WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2011
1
Brooke Bayoude, the nine-year-old central character of Ali Smith’s quirky new novel, There but for the, is precocious, a social butterfly according to her teachers and her peers, and obsessed with history and the possibility of eventual death. She’s also loveable—in fact, adorable—and a joy to observe as she tries to discover answers to life’s mostly unanswerable questions. To say that she is grown up by the end of the story, when she is ten, is probably inaccurate, but Brooke by then has certainly demonstrated a mature ability to understand the confused people around her. She is one of the few true adults in the story. Because of the novel’s inventive structure, it takes a fair amount of time before Brooke assumes center stage.
The opening of There but for the (grace of God, go I/you) is something else completely. Giles Garth, an unexpected guest at a dinner party in London, abruptly leaves the dinner table and goes upstairs, presumably in search of a bathroom. Giles has tagged along with one of the host’s invited guests, but even that guest confesses that he has only recently met Giles and knows little about him. For a while, no one pays much attention to Giles’ absence from the table, but after a lengthy period of time the hosts and the other guests (including Brooke and her parents) begin to be worried. Is the man possibly sick? Does he need help?
When attempts are made to discover what has happened, the story becomes a little bizarre. Giles Garth (the unexpected guest) has locked himself in one of the upstairs bedrooms and won’t come out. As the host explains ten days later in a message to one of Giles’ friends from years ago, “Mr. Garth has locked himself in our spare bedroom. I am only relieved the bedroom is ensuite. He will not leave the room. He is not just refusing to unlock the door and go to his own home, wherever that might be. He is refusing to speak to a single soul. It has now been ten days, and our unwanted tenant has only communicated by 1 piece of paper slipped under the bottom of the door. We are slipping flat packs of wafer-paper-thin turkey and ham to him under the said door but are unable to provide him with anything more dimensional because of the size of the space between the said door and the floor.”
What to do? Well, in their desperation, the Lees (the hosts) discover an address book in Giles’ sport coat that was left at the dinner table, and in that book the name of Anna, who it turns out knew Giles thirty years ago. But ask yourself what you would respond if someone contacted you about someone you haven’t seen in thirty years. What could you say? Then there’s Mark, who brought Giles to the dinner party, but he knows little about the acquaintance he met days earlier. So although Anna and Mark become the focus of two of the major sections of the novel, what they reveal about Giles Garth hardly matters, nor does Ali Smith mean them to. Rather, all of her main characters are variations on loneliness, insecurity, and death.
Still, Gen Lee (the hostess, who is not given a major section of the novel), may have the best insights about the strange man who came to dinner and then stayed: “Did he want to know what it felt like to not be in the world? Had he closed the door on himself so he would know what it feels like, to be a prisoner? Was it some wanky kind of middle-class game about how we’re all prisoners even though we believe we’re free as a bird, free to cross any shopping mall or airport concourse or fashionably stripped back wooden floor of the upstairs room of a house? Did he inhabit his cell for the good of the others, like a bee or a monk?”
Whatever, it doesn’t take long before the man upstairs becomes a cause celebre, with the media surrounding the Lee’s flat, with cameramen positioned at the back in case the mysterious man makes himself visible at a window. Worse, the profiteers of greed, including Mrs. Lee, are soon there attempting to make a quick killing out of the man’s absurd antics. And, finally, there’s Brooke Bayoude the only intelligent observer in the group. But that quality of the young girl you will need to discover for yourself, along with the juicy surprises of the other narrators and their own remarkable observations on life’s strange happenings. Taken all together, Ali Smith’s There but for the is as intriguing—and clever—as its title.
There but for the
By Ali Smith
Pantheon, 236 pp., $25
Charles R. Larson is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C. Email: clarson@american.edu.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Paul Brody’s Soliloquy How They Do Commemorations in Berlin by DAVID YEARSLEY Berlin
WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2011
3
I am distrustful of memorial services, not only because of the way memory is exploited by and manipulated through them, but because they inevitably indulge in the most embarrassing forms of kitsch, forms which music often decorates or even fundamentally.
I am spending this year in Berlin, Germany, a country weighted by the culture of commemoration and guilt as is no other. Normally, I live next to the Ithaca, New York’s 19th-century city cemetery, a picturesque and now very dilapidated twenty acres designed in the 1840s in accordance with the naturalistic impulses of the rural cemetery movement of which Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Mt. Auburn cemetery is the first and most famous example.
On a Memorial Day a couple of years ago early in the morning I came across a collection of veterans, police and firefighters gathered around the Firemen’s Monument at the northwest corner of the graveyard with a commanding view up Cayuga Lake stretching to the horizon. A black granite bench commemorating September 11 was placed in the shadow the weathered marble firefighters monument within a year or two of the attacks. The men were solemnly gathered around these memorials as a crystal clear performance of Taps came from a uniformed bugler some thirty feet away amidst the graves rising up the hillside. Not wanting to disturb the solemn gathering, I kept my distance from firemen but to do so had to pass within a few feet of the lone musician. As he finished Taps he motioned me towards him, and I obediently approached. He had a confession to make. He held the silver bugle out towards me and showed that it contained a digital insert that had done the bugling for him. He had simply held the instrument to his lips with gloved hand and made some pantomimic gestures suggesting the exertions of an embouchure. I’m not sure if this need to confide in me was motivated by guilt or by the compulsion to include someone outside of the fraternity of servicemen in his musical conspiracy.
What he was holding was a Ceremonial Bugle, which goes for $530 and, according to its manufacturers, is “a dignified method of playing Taps at military funeral when a live bugler is not available.” The Ithaca bugler was a (re)enactor playing himself in real time.
The melancholy arpeggio of Taps has long conditioned its listeners immediately to enter a state of patriotic devotion if not reverential sorrow. The faultless faux-performance of this Taps, so utterly devoid of the human touches of cracking high notes or wayward intonation, distills musically the repro kitsch mode of the commemoration industry.
The week before the tenth anniversary of September 11 was an eventful one in Berlin. Three days before two young men, one a Palestinian the other of Lebanese descent, were arrested, at which time they were possession of large, bomb-making quantities of chemicals as well as falsified papers. The storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo added to the tension, especially since the German government has consistently opposed Palestinian efforts to join the UN. A strong backer of Israel, Chancellor Angel Merkel has nonetheless been recently criticized publicly by her former political patron Helmut Kohl for letting Germany slip towards international irrelevance. Kohl was particularly distressed by the fact that Obama’s trip to Europe last spring did not include a visit to Germany, the first time since World War II that an American president omitted the country from his itinerary.
Sunday the 11th brought a perfect day to Berlin, without a cloud in the sky. It was a perfect coda to a rainy summer. An interfaith service for the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the attacks took place at the American Church in Berlin, situated in the large and leafy triangle that is the Dennewitzplatz in Schöneberg in what used to be the American zone of the divided city.
Surprisingly perhaps, the highly publicized occasion drew only enough people to fill perhaps two thirds of this bulky 19th-century church with brick facade and booming acoustics. I sat next a diplomat who’d just returned from a trip to Baghdad. His three-year stint in Germany was coming to an end in a couple of weeks. He’d be back in Tempe before the end of the month, the car waiting and the gardeners hard at work getting his place ready. I asked him if his child was in the John F. Kennedy School choir, which sang a modulating setting of Amazing Grace later in the service. He shook his head. “I’m a member of the congregation,” he said. “Someone’s got to be.” If a September 11 media-saturated service with American generals, the U. S. ambassador Philip Murphy, the German politicians in attendance, and a powerhouse roster of musical performers couldn’t begin to fill the church one had to wonder about the robustness of American expatriate religious sentiment in Babylonian Berlin.
It was the first time I’ve entered a place of worship through a metal detector, though given the fundamental role religion has played in spurring on the world’s endless conflicts, one wonders why such technology has not been more frequently employed. It was unclear whether these security measures were undertaken because of the date of commemorations and its potential for reprisal or because several rows of prominent German politicians were coming to the service. Merkel’s anticipated appearance never materialized, probably much to Kohl’s chagrin. Instead her foreign minister and coalition partner Guido Westerwelle of the Liberal Party was the top ranking member of the government. Though in coalition, the Liberals and Merkel’s CDU are currently at each other throats over the Euro crisis, so that it was perhaps unsurprising that Merkel and Westerwelle did not appear together for these commemorations. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder came shuffling along with other retired politicians. The Green Party candidate for Mayor of Berlin and former Cabinet Member in the previous government, Renate Künast showed up and greeted her affable old boss Schröder, then took her place on the left flank of the lefties. She ducked out midway of the service. There was only a week to go before the Berlin elections and much campaigning still to be done.
The service had more music than sermonizing and prayer. Members of the congregation were unsure of the exact nature of the event: was it a concert or a service. In the end they clapped after each number. When the praying and homilizing finale came one almost expected applause there too.
Some twenty minutes of music introduced the proceedings, with the excellent internationally-active American sopranos Tamara Haskin and Phoebe Fennell delivering powerful readings of Richard Strauss’s “Beim Schlafengehen” and Samuel Barber’s “Sure on this Shining Night” respectively. Amidst these succession of luminous and longing-filled ruminations the politicians entered in stages, taking their seats on one side or the other of the central aisle as they would have done in the Bundestag, the left-leaners shuffling off to the left, the right-leaners to the right. When the German President Christian Wulff showed up the congregation stood as if following the lead of King George II for the singing of the Hallelujah Chorus. But the music was not Handel, but Fauré’s Pie Jesu spontaneously reorchestrated by an antiphonal chorus of press photographers, their cameras clicking furiously from the right transept. Only during the obligatory moment of silence that followed later did the shuttering cease.
The cameras were particularly vocal during U.S. Ambassador Murphy’s comments, which beat the same old patriotic drum: the point of such commemorations, he said, was not only remembrance but action. Calls for peace, especially in God’s house are necessary, but the War on Terror—not named but clearly implied—requires long-term resolve. The crusade must continue.
There were prayers from men (no women) of god in Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, German, and English representing monotheism of the Christian (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant), Jewish, and Islamic persuasions.
The quality of the music making was high, from the school choir, to the church choir, to the professional contributions.
But the most memorable and powerful was the trumpet “soliloquy” of Paul Brody , an American expatriate who has lived in Berlin for some twenty years and is involved with experimental theatre projects here and elsewhere in Europe, To pursue the confrontation of Klezmer traditions with jazz, produces creative children’s music, and is undertakes many other diverse musical ventures. His September 11 improvisation began with a three-note minor motive, ending on a stuttering, repeated note. Brody melded in Klezmer chromatic touches that came across not as opportunistic multi-cultural clichés and interfaith blandishments, but as necessary elements of a moving musical discourse, aimed not at comforting or convincing but at querying. The pursuit of an unknowable message produced notes that were slightly whispered, doubting, fragile, yet the forceful ascending fourths of Hindemithian high-up in his range that came later were crystalline and pure, but far all their technical mastery expressive nonetheless of vulnerability. This was not the triumphalism or tears of the fanfare or the funeral, but a much more sincere into the limits of human control over events and their memorializations. After the strivings and adventures of the soaring trumpet, Brody recalled the opening motive at the end the soliloquoy, making a musical whole, tonally and structurally closing this piece, which had premiered and vanished in the course of three minutes. Yet this return did not suggest finality but instead the open-ended, deeper questions, far beyond the routines of rituals, that should be asked on such occasions, but never are.
David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu
3
I am distrustful of memorial services, not only because of the way memory is exploited by and manipulated through them, but because they inevitably indulge in the most embarrassing forms of kitsch, forms which music often decorates or even fundamentally.
I am spending this year in Berlin, Germany, a country weighted by the culture of commemoration and guilt as is no other. Normally, I live next to the Ithaca, New York’s 19th-century city cemetery, a picturesque and now very dilapidated twenty acres designed in the 1840s in accordance with the naturalistic impulses of the rural cemetery movement of which Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Mt. Auburn cemetery is the first and most famous example.
On a Memorial Day a couple of years ago early in the morning I came across a collection of veterans, police and firefighters gathered around the Firemen’s Monument at the northwest corner of the graveyard with a commanding view up Cayuga Lake stretching to the horizon. A black granite bench commemorating September 11 was placed in the shadow the weathered marble firefighters monument within a year or two of the attacks. The men were solemnly gathered around these memorials as a crystal clear performance of Taps came from a uniformed bugler some thirty feet away amidst the graves rising up the hillside. Not wanting to disturb the solemn gathering, I kept my distance from firemen but to do so had to pass within a few feet of the lone musician. As he finished Taps he motioned me towards him, and I obediently approached. He had a confession to make. He held the silver bugle out towards me and showed that it contained a digital insert that had done the bugling for him. He had simply held the instrument to his lips with gloved hand and made some pantomimic gestures suggesting the exertions of an embouchure. I’m not sure if this need to confide in me was motivated by guilt or by the compulsion to include someone outside of the fraternity of servicemen in his musical conspiracy.
What he was holding was a Ceremonial Bugle, which goes for $530 and, according to its manufacturers, is “a dignified method of playing Taps at military funeral when a live bugler is not available.” The Ithaca bugler was a (re)enactor playing himself in real time.
The melancholy arpeggio of Taps has long conditioned its listeners immediately to enter a state of patriotic devotion if not reverential sorrow. The faultless faux-performance of this Taps, so utterly devoid of the human touches of cracking high notes or wayward intonation, distills musically the repro kitsch mode of the commemoration industry.
The week before the tenth anniversary of September 11 was an eventful one in Berlin. Three days before two young men, one a Palestinian the other of Lebanese descent, were arrested, at which time they were possession of large, bomb-making quantities of chemicals as well as falsified papers. The storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo added to the tension, especially since the German government has consistently opposed Palestinian efforts to join the UN. A strong backer of Israel, Chancellor Angel Merkel has nonetheless been recently criticized publicly by her former political patron Helmut Kohl for letting Germany slip towards international irrelevance. Kohl was particularly distressed by the fact that Obama’s trip to Europe last spring did not include a visit to Germany, the first time since World War II that an American president omitted the country from his itinerary.
Sunday the 11th brought a perfect day to Berlin, without a cloud in the sky. It was a perfect coda to a rainy summer. An interfaith service for the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the attacks took place at the American Church in Berlin, situated in the large and leafy triangle that is the Dennewitzplatz in Schöneberg in what used to be the American zone of the divided city.
Surprisingly perhaps, the highly publicized occasion drew only enough people to fill perhaps two thirds of this bulky 19th-century church with brick facade and booming acoustics. I sat next a diplomat who’d just returned from a trip to Baghdad. His three-year stint in Germany was coming to an end in a couple of weeks. He’d be back in Tempe before the end of the month, the car waiting and the gardeners hard at work getting his place ready. I asked him if his child was in the John F. Kennedy School choir, which sang a modulating setting of Amazing Grace later in the service. He shook his head. “I’m a member of the congregation,” he said. “Someone’s got to be.” If a September 11 media-saturated service with American generals, the U. S. ambassador Philip Murphy, the German politicians in attendance, and a powerhouse roster of musical performers couldn’t begin to fill the church one had to wonder about the robustness of American expatriate religious sentiment in Babylonian Berlin.
It was the first time I’ve entered a place of worship through a metal detector, though given the fundamental role religion has played in spurring on the world’s endless conflicts, one wonders why such technology has not been more frequently employed. It was unclear whether these security measures were undertaken because of the date of commemorations and its potential for reprisal or because several rows of prominent German politicians were coming to the service. Merkel’s anticipated appearance never materialized, probably much to Kohl’s chagrin. Instead her foreign minister and coalition partner Guido Westerwelle of the Liberal Party was the top ranking member of the government. Though in coalition, the Liberals and Merkel’s CDU are currently at each other throats over the Euro crisis, so that it was perhaps unsurprising that Merkel and Westerwelle did not appear together for these commemorations. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder came shuffling along with other retired politicians. The Green Party candidate for Mayor of Berlin and former Cabinet Member in the previous government, Renate Künast showed up and greeted her affable old boss Schröder, then took her place on the left flank of the lefties. She ducked out midway of the service. There was only a week to go before the Berlin elections and much campaigning still to be done.
The service had more music than sermonizing and prayer. Members of the congregation were unsure of the exact nature of the event: was it a concert or a service. In the end they clapped after each number. When the praying and homilizing finale came one almost expected applause there too.
Some twenty minutes of music introduced the proceedings, with the excellent internationally-active American sopranos Tamara Haskin and Phoebe Fennell delivering powerful readings of Richard Strauss’s “Beim Schlafengehen” and Samuel Barber’s “Sure on this Shining Night” respectively. Amidst these succession of luminous and longing-filled ruminations the politicians entered in stages, taking their seats on one side or the other of the central aisle as they would have done in the Bundestag, the left-leaners shuffling off to the left, the right-leaners to the right. When the German President Christian Wulff showed up the congregation stood as if following the lead of King George II for the singing of the Hallelujah Chorus. But the music was not Handel, but Fauré’s Pie Jesu spontaneously reorchestrated by an antiphonal chorus of press photographers, their cameras clicking furiously from the right transept. Only during the obligatory moment of silence that followed later did the shuttering cease.
