Israeli] border so there were usual attacks. Every day we had events. People killed. People injured. Homes destroyed. Lands demolished. My father’s farm was bulldozed 4 or 5 times. Most of my relatives’ homes were targeted.

“Most of the semesters I couldn’t attend many lectures because of the usual attacks on my city. There were weekly attacks, sometimes daily attacks so I could not leave home, it was not safe to leave. And I’d also have to stay home when there were other attacks around the city, or around the university.”

Many times he was even able to attend final exams.

“I’d just keep studying throughout the semester and when time for exams come, attacks happen in Beit Hanoun and friends and relatives are killed, [so I‘d miss the exams]. I was supposed graduate in 2008, but I graduated in 2009, one year late because of these attacks. Attacks which have never stopped. Even now. Especially in my city.”

Ahmad was finally set to graduate in December 2008. But he was reminded once again that a Palestinian who dared pursue a good life had heavy taxes to pay.

“The end of December turned out to be the beginning of a war, not the beginning of final exams. It was a big, I don’t know how to describe it,” he said, searching for words to describe the deep personal affront he felt, “it was like, ‘here is a gift for graduation: You wont graduate. Just keep waiting for death.’ ”

His month of exams was exchanged for a month of terror.

“It was 23 days,” he said, “but you can say 23 weeks. 23 months. 23 years. 23 centuries. It never ends. You keep waiting, moment by moment. And you know nothing. You can only feel the darkness. There is no light, for any kind of hope, or safety, or human rights, or whatever. Just 23 days full of darkness. Full of horror. Full of victims. Massacres. Everything bad. I cannot remember words to describe it.”

But those days did pass. And he found enough strength to pick himself up out of the rubble and finish the mission he began. He graduated, at last, this past spring. But not, I cannot help but acknowledge, not without sacrifice and loss that no one should ever have to endure.

“These five years in university, I said and will keep saying forever,” Ahmad concluded, “these five years were the most horrible years of my life. Even though they’re supposed to be the best years, the nice years. The time to go out and discover life. But it wasn’t discovering life. It was discovering disasters, actually, here in Gaza.”

As the year winds down and Hollywood gets busy creating Oscar buzz, one unlikely contender is The Hurt Locker, the widely praised Iraq movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and was released in the U.S. in June 2009.

“Just when I thought I’d seen enough of Iraq war movies, along comes (Hurt Locker),” an Access Hollywood film critic told USA Today in September. “If any movie about Iraq is going to break through to the academy, this is it.”

Indeed, the “megabuzz-spawning film” (to quote the Modesto Bee) was nominated for its first official honor last month, by the prestigious (if relatively obscure) New York-based Independent Filmmaker Project, which tapped it for Best Feature. According to the Los Angeles Times, which has started tracking Oscar favorites, The Hurt Locker has been tapped by no fewer than 16 leading film pundits as a serious Academy Award contender.

Even if it skipped your radar, you’ve probably heard some beaming reviews about The Hurt Locker by now.

The almost unanimous acclaim it attracted from mainstream reviewers focused mainly on director Kathryn Bigelow’s suspenseful action scenes, which make up the majority of the film’s run time, and prominent reviewers agree that it’s a masterfully crafted American combat epic about three deceptively simple-looking and courageous American men making sacrifices for their country while in unfamiliar, hostile territory.

At least partially thanks to clever marketing, the film produced over $12 million in box office revenue, making it the most successful movie made about the U.S. war on Iraq and its so-called war on terror to date. (Compare to films like Redacted, which earned $25,628, or Rendition’s $9.6 million.)

But there are some curious contradictions in the praise Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have received for their work.

Reviewers cite Boal’s brief stint as an embedded journalist following a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq as supporting evidence for the film’s alleged accuracy. But they fail to consider the inevitable bias of such a narrow perspective.

Would reviewers have lauded the accuracy of a story based on the experiences of a journalist who had been embedded with the “other” side — particularly if the portrayal of American soldiers had not been positive?

Some reviewers have praised Bigelow for allegedly not incorporating a political stance into the film. This is simply ridiculous: It’s being endorsed by military-recruitment sites as we speak. A link to military.com, the largest military organization in the United States, appears on the front page of the film’s official Web site.

A Realistic Portrayal of Iraq?

Filmed in Jordan, The Hurt Locker is supposed to have taken place in Iraq in 2004, where an American bomb-dismantling team visits various danger spots in unfriendly neighborhoods.

The first scene, ironically, opens with a quote from award-winning anti-war journalist and author, Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction for war is a drug.” Cue screen fade.

The display re-emerges from within the lens of a remote-controlled robot making its way across a rocky road toward a suspicious-looking pile of sacks laid out on the ground near an old railway track. The audience catches brief glimpses of destruction from this unsteady viewpoint, as well as a shaky camera (through which most of the film is viewed) that narrows in and out on people and objects, as though they are all targets.

From these two perspectives, we see old blown-up cars and destroyed buildings juxtaposed beside the U.S. presence, shown here through the existence of a crushed Pepsi can and U.S. military men. A man’s voice sounds in the background while Iraqi civilians are told to evacuate. Cars continue to drive down a road very nearby. The civilians are either frantic or annoyed that they are being asked to exit the area.

