Author Archives: Lila

Citizens of empire: time to take off the masks

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Referencing a piece by John Pilger on Burma, Jason Goroncy writes:

“Scandalised by my own hypocrisy (which is no excuse for Rice’s, Brown’s or Howard’s), I am regularly reminded of Kierkegaard’s words from his Either/Or:

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself; … In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.

From Per Crucem Ad Lucem.

Impeach Cheney Now! Support Kucinich resolution.

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NOTE: This report has been confirmed by an official of the Kucinich campaign.
 There are reports that Kucinich will exercise the right of personal privilege and bring impeachment of Cheney before the House of Representatives this coming week- Tuesday or Thursday.

MAKE FOUR CALLS TO THE CAPITOL SWITCHBOARD, AND TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO DO THE SAME

Please call the Capitol switchboard at 800-862-5530- ask to speak to your Rep. Tell him/her to support Kucinich’s resolution, or at least to not vote him down.

Then call again and tell Kucinich‘s office you support what he’s doing.

Call twice more- once to John Conyers and once to Nancy Pelosi, and ask them to let the resolution come to vote, so at least every member will be on record about impeaching Cheney.

These four calls may be the most important you’ll ever make.

The grounds that Dennis is using are outlined in the following speech:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=177541

Last week, after meeting with pro-impeachment activists, Kucinich delivered a speech on the House floor in which he said:

This House cannot avoid its Constitutionally authorized responsibility to restrain the abuse of Executive power.

The Administration has been preparing for an aggressive war against Iran. There is no solid, direct evidence that Iran has the intention of attacking the United States or its allies.

The US is a signatory to the UN Charter, a constituent treaty among the nations of the world. Article II, Section 4 of the UN Charter states, “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. . .” Even the threat of a war of aggression is illegal.

Article VI of the US Constitution makes such treaties the Supreme Law of the Land. This Administration, has openly threatened aggression against Iran in violation of the US Constitution and the UN Charter.

This week the House Appropriations committee removed language from the Iraq war funding bill requiring the Administration, under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, to seek permission before it launched an attack against Iran.

Since war with Iran is an option of this Administration and since such war is patently illegal, then impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran.

Impeachment now!

Peace, Carol Wolman, MD
Green Candidate for Congress, CA District 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTowK03sr7Q
Cochair, Impeach Bush-Cheney
http://www.opednews.com/author/author20.html

MindBody: Memory, Identity and Violence

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“Much of the conflict in the world, whether between individuals or between communities, is fueled by memory of what has happened in the past. So on the one hand, we have to remember to preserve our identity. We have to remember in order not to allow similar violations in the future.

Yet when we remember, our memory is not innocent in our hands. I use the term “shield of memory.” But so quickly, the shield mutates into a sword. Memory played a significant role in the recent conflict in my native Croatia. My interest was to find ways in which we can prevent memory from mutating from a shield into a sword—indeed, finding ways in which memory can become a means of reconciliation. That’s why I’m interested not just in memory, but in remembering rightly….”

More at Per Crucem ad Lucem.

Impure art from the Land of the Pure

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The upcoming Pakistani film-festival in Glasgow is an attempt for Pakistanis in Glasgow (where they are a huge percent of the minority population) to show us glimpses of the art of modern Pakistan.

Why do I blog it (thus seriously compromising my own view point and positioning myself as a terrorist-sympathizer, alien, and whatever else in the current national pychosis)?

Because seeing our enemy (“Pakis” are undoubtedly enemies here) in human terms is always good. Seeing him as something other than a bearded, murderous fanatic out of the Middle Ages is good. Listening to what Pakistani women have to say about the bearded ones is good. Knowing more about the Pakistani diaspora is also good.

The more we know and can feel and see from another person’s point of view, the greater our mastery of reality. The more we master reality, the more capable we become of shaping it.

The less we know, conversely, the less capable we are. The more we end up boxing with shadows.

The war on terror, right now, is prolonged, delusional shadow-boxing.

As a game, it’s fun. But fun only until we exhaust ourselves, which we almost certainly will, because we are fighting the wrong thing the wrong way.

We will find that out shortly. We will exhaust ourselves. And then our nemesis really will come. And it won’t be from the Middle East.

Meanwhile, here is an essay by one of the festival coordinators, Scottish Asian novelist and a correspondent of mine, Suhayl Saadi:

 

‘Broken Maps’ by Suhayl Saadi (commissioned by ‘The Herald’ newspaper, March 2004)

Beautifully-lit, the white walls of the Rohtas 2 Gallery in Lahore, Pakistan could be a miniature modern Vatican Map Room, except that in Zarina Hashmi’s exhibition, energetically curated by Salima Hashmi, Dean of Beaconhouse National University School of Visual Arts, every map is fractured, every place, broken. Yet one is not left with the sense of emptiness one sometimes feels after visiting galleries of contemporary art in the West.