The cameras were particularly vocal during U.S. Ambassador Murphy’s comments, which beat the same old patriotic drum: the point of such commemorations, he said, was not only remembrance but action. Calls for peace, especially in God’s house are necessary, but the War on Terror—not named but clearly implied—requires long-term resolve. The crusade must continue.
There were prayers from men (no women) of god in Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, German, and English representing monotheism of the Christian (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant), Jewish, and Islamic persuasions.
The quality of the music making was high, from the school choir, to the church choir, to the professional contributions.
But the most memorable and powerful was the trumpet “soliloquy” of Paul Brody , an American expatriate who has lived in Berlin for some twenty years and is involved with experimental theatre projects here and elsewhere in Europe, To pursue the confrontation of Klezmer traditions with jazz, produces creative children’s music, and is undertakes many other diverse musical ventures. His September 11 improvisation began with a three-note minor motive, ending on a stuttering, repeated note. Brody melded in Klezmer chromatic touches that came across not as opportunistic multi-cultural clichés and interfaith blandishments, but as necessary elements of a moving musical discourse, aimed not at comforting or convincing but at querying. The pursuit of an unknowable message produced notes that were slightly whispered, doubting, fragile, yet the forceful ascending fourths of Hindemithian high-up in his range that came later were crystalline and pure, but far all their technical mastery expressive nonetheless of vulnerability. This was not the triumphalism or tears of the fanfare or the funeral, but a much more sincere into the limits of human control over events and their memorializations. After the strivings and adventures of the soaring trumpet, Brody recalled the opening motive at the end the soliloquoy, making a musical whole, tonally and structurally closing this piece, which had premiered and vanished in the course of three minutes. Yet this return did not suggest finality but instead the open-ended, deeper questions, far beyond the routines of rituals, that should be asked on such occasions, but never are.
David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu
Gilad Atzmon's "The Wandering Who" Tearing the Veil From Israel’s Civility by WILLIAM A. COOK
WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2011
7
Gilad Atzmon’s insight into the organism created by the Zionist movement in his book, The Wandering Who, is explosive; it tears the veil off of Israel’s apparent civility, its apparent friendship with the United States, and its expressed solicitude for western powers—Britain, Canada, Australia, France and Germany—exposing behind the veil, the assassin ready to slay any and all that interfere with its tribally focused ends. In February of this year, Atzmon characterized Islam and Judaism as tribally oriented belief systems rooted not in “enlightened individualism,” but rather in “…the survival of the extended family.” These belief systems have nothing to do with personal liberties or personal rights; they have to do with securing the realm of their respective “ways of life.” But unlike tribalism in Islam, tribalism in Judaism “can never live in peace with humanism and universalism” (4). “Both religions stand as systems that provide thorough answers in terms of spiritual, civil, cultural and day to day matters.” In this regard, “…both Islam and Judaism are more than just religions: they convey an entire ‘way of life,’ and
The Wandering Who is a personal journey of a man born in Jerusalem, raised in the Jewish ‘way of life,’ infused with the myths of the founding of the Jewish state; “Supremacy was brewed into our soul, we gazed at the world through racist, chauvinistic binoculars. And we felt no shame about it either” (5). Inducted into the Israeli military during the 1980s he served in Lebanon, and, in his late teens, experienced an epiphany caused in good measure by careful listening to voices beyond the wall that encircled him in the ghetto that is the Israeli state. This epiphany forced a distinction in identity versus identifying, between self-reliance and obedient servant to an ideology, a distinction that recognized Jews as people, Judaism as a religion, and Jewishness, an ideology that determines identity politics and a resulting political discourse.
What, then, characterizes a Jew? Atzmon distinguishes among those who follow the Judaic religion; those who regard themselves as a human being who happens to be of Jewish origin; and those who put their Jewishness over and above all other traits. Chaim Weizman, the first Israeli President and a Zionist, identified being a Jew as a ‘primary quality’ above citizenship, occupation, head of household, indeed “Jewishness becomes the key element and fundamental characteristic of one’s being.” Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote “…the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical racial type are Jewish” (“A Letter on Autonomy,” 1904). It is this identifying principle that Atzmon sees as corrosive, not only to Judaism, but to the safety and security of the Jewish people, their friends and their neighbors. “…probably then and there I left Chosen-ness behind to become an ordinary human being” (6). “For me to be Jewish is, above all, to be preoccupied with overcoming injustice and thirsting for justice in the world, and that means being respectful toward other peoples regardless of their nationality or religion, and empathetic in the face of human suffering whoever and wherever victimization is encountered” (“On Jewish Identity,” 1/15/2011).
Significantly, Atzmon turns to the ancient tale of the wandering Jew to reap the complexities inherent in the contradictions that beset Judaism in today’s world: tribalism versus universalism, chosen-ness versus democratic equality, rule by defiance of law versus nations ruled by law, control of government by Zionist controlled ideology versus responsiveness to the voice of the citizenry, and tribalistic morality where morals are fabricated for political utilitarian ends versus the inalienable rights of all endowed by nature.
The legend’s primary symbolic value resides in its identification of ‘otherness,’ the unique concept of ‘chosen-ness,’ that separates the Jews from the rest of humanity resulting in an ideological and psychological isolation that becomes a strategic tool used by the Zionists and the Neo-Cons to manipulate the Jewish people and the formation of the Jewish state. Jabotinsky and Weizmann’s “primary quality” of Jewishness prevents assimilation, thus forcing the Jew to remain always an alien wherever he or she resides. Personal identification can only exist in the tribe, a virtual and absolute commitment to Jewishness, making possible the use of Jews around the world as “sayanims” (assistants) to further the goals of the Jewish state (17). “The sayan is a person who would betray the nation of which he is a citizen out of devotion to a notion of a clannish brotherhood” (17).
There are thousands of sayanim around the world. In London alone, there are about 2,000 who are active, and another 5,000 on the list. They fulfill many different roles. A car sayan…running a rental agency, could help the Mossad rent a car without having to complete the usual documentation. … a bank sayan could get you money if you needed it in the middle of the night, a doctor sayan would treat a bullet wound without reporting it to the police…The idea is to have a pool of people available when needed who can provide services but will keep quiet about them out of loyalty to the cause (17).
“In Zionist eyes Jewishness is an international network operation…to be a Jew is a deep commitment that goes far beyond any legal or moral order” (19). Atzmon identifies a functioning organism controlled by Zionist ideology and Neo-Con sayanim in the United States that has yoked Israeli interests to those of the United States using a document titled the USA Defense Planning Guidance Report for fiscal years 1994-1999. “In the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, we seek to foster regional stability, deter aggression against our friends and interests in the region, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways and to the region’s oil. The United States is committed to the security of Israel and to maintaining the qualitative edge that is critical to Israel’s security.” (22). This manipulative strategy “transformed the Jewish tribal mode into a collective functioning system.” It also transformed “the American and British armies into a Zionist mission force” as Israel and the Neo-Cons manipulated the governments of the UK and the US to attack Israel’s enemies in Iraq while imposing sanctions on Syria and defending its occupation and oppression of the Palestinians and its wanton destruction of Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008-2009.
Atzmon illuminates the inner soul, or more correctly, the lack thereof, of the Israeli state as it has evolved from early Zionism to a politically astute merger of ancient Judaism with secular purposes to attain its goals. It is in this respect the abortive grandchild of Leo Strauss, a Professor and teacher of Paul Wolfowitz and the Neo-Cons who clustered about his determinist altar—Richard Perle (former Defense Policy Board Chairman), William Kristol (Chief Editor of the Weekly Standard), Gary Schmitt (Chairman and Director of the Project for the New American Century), Stephen Campone (Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Rumsfeld), Abram Shulsky (friend of Perle and head of Rumsfeld’s special intelligence unit sometimes characterized as the “Specious Planning Unit”), Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who are connected through the PNAC (Project for the New American Century)—all “leaders” of course accepting without question a brand of determinism that controlled human life with some born to lead and the vast majority born to follow.
I had tracked the emergence of this cult that came to power in an article published in 2003, “Moral Insanity: the Cabal that Corrupts,” and offer two paragraphs that capture the consequences of this deception.
Since Strauss taught that nature’s determinism thrust the “wise few” into positions of leadership over the “vulgar many,” and since virtue is defined by the elite who rule, and since morality does not exist, and since justice is merely the interest of the stronger, and since the rule of the wise is absolute, authoritarian and unquestionable, and since religion is “the glue that holds society together,” using religion for political ends, like lying, deception, secrecy, and intimidation, is a good necessary to achieve the determined goals of the government. Manipulation of the “vulgar masses” becomes an end in itself and the distortion of words and concepts becomes the means to that end…
Only a Straussian Cultist would have the arrogance to create a National and International policy on behalf of 300 million people when they represented none of them. Two years later, a year after 9/11, this report became “The National Security Strategy Report of the United States of America,” a document that details how America will act, nationally and internationally, during the second Bush regime. Needless to say, few Americans ever saw the details of this report before it became policy—not the average American citizen nor their representatives in Congress nor the Senate. Yet we are the ones who must pay for the plans these men designed, be victims of the world’s censure as they carry out their designs, and fall prey to their restrictions on civil liberties imposed by this regime as “security measures.”
Atzmon’s analysis reveals strategies used by the Zionists to control their population: “Some marginal politicians seek to publically ‘shame’ their integrated brothers and sisters. This serves two purposes. First, it conveys a clear message that real assimilation is impossible…Second, it pushes the assimilated being towards collaboration with his old clan. ‘You will never escape who you are so you better be proud of it’” (34). But it does not stop there. The Zionist lobbies tell the assimilated Jew “You will never escape who you are so why not be proud of it and work with us.” Indeed, this very assertion undermines a moral foundation as it forces the American Jew to succumb to that “primary quality” of Jewish-ness above loyalty to his nation. “First they are Jews and only then are they humanists” (35).
Zionism, as Atzmon notes, has used Jewish ‘separatism’ and its resulting ‘insecurity in relations with his fellow beings’ to coerce obedience and commitment. This tactic has been characteristic of the Zionist power since the Mandate period. In the Introduction to The Plight of the Palestinians, I presented evidence of such coercion from the classified documents of the British Mandate Police, most especially the Hagana Oath that forced an allegiance to the Zionist High Command:
The Haganah Oath goes deeper than fear. In effect, it declares that an individual has turned his/her conscience over to the High Command thus accepting what is right and what is wrong as determined by that authority regardless of local, state or international law, indeed, regardless of the morals, values and traditions of Judaism. This commitment is forever, to death.
From the moment an individual takes the oath, they are committed to a life of secrecy and hence of disloyalty and betrayal to those they are most intimate with in their day to day life. Neither their actions nor their true identity is discernible to those with whom they interact regularly. This is a life that encapsulates the necessity of lies, deceit, coercion, extortion, and obedience to a group that dictates the actions one must pursue; freedom no longer exists, self-direction no longer exists, loyalty to others no longer exists, indeed, friendship with others is compromised or impossible, one becomes the subject of that group, a veritable slave to their desires and wills. The mindset that promotes such control allows for spying, for deception of friends, for ostracism in one’s own community for thinking differently, for imprisonment without due process, for torture, even for extrajudicial executions. It is a total commitment to a cause that supersedes all others determined and dictated by an oligarchy in silence and subject to no legitimate institution and to no one (xxvi).
Atzmon elaborates on his contention that the Zionists intentionally manipulate Jewish separatism to their advantage by instilling a myth of persistent persecution against Jews as evidence of their need to support the Israeli enterprise, a virtual effort at ghetto building, and one that results in a form of Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome induced by a continual grand narrative of Israeli victimization caused by the Holocaust: being driven into the sea, being wiped off the map, delegitimized, all portend the impending disaster that awaits the Jewish state.
Such perception forces the Diaspora Jew to confront the significance of the promise and fulfillment of the Zionist dream, the return to Zion. “By bonding Eretz Yisrael and the Diaspora continuum, the Settler replaces the ‘negation of the Diaspora’ with a ‘negation of the Goyim’ (a return of the Jewish pre-Zionist condition).” This effectively stops the possibility of Jewish assimilation and promotes a return to tribal distinctiveness, albeit with political and global interests. Concomitantly, “It leaves the Diaspora Jew in limbo. He or she is neither assimilated into their surrounding social environment nor settled in a Jewish state” (43). Rejection then of the Zionist call must be understood as an act of treason or a form of self-hatred. Unfortunately, yet reflective of the symbolic nature of the legend of the Wandering Jew, “…it emphasizes the racist and expansionist Judeo-centric nature of the Jewish State. .. and the Diaspora Jew finds himself or herself intrinsically associated with a bigoted, ethnocentric ideology and an endless list of crimes against humanity” (43).
Chosen-ness determines its own end. What the Chosen believes through the books that give them their unique status must be truth. Since the words used are not theirs, but the words of their G-d, they are immune from the limitations of language (32). The Chosen need only respond to themselves to find identity, but in their affiliation with their group, not humanity at large. Atzmon notes that the religious understanding of Chosen-ness carries with it a moral burden to “stand as an exemplary model of ethical behavior,” but in the Zionist mind that has been “reduced to a crude, ethno-centric, blood-oriented chauvinism”… a kind of “tribal supremacism, in which ‘love yourself as much as you hate everyone else’ becomes a pragmatic reality” (86). Consequently, “This form of supremacy lies at the heart of the Zionist claim for Palestine, at the expense of its indigenous inhabitants” (87). Justice is not a consideration.
Perhaps the most insidious corruption imposed on the Jewish people and on their religion by the Zionists who garnered control of the new state of Israel was the manipulation of the Holocaust into both a religion and an industry. Norman Finkelstein covers the creation of the industry, Atzmon, with the help of Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a Latvian-born philosopher at the Hebrew University, and Adi Ophir, an Israeli philosopher and Associate Professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University, takes on the description and the consequences of transforming the Holocaust into a religion. Leibowitz, according to Uri Avnery (19.3.05, “Remember What? Remember How?), stated that “The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust.” Atzmon suggests that Lebowitz might have been the first to recognize that the Holocaust had been made into a religion with priests, prophets, commandments and dogmas, rituals and temples.
The Holocaust religion is, obviously, Judeo-centric to the bone. It defines the Jewish raison d’etre. For Zionist Jews, it signifies a total fatigue of the Diaspora, and regards the goy as a potential irrational murderer. This new Jewish religion preaches revenge. It could well be the most sinister religion known to man, for in the name of Jewish suffering, it issues licenses to kill, to flatten, to nuke, to annihilate, to loot, to ethnically cleanse. It has made vengeance into an acceptable Western value (127).
Let us return now to the wandering Jew of legend. In 1848, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “A Virtuoso’s Collection,” an exotic tale of the strange and fantastic that subsumes the legend in the personage of the Virtuoso.
Hawthorne uses the legend to capture that mystery of behaviour that has haunted writers for centuries, a mystery that still befuddles our scientists that search for an explanation for actions that seem devoid of “natural sympathies,” actions that elicit no response to human suffering, emotional or psychological, to physical pain and anguish, to loss of those loved, a child, a son or daughter, a father or mother, actions inflicted for no perceivable reason, where guilt has not been determined nor compassion considered. The legend captures the man that witnesses the suffering of the innocent, the Christ bearing His cross though guilty of nothing but the spirit of human compassion for his brothers and sisters, the sacrifice of atonement, yet mocks the innocent to “go on quicker,” for the Wanderer “is linked with the realities of this earth… to what I can see, and touch, and understand, and I ask for no more.” Nothing can stand in his way as he rushes through life acquiring all that this world can offer, and at any expense, regardless of his impact on others. “The soul is dead within him,” Hawthorne proclaims, the natural sympathy for his fellow humans does not exist.
Hawthorne grappled with this image of the lost soul, severed from the roots that carry all in the concept of humanity, where each is a brother or a sister to another and to all; where the teachings of the faiths that sustain humankind across the globe find love and compassion the fundamental life force that binds all and gives meaning to all; where mercy and kindness serve to heal and advance the commonweal; where the island that is this planet unites all humankind in bonds of necessary and never ending ties if there is to be a future for our children; this is the source of the human spirit that emanates from one all embracing soul that is the common experience of all that must endure the suffering and pain that is this life suffused and made endurable by the springs of love that give joy to the world. This is a concept that requires of all, sharing of all things, that each might survive despite the ravages of time and circumstance. It is the essence of all faiths that truly believe in the human spirit and the uncertainties that control our lives. It finds repulsive, as a consequence, those who seek to destroy the unity of spirit that binds all together in favour of personal gain, sought in the material acquisitions made possible in this world, regardless of the havoc wrought to achieve their ends.