Other Iraqis are also portrayed as disaffected, their blank, suspicious faces watching from balconies, windows, stores. Shots of expressionless or menacing Iraqis staring at American soldiers appear throughout, especially during action scenes that make up the majority of this film.

The Hurt Locker may be winning critical acclaim for its cinematic artistry, but it’s Web site suggests a different target audience. The site bares striking similarity to shoot ‘em-up video game Web sites like Call of Duty and Halo.

Complete with eerie, adrenaline-inspiring sound effects, flash clips and graphics taken from the film, the Web site caters to thrill-seeking, pro-military, weapons enthusiasts who want to see destruction and the technology and methods that breed it.

Boal, whose work on In the Valley of Elah was superior in its depth and complexity, apparently spent two weeks embedded with an explosives-ordnance-disposal team (EOD) team in Iraq. (Thus the repeated claims that the film is a fair and realistic portrayal of the situation in Iraq.)

But Guy Marot, a former bomb-disposal officer who also served in southern Iraq, points out in the Guardian, the film is full of “numerous glaring inaccuracies,” not the least of which is Jeremy Renner’s character, an impulsive, thrill-seeking team leader who endangers himself and everyone else on his team several times throughout the story:

Staff Sgt. William James … is basically insane. He’s supposed to have dealt with some 870 devices, which is completely unbelievable — it would mean dealing with three improvised explosive devices a day — and he just rocks up near a device and puts on a bomb suit.

If a bomb-disposal officer started behaving like this, he or she would be shipped home in minutes. James makes us look like hot-headed, irrational adrenaline junkies with no self-discipline. It’s immensely disrespectful to the many officers who have lost their lives.

When asked indirectly whether he thought his screenplay was narrow in perspective, during an interview in Vanity Fair, Boal was somewhat defensive:

I take a tiny issue with the premise of your question. I think the film investigates an awful lot. The IEDs [improvised explosive devices] are the central feature of the war. It’s a war of bombs. They are the key tactic of the insurgency; the success or failure of entire Iraq war depends on the ability to deal with IEDs. The movie is about the guys that deal with IEDs. So to me there couldn’t be a more topical, down-the-middle-of-the-plate look at the war.

While Boal is correct that IEDs are the cause of more than half of U.S. casualties in Iraq, his claim that “the success or failure of the entire Iraq war depends on the ability to deal with IEDs” is simplistic and confused (not unlike like some of the justifications given to launch the war in the first place).

In fact, Bigelow and Boal, like the characters in the film, never factor into the movie the question of why Iraq was invaded and occupied by the U.S. More importantly, they also never define what success or winning involves. This lack of context explains why the few non-action scenes in the movie seem misplaced or forced, like they were sloppily incorporated just for the sake of it.

Time reviewer Richard Corlisse concurs:

Except for a few digressive scenes — a solo sortie of personal vengeance, a conversation about what it all means — that could easily be cut from the 2-hour, 11-minute running time, The Hurt Locker is a near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work.

Indeed, the film only provides the perspectives of three American men working in a very dangerous military unit, with the lead character being the most unrealistic character of them all — an assessment even lead actor Renner agrees with:

“I got to spend a lot of time with the guys at Fort Irwin, and off base as well — to get in their heads a little bit, get to know them personally, which was even more important. I had to learn all the rules so I’d know how to break them. That was one of the toughest things when I was hanging out with these guys. There’s no one really like the character of James.”

But if the lead character is unrealistic, then what was realistic about the film? Certainly the anxiety portrayed by supporting actor Brian Geraghty, playing the young and inexperienced Spc. Owen Eldrige, is closer to real solders’ testimonies. The trauma Eldrige suffers after losing his first team leader enhances the fear he experiences every day of losing his own life.

Less realistic perhaps, in contrast to the “insane” but nevertheless endearing, altruistic and deeply caring James who is Caucasian, is that the most racist character in the film is the African American Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who refers to James as a “redneck piece of trailer trash.”

Unlike Sanborn, James actually cares about the Iraqis and risks his own life many times to save theirs. He even goes on a rampage after he mistakenly thinks that an Iraqi boy who he had gone out of his way to befriend was savagely murdered by insurgents and made into a human bomb. His quest to find answers takes him into an Iraqi professor’s home where he is greeted with joy: “I am very pleased to see CIA in my home,” after his unexpected presence is discovered in the house.

Is this supposed to be another realistic portrayal of the situation in Iraq? Are we to believe that Iraqis welcome the presence of the CIA in their country?

In another scene, which was the most implausible event in the entire film, James risks his life until the very last minute trying to help an Iraqi man who somehow made it through U.S. security checkpoints alive while frantically yelling that he had multiple bombs attached to his body. (This is in direct contrast to Sanborn, who always only does the minimum and even hints that he would be willing to kill the unpredictable James and make it look an accident, since all he wants to do is finish his tour and go home alive.)