Theatre, visual art, music, literature and puppetry in Pakistan arise from economic, physical and social life. Over the past thirty years, much of the arts has been led, driven and created by women. They receive little official support and yet are burgeoning and gaining increasing recognition abroad. Vital, aesthetic and plugged-in to networks of intra-national, regional, and global politics, they are as far from bourgeois pastimes as you can get. Every artist is de facto an activist.

During the long, dark night of Zia’s dictatorship (1977-1990), artists were imprisoned or prevented from working and a shameful parody of Islam was burned into statute. In a deeply patriarchal society, Woman became the Other. Over the years, artists have worked with the women of the Craft Cooperative Movement, have explored the conceptual centrality of Sufism in South Asia, have translated to and from intra-national languages and have been diligent in every field of folk culture. Women writers challenge a dominant romanticism; this is art as truth-telling.

There is anger, yes, in a country where wealth distribution is like an Escher folly, where, in spite of the national debt, military spending never seems to run dry, where ‘honour’/dowry killings are rife, where most women work outside the home in fields or offices yet have a farcical level of public representation, and where health statistics and literacy levels, especially for women, remain scandalously low. However, key themes of this art seem to be humanity, sensibility, tolerance, dialogue, love and understanding – a powerful alternative cartogram to that of the Taliban-types who have just taken over the government of the Northwest Frontier Province of the country.

Grassroots artistic bodies get funding mainly from donors, private sponsors and NGOs, while the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation links together journalists, writers, lawyers, transport and water administrators across the seven countries of South Asia and aims through civil societal means to drag governments into action. Poetry is intimately linked with the Women’s Movement, and far from being in thrall to the West (whose rulers, to maintain hegemonic control of trade and resources, have created, financed, armed and skillfully utilised the fundamentally misguided Islamists), in their creations these artists draw deeply on the living cultures of the region.

Surely, given the right ‘creative cluster’ approach (à la Oslo, which has one of the largest Pakistani communities outside South Asia), the youth of Pollokshields, Bradford and Tipton might plug in to the verve, activism and centredness of these arts movements. Once you have painted a picture or written a poem, it becomes increasingly difficult to render your brain subject to someone else’s machinations. Subverting nihilistic unemployment and fascistic thought, the link between art and political and economic life is real. Civilisation is partly about connectedness. It is hugely exciting that the Scottish Arts Council is exploring such creative interactions.

Some Pakistani artists point to the difference in attitude between their own embassies and those of India, which actively promote art abroad. Just as, irritatingly, the world refers to Britain as ‘England’, so the conception of South Asia resides in the numinous iconic receptacle of ‘India’.

The general perception of Pakistan heaves with inchoate archetypes of bearded violence. The blame for this lies with tenacious Western folk prejudice, with contradictory notions of national self-image and with the political instability and entrenched patriarchal feudal interests of successive Pakistani governments. Who, internationally, knows of Sadequain, whose artistic stature matches that of Dali? Or of the sharp intellect of feminist poet Kishvar Naheed? Or of the fearless Ajoka Theatre, set up by actor-director Madeeha Gauhar twenty years ago with the express purpose of exploring the social relevance of themes of living traditions of dance and drama? Or of Jamil Naqsh, whose elegant, visceral paintings currently inhabit the luminous, echoing galleries of the 1920s Rajput-Mughal-style Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi?

Artists of both sexes in the ‘Land of the Pure’ are carving out new territories, untrammeled by either cultural bankruptcy or the dysfunctional parameters of religious psychosis. The maps are broken. The lights in the galleries of Pakistan are switching on. Let us hope that they will not go out again in our time.

Suhayl Saadi recently accompanied freelance arts curator Alina Mirza on her Scottish Arts Council-funded feasibility study of the arts in Pakistan.

Iraq War Wimp Out: How Not to Be an Imperial Power

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“Hell no, we won’t go,” say US diplomats assigned to Iraq:

“It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment,” Mr. Croddy said. “I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?”

His remarks were met with loud and sustained applause from the approximately 300 diplomats at the meeting. Mr. Thomas responded by saying the comments were “filled with inaccuracies” but did not elaborate until challenged by the head of the diplomats’ union, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), who, like Mr. Croddy and others, demanded to know why many learned of the decision from news reports.

Mr. Thomas took full responsibility for the late notification but objected when AFSA President John Naland said a recent survey found only 12 per cent of the union’s membership believed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was “fighting for them.”