The image of the Wandering Jew reflects that person who abandons his fellows for personal gain, who forfeits human love and compassion for the artefacts of this world gained at any expense, satisfied with the acquisition of wealth, of position, of power even when achieved by devastation and death since ultimately only he exists and all routes to his end are achieved. All humans are expendable and are, then, by definition inferior to the man free of moral or spiritual restraints.
The Wandering Jew is then, as metaphor, another rendering of the story of Cain who slew his brother, for which act he was cursed by God Almighty to wander the earth a fugitive…. The Wandering Jew, like Cain, is Everyman” (William A. Cook, “The Eternal Jew Goes on Forever,” 8/24/2009).
Gilad Atzmon brings us to this understanding as it applies in our day; he is our Hawthorne who journeys through our time to illuminate the consequences of actions that deny, indeed, that defy the oneness of humanity to benefit the few at the expense of the many. He writes a critical and devastating explanation of Jewishness as it has been manipulated to control the Jewish people and impose the will of the Zionist dictators in Israel and the U.S. on the American people through control of the U.S. Congress. He unravels the nuances that veil the arrogance, the deceit, and the hypocrisy of those in power, why they are so bound by terrorism and force, revealing in the process the horror of their betrayal and the emptiness of their words.
He comprehends Hawthorne’s description of the Virtuoso, the Wandering Jew, as it fittingly captures the mindset of those who impose a deterministic and amoral direction on political events both in the United Nations and the United States, “…there was a bitterness indefinably mingled with his tone, as of one cut off from natural sympathies, and blasted with a doom that had been inflicted on no other human being, and by the results of which he had ceased to be human. Yet…it seemed one of the most terrible consequences of that doom, that the victim no longer regarded it as a calamity, but had finally accepted it as the greatest good that could have befallen him.”
That frame of mind accepts no guilt because it has rejected personal conscience as the basis for actions in lieu of tribal security; the tribe alone determines right: individualism, natural rights, self-reliance, personal responsibility in a democracy no longer exists. This mindset, clustered in a functioning, global, tribal concentration of power, focuses on one voice, theirs. It denies democracy yet calls itself democratic; it speaks of universalism but protects only itself; it proclaims brotherhood with nations that exist by rule of law even as it defies all laws but its own; it presents itself as a nation imbued with the righteous morals of ancient times yet establishes policies that are apartheid in character.
To not defend this frame of mind is to damn self and the Jewishness that gives them an identity. It is in effect a self-inflicted torture; an incredibly powerful identity fabricated out of ancient tales that gives the most ordinary of them superiority over others who must be denigrated and even destroyed. It’s a tribal character, protection of the group at all cost or lose self in the multitudes with which one must live. It had a place in ancient days, but cannot exist in a world where 192 nations share covenants with each other based on equality, respect and human dignity.
To hold to their beliefs they must negate similarity and equity, as well as justice and freedom for all. Given the power they possess and the money they use to control the U.S. Congress and the British Parliament, with similar controls being exerted in Canada, Australia, France and Germany, as Atzmon graphically demonstrates, the dangers of an elite few dominating the direction of international policies threatens international security and the quest for peace.
This 21st century Jew, like Jeremiah of old, wanders the world warning of an impending doom hidden behind the mask of civility that is the Israeli state. The world meets this nation in the halls of the United Nations through its pin-striped representatives who speak fluently and even eloquently of rights, of democracy, of justice, of self-defense, and of terrorism that threatens the civilized world. Yet behind that mask of civility reside a nation and its fascist belligerent leaders whose sole purpose is to control the very organizations erected to bring equity and justice to all. Their purpose, to gain time to achieve their end, the creation of Eretz Yisrael through the continuing ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people. Gilad Atzmon fears this end for the Jews and defies the Zionists that preach it. The Wandering Who proclaims the choice; we are Everyman, one in soul, one in sympathy, one in respect and dignity for all humanity.
William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, and The Plight of the Palestinians published a year ago. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or through his web sitewww.drwilliamacook.com.
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Gilad Atzmon’s insight into the organism created by the Zionist movement in his book, The Wandering Who, is explosive; it tears the veil off of Israel’s apparent civility, its apparent friendship with the United States, and its expressed solicitude for western powers—Britain, Canada, Australia, France and Germany—exposing behind the veil, the assassin ready to slay any and all that interfere with its tribally focused ends. In February of this year, Atzmon characterized Islam and Judaism as tribally oriented belief systems rooted not in “enlightened individualism,” but rather in “…the survival of the extended family.” These belief systems have nothing to do with personal liberties or personal rights; they have to do with securing the realm of their respective “ways of life.” But unlike tribalism in Islam, tribalism in Judaism “can never live in peace with humanism and universalism” (4). “Both religions stand as systems that provide thorough answers in terms of spiritual, civil, cultural and day to day matters.” In this regard, “…both Islam and Judaism are more than just religions: they convey an entire ‘way of life,’ and
The Wandering Who is a personal journey of a man born in Jerusalem, raised in the Jewish ‘way of life,’ infused with the myths of the founding of the Jewish state; “Supremacy was brewed into our soul, we gazed at the world through racist, chauvinistic binoculars. And we felt no shame about it either” (5). Inducted into the Israeli military during the 1980s he served in Lebanon, and, in his late teens, experienced an epiphany caused in good measure by careful listening to voices beyond the wall that encircled him in the ghetto that is the Israeli state. This epiphany forced a distinction in identity versus identifying, between self-reliance and obedient servant to an ideology, a distinction that recognized Jews as people, Judaism as a religion, and Jewishness, an ideology that determines identity politics and a resulting political discourse.
What, then, characterizes a Jew? Atzmon distinguishes among those who follow the Judaic religion; those who regard themselves as a human being who happens to be of Jewish origin; and those who put their Jewishness over and above all other traits. Chaim Weizman, the first Israeli President and a Zionist, identified being a Jew as a ‘primary quality’ above citizenship, occupation, head of household, indeed “Jewishness becomes the key element and fundamental characteristic of one’s being.” Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote “…the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical racial type are Jewish” (“A Letter on Autonomy,” 1904). It is this identifying principle that Atzmon sees as corrosive, not only to Judaism, but to the safety and security of the Jewish people, their friends and their neighbors. “…probably then and there I left Chosen-ness behind to become an ordinary human being” (6). “For me to be Jewish is, above all, to be preoccupied with overcoming injustice and thirsting for justice in the world, and that means being respectful toward other peoples regardless of their nationality or religion, and empathetic in the face of human suffering whoever and wherever victimization is encountered” (“On Jewish Identity,” 1/15/2011).
Significantly, Atzmon turns to the ancient tale of the wandering Jew to reap the complexities inherent in the contradictions that beset Judaism in today’s world: tribalism versus universalism, chosen-ness versus democratic equality, rule by defiance of law versus nations ruled by law, control of government by Zionist controlled ideology versus responsiveness to the voice of the citizenry, and tribalistic morality where morals are fabricated for political utilitarian ends versus the inalienable rights of all endowed by nature.
The legend’s primary symbolic value resides in its identification of ‘otherness,’ the unique concept of ‘chosen-ness,’ that separates the Jews from the rest of humanity resulting in an ideological and psychological isolation that becomes a strategic tool used by the Zionists and the Neo-Cons to manipulate the Jewish people and the formation of the Jewish state. Jabotinsky and Weizmann’s “primary quality” of Jewishness prevents assimilation, thus forcing the Jew to remain always an alien wherever he or she resides. Personal identification can only exist in the tribe, a virtual and absolute commitment to Jewishness, making possible the use of Jews around the world as “sayanims” (assistants) to further the goals of the Jewish state (17). “The sayan is a person who would betray the nation of which he is a citizen out of devotion to a notion of a clannish brotherhood” (17).
There are thousands of sayanim around the world. In London alone, there are about 2,000 who are active, and another 5,000 on the list. They fulfill many different roles. A car sayan…running a rental agency, could help the Mossad rent a car without having to complete the usual documentation. … a bank sayan could get you money if you needed it in the middle of the night, a doctor sayan would treat a bullet wound without reporting it to the police…The idea is to have a pool of people available when needed who can provide services but will keep quiet about them out of loyalty to the cause (17).
“In Zionist eyes Jewishness is an international network operation…to be a Jew is a deep commitment that goes far beyond any legal or moral order” (19). Atzmon identifies a functioning organism controlled by Zionist ideology and Neo-Con sayanim in the United States that has yoked Israeli interests to those of the United States using a document titled the USA Defense Planning Guidance Report for fiscal years 1994-1999. “In the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, we seek to foster regional stability, deter aggression against our friends and interests in the region, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways and to the region’s oil. The United States is committed to the security of Israel and to maintaining the qualitative edge that is critical to Israel’s security.” (22). This manipulative strategy “transformed the Jewish tribal mode into a collective functioning system.” It also transformed “the American and British armies into a Zionist mission force” as Israel and the Neo-Cons manipulated the governments of the UK and the US to attack Israel’s enemies in Iraq while imposing sanctions on Syria and defending its occupation and oppression of the Palestinians and its wanton destruction of Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008-2009.
Atzmon illuminates the inner soul, or more correctly, the lack thereof, of the Israeli state as it has evolved from early Zionism to a politically astute merger of ancient Judaism with secular purposes to attain its goals. It is in this respect the abortive grandchild of Leo Strauss, a Professor and teacher of Paul Wolfowitz and the Neo-Cons who clustered about his determinist altar—Richard Perle (former Defense Policy Board Chairman), William Kristol (Chief Editor of the Weekly Standard), Gary Schmitt (Chairman and Director of the Project for the New American Century), Stephen Campone (Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Rumsfeld), Abram Shulsky (friend of Perle and head of Rumsfeld’s special intelligence unit sometimes characterized as the “Specious Planning Unit”), Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who are connected through the PNAC (Project for the New American Century)—all “leaders” of course accepting without question a brand of determinism that controlled human life with some born to lead and the vast majority born to follow.
I had tracked the emergence of this cult that came to power in an article published in 2003, “Moral Insanity: the Cabal that Corrupts,” and offer two paragraphs that capture the consequences of this deception.
Since Strauss taught that nature’s determinism thrust the “wise few” into positions of leadership over the “vulgar many,” and since virtue is defined by the elite who rule, and since morality does not exist, and since justice is merely the interest of the stronger, and since the rule of the wise is absolute, authoritarian and unquestionable, and since religion is “the glue that holds society together,” using religion for political ends, like lying, deception, secrecy, and intimidation, is a good necessary to achieve the determined goals of the government. Manipulation of the “vulgar masses” becomes an end in itself and the distortion of words and concepts becomes the means to that end…
Only a Straussian Cultist would have the arrogance to create a National and International policy on behalf of 300 million people when they represented none of them. Two years later, a year after 9/11, this report became “The National Security Strategy Report of the United States of America,” a document that details how America will act, nationally and internationally, during the second Bush regime. Needless to say, few Americans ever saw the details of this report before it became policy—not the average American citizen nor their representatives in Congress nor the Senate. Yet we are the ones who must pay for the plans these men designed, be victims of the world’s censure as they carry out their designs, and fall prey to their restrictions on civil liberties imposed by this regime as “security measures.”
Atzmon’s analysis reveals strategies used by the Zionists to control their population: “Some marginal politicians seek to publically ‘shame’ their integrated brothers and sisters. This serves two purposes. First, it conveys a clear message that real assimilation is impossible…Second, it pushes the assimilated being towards collaboration with his old clan. ‘You will never escape who you are so you better be proud of it’” (34). But it does not stop there. The Zionist lobbies tell the assimilated Jew “You will never escape who you are so why not be proud of it and work with us.” Indeed, this very assertion undermines a moral foundation as it forces the American Jew to succumb to that “primary quality” of Jewish-ness above loyalty to his nation. “First they are Jews and only then are they humanists” (35).
Zionism, as Atzmon notes, has used Jewish ‘separatism’ and its resulting ‘insecurity in relations with his fellow beings’ to coerce obedience and commitment. This tactic has been characteristic of the Zionist power since the Mandate period. In the Introduction to The Plight of the Palestinians, I presented evidence of such coercion from the classified documents of the British Mandate Police, most especially the Hagana Oath that forced an allegiance to the Zionist High Command:
The Haganah Oath goes deeper than fear. In effect, it declares that an individual has turned his/her conscience over to the High Command thus accepting what is right and what is wrong as determined by that authority regardless of local, state or international law, indeed, regardless of the morals, values and traditions of Judaism. This commitment is forever, to death.
From the moment an individual takes the oath, they are committed to a life of secrecy and hence of disloyalty and betrayal to those they are most intimate with in their day to day life. Neither their actions nor their true identity is discernible to those with whom they interact regularly. This is a life that encapsulates the necessity of lies, deceit, coercion, extortion, and obedience to a group that dictates the actions one must pursue; freedom no longer exists, self-direction no longer exists, loyalty to others no longer exists, indeed, friendship with others is compromised or impossible, one becomes the subject of that group, a veritable slave to their desires and wills. The mindset that promotes such control allows for spying, for deception of friends, for ostracism in one’s own community for thinking differently, for imprisonment without due process, for torture, even for extrajudicial executions. It is a total commitment to a cause that supersedes all others determined and dictated by an oligarchy in silence and subject to no legitimate institution and to no one (xxvi).
Atzmon elaborates on his contention that the Zionists intentionally manipulate Jewish separatism to their advantage by instilling a myth of persistent persecution against Jews as evidence of their need to support the Israeli enterprise, a virtual effort at ghetto building, and one that results in a form of Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome induced by a continual grand narrative of Israeli victimization caused by the Holocaust: being driven into the sea, being wiped off the map, delegitimized, all portend the impending disaster that awaits the Jewish state.
Such perception forces the Diaspora Jew to confront the significance of the promise and fulfillment of the Zionist dream, the return to Zion. “By bonding Eretz Yisrael and the Diaspora continuum, the Settler replaces the ‘negation of the Diaspora’ with a ‘negation of the Goyim’ (a return of the Jewish pre-Zionist condition).” This effectively stops the possibility of Jewish assimilation and promotes a return to tribal distinctiveness, albeit with political and global interests. Concomitantly, “It leaves the Diaspora Jew in limbo. He or she is neither assimilated into their surrounding social environment nor settled in a Jewish state” (43). Rejection then of the Zionist call must be understood as an act of treason or a form of self-hatred. Unfortunately, yet reflective of the symbolic nature of the legend of the Wandering Jew, “…it emphasizes the racist and expansionist Judeo-centric nature of the Jewish State. .. and the Diaspora Jew finds himself or herself intrinsically associated with a bigoted, ethnocentric ideology and an endless list of crimes against humanity” (43).
Chosen-ness determines its own end. What the Chosen believes through the books that give them their unique status must be truth. Since the words used are not theirs, but the words of their G-d, they are immune from the limitations of language (32). The Chosen need only respond to themselves to find identity, but in their affiliation with their group, not humanity at large. Atzmon notes that the religious understanding of Chosen-ness carries with it a moral burden to “stand as an exemplary model of ethical behavior,” but in the Zionist mind that has been “reduced to a crude, ethno-centric, blood-oriented chauvinism”… a kind of “tribal supremacism, in which ‘love yourself as much as you hate everyone else’ becomes a pragmatic reality” (86). Consequently, “This form of supremacy lies at the heart of the Zionist claim for Palestine, at the expense of its indigenous inhabitants” (87). Justice is not a consideration.
Perhaps the most insidious corruption imposed on the Jewish people and on their religion by the Zionists who garnered control of the new state of Israel was the manipulation of the Holocaust into both a religion and an industry. Norman Finkelstein covers the creation of the industry, Atzmon, with the help of Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a Latvian-born philosopher at the Hebrew University, and Adi Ophir, an Israeli philosopher and Associate Professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University, takes on the description and the consequences of transforming the Holocaust into a religion. Leibowitz, according to Uri Avnery (19.3.05, “Remember What? Remember How?), stated that “The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust.” Atzmon suggests that Lebowitz might have been the first to recognize that the Holocaust had been made into a religion with priests, prophets, commandments and dogmas, rituals and temples.
The Holocaust religion is, obviously, Judeo-centric to the bone. It defines the Jewish raison d’etre. For Zionist Jews, it signifies a total fatigue of the Diaspora, and regards the goy as a potential irrational murderer. This new Jewish religion preaches revenge. It could well be the most sinister religion known to man, for in the name of Jewish suffering, it issues licenses to kill, to flatten, to nuke, to annihilate, to loot, to ethnically cleanse. It has made vengeance into an acceptable Western value (127).
Let us return now to the wandering Jew of legend. In 1848, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “A Virtuoso’s Collection,” an exotic tale of the strange and fantastic that subsumes the legend in the personage of the Virtuoso.