Racial misrepresentations are however most easily observed in the film’s portrayals of Iraqis. Aside from the Iraqi boy James becomes smitten with (even he is Westernized to the extent that he sells American DVDs and introduces himself as “Beckham,” after the British soccer player), there is no Iraqi that is given any meaningful character development in the film. They are either the anonymous, sneering or menacing Arabs who watch the American soldiers while they are in high-stress situations, the victims of other evil Iraqis who murder young boys to put bombs inside their bodies, or the voiceless snipers and aiders of those determined to harm Americans and other Iraqis.

That a film that does not include a single Iraqi perspective is being hailed as an accurate portrayal of the situation in Iraq is either indicative of the blatant bias and possibly hidden intentions of the film’s creators and reviewers, or representative of the flawed view that continues to resonate within people’s minds about the war in Iraq.

These views, are, in case they need repeating: that this war was waged with good intentions, that the continued U.S. presence is actually beneficial to the Iraqis, that Iraqis are either idiots or savages, and that the American presence there is composed of lost or lonely soldiers who are just trying to live another day.

This after a reported 1 million Iraqis are now dead, and after we have seen such atrocities committed by U.S. troops as the torture at Abu Gharib, the Al-Mahmudiyah killings and the Haditha slayings.

On The Hurt Locker Web site’s “Acclaim” section, the following quote is attributed to The New Yorker: “Quite a feat. A classic of tension, fear and bravery that will be studied 20 years from now.”

If this proves to be true, what a sad prediction it would make. Ironically, a different quote, taken from a review of the film on military.com, is actually far more honest:

“The Hurt Locker is both a gripping portrayal of real-life sacrifice and heroism, and a layered, probing study of the soul-numbing rigors and potent allure of the modern battlefield.”

Pay attention to the last part of that statement. Listening to the young men in front of me discuss it after watching the film for the third time in the theater, I’m also confident that many like them left with the impression that while war may not be pretty, it sure can be fun.

When the film ends with James marching defiantly toward yet another bomb in slow motion, one can practically hear the parody song, “America, Fuck Yeah!” playing in the background.

This latest move by the administration follows a pattern replicated countless times by Obama since assuming the presidency in January: denounce the lawless behavior of his Oval Office predecessor while continuing, even expanding, the reach of unaccountable security agencies that subvert constitutional guarantees barring “unreasonable searches and seizures.” EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston wrote:

In a Court filing late Friday night, the Obama Administration attempted to dress up in new clothes its embrace of one of the worst Bush Administration positions–that courts cannot be allowed to review the National Security Agency’s massive, well-documented program of warrantless surveillance. In doing so it demonstrated that it will not willingly set limits on its own power and reinforced the need for Congress to step in and reform the so-called ’state secrets’ privilege. (Kevin Bankston, “As Congress Considers State Secrets Reform, Obama Admin Tries to Shut Down Yet Another Warrantless Wiretapping Lawsuit,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 2, 2009)

In June, Judge Walker dismissed EFF’s landmark Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit, when he ruled that the telecoms enjoyed immunity from liability after the Democratic-controlled Congress rammed through the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in July 2008.

That law, passed in response to citizen challenges to the state and their corporate partners in crime, granted the Attorney General exclusive power to require dismissal of the lawsuits “if the government secretly certifies to the court that the surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president,” the civil liberties’ watchdog group wrote in June.

In essence, it is not the co-equal and independent federal Judiciary that determines whether or not a crime has been committed that flaunts constitutional norms but rather, an unchallengeable assertion by an imperial Executive Branch.

As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, this craven capitulation by Congress to the Executive locks in place the statutory machinery for a presidential dictatorship, one where power is wielded with neither transparency nor accountability.

EFF’s Jewel v. NSA civil suit, brought on behalf of AT&T customers to halt the firm’s ongoing collaboration with the government’s illegal surveillance continues–for the moment.

In April however, taking a page from the Bush/Cheney playbook, the Obama administration argued that this lawsuit too, must be dismissed, claiming that should the litigation go forward it would require government disclosure of “privileged state secrets.”

Antifascist Calling reported at the time that the Obama administration has argued that under provisions of the disgraceful USA PATRIOT Act, the state is “immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act.”

Claiming “sovereign immunity” in practice, this means that under DoJ’s ludicrous interpretation of the Orwellian PATRIOT Act, the government can never be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statute. As Salon pointed out:

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad “state secrets” privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and–even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal–you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned. (Glenn Greenwald, “New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ,” Salon, April 6, 2009)

The “change” regime’s cynical maneuver to have Shubert kicked to the curb is all the more remarkable considering that the Justice Department announced a month earlier that the administration will “impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons,” The New York Times reported.

“Under the new policy,” investigative journalist Charlie Savage wrote, “if an agency like the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to block evidence or a lawsuit on state secrets grounds, it would present an evidentiary memorandum describing its reasons to the assistant attorney general for the division handling the lawsuit in question.”

According to the Times, “if that official recommended approving the request” it would be sent on to a high-level committee comprised of DoJ officials who would be charged “whether the disclosure of information would risk ’significant harm’ to national security.”