Comment:

I had mixed feelings when I read this. On one hand, it’s good news that the rank and file of the diplomatic corps are up in arms against this administration’s policies. It means staying on in Iraq gets more and more dicey. On the other hand, leaving aside the bigger picture, what does this say about the governing class?

That it’s a bunch of tough-talking wimps could be one ungenerous conclusion.

Let’s see.

Some of you folks did nothing to stop the mad rush to war when you had both the expertise and the credibility to do so. You could have resigned en masse. You could have publicized what was going on. You could have signed up with the antiwar movement. You could have blown whistles, sounded alarms, rung bells, issued distress signals – whatever it took.

But you did nothing of the sort. You were quite happy to go along when it was young men and women from rural areas, small towns, and impoverished neighborhoods who were hauled off to the desert to kill and mutilate and to be killed and mutilated themselves. When they survive intact in body, they will still be maimed for life in their minds and souls. Ask John McCain.

All for reasons that they hardly knew.

And now, now, when YOU have to face the fact that your life might be in danger, it’s a whole different game suddenly.

Suddenly, you are in revolt.

Mind you, the Green Zone you are going to is an impregnable fortress next to the rest of the country the poor grunts get to see up close and personal.

And mind you, I am all for people shirking their duty if it’s tied up with death and mutiliation. The more people do that, the fewer wars we would have.

But so much tender concern for your own hide with no concern whatsoever for anyone else’s is a bit…..what’s that word I’m groping for here?….begins with a “c”?

Hmmm…

Conscientious? Christian?

Try again.

OK, Cautious….

Or wait,

Compromised….cringe-making….cowardly…craven….

Bingo.

Iran War Mongering: Less method than madness….

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From a report in Stratfor discussing how the Bush administration might take on Iran:

“This leaves a direct assault against the Iranian economic infrastructure. Although this is the most promising path, it must be remembered that counterinfrastructure and counterpopulation strategic air operations have been tried extensively. The assumption has been that the economic cost of resistance would drive a wedge between the population and the regime, but there is no precedent in the history of air campaigns for this assumption. Such operations have succeeded in only two instances: Japan and Kosovo. In Japan, counterpopulation operations of massive proportions involving conventional weapons were followed by two atomic strikes. Even in that case, there was no split between regime and population, but a decision by the regime to capitulate. The occupation in Kosovo was not so much because of military success as diplomatic isolation. That isolation is not likely to happen in Iran.

In all other cases — Britain, Germany, Vietnam, Iraq — air campaigns by themselves did not split the population from the regime or force the regime to change course. In Britain and Vietnam, the campaigns failed completely. In Germany and Iraq (and Kuwait), they succeeded because of follow-on attacks by overwhelming ground forces.

The United States could indeed inflict heavy economic hardship, but history suggests that this is more likely to tighten the people’s identification with the government — not the other way around. In most circumstances, air campaigns have solidified the regime’s control over the population, allowing it to justify extreme security measures and generating a condition of intense psychological resistance. In no case has a campaign led to an uprising against the regime. Moreover, a meaningful campaign against economic infrastructure would take some 4 million barrels per day off of the global oil market at a time when oil prices already are closing in on $100 a barrel. Such a campaign is more likely to drive a wedge between the American people and the American government than between the Iranians and their government.

For an air campaign to work, the attacking power must be prepared to bring in an army on the ground to defeat the army that has been weakened by the air campaign — a tactic Israel failed to apply last summer in Lebanon. Combined arms operations do work, repeatedly. But the condition of the U.S. Army and Marines does not permit the opening of a new theater of operations in Iran. Most important, even if conditions did permit the use of U.S. ground forces to engage and defeat the Iranian army — a massive operation simply by the size of the country — the United States does not have the ability to occupy Iran against a hostile population. The Japanese and German nations were crushed completely over many years before an overwhelming force occupied them. What was present there, but not in Iraq, was overwhelming force. That is not an option for Iran.

Finally, consider the Iranian response. Iran does not expect to defeat the U.S. Air Force or Navy, although the use of mine warfare and anti-ship cruise missiles against tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz should not be dismissed. The Iranian solution would be classically asymmetrical. First, they would respond in Iraq, using their assets in the country to further complicate the occupation, as well as to impose as many casualties as possible on the United States. And they would use their forces to increase the difficulty of moving supplies from Kuwait to U.S. forces in central Iraq. They also would try to respond globally using their own forces (the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), as well as Hezbollah and other trained Shiite militant assets, to carry out counterpopulation attacks against U.S. assets around the world, including in the United States….”