Hawthorne uses the legend to capture that mystery of behaviour that has haunted writers for centuries, a mystery that still befuddles our scientists that search for an explanation for actions that seem devoid of “natural sympathies,” actions that elicit no response to human suffering, emotional or psychological, to physical pain and anguish, to loss of those loved, a child, a son or daughter, a father or mother, actions inflicted for no perceivable reason, where guilt has not been determined nor compassion considered. The legend captures the man that witnesses the suffering of the innocent, the Christ bearing His cross though guilty of nothing but the spirit of human compassion for his brothers and sisters, the sacrifice of atonement, yet mocks the innocent to “go on quicker,” for the Wanderer “is linked with the realities of this earth… to what I can see, and touch, and understand, and I ask for no more.” Nothing can stand in his way as he rushes through life acquiring all that this world can offer, and at any expense, regardless of his impact on others. “The soul is dead within him,” Hawthorne proclaims, the natural sympathy for his fellow humans does not exist.
Hawthorne grappled with this image of the lost soul, severed from the roots that carry all in the concept of humanity, where each is a brother or a sister to another and to all; where the teachings of the faiths that sustain humankind across the globe find love and compassion the fundamental life force that binds all and gives meaning to all; where mercy and kindness serve to heal and advance the commonweal; where the island that is this planet unites all humankind in bonds of necessary and never ending ties if there is to be a future for our children; this is the source of the human spirit that emanates from one all embracing soul that is the common experience of all that must endure the suffering and pain that is this life suffused and made endurable by the springs of love that give joy to the world. This is a concept that requires of all, sharing of all things, that each might survive despite the ravages of time and circumstance. It is the essence of all faiths that truly believe in the human spirit and the uncertainties that control our lives. It finds repulsive, as a consequence, those who seek to destroy the unity of spirit that binds all together in favour of personal gain, sought in the material acquisitions made possible in this world, regardless of the havoc wrought to achieve their ends.
The image of the Wandering Jew reflects that person who abandons his fellows for personal gain, who forfeits human love and compassion for the artefacts of this world gained at any expense, satisfied with the acquisition of wealth, of position, of power even when achieved by devastation and death since ultimately only he exists and all routes to his end are achieved. All humans are expendable and are, then, by definition inferior to the man free of moral or spiritual restraints.
The Wandering Jew is then, as metaphor, another rendering of the story of Cain who slew his brother, for which act he was cursed by God Almighty to wander the earth a fugitive…. The Wandering Jew, like Cain, is Everyman” (William A. Cook, “The Eternal Jew Goes on Forever,” 8/24/2009).
Gilad Atzmon brings us to this understanding as it applies in our day; he is our Hawthorne who journeys through our time to illuminate the consequences of actions that deny, indeed, that defy the oneness of humanity to benefit the few at the expense of the many. He writes a critical and devastating explanation of Jewishness as it has been manipulated to control the Jewish people and impose the will of the Zionist dictators in Israel and the U.S. on the American people through control of the U.S. Congress. He unravels the nuances that veil the arrogance, the deceit, and the hypocrisy of those in power, why they are so bound by terrorism and force, revealing in the process the horror of their betrayal and the emptiness of their words.
He comprehends Hawthorne’s description of the Virtuoso, the Wandering Jew, as it fittingly captures the mindset of those who impose a deterministic and amoral direction on political events both in the United Nations and the United States, “…there was a bitterness indefinably mingled with his tone, as of one cut off from natural sympathies, and blasted with a doom that had been inflicted on no other human being, and by the results of which he had ceased to be human. Yet…it seemed one of the most terrible consequences of that doom, that the victim no longer regarded it as a calamity, but had finally accepted it as the greatest good that could have befallen him.”
That frame of mind accepts no guilt because it has rejected personal conscience as the basis for actions in lieu of tribal security; the tribe alone determines right: individualism, natural rights, self-reliance, personal responsibility in a democracy no longer exists. This mindset, clustered in a functioning, global, tribal concentration of power, focuses on one voice, theirs. It denies democracy yet calls itself democratic; it speaks of universalism but protects only itself; it proclaims brotherhood with nations that exist by rule of law even as it defies all laws but its own; it presents itself as a nation imbued with the righteous morals of ancient times yet establishes policies that are apartheid in character.
To not defend this frame of mind is to damn self and the Jewishness that gives them an identity. It is in effect a self-inflicted torture; an incredibly powerful identity fabricated out of ancient tales that gives the most ordinary of them superiority over others who must be denigrated and even destroyed. It’s a tribal character, protection of the group at all cost or lose self in the multitudes with which one must live. It had a place in ancient days, but cannot exist in a world where 192 nations share covenants with each other based on equality, respect and human dignity.
To hold to their beliefs they must negate similarity and equity, as well as justice and freedom for all. Given the power they possess and the money they use to control the U.S. Congress and the British Parliament, with similar controls being exerted in Canada, Australia, France and Germany, as Atzmon graphically demonstrates, the dangers of an elite few dominating the direction of international policies threatens international security and the quest for peace.
This 21st century Jew, like Jeremiah of old, wanders the world warning of an impending doom hidden behind the mask of civility that is the Israeli state. The world meets this nation in the halls of the United Nations through its pin-striped representatives who speak fluently and even eloquently of rights, of democracy, of justice, of self-defense, and of terrorism that threatens the civilized world. Yet behind that mask of civility reside a nation and its fascist belligerent leaders whose sole purpose is to control the very organizations erected to bring equity and justice to all. Their purpose, to gain time to achieve their end, the creation of Eretz Yisrael through the continuing ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people. Gilad Atzmon fears this end for the Jews and defies the Zionists that preach it. The Wandering Who proclaims the choice; we are Everyman, one in soul, one in sympathy, one in respect and dignity for all humanity.
William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, and The Plight of the Palestinians published a year ago. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or through his web sitewww.drwilliamacook.com.
What the Auction House’s Lockout Tells Us About the Future of Work in America The Sotheby’s Economy by ARI PAUL
WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2011
6
While most of America suffers through recession and unemployment, luxury retailers and service providers are doing quite well. With corporate profits remaining high, the moneyed elites continue to enjoy 5-star hotels, private jets, fancy jewelry, and splendid works of art. Their friends commanding those industries couldn’t be happier.
Such is the case with Sotheby’s, the famous art auction house in Manhattan, New York, which reported $680 million in gross profits last year, its largest take in its history. And the company’s assault on the very workers who make it what it is represents one of the darkest aspects of America’s jobless economic recovery.
Sotheby’s abruptly cut off contract negotiations with Teamsters Local 814, which represents its 43 art handlers, demanding that they accept a 10 percent wage cut, caps on overtime and an end to their retirement benefits. The workers have been locked out without pay since August 1. To add insult to injury, the company two days announced that its net income for the last quarter was up 48 percent from the previous year–the “best quarter in Sotheby’s history,” bragged company president Bill Ruprecht.
“They want to bring in low wage non-union laborers to contribute: no benefits, low wages, no rights on the job, that whole package, and not necessarily people who have art handling experience,” said union president Jason Ide, a former art handler. “We think it’s a risk to put masterpieces in the hands of these replacement laborers.”
(Disclosure: Ide and I were college classmates and active in the student anti-sweatshop movement, and have remained friends since then.)
The lockout shocked the union, as the two sides hadn’t yet hit an impasse and the company had publicly vowed to bargain in good faith. Ide added that the other major auction house, Christie’s, has already settled a contract with the union. Since the lockout out began, Sotheby’s management has not explained why it is demanding such deep cuts, but Ide can only speculate that the company has been influenced by the anti-union law firm Jackson Lewis, which it had brought in to represent it for the contract talks. “It’s just a power grab, really,” Ide said.
The union’s campaign has been to put pressure on the small but wealthy circle of fine art consumers. “The art world kind of picks up in September,” Ide explained. Locked out workers intend to demonstrate at major events in New York City where Sotheby’s clients will be present, telling them that they are about to spend millions on a work of art that won’t be transported a seasoned professional, but by a random Joe with little specialized training looking for a gig. Ide claims the union already has photos of damaged art works.
On the one hand, with so much economic bad news in the United States, the plight of these 43 workers might seem insignificant. But this is a microcosm of the decline of working America, in the context of the ongoing jobless economic recovery.
Historically, bitter labor disputes have two sides. Workers want their wages to keep up with the rising cost of living, while companies contend that they must deal with losses, the whopping costs of providing health care and competition. The Sotheby’s case and others take America’s labor question into new territory. Last summer, the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group forced more than 200 workers to strike when it demanded deep cuts to worker pay and benefits at an upstate New York food and drink plant, all while boasting about rising profits through its recession.
And 45,000 workers at the telecom giant Verzion recently ended a strike; the company, while taking in $19 billion in profits over the four years demanded $1 billion in pay and benefit givebacks from workers.
Like these workers, Sotheby’s art handlers don’t get rich, but they make a living. And that is precisely what these bosses have a problem; no longer does their greed need an economic justification. Instead they demand lower wages and fewer benefits for their workers not because these costs are too burdensome, but simply because they are ideologically motivated to widen the wealth gap at all costs, and know that there are plenty of jobless Americans who are willing to work for peanuts.
The labor conflict at Sotheby’s is a demonstration of how far the American economy has fallen from the ideal standard of American industry in which profitable companies can only sustain themselves if their workers can afford to be consumers in the marketplace. Because of employers like Sotheby’s, the phrase “Be lucky you have a job,” will soon be “Be lucky to be a serf.”
Ari Paul is a contributor to Free Speech Radio News and the Indypendent. His articles have also appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Z Magazine and The American Prospect.
6
While most of America suffers through recession and unemployment, luxury retailers and service providers are doing quite well. With corporate profits remaining high, the moneyed elites continue to enjoy 5-star hotels, private jets, fancy jewelry, and splendid works of art. Their friends commanding those industries couldn’t be happier.
Such is the case with Sotheby’s, the famous art auction house in Manhattan, New York, which reported $680 million in gross profits last year, its largest take in its history. And the company’s assault on the very workers who make it what it is represents one of the darkest aspects of America’s jobless economic recovery.
Sotheby’s abruptly cut off contract negotiations with Teamsters Local 814, which represents its 43 art handlers, demanding that they accept a 10 percent wage cut, caps on overtime and an end to their retirement benefits. The workers have been locked out without pay since August 1. To add insult to injury, the company two days announced that its net income for the last quarter was up 48 percent from the previous year–the “best quarter in Sotheby’s history,” bragged company president Bill Ruprecht.
“They want to bring in low wage non-union laborers to contribute: no benefits, low wages, no rights on the job, that whole package, and not necessarily people who have art handling experience,” said union president Jason Ide, a former art handler. “We think it’s a risk to put masterpieces in the hands of these replacement laborers.”
(Disclosure: Ide and I were college classmates and active in the student anti-sweatshop movement, and have remained friends since then.)
The lockout shocked the union, as the two sides hadn’t yet hit an impasse and the company had publicly vowed to bargain in good faith. Ide added that the other major auction house, Christie’s, has already settled a contract with the union. Since the lockout out began, Sotheby’s management has not explained why it is demanding such deep cuts, but Ide can only speculate that the company has been influenced by the anti-union law firm Jackson Lewis, which it had brought in to represent it for the contract talks. “It’s just a power grab, really,” Ide said.
The union’s campaign has been to put pressure on the small but wealthy circle of fine art consumers. “The art world kind of picks up in September,” Ide explained. Locked out workers intend to demonstrate at major events in New York City where Sotheby’s clients will be present, telling them that they are about to spend millions on a work of art that won’t be transported a seasoned professional, but by a random Joe with little specialized training looking for a gig. Ide claims the union already has photos of damaged art works.
On the one hand, with so much economic bad news in the United States, the plight of these 43 workers might seem insignificant. But this is a microcosm of the decline of working America, in the context of the ongoing jobless economic recovery.
Historically, bitter labor disputes have two sides. Workers want their wages to keep up with the rising cost of living, while companies contend that they must deal with losses, the whopping costs of providing health care and competition. The Sotheby’s case and others take America’s labor question into new territory. Last summer, the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group forced more than 200 workers to strike when it demanded deep cuts to worker pay and benefits at an upstate New York food and drink plant, all while boasting about rising profits through its recession.
And 45,000 workers at the telecom giant Verzion recently ended a strike; the company, while taking in $19 billion in profits over the four years demanded $1 billion in pay and benefit givebacks from workers.
Like these workers, Sotheby’s art handlers don’t get rich, but they make a living. And that is precisely what these bosses have a problem; no longer does their greed need an economic justification. Instead they demand lower wages and fewer benefits for their workers not because these costs are too burdensome, but simply because they are ideologically motivated to widen the wealth gap at all costs, and know that there are plenty of jobless Americans who are willing to work for peanuts.
The labor conflict at Sotheby’s is a demonstration of how far the American economy has fallen from the ideal standard of American industry in which profitable companies can only sustain themselves if their workers can afford to be consumers in the marketplace. Because of employers like Sotheby’s, the phrase “Be lucky you have a job,” will soon be “Be lucky to be a serf.”
Ari Paul is a contributor to Free Speech Radio News and the Indypendent. His articles have also appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Z Magazine and The American Prospect.
A Shot Heard Round the Continent The New Scramble for Africa by CONN HALLINAN
WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2011
15
Is current U.S. foreign policy in Africa following a blueprint drawn up almost eight years ago by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, one of the most conservative think tanks in the world? While it seems odd that a Democratic administration would have anything in common with the extremists at Heritage, the convergence in policy and practice between the two is disturbing.
Heritage, with help from Joseph Coors and the Scaife Foundations, was founded in 1973 by the late Paul Weyrich, one of the most conservative thinkers in the U.S. and a co-founder of the Moral Majority. While the Moral Majority whipped up the culture wars against abortion and gays, Heritage lobbied for an aggressive foreign policy and American military supremacy.
In October 2003, James Carafano and Nile Gardiner, two Heritage Foundation heavyweights, proposed a major shift in U.S. military policy vis-à-vis the African continent. Carafano is a West Point graduate who heads up the Foundation’s foreign policy section, and Gardiner is the director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.
In a “Backgrounder” article entitled “U.S. Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution,” the two called for the creation of a military command for the continent, a focus on fighting “terrorism,” and direct military intervention using air power and naval forces if “vital U.S. interests are at stake.” Such interventions should avoid using ground troops, the authors argue, and should include the participation of other allies.
Almost every element of that proposal has come together over the past year, though some pieces, like African Command (Africom) and the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative, were in place before the Obama administration took office.
The Libya war seems almost straight off of Heritage’s drawing board. While the U.S. appeared to take a back seat to its allies, NATO would not have been able to carry out the war without massive amounts of U.S. military help. It was the U.S. who took out the Libyan anti-air craft systems, blockaded the coast, collected the electronic intelligence, fueled the warplanes, and supplied munitions when NATO ran low.
While the UN resolution forbade using ground troops, U.S. special forces and CIA teams, along with special units from Britain, France, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates organized the rebels, coordinated air strikes, and eventually pulled off an amphibious operation that sealed Tripoli’s fate.
The Heritage scholars were also clear what they meant by vital U.S. interests:
“With its vast natural and mineral resources, Africa remains strategically important to the West, as it has been for hundreds of years, and its geostrategic significance is likely to rise in the 21st century. According to the National Intelligence Council, the United States is likely to draw 25 percent of its oil from West Africa by 2015, surpassing the volume imported from the Persian Gulf.”
It was a sentiment shared by the Bush Administration. “West Africa’s oil has become a national strategic interest,” said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Walter Kansteiner in 2002.
The UN tasked NATO with protecting civilians in Libya, but France, Britain, the U.S. and their Gulf allies focused on regime change. Indeed, when leaders of the African Union (AU) pushed for negotiations aimed at a political settlement, NATO and the rebels brusquely dismissed them.
The NATO bombing “really undermined the AU’s initiates and effort to deal with the matter in Libya,” complained South African President Jacob Zuma. More than 200 prominent Africans released a letter Aug. 24 condemning the “misuse of the United Nations Security Council to engage in militarized diplomacy to effect regime change in Libya,” as well as the “marginalization of the African Union.”
The suspicion that the Libya war had more to do with oil and gas than protecting civilians is why the AU has balked at recognizing the rebel Transitional National Council. For much of Africa, the Libya war was a “shot heard ‘round the continent,” and there is a growing unease at the West’s “militarized diplomacy.”
Though the Defense Department’s African Contingency Operation Training and Assistance Program, the U.S. is actively engaged in training the militaries of Mali, Chad, Niger, Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Gabon, Zambia, Uganda, Senegal, Mozambique, Ghana and Malawi, and Mauretania.