Under the new guidelines, Justice Department officials are supposed to reject the request to deploy the state secrets privilege to quash lawsuits if the Executive Branch’s motivation for doing so would “conceal violations of the law, inefficiency or administrative error” or to “prevent embarrassment.”

While Holder has claimed DoJ’s so-called “high-level committee” has reviewed the relevant material and concluded that disclosure would risk “significant harm” to “national security” if the case went forward, security analyst Steven Aftergood wrote in Secrecy News that “one aspect of the new policy that he did not address was the question of referral of the alleged misconduct to an agency inspector general for investigation.”

This is supposed to occur whenever “invocation of the privilege would preclude adjudication of particular claims,” as it certainly does in the Shubert litigation, particularly when the “case raises credible allegations of government wrongdoing.”

However as Aftergood avers, “somewhat artfully” (although this writer prefers a stronger phrase to describe the Attorney General’s actions) “the government denies that any such collection occurred ‘under the Terrorist Surveillance Program,’ implicitly allowing for the possibility that it may have occurred under some other framework.”

What that “other framework” is hasn’t been specified; however, in all probability it relates to other NSA above top secret Special Access Programs which haven’t come to light.

Whatever the secret state is continuing to do under Obama, a recent piece in InformationWeek provides striking details that it is massive.

The publication reports that the NSA “will soon break ground on a data center in Utah that’s budgeted to cost $1.5 billion.”

According to InformationWeek, the new facility will “provide intelligence and warnings related to cybersecurity threats, cybersecurity support to defense and civilian agency networks, and technical assistance to the Department of Homeland Security.”

The new data center will be located at Camp Williams, a National Guard training facility 26 miles from Salt Lake City in the conservative state of Utah. While providing few details on how NSA will use the 1.5 million square foot center, Glenn Gaffney, a deputy director of intelligence with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), claims that NSA will “protect civil liberties.”

“We will accomplish this in full compliance with the U.S. Constitution and federal law and while observing strict guidelines that protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people,” Gaffney said.

As with other pronouncements by intelligence officials, Gaffney’s statement should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

The New York Times revealed in April and June that the ultra-spooky agency “intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.”

Indeed, a former NSA analyst told investigative journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that he was “trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants.”

We do know that NSA’s STELLAR WIND and PINWALE intercept programs are giant data mining vacuum cleaners that sift emails, faxes, and text messages of millions of people in the United States. These programs are not, as the Bush and now, the Obama regime mendaciously claim, primarily “targeting al-Qaeda.”

As Cryptohippie points out in their analysis of current global surveillance trends, “an electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.”

Answering those who claim they have “nothing to hide,” Cryptohippie argues that “state use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence” is primarily for use “against its citizens.”

Indeed, the information gathered by the secret state and stored in huge data warehouses scattered across the country “is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial,” and “it is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions.”

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it–the evidence is already in their database. (Cryptohippie, The Electronic Police State: 2008 National Rankings, no date)

How does this “quiet, pristine” system operate? As AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in a sworn affidavit that described how the company physically split and copied the traffic that flowed into its offices, NSA was virtually duplicating, sifting and storing the entire Internet. Klein wrote in his self-published book:

What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” …

This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in the their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)

Klein’s revelations were confirmed by former NSA analyst and whistleblower Russell Tice, who told MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann in January that the NSA “had access to all Americans’ communications” and spied “24/7″ on domestic political activist groups and “U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.”

In demanding that the independent federal judiciary toss these cases, the Obama administration is asserting a broad interpretation of Executive Branch privileges that caused much outrage and hand-wringing by congressional Democrats–when they were out of power.

Under the “change” regime however, what were once viewed by Democrats and their supporters as prime examples of Bushist lawlessness and contempt for constitutional safeguards, are now deemed vital state secrets that “protect” the American people, even as the capitalist state wages an endless “War on Terror” to seize other people’s resources for geostrategic advantage over the competition. As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

That was the principal authoritarian instrument used by Bush/Cheney to shield itself from judicial accountability, and it is now the instrument used by the Obama DOJ to do the same. Initially, consider this: if Obama’s argument is true–that national security would be severely damaged from any disclosures about the government’s surveillance activities, even when criminal–doesn’t that mean that the Bush administration and its right-wing followers were correct all along when they insisted that The New York Times had damaged American national security by revealing the existence of the illegal NSA program? Isn’t that the logical conclusion from Obama’s claim that no court can adjudicate the legality of the program without making us Unsafe? (Glenn Greenwald, “Obama’s latest use of ’secrecy’ to shield presidential lawbreaking,” Salon, November 1, 2009)

Democrat or Republican, “liberal” or “conservative:” what matters most for all factions in Washington is the defense and preservation of the class privileges of the capitalist elite.

Criminality on such a scale requires that the armed fist of the state is mobilized and ever-vigilant; ready at the nonce to crush anyone who would challenge the prerogatives of our masters.