Comment:

Stratfor is a widely cited firm that sends out geo-political intelligence reports to businesses. The excerpt above was from one of their free reports.

They have their biases. Perhaps not intentional so much as occupational, but I take their forecasts with some caution.

From Sourcewatch:

Stratfor – which is also known as Strategic Forecasting, Inc. – is a private company that provides strategic and issues management intelligence anlaysis to corporations and governments.

The company, founded in 1996, is based in Austin, Texas and boasts that it has “an intelligence network located throughout the world.”

“Stratfor is the world’s leading private intelligence firm providing corporations, governments and individuals with geopolitical analysis and forecasts that enable them to manage risk and to anticipate political, economic and security issues vital to their interests,” it states on its website. [1]

Al Giordano, a progressive journalist and founder of NarcoNews , who has lived and worked in Latin America for years, details what he calls “20 Stratfor Lies about Latin America”:

“Stratfor’s track record in Latin America is abhorrent (how many years in a row did it predict that Hugo Chavez would not survive that year as Venezuela’s president?). It’s “spin” is ideological: pro-corporate, which is no surprise, given that it’s undisclosed clientele purchases something called “Business Intelligence Services.”

In my opinion, Stratfor engages in circulating disinformation into the datasphere through its free and paid email memos in ways that seem aimed to help the agendas of that very same corporate world that contracts its services.
In March 2004, Bart Mongoven from Stratfor’s Washington D.C. office appeared on a panel – Strategies for Dealing with Environmental Litigation – at the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas. (Also appearing on the panel were Marc Sisk, Dorsey & Whitney, Washington, DC and Stephen Brown from The Dutko Group LLC).
Mongoven warned industry leaders about the increasing collaboration between environmental groups and patients groups on the issue of exposure to chemicals. Washington D.C. trade magazine, Inside EPA, reported Mongoven told the NPRA that “in five years, the environmental community would like to see all debates [be about] the environment and health.” Mongoven nominated Collaborative on Health and the Environment as an example of the new approach.

According to Inside EPA, Mongoven said that the collaboration was broadening the debate beyond exposure to pesticides to the health impacts of industrial emissions. According to Inside EPA, he suggested that one option for industry to counter this development was to dismiss advocates stated public health goal and instead portray them as being “anti-chemical”.
Comment:

Of course, this does not mean that everything Stratfor writes is compromised. But I think in the age of “astroturf lobbying,” (i.e. faked grass-roots advocacy meant to coopt real populist voices), better watch out would be a good motto.

The Beauty of Beasts: Fairy tales, Arabesques and the America psyche

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Jean Cocteau, decribing the making of his great film, “La Belle et la Bete” (Beauty and the Beast), 1946:

“To fairyland as people usually see it, I would bring a kind of realism to banish the vague and misty nonsense now so completely outworn. My story would concern itself mainly with the unconscious obstinacy with which women pursue the same type of man, and expose the naiveté of the old fairy tales that would have us believe that this type reaches its ideal in conventional good looks. My aim would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty, condemning her to a humdrum marriage and a future that I summed up in that last sentence of all fairy tales: “And they had many children.”

I was therefore obliged to deceive both the public and Beauty herself. Slyly, and with much effort, I persuaded my cameraman Alekan to shoot Jean Marais, as the Prince in as saccharine a style as possible. The trick worked. When the picture was released, letters poured in from matrons, teen-age girls and children, complaining to me and Marais about the transformation. They mourned the disappearance of the Beast—the same Beast who terrified them so at the time when Madame Leprince de Beaumont wrote the tale.

When Madame de Beaumont published Beauty and the Beast, she was an impoverished teacher in England, and I suppose that the story is of Scotch origin. Anglo-Saxons manage the horror story, the weird tale, better than anybody else. In fact, in England one still hears tales of lords, the eldest sons of noble families, heirs to the title, hidden away in barred rooms of old castles.

There are three reasons why I have high hopes that Americans will readily grasp my intention. First, America is the home of Edgar Allen Poe, secret societies, mystics, ghosts, and a wonderful lyricism in the very streets. Second, childhood remains longer within the soul than it does here in France, where we try to suppress it as a weakness….”

Comment:

How right Cocteau is to mention Poe here. And how wrong T. S. Eliot – Boston Brahmin and scholar of Sanskrit – to see interest in Poe as the mark of a second-rate mind.