In June 2006, NATO troops stormed ashore on Sao Vicente island in the Cape Verde archipelago in operation “Steadfast Jaguar” (an odd choice of monikers, since jaguars are natives of the New World, not Africa). The exercise, which brought together a host of nations, including France, Germany, Spain, Greece, the U.S. and Poland, was aimed at “protecting energy supplies” in the Niger Delta and Gulf of Guinea.
Major oil producers in the region include Angola, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Chad and Mauritania.
Protecting energy supplies from whom?
In the case of the Niger Delta, it means protecting oil companies and the Nigerian government from local people fed up with the pollution that is killing them, and corruption that denies them any benefits from their resources. Under the umbrella of the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), locals are waging a low-key guerilla war that at one point reduced oil supplies by 20 percent.
MEND is certainly suspicious of American motives in the region. “Of course, it is evident that oil is the key concern of the U.S. in establishing African Command,” says the organization’s spokesman, Jomo Gbomo.
The Nigerian government labels a number of restive groups in Nigeria as “terrorist” and links them to al-Qaeda, including Boko Haram in the country’s north.
But labeling opponents “terrorists” or raising the al-Qaeda specter is an easy way to dismiss what may be real local grievances. For instance, Boko Haram’s growing penchant for violence is more likely a response to the heavy handedness of the Nigerian Army than an al-Qaeda inspired campaign.
Terrorism and the protection of civilians may be the public rationale for intervention, but the bottom line looks suspiciously like business. Before the guns go silent in Libya, one British business leader complained to The Independent that Britain was behind the curve on securing opportunities. “It‘s all politics, no commercial stuff. I think that is a mistake. We need to be getting down there as soon as possible,”
The Spanish oil company Reposal and the Italian company Eni are already gearing up for production. “Eni will play a No.1 role in the future,” says Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini. Almost 70 percent of Libya’s oil goes to four countries, Spain, Germany, France and Italy. Qatar, which is already handing oil sales in Eastern Libya, will also be on the ground floor as production ramps up.
A major loser in the war—and some would argue, not by accident—is China. Beijing had some 75 companies working in Libya and 36,000 personnel, and accounted for about 11 percent of Libya’s pre-war exports. But because China complained that NATO had unilaterally changed the UN resolution from protecting civilians to regime change, Beijing is likely to suffer. Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager of the rebel oil firm AGOCO told Reuters that China, Brazil and Russia would be frozen out of contracts.
Brazil and Russia also supported negotiations and complained about NATO’s interpretation of the UN resolution on Libya.
For Heritage, keeping China out of Africa is what it is all about. Peter Brookes, the former principal Republican advisor for East Asia on the House Committee on International Relations, warned that China was hell-bent on challenging the U.S. and becoming a global power, and key to that is expanding its interests in Africa. “In a throwback to the Maoist revolutionary days of the 1960s and 1970s and the Cold War, Beijing has once again identified the African continent as an area of strategic interest,” he told a Heritage Foundation audience in a talk entitled “Into Africa: China’s Grab for Influence and Oil.”
Beijing gets about one third of its oil from Africa—Angola and Sudan are its major suppliers—plus important materials like platinum, copper, timber and iron ore.
Africa is rife with problems, but terrorism is not high on that list. A severe drought has blistered much of East Africa, and, with food prices rising, malnutrition is spreading continent-wide. The “war on terrorism” has generated 800,000 refugees from Somalia. African civilians do, indeed, need help, but not the kind you get from fighter-bombers, drone strikes, or Tomahawk cruise missiles dispatched at the urging of right-wing think tanks or international energy companies.
Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com
15
Is current U.S. foreign policy in Africa following a blueprint drawn up almost eight years ago by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, one of the most conservative think tanks in the world? While it seems odd that a Democratic administration would have anything in common with the extremists at Heritage, the convergence in policy and practice between the two is disturbing.
Heritage, with help from Joseph Coors and the Scaife Foundations, was founded in 1973 by the late Paul Weyrich, one of the most conservative thinkers in the U.S. and a co-founder of the Moral Majority. While the Moral Majority whipped up the culture wars against abortion and gays, Heritage lobbied for an aggressive foreign policy and American military supremacy.
In October 2003, James Carafano and Nile Gardiner, two Heritage Foundation heavyweights, proposed a major shift in U.S. military policy vis-à-vis the African continent. Carafano is a West Point graduate who heads up the Foundation’s foreign policy section, and Gardiner is the director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.
In a “Backgrounder” article entitled “U.S. Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution,” the two called for the creation of a military command for the continent, a focus on fighting “terrorism,” and direct military intervention using air power and naval forces if “vital U.S. interests are at stake.” Such interventions should avoid using ground troops, the authors argue, and should include the participation of other allies.
Almost every element of that proposal has come together over the past year, though some pieces, like African Command (Africom) and the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative, were in place before the Obama administration took office.
The Libya war seems almost straight off of Heritage’s drawing board. While the U.S. appeared to take a back seat to its allies, NATO would not have been able to carry out the war without massive amounts of U.S. military help. It was the U.S. who took out the Libyan anti-air craft systems, blockaded the coast, collected the electronic intelligence, fueled the warplanes, and supplied munitions when NATO ran low.
While the UN resolution forbade using ground troops, U.S. special forces and CIA teams, along with special units from Britain, France, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates organized the rebels, coordinated air strikes, and eventually pulled off an amphibious operation that sealed Tripoli’s fate.
The Heritage scholars were also clear what they meant by vital U.S. interests:
“With its vast natural and mineral resources, Africa remains strategically important to the West, as it has been for hundreds of years, and its geostrategic significance is likely to rise in the 21st century. According to the National Intelligence Council, the United States is likely to draw 25 percent of its oil from West Africa by 2015, surpassing the volume imported from the Persian Gulf.”
It was a sentiment shared by the Bush Administration. “West Africa’s oil has become a national strategic interest,” said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Walter Kansteiner in 2002.
The UN tasked NATO with protecting civilians in Libya, but France, Britain, the U.S. and their Gulf allies focused on regime change. Indeed, when leaders of the African Union (AU) pushed for negotiations aimed at a political settlement, NATO and the rebels brusquely dismissed them.
The NATO bombing “really undermined the AU’s initiates and effort to deal with the matter in Libya,” complained South African President Jacob Zuma. More than 200 prominent Africans released a letter Aug. 24 condemning the “misuse of the United Nations Security Council to engage in militarized diplomacy to effect regime change in Libya,” as well as the “marginalization of the African Union.”
The suspicion that the Libya war had more to do with oil and gas than protecting civilians is why the AU has balked at recognizing the rebel Transitional National Council. For much of Africa, the Libya war was a “shot heard ‘round the continent,” and there is a growing unease at the West’s “militarized diplomacy.”
Though the Defense Department’s African Contingency Operation Training and Assistance Program, the U.S. is actively engaged in training the militaries of Mali, Chad, Niger, Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Gabon, Zambia, Uganda, Senegal, Mozambique, Ghana and Malawi, and Mauretania.
In June 2006, NATO troops stormed ashore on Sao Vicente island in the Cape Verde archipelago in operation “Steadfast Jaguar” (an odd choice of monikers, since jaguars are natives of the New World, not Africa). The exercise, which brought together a host of nations, including France, Germany, Spain, Greece, the U.S. and Poland, was aimed at “protecting energy supplies” in the Niger Delta and Gulf of Guinea.
Major oil producers in the region include Angola, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Chad and Mauritania.
Protecting energy supplies from whom?
In the case of the Niger Delta, it means protecting oil companies and the Nigerian government from local people fed up with the pollution that is killing them, and corruption that denies them any benefits from their resources. Under the umbrella of the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), locals are waging a low-key guerilla war that at one point reduced oil supplies by 20 percent.
MEND is certainly suspicious of American motives in the region. “Of course, it is evident that oil is the key concern of the U.S. in establishing African Command,” says the organization’s spokesman, Jomo Gbomo.
The Nigerian government labels a number of restive groups in Nigeria as “terrorist” and links them to al-Qaeda, including Boko Haram in the country’s north.
But labeling opponents “terrorists” or raising the al-Qaeda specter is an easy way to dismiss what may be real local grievances. For instance, Boko Haram’s growing penchant for violence is more likely a response to the heavy handedness of the Nigerian Army than an al-Qaeda inspired campaign.
Terrorism and the protection of civilians may be the public rationale for intervention, but the bottom line looks suspiciously like business. Before the guns go silent in Libya, one British business leader complained to The Independent that Britain was behind the curve on securing opportunities. “It‘s all politics, no commercial stuff. I think that is a mistake. We need to be getting down there as soon as possible,”
The Spanish oil company Reposal and the Italian company Eni are already gearing up for production. “Eni will play a No.1 role in the future,” says Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini. Almost 70 percent of Libya’s oil goes to four countries, Spain, Germany, France and Italy. Qatar, which is already handing oil sales in Eastern Libya, will also be on the ground floor as production ramps up.
A major loser in the war—and some would argue, not by accident—is China. Beijing had some 75 companies working in Libya and 36,000 personnel, and accounted for about 11 percent of Libya’s pre-war exports. But because China complained that NATO had unilaterally changed the UN resolution from protecting civilians to regime change, Beijing is likely to suffer. Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager of the rebel oil firm AGOCO told Reuters that China, Brazil and Russia would be frozen out of contracts.
Brazil and Russia also supported negotiations and complained about NATO’s interpretation of the UN resolution on Libya.
For Heritage, keeping China out of Africa is what it is all about. Peter Brookes, the former principal Republican advisor for East Asia on the House Committee on International Relations, warned that China was hell-bent on challenging the U.S. and becoming a global power, and key to that is expanding its interests in Africa. “In a throwback to the Maoist revolutionary days of the 1960s and 1970s and the Cold War, Beijing has once again identified the African continent as an area of strategic interest,” he told a Heritage Foundation audience in a talk entitled “Into Africa: China’s Grab for Influence and Oil.”
Beijing gets about one third of its oil from Africa—Angola and Sudan are its major suppliers—plus important materials like platinum, copper, timber and iron ore.
Africa is rife with problems, but terrorism is not high on that list. A severe drought has blistered much of East Africa, and, with food prices rising, malnutrition is spreading continent-wide. The “war on terrorism” has generated 800,000 refugees from Somalia. African civilians do, indeed, need help, but not the kind you get from fighter-bombers, drone strikes, or Tomahawk cruise missiles dispatched at the urging of right-wing think tanks or international energy companies.
Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com
EP Thompson on William Morris Two Green Communists by PETER LINEBAUGH
Given the overall pollution of the seas, the land, the atmosphere, as well as the geological layers beneath the seas, the world, considered as a chemical organization, is undergoing an inversion. Dangerous gases derived from beneath the seas are being consumed on earth and elevated into the atmosphere with dire consequences for the biological organization of the world. As Rebecca Solnit points out, it is “the world turned upside down”, although that is not what is commonly meant by the phrase, which was always egalitarian and anti-imperial. Formerly it described spiritual and political revolutions; St. Paul was accused of ‘turning the world upside down’ when he preached universally to all—Greeks, Jews, men, women—in Thessalonica (Acts 17:6) and it was the name of the tune supposedly played at Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown which achieved American independence (“all men are created equal”).
As egalitarian and anti-imperial, E.P. Thompson and William Morris were both communists, and we need communists now as never before. But what does the term mean?
As a founder of an anti-capitalist, revolutionary, working-class organization Morris had to come up with definitions suitable for a political program: “Well, what I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there would be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and wouldmanage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all—the realization at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH.” Most of the elements of this definition—that there may be several types of societies, that the prevailing society is based on the classes rich and poor, that equality is an attainable condition, that over-work and alienation of labor violate human solidarity—are derived from the struggles of the early industrial revolution as we have come to know them thanks to E.P. Thompson’s narrative, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The only point that is distinctly that of Morris is the demand for “unwaste”. This is what makes his communism green.
We sense the green again when Morris loses his temper: “It is a shoddy age. Shoddy is king. From the statesman to the shoe- maker all is shoddy” he exclaimed to a reporter. “Then you do not admire the common sense John Bull, Mr. Morris?” “John Bull is a stupid, unpractical oaf”, Morris replied. At a calmer moment he said, “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” That hatred stems from a repugnance of all that was squalid, stupid, dull, and hateful in capitalism and it led to its repudiation root and branch. Morris’s anti-capitalism was nurtured by his study of the romantic poets and to show this is one of Thompson’s achievements.
Morris possessed “a deep love of the earth and life on it, and a passion for the history of the past of mankind. Think of it! Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap. . . .?” The question has become more urgent, the counting houses have become skyscrapers, the cinder-heap has become mounds of coal ash, piles of tailings, poisonous slurry, vast oil spills, buried beryllium, et cetera. Morris says—think of it! Indeed, that is our order of the day. Or, more simply, towards the end of his life he provided a familiar meaning whose very modesty conceals what is most revolutionary in it, namely, the suggestion that the future is already immanently in the present: “We are living in an epoch where there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighborly common sense.”
Thompson as a stalwart member of the Communist Party of Great Britain did not have the same pressure that Morris felt as a founder to devise comprehensive definitions. Thompson’s problem was the opposite. He joined a Party that had already attained victory in one country, the USSR, so that any definition was bound to include raison d’état, far from neighborly common sense. As a founder of the New Left, Thompson grafted on to the old what was new, namely, “socialist humanism”, which however has not yet taken hold. Morris had an aesthetic practice as poet and crafts worker wherein the relation between revolutionary communism and the commons found manifold expressions. For Thompson, the relation found private, familial expression, and it infused his writing as an historian and peacenik. Thompson’s lasting political achievement was in the movement against nuclear weapons.
The periods of Morris’s writings at the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century when Thompson wrote about Morris were characterized by a planetary transition in the sources of energy driving economic development, from coal to petroleum to nuclear. These changes are largely absent in the writings of Thompson as they are from the commentators on Morris. I do not wish to “reduce” the thought of either man to the material and energy basis of the societies they lived in (the reduction of the ideological superstructure to the material base was the Marxist error Thompson criticized most). Morris was a craftsman of many and several materials, Thompson was an innovative and skilled historian; both were historical materialists. If we are to restore notions of the commons to revolutionary communism then we need to understand the materiality of history.
As communists they were both opposed to the capitalist mode of production but they wrote little about it per se. Since capital requires the separation of the worker from the means of production and subsistence, and since the most important such means is land, commoning must logically be the answer to the ills of a class-riven society. Not only is the commons an answer or therapeutic cure (as it were), it was the previously existing condition, because the original expropriation was from the commons. Morris was aware of this, and so was Thompson, who expressed it differently. Thus, historically speaking, capitalism is merely the middle, an interlude one might hopefully say, between the old commons of the past and the true communism of the future. Our language reflects the change in the degradation of the meaning of “commoner” from a person with access to the earthly commons to the undistinguished, ignoble mass, with the implicit understanding that he or she had nothing to call his or her own.
This edition of William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary was published in 1977 considerably revised from the first edition of 1955 and with the addition of a fifty-page postscript. The first edition itself was the result of many years of work. We have three dates in the evolution of Thompson’s Morris, 1951, 1955, and 1977. Actually, the relationship begins earlier.
In January 1944 Frank wrote Edward, two brothers now two soldiers in armies defeating fascism, about News from Nowhere as an example of “the most passionate possible idealism”. “Until we are conscious shapers of our own destiny there can be no balanced coherent goodness or beauty.” When the troops returned they were determined to shape their own destiny. News from Nowhere helped shape the outlook of Jack Dash, a London docker, and fierce rank-and-file leader of the dockers—port-wide, nation-wide, and world-wide—whose strike of 1947 was the beginning of post-war industrial turmoil.
Morris remained with Thompson his whole life. He told an American interviewer, “[after the war] I was teaching as much literature as history. I thought, how do I, first of all, raise with an adult class, many of them in the labor movement—discuss with them the significance of literature to their lives? And I started reading Morris. I was seized by Morris. I thought, why is this man thought to be an old fuddy-duddy? He is right in with us still.” Thompson concluded that Morris was “the first creative artist of major stature in the history of the world to take his stand, consciously and without the shadow of a compromise with the revolutionary working class.” “The Morris/Marx argument has worked inside me ever since. When, in 1956, my disagreements with orthodox Marxism became fully articulate, I fell back on modes of perception which I’d learned in those years of close company with Morris, and I found, perhaps, the will to go on arguing from the pressure of Morris behind me.” And perhaps it was a way of keeping faith with the passionate idealism of his brother. Thompson did not drop Morris’s unequivocal assertion of allegiance to “the revolutionary working class” from his 1977 edition. Thompson himself elaborated on it in his history if not in his current politics, for both , ‘revolution’ and ‘working class’ had been perversely distorted in Cold War discourse.