Re: Ms Berlanty Azzam (I.D. 801158791)

Ms Azzam is a Gaza resident who is staying in the West Bank illegally. Ms Azzam held a permit to stay in the West Bank for 4 days in 2005 and since the permit has expired has been residing in the West Bank illegally.

As you probably know, every Gaza resident who stays in the West Bank requires a permit, failing to do so is a breach of the law. As Ms Azzam has failed to provide a valid permit she was deported back to Gaza. If Ms Azzam wishes to complete her studies in Bethlehem University, she will need to submit her application to the relevant authorities (COGAT) in Gaza where they will be processed.

Sincerely yours,

Ms Ma’ayan, Israeli Public Affairs Department
Embassy of Israel
2 Palace Green
London W8 4QB
Tel: +44-(0)207-957-9541
Fax: +44-(0)207-957-9555
Email: Public@london.mfa.gov.il

Berlanty was resident in the West Bank since 2005 and all that time resisted the temptation to return home to Gaza to see her folks. If her permit expired in 2005 why did the Israelis wait to ‘discover’ this fact just 2 months before she was due to graduate?

What the embassy tells me does not tally with what the University has been told. In an update issued today Bethlehem University management reports:

• On Tuesday, 3 November 2009 the lawyers at Gisha were informed that the state of Israel claims that Berlanty has no right to be at Bethlehem University – to be in the West Bank. However, Berlanty did not need a permit to remain in the West Bank after entering, and no such kind of permit existed in 2005, so she couldn’t have requested one. Berlanty only needed the Israeli permit to cross through Israel from Gaza to the West Bank, which she received.
• The Israeli High Court of Justice will hold another court hearing on Berlanty’s case next Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 9:00am to have the Israeli military to further explain why Berlanty was removed from Bethlehem to Gaza.
• In their response to the court, the Israeli state admits that a “mistake” was made in removing Berlanty on the night of Wednesday, 28 October 2009. Orders were given by the legal adviser’s office not to do it. It was done anyway and still they refuse to return her to her studies at Bethlehem University.

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are internationally recognized as one integral territory. The embassy’s explanation is at odds with the contention by Birzeit (another West Bank university) that similar action by Israel against a number of Birzeit students from Gaza was “in clear violation of the fundamental human right to education, the right to freedom of movement and the right to choose one’s place of residence within a single territory, in accordance with internationally accepted standards of human rights law”.

I’m not a lawyer, but it would be nice to hear a legal expert explain what authority Israel has for its bloody-minded and cruel conduct towards hard-working students.

It was the summer of 2006. I was in Crawford, Texas, home to Bush’s ranch and Camp Casey, the activist campout organized by Cindy Sheehan who lost her son in Iraq. It was the second year for Camp Casey. But this time, Bush had chosen to spend his holidays elsewhere, leaving us with more free time.

Fort Hood, the largest army base in the U.S., where most soldiers heading off to war pass through, is an hour and a half from Crawford. We decided to go there to give information to members of the military. With us were veterans of the war in Iraq and we had leaflets from the GI Rights Hotline, an organization that provides counseling to soldiers, including information on how to get out of the military.

We set up about a hundred meters from the entrance during evening rush hour as soldiers left the base. I expected to find myself in a hostile environment, but that’s not the way it turned out.

We had signs with a very simple message, “You don’t have to go.” It was enough to cause many soldiers to stop for more information, even in uniform, violating the military code and in sight of the guards at the entrance to the base. Some drove by in their cars and flashed us the peace sign. Others stopped just long enough to jot down the toll free number for the GI Rights Hotline written in large letters on the side of our van. Spouses, mothers and fathers of soldiers stopped to get material to take home.

Fort Hood has the highest suicide rate of all U.S. bases. Nidal M. Hasan, the soldier who killed his fellow troops, had spent six years, from 2003 to 2009, as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed military hospital in Washington treating soldiers with post-traumatic stress syndrome. He was soon set to deploy to Iraq.

Over three years have passed since I was at Fort Hood. At the time, the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the White House. Now the Democrats have the majority. But I feel certain that if I were to go stand in front of the base with the same sign, the scene of three years ago would repeat itself.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

— Voltaire

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution,” and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to.¹

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry.”² War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”³

What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:

    “If any question why we died,
    Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.

A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.

If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.

“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”

War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” — Eduardo Galeano

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.”⁴

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq.⁵

“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama.⁶

Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?

God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.

Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.”⁷ There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.”⁸ And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless.” Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to

“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem,” the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.

In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.

These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah.” We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone:

How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.”⁹

On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁰ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.

1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009.
2. Washington Post, October 20, 2009.
3. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1991), p.71.
4. New York Daily News, September 19, 2001.
5. Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.)
6. Washington Post, August 17, 2008.
7. Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009.
8. Washington Post, October 25, 2009.
9. Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742.
10. Ibid., p.885

Of course, it is not so simple. All processes and events occur in a context – often called environment.

It is not the goal of our historical time to adapt to the conditions that surround us, but to change them. This is long human practice and the slowly accumulated changes to our environment are the reason that we are in the trouble we are in, but we are now being told that we must adapt to the holey ad hoc structures that make claims of “reality” solely because it is what we are supposed to believe.