Poe – like Mencken, also a Baltimorean – haunts the urban landscape of the Midwest, not simply because of his Amity street house in Baltimore, or his birth in Richmond, but in a more elusive way, captured accurately in this fine analysis:

“Poe is not un-American, despite his aristocratic disgust with democracy, preference for the exotic, and themes of dehumanization. On the contrary, he is almost a textbook example of Tocqueville’s prediction that American democracy would produce works that lay bare the deepest, hidden parts of the psyche. Deep anxiety and psychic insecurity seem to have occurred earlier in America than in Europe, for Europeans at least had a firm, complex social structure that gave them psychological security. In America, there was no compensating security; it was every man for himself. Poe accurately described the underside of the American dream of the self-made man and showed the price of materialism and excessive competition — loneliness, alienation, and images of death-in-life.

Poe’s “decadence” also reflects the devaluation of symbols that occurred in the 19th century — the tendency to mix art objects promiscuously from many eras and places, in the process stripping them of their identity and reducing them to merely decorative items in a collection. The resulting chaos of styles was particularly noticeable in the United States, which often lacked traditional styles of its own. The jumble reflects the loss of coherent systems of thought as immigration, urbanization, and industrialization uprooted families and traditional ways. In art, this confusion of symbols fueled the grotesque, an idea that Poe explicitly made his theme in his classic collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).”

Iran war-mongering: Israeli Minister pooh-poohs Iranian nuke threat

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“Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran.”

More here at Haaretz. 

McGrath’s Mother: Is the Modern West Truly the Acme of Civilization?

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We wear more clothes here than Gunga Din – who had nothing much before him, and little less than ‘arf of that behind, according to Kipling.

And clothes make the man, they say. But does it make a civilization too? I don’t know.

It’s true we have the Hubble telescope and can compare the soil of Jupiter and Mars at first hand. But, playing Peeping Tom in space is one thing. Down here on terra infirma, our infernal voyeurism is nothing if not barbaric. A recent example:

Australian police yesterday said a threat to sell letters penned by cricketer Glenn McGrath’s mother via the Internet may be immoral but did not appear to be illegal.

“Just because something is unsavoury or immoral doesn’t necessarily make it illegal,” Detective Superintendent Peter Cotter told reporters. “It would appear certainly at this juncture that no criminal offence has occurred.”

Police launched an investigation after receiving a complaint from McGrath’s management.

New South Wales state police said they had received legal advice that the former McGrath family friend who asked for money from the bowler’s management for the letters was not guilty of extortion.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that a former McGrath family acquaintance, Peter Amiet, had threatened to publicly release the letters, which reportedly contain details about McGrath’s parents’ marriage, unless he received several thousand dollars.

It said the letters were briefly advertised on Tuesday on the Internet auction site eBay and attracted an offer of 15,100 Australian (US$11,630) before being removed pending a police investigation.

Amiet told the Daily Telegraph that the letters were addressed to him in the early 1990s, when he worked with Beverley McGrath at a mail sorting centre.

He said he was now in a “financial situation” and needed money. He said back then, he initially offered the letters to McGrath’s management. But when they declined to buy them, he decided to sell them publicly.

McGrath, 35, arrived in Sydney yesterday after failing to inspire Australia to victory in the fifth and final Test at The Oval in England.

McGrath’s manager Warren Craig said he had attempted to shield his client from the potentially distracting situation during the series, which England won 2-1.”

Source: China Daily

Comment:

I read something like this and I think it can’t be all bad in Saudi Arabia, where trying to take unauthorized pictures of someone, especially a woman, is liable to get you hauled off to jail. Yes. Saudi color coordination grates on me and I don’t care for a few other gentle practices – such as stoning women for being unfaithful – but on the issue of privacy, I think they have gotten the lead on us.

Global Games: Asians want to eat too..

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“Imagine if five people were washed up on a desert island: four Asians and an American. In splitting up their duties, one Asian says he’ll fish; another will hunt, another will look for firewood, and another will cook. The American assigns himself the job of eating.“The modern economist looks at this situation and says the American is key to the whole thing,” says Schiff. “Because without him to eat, the four Asians would be unemployed.” The alternative: Without the American, the Asians might eat a little more themselves and even spend some time building a boat. This is happening as we speak: With the rise of the Chinese consumer class, the local citizenry is now spending, and the country is no longer totally dependent on exports. Which means they’re no longer totally dependent on us.

Readers of the financial press are surely familiar with the buzzword of the moment, decoupling. It’s used to describe how U.S.-Europe and U.S.-Asian trade relationships are becoming less dependent at the same time as European-Asian ties are growing. Most Asian nations, including China, are seeing more rapid growth in exports to Europe than to the U.S. And the U.S. now accounts for a declining share of European exports. The bearish interpretation: that the longtime global embrace of the dollar is loosening.”

More at the NewYorker by Duff McDonald.