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary was first published in 1955. At the beginning of 1956 Krushchev gave his “secret speech” denouncing Stalin but in October of that year Soviet tanks rumbled onto the streets of Budapest suppressing a revolt of the workers’ councils. Between these events Thompson and his comrade John Saville began a discussion in three issues of The Reasoner. Thompson had to make his mind up about the moralism that he’d been exploring through the study of Morris. He wrote in the third and last number of The Reasoner. The “subordination of the moral and imaginative faculties to political and administrative authority is wrong; the elimination of moral criteria from political judgment is wrong; the fear of independent thought, the deliberate encouragement of anti-intellectual trends among the people is wrong; the mechanical personification of unconscious social forces, the belittling of the conscious process of intellectual and spiritual conflict, all this is wrong.” He was expelled from the Party. It was a moment of personal liberation too. He described “a psychological structure among Communist intellectuals from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s which left us all lacking in self-confidence when confronted by the intrusion of ‘the Party.’”
It was not merely fortuitous that the questioning of the CPGB represented by The Reasoner and less directly by his biography of William Morris the year before, occurred as the students and workers of Hungary rose up against domination by the USSR forming as they did so councils of direct democracy.
The Budapest students struck on 23 October 1956. A week earlier, on 17 October, Queen Elizabeth II opened the first ever nuclear energy plant commercially providing electricity. It was at Calder Hall, Sellafield, Cumbria on the coast of the Irish Sea. Otherwise electricity in England was provided thanks to the aid of tens of thousands of coal miners who had the power to install the Welfare State and might change society even further. Ever since President Eisenhower gave his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the UN in 1953, the peaceful use of nuclear energy sparked as many fanciful dreams of cheap energy without the interruptions of either oil politics or industrial disputes. The response in England was the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament whose famous peace symbol signaled a taboo upon nuclear bombs but not nuclear energy. Although the New Left was defined by its relation to the Aldermaston marches (1958) against nuclear weapons, it was unable to organize against nuclear energy as such. The base commodity was directly linked to the war machine. Nuclear war was averted, but Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) were down the road.
His subtitle raises questions. What is a romantic? What is a revolutionary? Is the former all ideal and imagination, while the latter is all reality and science? The English romantic movement among poets corresponded with both counter-revolution and intensity in the enclosure movement. The agrarian commons and the subsistence it provided were fast disappearing. Although Thompson will make this the theme of one of his most important history books, Customs in Common, he did not in the 1950s tie it to the Romantic poets. Thompson claims that Morris’s greatness is found in the “moral realism” that infused especially News from Nowhere (1890) and A Dream of John Ball (1886).
William Morris gave a lecture on communism in 1893 towards the end of his life at the Hammersmith Socialist Society. He stated, “If our ideas of a new Society are anything more than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working people; and then, I say, the thing will be done.” The three qualities wanting to attain practical equality were the “intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel.”
The strength of Thompson’s biography is that it takes you right into the political developments of Morris’s life as an activist. Therefore, it must go to the working class, and hence to the mode of production. Thompson may not have written about the material changes of social life at the time he was writing, but he was assuredly aware of them at the time Morris was living. “What was the hinge that Labor depended upon at present?” Morris asked. “Coal-mining,” he answered.
The biography belonged to the year when the non-white people of the world met in Bandung, Indonesia, searching for a third way that was neither capitalist nor communist. Rosa Parks took a seat at the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The French historian Alfred Sauvy coined the term “the Third World” in 1952 to reflect the reality that neither the capitalist West nor the Soviet East comprised geographically Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Oceana. His usage referred to the Third Estate, the commoners of France who, before and during the French Revolution opposed priests and nobles who composed the First and Second Estate. Sauvy wrote, “Like the third estate, the Third World is nothing, and wants to be something.” Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” that year, seeking a rhapsodic, hip liaison with people of color against “Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone.” Although Thompson’s biography was a powerful contribution to the search for indigenous radical roots in England it was also part of the global stirring of the moral capacities of humankind whose most bitter outrage perhaps was that greeting the American explosion of the H-bomb, code name Bravo, on the Bikini atoll in 1954, which poisoned the Japanese fishermenaboard the “Lucky Dragon” and inspired Godzilla.
This essay is adapted from the forward to William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary by EP Thompson (Spectre).
Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. His latest book is the Magna Carta Manifesto. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
The Demigods of Modern War The Killing Machines by BRIAN CLOUGHLEY
WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2011
8
In an interview for an article about the machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency one of the Washington Post’s sources described it as “one helluva killing machine.” Then, according to the reporter, he ‘blanched’ at his words and altered them to “one hell of an operational tool.”
I think we’ll stick with the ‘killing machine’ depiction. The CIA’s drone attacks in Pakistan have killed a lot more innocent people than it does in more mundane day-to-day butchery, but the plain fact is that it has always been in the business of killing, and always will be. The double murder in January in the Pakistani city of Lahore by the CIA employee Raymond Davis was bizarre and outrageous but only a minor indication of its embrace of criminality.
Its loony tunes schemes to assassinate Fidel Castro were so preposterous as to be comical, in a sick sort of way (exploding cigars and lethal fungus in a diving suit), but they were perfectly serious at the time. In 2007 the US declassified some documents, including “a memo that reveals that CIA director, Allen Dulles, personally approved a plot to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro.” Many people knew about this, but we should remember that “In addition to Castro, proposed targets included Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator.”
Of course these assassination plots are old stuff, and it’s too much to hope that even Wikileaks might provide information about later schemes. President Chavez of Venezuela, an energetic nationalist detested by American business interests, has probably been a target, but it is unlikely we’ll ever know for certain – unless there is another trove of papers like the one discovered recently in offices in Libya.
The Libya documents (discussion of which has vanished from the mainstream media) make it clear that senior representatives of the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6, enjoyed the comradeship of Gaddafi’s brutish spooks and cooperated with them in what is quaintly called “rendition” of suspects for interrogation by torture. Brits and Americans are not averse to torture, you understand, but they want it to be done by someone else, if possible, so that they can look starry-eyed at the world and declare they would be shocked—shocked!—that anyone could imagine they would be involved. They wring their bloodstained hands in mock dismay – but this time they’ve been caught with their hands in the kill.
Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron says “Gaddafi was a monster. He was responsible for appalling crimes, and the world will be much better off without him,” which words may come back to haunt him in future revelations of “appalling crimes” committed by other tyrants whom he favors. President Obama was better briefed and avoided personal comment, merely referring to Gaddafi as indulging in “repression to remain in power” — just like Washington’s dictator buddy who runs torture-supporting Bahrain, the home of the US Naval Fleet which is menacing Iran.
But both Cameron and Obama will try to justify the actions of their intelligence agencies by maintaining that their cooperation with Gaddafi took place during the time of their terrible predecessors and they would never dream of doing anything so dreadful. In fact Britain’s foreign minister, an egregious little prat called Hague, stated he had “no knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes at that time.”
We are asked to believe that the British foreign minister has never had a briefing about Britain’s long-time intelligence cooperation with the Gaddafi dictatorship. He was never told that his intelligence service had provided information to Libya about anti-Gaddafi exiles in the UK, who could then be targeted. He hadn’t the vaguest idea that the British intelligence service was officially grateful to its vicious Libyan counterpart for “the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years,” as stated in a letter from a “senior UK intelligence official” to his Libyan buddy. He was never told that UK intelligence operatives helped plan the CIA’s ‘rendition’ of suspects — and their families (“his pregnant (four months) wife”, for example; excuse me while I puke) — for discussions with kindly Libyan interrogators. And Hague was never told, poor duck, anything at all about the intelligence background that shaped the decision of his government to bomb the hell out of its former warm ally. No, of course not. And the moon is made of green cheese.
And as for the CIA, in the context of cooperation with the murderous thug Gaddafi its spokeswoman pronounced that “It can’t come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats.” She is justifying the fact that the US “sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.”
How many people were killed or maimed by the Libyan partner of the ‘helluva killing machine’?
Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, which found the documents, said it is appalling that the CIA “cooperated with these very abusive intelligence services.” But we know only the tiniest, the most miniscule fraction of what has been going on, because all the other documents were swiftly gathered up and secured unless the world might realize just how totally dishonorable are the governments in London and Washington. The only certainty is that these British and American intelligence operatives are, the whole bunch of them, amoral, evil and barbaric. The person who arranged ‘rendition’ for a “pregnant (four months) wife” to Libyan interrogators is a poisonous gobbet of perambulating filth. I hope he (or she, of course: that’s far from improbable) rots in hell for an eternity of waterboarding.
And there are other ways of enjoying maiming, torturing or killing people while standing well away from scenes of evil butchery.
CIA video-gamers have killed about 400 civilians in drone missile attacks on Pakistan, so we shouldn’t be surprised that their colleagues collaborated so vigorously with Libyan criminals. Mind you, we have been assured by President Obama’s adviser on counter-terrorism, John O Brennan, that in all the years of the CIA bombarding Pakistan with missiles “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”
Brennan and the White House are telling us to believe that in over 300 missile attacks in Pakistan by CIA-controlled drones targeting vehicles, villages, hamlets and houses, there has not been one single civilian death. Not one. Not even when one particularly stupid attack in March this year killed some twenty civilians, prompting no less a person than Pakistan’s army chief, an equable and civilized man, to state with remarkable restraint that “It is highly regrettable that a jirga [meeting] of peaceful citizens including elders of the area was carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life.”
Brennan is either a psychotic fantasist or a moronic liar.
But then we might suspect something of that nature, because he had 25 years in the CIA.
Certainly there are hideous fanatics in Pakistan who kill lots of people. Indeed, as I write this, the news comes in that “Islamist gunmen opened fire on a school bus in north-western Pakistan on Tuesday morning, killing a teacher, three children and the driver.” And who could possibly claim for an instant that any such wicked slaughter is justified? The photograph of one of the injured children is truly tear-jerking. Just as are the photographs of the bodies of some of the scores of Pakistani kids killed by the CIA’s drone missiles.
The killing machine is having a helluva time, and will continue to do so. And there is nothing – nothing – that anyone else in the world can do about it. How wonderful for the CIA Controllers, the wizards and demigods of modern war, to feel, in their celestial video nests, that they are above all laws, be these of man, of the gods, of nature. They select the objects for slaughter. They kill them. They go home to supper.
Come suppertime they then have to live with their consciences – or would, if they had any. It is almost impossible to believe that any human being, having seen, even from thousands of miles away, the blood-spattered shattered corpse of a tiny child whom they had just killed (and they can see this : mark my words) could ever, had they a conscience, come back to their Olympian video parlor and do the same again.
But they do. And we must pity them. For they are damned souls. Like all members of the helluva killing machine.
Brian Cloughley’s website is www.beecluff.com
8
In an interview for an article about the machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency one of the Washington Post’s sources described it as “one helluva killing machine.” Then, according to the reporter, he ‘blanched’ at his words and altered them to “one hell of an operational tool.”
I think we’ll stick with the ‘killing machine’ depiction. The CIA’s drone attacks in Pakistan have killed a lot more innocent people than it does in more mundane day-to-day butchery, but the plain fact is that it has always been in the business of killing, and always will be. The double murder in January in the Pakistani city of Lahore by the CIA employee Raymond Davis was bizarre and outrageous but only a minor indication of its embrace of criminality.
Its loony tunes schemes to assassinate Fidel Castro were so preposterous as to be comical, in a sick sort of way (exploding cigars and lethal fungus in a diving suit), but they were perfectly serious at the time. In 2007 the US declassified some documents, including “a memo that reveals that CIA director, Allen Dulles, personally approved a plot to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro.” Many people knew about this, but we should remember that “In addition to Castro, proposed targets included Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator.”
Of course these assassination plots are old stuff, and it’s too much to hope that even Wikileaks might provide information about later schemes. President Chavez of Venezuela, an energetic nationalist detested by American business interests, has probably been a target, but it is unlikely we’ll ever know for certain – unless there is another trove of papers like the one discovered recently in offices in Libya.
The Libya documents (discussion of which has vanished from the mainstream media) make it clear that senior representatives of the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6, enjoyed the comradeship of Gaddafi’s brutish spooks and cooperated with them in what is quaintly called “rendition” of suspects for interrogation by torture. Brits and Americans are not averse to torture, you understand, but they want it to be done by someone else, if possible, so that they can look starry-eyed at the world and declare they would be shocked—shocked!—that anyone could imagine they would be involved. They wring their bloodstained hands in mock dismay – but this time they’ve been caught with their hands in the kill.
Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron says “Gaddafi was a monster. He was responsible for appalling crimes, and the world will be much better off without him,” which words may come back to haunt him in future revelations of “appalling crimes” committed by other tyrants whom he favors. President Obama was better briefed and avoided personal comment, merely referring to Gaddafi as indulging in “repression to remain in power” — just like Washington’s dictator buddy who runs torture-supporting Bahrain, the home of the US Naval Fleet which is menacing Iran.
But both Cameron and Obama will try to justify the actions of their intelligence agencies by maintaining that their cooperation with Gaddafi took place during the time of their terrible predecessors and they would never dream of doing anything so dreadful. In fact Britain’s foreign minister, an egregious little prat called Hague, stated he had “no knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes at that time.”
We are asked to believe that the British foreign minister has never had a briefing about Britain’s long-time intelligence cooperation with the Gaddafi dictatorship. He was never told that his intelligence service had provided information to Libya about anti-Gaddafi exiles in the UK, who could then be targeted. He hadn’t the vaguest idea that the British intelligence service was officially grateful to its vicious Libyan counterpart for “the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years,” as stated in a letter from a “senior UK intelligence official” to his Libyan buddy. He was never told that UK intelligence operatives helped plan the CIA’s ‘rendition’ of suspects — and their families (“his pregnant (four months) wife”, for example; excuse me while I puke) — for discussions with kindly Libyan interrogators. And Hague was never told, poor duck, anything at all about the intelligence background that shaped the decision of his government to bomb the hell out of its former warm ally. No, of course not. And the moon is made of green cheese.
And as for the CIA, in the context of cooperation with the murderous thug Gaddafi its spokeswoman pronounced that “It can’t come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats.” She is justifying the fact that the US “sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.”
How many people were killed or maimed by the Libyan partner of the ‘helluva killing machine’?
Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, which found the documents, said it is appalling that the CIA “cooperated with these very abusive intelligence services.” But we know only the tiniest, the most miniscule fraction of what has been going on, because all the other documents were swiftly gathered up and secured unless the world might realize just how totally dishonorable are the governments in London and Washington. The only certainty is that these British and American intelligence operatives are, the whole bunch of them, amoral, evil and barbaric. The person who arranged ‘rendition’ for a “pregnant (four months) wife” to Libyan interrogators is a poisonous gobbet of perambulating filth. I hope he (or she, of course: that’s far from improbable) rots in hell for an eternity of waterboarding.
And there are other ways of enjoying maiming, torturing or killing people while standing well away from scenes of evil butchery.
CIA video-gamers have killed about 400 civilians in drone missile attacks on Pakistan, so we shouldn’t be surprised that their colleagues collaborated so vigorously with Libyan criminals. Mind you, we have been assured by President Obama’s adviser on counter-terrorism, John O Brennan, that in all the years of the CIA bombarding Pakistan with missiles “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”
Brennan and the White House are telling us to believe that in over 300 missile attacks in Pakistan by CIA-controlled drones targeting vehicles, villages, hamlets and houses, there has not been one single civilian death. Not one. Not even when one particularly stupid attack in March this year killed some twenty civilians, prompting no less a person than Pakistan’s army chief, an equable and civilized man, to state with remarkable restraint that “It is highly regrettable that a jirga [meeting] of peaceful citizens including elders of the area was carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life.”
Brennan is either a psychotic fantasist or a moronic liar.
But then we might suspect something of that nature, because he had 25 years in the CIA.
Certainly there are hideous fanatics in Pakistan who kill lots of people. Indeed, as I write this, the news comes in that “Islamist gunmen opened fire on a school bus in north-western Pakistan on Tuesday morning, killing a teacher, three children and the driver.” And who could possibly claim for an instant that any such wicked slaughter is justified? The photograph of one of the injured children is truly tear-jerking. Just as are the photographs of the bodies of some of the scores of Pakistani kids killed by the CIA’s drone missiles.
The killing machine is having a helluva time, and will continue to do so. And there is nothing – nothing – that anyone else in the world can do about it. How wonderful for the CIA Controllers, the wizards and demigods of modern war, to feel, in their celestial video nests, that they are above all laws, be these of man, of the gods, of nature. They select the objects for slaughter. They kill them. They go home to supper.
Come suppertime they then have to live with their consciences – or would, if they had any. It is almost impossible to believe that any human being, having seen, even from thousands of miles away, the blood-spattered shattered corpse of a tiny child whom they had just killed (and they can see this : mark my words) could ever, had they a conscience, come back to their Olympian video parlor and do the same again.
But they do. And we must pity them. For they are damned souls. Like all members of the helluva killing machine.