There is no reason to ‘believe in’ the accepted structures of our time, like economic growth; no reason to believe in Christianity, private property, Islam, American Exceptionalism, progress or hundreds other things, but there is reason to believe in physical “laws”, evolutionary and adaptive process and scientific method. We believe in “facts” as a matter of convenience; we adopt processes because they work. This is one of the oldest and most well worn paths in the human experience.

Experimentation v. authority has been a tension for the whole of human existence; and experimentation began formally winning with the enlightenment. The assumption (belief) that statements could be true and complete, and the property of those with special powers or superior connections (like with a God), began to weaken as people actually looked, measured and theorized. But humans often continue following the old habit and believing in science ‘fact’ when what we need to believe in is science method.

This is not to say that there should be no inhibiting force to rein in and ‘govern’ experimentation. There should; it is called the scientific method and requires that a consensus of experts (authorities) agree based on repeated experimental results comporting with theoretical foundations. This means that ‘facts’ will always be in a state of change, but that the Method can be usefully relied on to bring those ‘facts’ closer and closer, more adaptively useful, to an ultimately unknowable reality. And even the method itself is subject to adaptive changes as the processes uncover better ways to perform its function.

Designs for behavior may or not comport with the best understandings of the moment supplied by a soundly based adaptive process. We see this all the time: * I am better off eating broccoli, free range eggs (and then just the albumen) and high quality sardines. But I like lasagna, beer, ice cream and pie. * Waste chemicals from my small business damage the environment, but it costs so much to dispose of them properly (if that is even possible) that I dump them secretly. * Increasing population and consumption is clearly endangering the ecological stabilities that support and allow the present ecological structures of the earth, but I am benefiting in this moment from the economic growth that is driven by increasing consumption and can’t imagine life without those benefits.

Belief in ‘facts’ is dangerous, potentially dramatically so. Einstein couldn’t ‘believe in’ quantum mechanics because he didn’t believe that the underlying principle of physical order could be probabilistic, even as the experimental data piled higher and higher. Alan Greenspan believed in economic theories that had been come to by ‘echo chamber’ research and Randian philosophy unfounded in human behavioral studies; he liked them like I like ice cream. And at the greatest and most depressing extreme, Henry Paulson (and now Tim Geithner), pathologically, believed in his own righteousness and self-importance, and so was the front man for an on going monumental theft bringing damage and destruction to millions of people all over the earth.

A deeper belief in the adaptive processes of the scientific method could have led Einstein closer to the truth, could have caused Greenspan to question his certainties and moderate his actions and, perhaps, could have caused Paulson to be diagnosed as dangerously sociopathic before he found his way to the highest eyries of power.

It should be obvious that we are in a terrible situation: billions of people, thousands of ‘fact-based’ belief systems and almost none of them naturally supporting of adaptive process-based systems. Yet, we all must become method-based and not ‘fact’ based; we must all become scientists, adopting process-based belief systems just as we have, over time, all become literate. There was, for a long time, a prejudice against being literate with letters and numbers, just as today being scientifically literate is considered geeky. As long as we continue arguing over beliefs as ‘facts,’ there is no hope for resolution: there are endless years of squabbling over facts. If people have mutual respect for the process, divergence in fact only supplies material for adaptation, not reason to compete for truth as an absolute.

And there is little time, perhaps a generation. I can only guess at the thinking of the economic and political elites, whether they support an enslaved world or an enlightened one, though I have serious doubts that the necessary changes in education and media are high on their agendas. But as helpful as it would be to have the elites fully engaged in the next salutary steps toward a ecologically sustaining future, they are not required if enough of the rest of us are willing to do the necessary work and to take them on when required.

Ralph Nader has recently made the argument, in a work of fiction, that the economic elite can save us – and it is certainly true if they were to seriously devote themselves and their resources to the problems detailed by sound scientific research, that many seemingly intractable problems could be solved, but it is more likely that they will obstruct the changes that are needed since most of the solutions contain the lessening of their power, their wealth and their entitlement. The more amorphous masses will have to lead the way. In this direction lies more suffering, closer brushes with oblivion and other dangers, but it may be the only way.

Becoming evermore depressingly clear is, based on a vast evidence base that the world’s leaders have seemingly chosen not to believe in, that maintaining our present human habits will so damage ecological and biophysical systems that many present ecological structures will collapse with drastic consequences for human social and economic order. A process-based belief system would examine the data, evaluate it on its merits and develop actions corresponding to the greatest weight of the evidence. Focusing on whether the ‘facts’ benefit one political party or another is the sort of madness that comes from belief in propositions over process.

We need to believe in the process of the scientific method,¹ but first we need to be well versed in its functioning. We, a significant part of humanity, must make this process the basis for our actions. The old ways of believing in Men and Gods and their proclamations must give way to adaptive systems of change based on the processes of discovery that have led us so well in our material quests. This is no more than adaptation explicitly within the consciousness domain: we have no more time or space to do it in the old ways; they have brought us far, both in understanding and knowledge… and to the brink of destruction.