Brian Cloughley’s website is www.beecluff.com
How Much Longer Until We Find the Missing and Grant Civil Rights to the Rest? 29 Years After the Massacre at Sabra Shatila by FRANKLIN LAMB Sabha, Libya.
WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2011
9
“The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind” was the general consensus following a discussion between this observer and a gathering of Palestinian refugees in Sabha, Libya, many of whom would very much like to travel to Shatila camp in Beirut this week and participate in the 29th annual commemoration of the 1982 Israeli facilitated massacre that left more than 3000 dead and hundreds still missing. Sabha, now the district Capitol, is about 400 miles south of Tripoli in the Saharan desert, and is one of the four main areas that NATO concedes is still controlled by pro-Gaddafi loyalists,( the other three are Sirte, Bani Walid, and Jufra) and for that reason NATO has intensified its, sometimes seemingly indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas. Today, NATO is desperately wanting to announce “mission accomplished” and put an end to its ill-conceived mission “ to protect Libya‘s civilians”, that President Obama assured the World nearly 7 months ago, “will last days, not weeks.”
NATO continues to hope that no one bothers to carefully examine what it has wrought here because no person of good will would accept its massive gratuitous carnage. NATO’s bad luck it that its war on Libya’s civilian population continues to be documented and it will be held accountable, at least in the court room of public opinion and conceivably elsewhere.
It was from Sabha, following the 1969 September 1st Fatah Revolution that Gaddafi announced “the breaking dawn of the era of the masses”. As NATO tightens its noose around Sabha, the cousin of the “brother leader” (as Moammar was nick named by Nelson Mandela in gratitude for Libyan support for the long African National Congress (ANC) resistance to South African apartheid), and his able spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, reminds his audiences that the deepening civil war in Libya which was forced on this peaceful people by NATO and its ill-advised rush for regime change, is just beginning.
Ibrahim and some diplomats here believe it may well engulf other parts of Africa and the Middle East. Musa added yesterday, “Our leader will die in our sacred country for what his hero, Omar Muktar sacrificed his life for, and that is our country’s freedom from colonialism.”
Today Sabha, with a usual population of around 130,000 is now less than half that but hosts a few thousand Palestinian refugees, who appear to avoid current Libyan politics. Some are survivors of the 1982 Israeli facilitated massacre at Shatila camp in Beirut and they insist that no Palestinian or Hezbollah groups were fighting anywhere in the East or around here. Maybe a few individual Palestinian members of the Benghazi based Muslim Brotherhood happened to be Palestinians but that was about all the gathered explained.
Many of Libya’s Palestinian refugees in Libya, like those is the Diaspora, desperately seek to learn what became of their family members who disappeared before, during and following the events of Sept. 15-20, 1982. Palestinian refugees, like their Lebanese sisters and brothers suffer unrelenting pain and anguish as they resolve to take concrete steps to learn what happened to their loved ones. For more than 30 years Palestinians in Lebanon have disappeared as a result of various Israeli invasions and the Lebanese civil war with innocent refugee camp residents becoming victims of shifting regional and local political alliances. Thousands of Palestinians, like Lebanese from all the sects, became victims of enforced disappearances, abductions and other abuses.
Seriously compounding the problem, Lebanon has failed to legislate a truth, justice and reconciliation agency. Consequently, along with the failure of the governments of other states that were involved, the result has been that the whereabouts of many Palestinians remain a mystery and those responsible remain unidentified and unpunished. Robert Fisk, writing in the UK Independent claims that more than 1000 Palestinians are buried in pits in Lebanon’s only Golf Course that is adjacent to Shatila camp and the Kuwaiti Embassy.
Dr. Bayan Nuwayhed al Hout — author of “Sabra and Shatila: September 1982″ told this observer: ”I’m positive that dozens of people were buried there with the help of bulldozers. The bulldozers were used to get rid of the dead bodies.” Author Al Hout is referring to the fact that Israel supplied bulldozers, paid for by American taxpayers, to their allies, the right wing Christian militia that committed the slaughter with Israeli facilitation.
On Saturday morning, September 18, 1982 Israeli Mossad agents inside the camp actually were observed driving three of the bulldozers in a frantic attempt to assist the Christian militia in covering up evidence of the crime before the exported international media arrived on the scene. The late American journalist, Janet Lee Stevens, documented that during Sept. 18 and 19th, most of the massacre victims killed during this period were slaughtered inside the joint Israeli-Lebanese Forces “interrogation center.” Janet testified that these killed were put in flatbed trucks and taken to the Golf Course, just 300 yards away, where waiting Israeli bulldozers dug pits. Other trucks drove in the direction of East Beirut. At the time of her death, seven months later, Janet was preparing her report for publication. This observer packed Janet’s belongings and after some wrangling with the US Embassy staff who had arrived on the plane President Ronald Reagan sent to return Janet and the other Americans remains to the US, her two cardboard boxes of papers and research notes were onboard.
Unfortunately, but understandably, a family member, who I was advised did not understand Janet’s work in Lebanon, discarded her papers, following Janet’s funeral in Atlanta, Georgia and before they could be collected by the University of Pennsylvania for analysis and preservation. So we are deprived of most of Janet’s data on the missing Palestinians which confirmed the fate of several hundred who disappeared during the massacre. Fortunately, in February of 1982 Janet had forwarded some of her conclusions to friends and for publication. What needs to be done to locate the missing Palestinians and Lebanese? A serious and sustained effort to locate the disappeared Palestinians and Lebanese and bring some degree of solace and closure to their families should be undertaken without further delay. These Palestinian and Lebanese families have no idea if their loved ones are dead or alive. Obviously they are unable to organize a dignified burial or even properly grieve.
Families of the disappeared suffer from a series of legal, financial, and administrative problems that result from not knowing what became of their missing loved ones. A recent Amnesty International study of Lebanon’s problems on this urgent subject included the experience of Wadad Halawani, the founder of the Committee of the families of the Kidnapped and missing in Lebanon. Wadad described her life after her husband, was taken away from their home in Beirut in September 1982, apparently by agents of Lebanese military Intelligence, the Deuxième Bureau. Wadad was forced to raise her two young children, aged six and three alone following his disappearance, and she described how she “lost her balance in life.” She did not know “how to protect the children from the rockets” and was “lost for answers to their endless questions” about their father for which she had no replies.
From knowing many families of missing husbands, Wadad outlined the problems faced by them, personal, social, legal, administrative, and economic. On the personal and social level, she explained that a Palestinian or any woman in Lebanon, whose husband is missing is neither a married woman nor single, divorced or a widow, and for all that time she will have faced serious problems and obstacles linked to the low status of women. On the legal and administrative level she explained that “a woman cannot spend her husband’s money nor dispose of his property, such as selling his car, as she does not have power of attorney allowing her to do so. Nor can she get a passport for herself, nor for her children if they are under 18 as the guardian required the father even though the mother is raising the children.
On the economic level, Wadad told Amnesty International that most of the missing people are from poor families, so the loss of the breadwinner has had devastating impact. In many cases, the families have been unable to cover basic daily needs, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and the costs of education. The families of missing and disappeared Palestinians and other persons have the right, under international law, to the truth which means a full and complete disclosure about events that transpired during the disappearance of their loved ones.
In March 2010, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that this includes the right to know the exact fate and whereabouts of each victim. International law and human rights standards also require each party to an armed conflict must take all feasible measures to try and account for people reported missing as a result of the conflict, and release all relevant information concerning their fate or whereabouts. This applies to Israel during the September 1982 massacre. More than once over the past three decades Israeli officials have reported that Israel has detailed records of what its sponsored militias did inside Shatila camp and on the periphery with respects to eliminating terrorists and hiding their remains. To date Israel has refused UN and international demands to turn over its records. The international community must sanction Israel until is complies with international law on this subject.
In addition, friends of Palestine including NGO’s and relevant UN agencies should immediately establish an agency cooperating with independent experts and representatives of civil society, including relatives of missing individuals, in cooperation with the Government of Lebanon to investigate the fates of every missing Palestinian and Lebanese including locating and ensuring protection for mass graves and for exhumations, to be carried out consistent with international standards to identify human remains and match them with DNA from relatives. The Embassy of Palestine in Lebanon would be a good choice for organizing the collection of DNA samples from Palestinian families with missing relatives. As many Palestinians and their supporters arrive at Shatila camp in Beirut this weekend, the thoughts of Palestinians in Libya and the diaspora, land their friends around the world will be with them. As a young Palestinian lady in Sabha told this observer, and sounding very much like Miss Hiba Hajj in Lebanon’s Ein el Helwe camp: “Every Palestinian must visit this site you told us about of this mass murder of our brothers and sisters. I will do it soon. I promise you. It is not an option, it is an obligation.”
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Libya and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com
9
“The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind” was the general consensus following a discussion between this observer and a gathering of Palestinian refugees in Sabha, Libya, many of whom would very much like to travel to Shatila camp in Beirut this week and participate in the 29th annual commemoration of the 1982 Israeli facilitated massacre that left more than 3000 dead and hundreds still missing. Sabha, now the district Capitol, is about 400 miles south of Tripoli in the Saharan desert, and is one of the four main areas that NATO concedes is still controlled by pro-Gaddafi loyalists,( the other three are Sirte, Bani Walid, and Jufra) and for that reason NATO has intensified its, sometimes seemingly indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas. Today, NATO is desperately wanting to announce “mission accomplished” and put an end to its ill-conceived mission “ to protect Libya‘s civilians”, that President Obama assured the World nearly 7 months ago, “will last days, not weeks.”
NATO continues to hope that no one bothers to carefully examine what it has wrought here because no person of good will would accept its massive gratuitous carnage. NATO’s bad luck it that its war on Libya’s civilian population continues to be documented and it will be held accountable, at least in the court room of public opinion and conceivably elsewhere.
It was from Sabha, following the 1969 September 1st Fatah Revolution that Gaddafi announced “the breaking dawn of the era of the masses”. As NATO tightens its noose around Sabha, the cousin of the “brother leader” (as Moammar was nick named by Nelson Mandela in gratitude for Libyan support for the long African National Congress (ANC) resistance to South African apartheid), and his able spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, reminds his audiences that the deepening civil war in Libya which was forced on this peaceful people by NATO and its ill-advised rush for regime change, is just beginning.
Ibrahim and some diplomats here believe it may well engulf other parts of Africa and the Middle East. Musa added yesterday, “Our leader will die in our sacred country for what his hero, Omar Muktar sacrificed his life for, and that is our country’s freedom from colonialism.”
Today Sabha, with a usual population of around 130,000 is now less than half that but hosts a few thousand Palestinian refugees, who appear to avoid current Libyan politics. Some are survivors of the 1982 Israeli facilitated massacre at Shatila camp in Beirut and they insist that no Palestinian or Hezbollah groups were fighting anywhere in the East or around here. Maybe a few individual Palestinian members of the Benghazi based Muslim Brotherhood happened to be Palestinians but that was about all the gathered explained.
Many of Libya’s Palestinian refugees in Libya, like those is the Diaspora, desperately seek to learn what became of their family members who disappeared before, during and following the events of Sept. 15-20, 1982. Palestinian refugees, like their Lebanese sisters and brothers suffer unrelenting pain and anguish as they resolve to take concrete steps to learn what happened to their loved ones. For more than 30 years Palestinians in Lebanon have disappeared as a result of various Israeli invasions and the Lebanese civil war with innocent refugee camp residents becoming victims of shifting regional and local political alliances. Thousands of Palestinians, like Lebanese from all the sects, became victims of enforced disappearances, abductions and other abuses.
Seriously compounding the problem, Lebanon has failed to legislate a truth, justice and reconciliation agency. Consequently, along with the failure of the governments of other states that were involved, the result has been that the whereabouts of many Palestinians remain a mystery and those responsible remain unidentified and unpunished. Robert Fisk, writing in the UK Independent claims that more than 1000 Palestinians are buried in pits in Lebanon’s only Golf Course that is adjacent to Shatila camp and the Kuwaiti Embassy.
Dr. Bayan Nuwayhed al Hout — author of “Sabra and Shatila: September 1982″ told this observer: ”I’m positive that dozens of people were buried there with the help of bulldozers. The bulldozers were used to get rid of the dead bodies.” Author Al Hout is referring to the fact that Israel supplied bulldozers, paid for by American taxpayers, to their allies, the right wing Christian militia that committed the slaughter with Israeli facilitation.
On Saturday morning, September 18, 1982 Israeli Mossad agents inside the camp actually were observed driving three of the bulldozers in a frantic attempt to assist the Christian militia in covering up evidence of the crime before the exported international media arrived on the scene. The late American journalist, Janet Lee Stevens, documented that during Sept. 18 and 19th, most of the massacre victims killed during this period were slaughtered inside the joint Israeli-Lebanese Forces “interrogation center.” Janet testified that these killed were put in flatbed trucks and taken to the Golf Course, just 300 yards away, where waiting Israeli bulldozers dug pits. Other trucks drove in the direction of East Beirut. At the time of her death, seven months later, Janet was preparing her report for publication. This observer packed Janet’s belongings and after some wrangling with the US Embassy staff who had arrived on the plane President Ronald Reagan sent to return Janet and the other Americans remains to the US, her two cardboard boxes of papers and research notes were onboard.
Unfortunately, but understandably, a family member, who I was advised did not understand Janet’s work in Lebanon, discarded her papers, following Janet’s funeral in Atlanta, Georgia and before they could be collected by the University of Pennsylvania for analysis and preservation. So we are deprived of most of Janet’s data on the missing Palestinians which confirmed the fate of several hundred who disappeared during the massacre. Fortunately, in February of 1982 Janet had forwarded some of her conclusions to friends and for publication. What needs to be done to locate the missing Palestinians and Lebanese? A serious and sustained effort to locate the disappeared Palestinians and Lebanese and bring some degree of solace and closure to their families should be undertaken without further delay. These Palestinian and Lebanese families have no idea if their loved ones are dead or alive. Obviously they are unable to organize a dignified burial or even properly grieve.
Families of the disappeared suffer from a series of legal, financial, and administrative problems that result from not knowing what became of their missing loved ones. A recent Amnesty International study of Lebanon’s problems on this urgent subject included the experience of Wadad Halawani, the founder of the Committee of the families of the Kidnapped and missing in Lebanon. Wadad described her life after her husband, was taken away from their home in Beirut in September 1982, apparently by agents of Lebanese military Intelligence, the Deuxième Bureau. Wadad was forced to raise her two young children, aged six and three alone following his disappearance, and she described how she “lost her balance in life.” She did not know “how to protect the children from the rockets” and was “lost for answers to their endless questions” about their father for which she had no replies.
From knowing many families of missing husbands, Wadad outlined the problems faced by them, personal, social, legal, administrative, and economic. On the personal and social level, she explained that a Palestinian or any woman in Lebanon, whose husband is missing is neither a married woman nor single, divorced or a widow, and for all that time she will have faced serious problems and obstacles linked to the low status of women. On the legal and administrative level she explained that “a woman cannot spend her husband’s money nor dispose of his property, such as selling his car, as she does not have power of attorney allowing her to do so. Nor can she get a passport for herself, nor for her children if they are under 18 as the guardian required the father even though the mother is raising the children.
On the economic level, Wadad told Amnesty International that most of the missing people are from poor families, so the loss of the breadwinner has had devastating impact. In many cases, the families have been unable to cover basic daily needs, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and the costs of education. The families of missing and disappeared Palestinians and other persons have the right, under international law, to the truth which means a full and complete disclosure about events that transpired during the disappearance of their loved ones.
In March 2010, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that this includes the right to know the exact fate and whereabouts of each victim. International law and human rights standards also require each party to an armed conflict must take all feasible measures to try and account for people reported missing as a result of the conflict, and release all relevant information concerning their fate or whereabouts. This applies to Israel during the September 1982 massacre. More than once over the past three decades Israeli officials have reported that Israel has detailed records of what its sponsored militias did inside Shatila camp and on the periphery with respects to eliminating terrorists and hiding their remains. To date Israel has refused UN and international demands to turn over its records. The international community must sanction Israel until is complies with international law on this subject.
In addition, friends of Palestine including NGO’s and relevant UN agencies should immediately establish an agency cooperating with independent experts and representatives of civil society, including relatives of missing individuals, in cooperation with the Government of Lebanon to investigate the fates of every missing Palestinian and Lebanese including locating and ensuring protection for mass graves and for exhumations, to be carried out consistent with international standards to identify human remains and match them with DNA from relatives. The Embassy of Palestine in Lebanon would be a good choice for organizing the collection of DNA samples from Palestinian families with missing relatives. As many Palestinians and their supporters arrive at Shatila camp in Beirut this weekend, the thoughts of Palestinians in Libya and the diaspora, land their friends around the world will be with them. As a young Palestinian lady in Sabha told this observer, and sounding very much like Miss Hiba Hajj in Lebanon’s Ein el Helwe camp: “Every Palestinian must visit this site you told us about of this mass murder of our brothers and sisters. I will do it soon. I promise you. It is not an option, it is an obligation.”