Just as reading and writing were once new, suspicious, seen as largely unimportant and seemingly for only a few, yet fueled the greatest changes in human societies; so today the broad epistemological and social designs of science must be poised to be both tool and primary system of belief for any successful future.

1. This has to be an unapologetic sustaining of a method for selecting the most veridical options to be the ‘facts’ with which we inform our actions. A common current model for discord, that of looking for equality in all positions, is silly, fundamentally unscientific and flagrantly non-adaptive.

This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?

The question befuddled my students. I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up.

Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity.

Do the lives of my students rise to Eurocentric purity once they step out of the toilet and enter into the more serious business of going about their lives? Not quite.

I walk my student through her breakfast. Most likely, this consists of cereals, coffee and orange juice, with sugar added to the bargain. None originated in Europe. Cereals were first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent some ten thousand years BCE. Coffee, orange and sugar still carry – in their etymology – telltale signs of their origins, going back to the Arabs, Ethiopians and Indians. Try to imagine your life without these stimulants and sources of calories.

How far could my students go without the alphabet, numbers and paper? Yet, the alphabet came to Europe courtesy of the ancient Phoenicians. As their name suggests, the Arabic numerals were brought to Europe by the Arabs, who, in turn, had obtained it from the Indians. Paper came from China, also brought to Europe by the Muslims.

Obstinately, my students’ day refuses to get off to a dignified Eurocentric start.

In her prayer, my Christian student turns to a God who – in his human form – walked the earth in Palestine and spoke Aramaic, a close cousin of Arabic. When her thoughts turn to afterlife, my student thinks of the Day of Judgment, paradise and hell, concepts borrowed from the ancient Egyptians and Persians. ‘Paradise’ entered into English, via Greek, from the ancient Avestan pairidaeza.

Of medieval origin, the college was inspired and, most likely, modeled after the madrasa or Islamic college, first set up by a Seljuk vizier in eleventh century Baghdad. In a nod to this connection, professors at universities still hold a ‘chair,’ a practice that goes back to the madrasa, where the teacher alone sat in a chair while his students sat around him on rugs.

When she finishes college and prepares to receive her baccalaureate at the graduation ceremony, our student might do well to acknowledge another forgotten connection to the madrasa. This diploma harks back to the ijaza – Arabic for license – given to students who graduated from madrasas in the Islamicate.

Our student runs into fields of study – algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and philosophy – that were introduced, via Latin, to Western Europe from the Islamicate. She also encounters a variety of scientific terms – algorithm, alkali, borax, amalgam, alembic, amber, calibrate, azimuth and nadir – which have Arabic roots.

If my students play chess over the weekend and threaten the King with ‘check mate,’ that phrase is adapted from Farsi – Shah maat – for ‘the King is helpless, defeated.’

When she uses coins, paper currency or writes a check, she is using forms of money first used outside Europe. Gold bars were first used as coins in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE. With astonishment, Marco Polo records the use of paper currency in China, and describes how the paper used as currency was made from the bark of mulberry trees.

At college, my student will learn about modernity, ostensibly the source and foundation of the power and the riches of Western nations. Her professors in sociology will claim that laws based on reasoning, the abolition of priesthood, the scientific method, and secularism – hallmarks of modernity – are entirely of Western origin. Are they?

During the eighteenth century, many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were keenly aware that Chinese had preceded them in their emphasis on reasoning by some two millennia. By the end of this century, however, a more muscular, more confident Europe chose to erase their debt to China from its collective memory.

Similarly, Islam, in the seventh century, made a more radical break from priesthood than the Reformation in Europe. In the eleventh century, an Arab scientist, Alhazen – his Latinized name – devised numerous experiments to test his theories in optics, but, more importantly, theorized cogently about the scientific method in his writings. Roger Bacon, the putative ‘founder’ of the scientific method, had read Alhazen in a Latin translation.

When our student reads the sonnets of Shakespeare and Spenser, she is little aware that the tradition of courtly love they celebrate comes via Provencal and the troubadours (derived from taraba, Arabic for ‘to sing’) from Arab traditions of love, music and poetry. When our male student gets down on one knee while proposing to his fair lady, he might do well to remember this.

On a clear night, with a telescope on her dormitory rooftop, our student can watch stars, many of which still carry Arabic names. This might be a fitting closure to a day in the life of our student, who, more likely than not, remains Eurocentric in her understanding of world history, little aware of the multifarious bonds that connect her life to different parts of the ‘Orient.’

Katsoulis has recently published a book about the history of literary hoaxes. She is interested in particular in a unique fictional genre; namely ‘the Holocaust hoaxers’.

On the one hand, she confesses that “special privilege must be given to those increasingly few witness-writers who survived the Second World War in Europe.” She is even willing to accept Elie Wiesel’s peculiar take on ‘truth and fiction’, that “some stories are true that never happened.”

On the other hand she says, “those memoirists who think that they can pretend they were there when they weren’t ought to remember that hijacking the experiences of others for selfish ends will only end in ignominy.”

Katsoulis suggests that perhaps what “readers seek in trauma stories is akin to what people look for in pornography: something edgy they have never seen before, followed by a spectacular resolution”. Very much like the case of pornography, the dedicated audience of Jewish pain “want to identify (safely) with what they are reading; to try on someone else’s crisis for a while and see how it compares to their own.”

Katsoulis’ reference to ‘pornography’ is indeed interesting bearing in mind that, at the time of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (1960’s), a new genre of S&M pornography namely Stalagemerged in Israel. It was a short-lived, highly sexualised fictional magazine that drew its imagery from Nazi exploitation of inmates in prisoner camps.

However, Katsoulis’ reference to ‘pornography’ may raise some questions. While pornography consumption can be realised as an attempt to seek libidinal pleasure through the imagery of others celebrating their symptoms, one may wonder, what kind of satisfaction anyone might seek from the repetition of a holocaust memory? Do we look for satisfaction? And if we do, what kind of satisfaction are we after exactly? What are the symptoms that are celebrated by the story tellers, and what are our symptoms consuming them?

Instead of a culture hooked on recycled images of degradation and suffering, I would actually expect a moral lesson to surface from the Shoa. I would hope for a genuine search for mercy and compassion. Evidently, this has never happened. Putting aside Israeli barbarism in Palestine, the West and the English speaking empire have never stopped igniting wars in the name of fake values driven by the Holocaust (democracy, liberalism, ‘universal’ human rights and so on).

Katsoulis stresses that the ‘hoaxers’ “had difficult childhoods but, feeling that their truth was shamefully small, they sought the grand signifier of the Holocaust to attract the compassion that they desired.” I urge you to read Katsoulis and if you have a spare moment, check out the comments that are no less revealing.

I myself saw recently saw two short videos that left me puzzled.

The first was an ABC News televised interview with Herman Rosenblat.

“The twinkly-eyed American pensioner who came forward with a story so magical that it lifted the heart of every cynic in New York,” was nothing but that of a compulsive liar. Once Rosenblat was confronted as a hoaxer he told the camera.

“It wasn’t a lie. It was my imagination. I believed my imagination, I believe my mind, I believe it now”

“But you know it wasn’t true” he is challenged by the ABC interviewer. “Yes”, he answers, “But in my imagination it was true”.

I guess that no one can argue with such an advanced post modernist argument.

In another video clip; Irene Weisberg Zisblatt, whose testimony is showcased in Steven Spielberg’s documentary film The Last Days, is caught lying to the camera at least twice.

I am not judging Zisblatt’s dishonesty or her tendency to exaggerate. It is more than likely that this woman went through hell on earth. But I do challenge Stephen Spielberg who, for some reason decided to exploit this woman in his Holywoodian attempt to archive and depict what he calls the ‘truth’ of the holocaust.

The question we are left with is why. Why does she lie? Why does he lie? Why does anyone lie? And if they lie and are entitled to believe in their figment of imagination, where can we learn about the truth? What can we learn about the truth? What is truth? Is there any truth? And if we can ever be lucky enough to find the truth or even just ‘a truth’, can we announce it without being at risk of social exclusion or even losing our freedom?

Katsoulis exposes a perverse tendency in the midst of our Western discourse. It is proved beyond doubt that our freedom to speak, and even to think, is under severe assault. I would take it one step further and argue that the Holocaust religion is the biggest current assault against humanity and humanism. First, it stops us from revisiting and revising our own living memory. Second, it stops us from drawing a universal ethical lesson from history and third, it leads to more and more genocidal crimes.

Instead of a revenge-driven doctrine, what we really want is grace and compassion.

Rather than a singular monolithic belief system promoting a deceptive notion of freedom centred on Jewish pain, what we really want is real pluralism and tolerance that would accept more than just one truth and encourage belief systems to respect each other.

In fact, the Jews, should have been the first to grasp it all. As Emmanuel Levinas suggested after WWII, Jews should have located themselves at the forefront of the battle against evil and racism. Despite there being a handful of Jewish ‘self haters’ who are committed to the exposure of the Zionist crime, this never happened. Not only did it not happen, the Jewish state is the ultimate example of a racist nationalist terrorist state.

Katsoulis is far from being a Holocaust denier. She believes that the Holocaust happened, yet she writes about the robbery of its memory. “When a writer stands before other survivors and gives as scripture what is stolen from the memories of real witnesses, they can expect little sympathy.” Katsoulis offers some criticism of the “unregulated Holocaust “industry”, where victimhood is rewarded by money and fame.”

However, I would like to extend Katsoulis’ quest. I would maintain that in fact we are the witnesses of an ongoing holocaust in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We also witness Israel preparing itself to nuke Iran in the name of Jewish history and the Holocaust in particular. In front of our eyes we see the emergence of evil on a colossal magnitude, and we are somehow paralyzed by a historical chapter that, in comparison to contemporary Israeli crimes, has less and less significance or relevance.

Rather than being subject to an idolatry of an untouchable past, we better start to be concerned with the HERE and NOW, with the genocides that are committed in our names and under our nose by Israel and its supporters around the world.