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Libya and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com
Libya, the Lie The Real Reason the US Wanted Gaddafi Gone by MURRAY DOBBIN Powell River, BC
WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2011
58
When the U.S. invaded Iraq riding a pack of lies and monstrous manipulation, the entire U.S. elite, including major news services, academics, and politicians from both parties, lined up to cheerlead and off they went to war. It was one of the most shameful chapters in the long history of shameful acts of U.S. imperial foreign policy.
But it actually didn’t take too long for dissenting voices to come out of the woodwork. The lies were exposed, the liars identified, the manipulation denounced. The war went ion but at least we knew the lies.
Watching the sorry media spectacle of the tragic farce unfolding in Libya, one has to wonder if anyone will ever expose the lies and hubris that have characterized the coverage of this faux Arab spring.
To be sure, as more journalists, aid workers and human rights representatives arrive in the country the more some of the obvious facts trickle out. The “freedom fighters” — more like soccer hooligans with guns — have looted dozens of arms depots of the Libyan military. According to Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, “Every time a city falls, they end up being looted. . . Every facility we go to where there were surface-to-air missiles, they’re gone.”
Just what will these lovers of democracy do with these weapons? The U.S. and E.U. might just start to worry that no matter who buys them on the black market, they will eventually end up in the hands of al Qaeda or other militant groups. As NATO knows full well, some of the so-called rebels have ties to al Qaeda. Or perhaps the missiles will end up in the hands of the Taliban where they will be used to shoot down U.S. helicopters. Talk about blowback. Too bad the Americans have never quite grasped the meaning of irony.
The photos of the revolutionaries give any thoughtful observer pause. Almost every photo of the victorious rebels show aggressive, undisciplined, young men armed to the teeth holding their guns high in the air (often firing randomly). Boys with their (lethal) toys.
And while the Western media repeatedly imply that the Nation Transitional Council is in control of these dangerous gangs the truth lies elsewhere. Several rebel groups have denounced the NTC and said they don’t recognize its authority. So not only does the council not represent anyone, it doesn’t even control its own “army.” The NTC is little more than a group of greedy opportunists salivating at the thought of getting its hands on the billions in state funds that NATO is now handing over to them. Only with the constant disciplinary efforts of its NATO handlers does the council manage to maintain a semblance of decorum and credibility.
In other situations where dictators were deposed the seizing of their assets was justified – because they were in personal bank accounts. But the tens of billions illegally seized by Western countries was money belonging to the Libyan state and its national bank. That no one has commented on the casual elimination of sovereignty, someone should. NATO has effectively destroyed the Libyan government — not just Gaddafi’s regime. Tens of thousands of foreign workers have left Libya, many of whom were critical to the running of the country. Rebels have been accused of randomly executing blacks, many of them students and workers. Who will fill their critical roles now?
But none of this bothers the Canadian political elite and its intellectual hired guns. One of the most shameful examples is Lloyd Axworthy, the “highly respected” former foreign affairs minister under Jean Chretien. He penned an op-ed for the Globe and Mail in which he waxed on romantically about how the NATO bombing of Libya is a huge advance for the principle of Responsibility to Protect – a UN principle promoted by Axworthy in in 1999-2000.
According to Axworthy, “We are seriously engaged in a resetting of the international order toward a more humane, just world.” I predict that instead NATO’s grotesque manipulation of the UN mandate to impose a “no fly” zone to protect “civilians” (a violation Axworthy doesn’t even mention) will in fact do more damage to the responsibility to protect principle than any similar action to date. It will tarnish the UN, too, which has allowed its mandate to be used for imperial gain. The rush by France, Britain and Italy in particular, to get their hands on Libyan oil will soon be too obvious to cover up. The revolutionaries are no doubt busy signing deals handing over that previously nationalized resource to the neo-colonialists who put them in power — robbing the real civilians of their birthright.
We should ask who will take the “responsibility to protect” Libyans from this new gang? Who will protect the people of Libya so that they continue to enjoy a literacy rate above 90 per cent, the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy of all of Africa, free medical care and education and the highest Human Development Index of any country on the continent?
Do the boys firing their guns in the air even have a clue that their living standards — subsidized by nationalized oil — were among the highest in Africa? Who will they blame when medical care disappears and their kids have to pay to go to school? Western, free-market democracy will come to Libya at a very high price when designed and delivered by the neo-colonial powers.
Why does virtually no one in the mainstream Canadian media even mention the fact that Libya was the biggest obstacle to the continued super-exploitation of Africa and its vast resources. This is, after all, the principle reason for NATO’s determination to turn a ‘no fly zone” into regime change. On a whole number of fronts, Libya was using its oil wealth to gradually close the doors to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar in the economic domination of Africa.
Africa’s role as a giant pool of cheap resources was being threatened just as the U.S. and E.U. faced economic catastrophe because of the failure of their own neo-liberal policies. Gaddafi’s determination to eliminate Africa’s dependence on Western financial institutions was one of the most serious threats faced by global capitalism. Gaddafi was not only in the process of creating the African Investment Bank (providing interest-free loans to African nations) and the African Monetary Fund (to be centred in Cameroon) and eliminating the role of the IMF. It was also in the planning stages of creating a new, gold-backed African currency that would seriously weaken the U.S. by undermining the dollar.
It is almost certain that in return for putting the new bunch in power, and freeing up the billions in state funds, NATO will demand these new institutions be smothered in their cribs. Gaddafi was also instrumental in killing AFRICOM, a new U.S. military command and control base intended to add military intimidation to American economic domination. Look for that initiative to be revived.
It’s easy to be gratified getting rid of a brutal dictator. But when will we learn that waging war has enormous, long-lasting consequences? Already, the head of the new “government” is calling for legislation based on Sharia law – reversing 42 years of secularism in Libya. Western-style democracy is an unlikely outcome in a country consisting of many different and hostile tribes – unified only by Gaddafi’s iron fist and socialist policies which distributed wealth equally amongst them.
So if we are going to feel triumphant – Prime Minister Stephen Harper boasted about Canada “punching above our weight” – let’s be clear what we have accomplished. We got rid of one moderately nasty dictator. But we have eliminated a government which distributed its oil wealth more equally than any other Arab state, will impose on Libya a new market imperative, likely eliminating most social programs and making Libya less equal, may well end up with a government based on Islamic law (if it doesn’t fly apart in tribal warfare) and have destroyed Africa’s best hope for independent development.
How shall we celebrate?
MURRAY DOBBIN, now living in Powell River, BC has been a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for over forty years. He now writes a bi-weekly column for the on-line journals the Tyee and rabble.ca. He can be reached at mdobbin@telus.net.
58
When the U.S. invaded Iraq riding a pack of lies and monstrous manipulation, the entire U.S. elite, including major news services, academics, and politicians from both parties, lined up to cheerlead and off they went to war. It was one of the most shameful chapters in the long history of shameful acts of U.S. imperial foreign policy.
But it actually didn’t take too long for dissenting voices to come out of the woodwork. The lies were exposed, the liars identified, the manipulation denounced. The war went ion but at least we knew the lies.
Watching the sorry media spectacle of the tragic farce unfolding in Libya, one has to wonder if anyone will ever expose the lies and hubris that have characterized the coverage of this faux Arab spring.
To be sure, as more journalists, aid workers and human rights representatives arrive in the country the more some of the obvious facts trickle out. The “freedom fighters” — more like soccer hooligans with guns — have looted dozens of arms depots of the Libyan military. According to Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, “Every time a city falls, they end up being looted. . . Every facility we go to where there were surface-to-air missiles, they’re gone.”
Just what will these lovers of democracy do with these weapons? The U.S. and E.U. might just start to worry that no matter who buys them on the black market, they will eventually end up in the hands of al Qaeda or other militant groups. As NATO knows full well, some of the so-called rebels have ties to al Qaeda. Or perhaps the missiles will end up in the hands of the Taliban where they will be used to shoot down U.S. helicopters. Talk about blowback. Too bad the Americans have never quite grasped the meaning of irony.
The photos of the revolutionaries give any thoughtful observer pause. Almost every photo of the victorious rebels show aggressive, undisciplined, young men armed to the teeth holding their guns high in the air (often firing randomly). Boys with their (lethal) toys.
And while the Western media repeatedly imply that the Nation Transitional Council is in control of these dangerous gangs the truth lies elsewhere. Several rebel groups have denounced the NTC and said they don’t recognize its authority. So not only does the council not represent anyone, it doesn’t even control its own “army.” The NTC is little more than a group of greedy opportunists salivating at the thought of getting its hands on the billions in state funds that NATO is now handing over to them. Only with the constant disciplinary efforts of its NATO handlers does the council manage to maintain a semblance of decorum and credibility.
In other situations where dictators were deposed the seizing of their assets was justified – because they were in personal bank accounts. But the tens of billions illegally seized by Western countries was money belonging to the Libyan state and its national bank. That no one has commented on the casual elimination of sovereignty, someone should. NATO has effectively destroyed the Libyan government — not just Gaddafi’s regime. Tens of thousands of foreign workers have left Libya, many of whom were critical to the running of the country. Rebels have been accused of randomly executing blacks, many of them students and workers. Who will fill their critical roles now?
But none of this bothers the Canadian political elite and its intellectual hired guns. One of the most shameful examples is Lloyd Axworthy, the “highly respected” former foreign affairs minister under Jean Chretien. He penned an op-ed for the Globe and Mail in which he waxed on romantically about how the NATO bombing of Libya is a huge advance for the principle of Responsibility to Protect – a UN principle promoted by Axworthy in in 1999-2000.
According to Axworthy, “We are seriously engaged in a resetting of the international order toward a more humane, just world.” I predict that instead NATO’s grotesque manipulation of the UN mandate to impose a “no fly” zone to protect “civilians” (a violation Axworthy doesn’t even mention) will in fact do more damage to the responsibility to protect principle than any similar action to date. It will tarnish the UN, too, which has allowed its mandate to be used for imperial gain. The rush by France, Britain and Italy in particular, to get their hands on Libyan oil will soon be too obvious to cover up. The revolutionaries are no doubt busy signing deals handing over that previously nationalized resource to the neo-colonialists who put them in power — robbing the real civilians of their birthright.
We should ask who will take the “responsibility to protect” Libyans from this new gang? Who will protect the people of Libya so that they continue to enjoy a literacy rate above 90 per cent, the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy of all of Africa, free medical care and education and the highest Human Development Index of any country on the continent?
Do the boys firing their guns in the air even have a clue that their living standards — subsidized by nationalized oil — were among the highest in Africa? Who will they blame when medical care disappears and their kids have to pay to go to school? Western, free-market democracy will come to Libya at a very high price when designed and delivered by the neo-colonial powers.
Why does virtually no one in the mainstream Canadian media even mention the fact that Libya was the biggest obstacle to the continued super-exploitation of Africa and its vast resources. This is, after all, the principle reason for NATO’s determination to turn a ‘no fly zone” into regime change. On a whole number of fronts, Libya was using its oil wealth to gradually close the doors to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar in the economic domination of Africa.
Africa’s role as a giant pool of cheap resources was being threatened just as the U.S. and E.U. faced economic catastrophe because of the failure of their own neo-liberal policies. Gaddafi’s determination to eliminate Africa’s dependence on Western financial institutions was one of the most serious threats faced by global capitalism. Gaddafi was not only in the process of creating the African Investment Bank (providing interest-free loans to African nations) and the African Monetary Fund (to be centred in Cameroon) and eliminating the role of the IMF. It was also in the planning stages of creating a new, gold-backed African currency that would seriously weaken the U.S. by undermining the dollar.
It is almost certain that in return for putting the new bunch in power, and freeing up the billions in state funds, NATO will demand these new institutions be smothered in their cribs. Gaddafi was also instrumental in killing AFRICOM, a new U.S. military command and control base intended to add military intimidation to American economic domination. Look for that initiative to be revived.
It’s easy to be gratified getting rid of a brutal dictator. But when will we learn that waging war has enormous, long-lasting consequences? Already, the head of the new “government” is calling for legislation based on Sharia law – reversing 42 years of secularism in Libya. Western-style democracy is an unlikely outcome in a country consisting of many different and hostile tribes – unified only by Gaddafi’s iron fist and socialist policies which distributed wealth equally amongst them.
So if we are going to feel triumphant – Prime Minister Stephen Harper boasted about Canada “punching above our weight” – let’s be clear what we have accomplished. We got rid of one moderately nasty dictator. But we have eliminated a government which distributed its oil wealth more equally than any other Arab state, will impose on Libya a new market imperative, likely eliminating most social programs and making Libya less equal, may well end up with a government based on Islamic law (if it doesn’t fly apart in tribal warfare) and have destroyed Africa’s best hope for independent development.
How shall we celebrate?
MURRAY DOBBIN, now living in Powell River, BC has been a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for over forty years. He now writes a bi-weekly column for the on-line journals the Tyee and rabble.ca. He can be reached at mdobbin@telus.net.
Banking Skullduggery The Irish Debt Crisis Story by LIAM LEONARD Sligo, Ireland.
WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 17-18, 2011
2
By the mid-1990s, the historically troubled Irish economy began to move into a phase of rapid growth. Of course, the Irish economy could only improve from lows of the 1980s, but this economic success was measured against the collapse of economies in nations such as Japan. The turn of the decade was characterised by a global recession, and the rise of the Irish economy at this time was likened by some commentators as having similarities with the ‘Tiger’ economies of South East Asia in the late 1980s By 2005, the New York Times was lauding ‘Ireland’s Economic Miracle publishing ‘the amazing story of how Ireland went from sick man of Europe to rich man in less than a generation’ (NY Times, April 25, 2009). Many factors contributed to Ireland ’s phase of accelerated economic growth, some planned, some serendipitous. European Union support and subsidies, low corporation tax rates of 10–12.5 per cent, the high rates of young, well educated, English speaking graduates in the workforce, the cultural links between Ireland and the United States, the Peace Process in Northern Ireland and the support for Ireland provided by successive US Governments, ongoing state support for direct foreign investment, the development of better internal infrastructure and the increase in female participation in the workforce all contributed to growth in the 1990s.
Ireland’s key area of industry was no longer agriculture and domestic manufacturing. By the 1990s, the Irish economy shifted, and high technology based multinationals, financial services and the internet-based knowledge economy supplanted the traditional forms of economy, as the economy boomed. This transformation was facilitated by a number of factors, such as the establishment of the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin , whereas Ireland ’s low corporate tax rate which was far below many European countries. Concerns about some of the factors in such a dramatic transformation began to be voiced by international commentators. These concerns were to be addressed by the establishment of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (IFSRA) in 2003. Of course, Ireland ’s banking sector was itself historically problematic. According to Irish author and Senator Shane Ross:
‘Ireland has a shameful banking history, not a proud one. For over thirty years Ireland has been cursed by banking scandals. While the smaller scandals and the smaller banks have come and gone, the activities of the larger ones suggest that banking skulduggery is endemic’.
Many of the elites in Irish society came under scrutiny in the years either side of the Millennium. Many of Ireland ’s major institutions, such as the political class, Catholic Church and banks were caught up in a series of scandals that involved abuse of power, vulnerable children and financial privileges. A series of costly Tribunals of Inquiry were called to investigate the behaviour of an array of figures and groups in Irish society. A second phase of the economic boom was fabricated through an inflated property market in the early years of the 2000s. However, the vastly overrated pricing of properties and very high rates of lending from the banks led to a ‘casino culture’ in the Irish property market which fuelled the inevitable bust that followed. The economist David McWilliams has claimed that property transactions became a national sport, as nearly half a million properties changed hands in the three years between 2005 and 2008. Wealthy investors developed portfolios of properties in Ireland and the United Kingdom , and across Europe . European banks gave large loans that many Irish recipients were never in a position to pay back.
With the onset of the global economic downturn in 2008, the Irish economy was over exposed to the vagaries of the market, and in many ways the gullible rookies in the Irish investor sector had been duped into a spiral of debt and over priced properties by shrewd and unscrupulous financiers. In 2009, the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) was established, in an attempt to reclaim some of the value of Ireland ’s collapsed property market, with limited success.
The IMF and European Central bank had become involved in Ireland ’s economic affairs in the aftermath of the banking guarantee given by Fianna Fail Finance Minister Brian Lenihan in September 2008. Lenihan had been a part of the coalition that participated in Ireland’s phase with the Presidency of the European Union in the 1990s, and his sense of heightened duty went so far as to bring him to guarantee the debts of not just the Irish banks, but of the speculators and bond holders who take financial risks as a central part of their profession.
The dilemma of ‘who to trust’ which is facing the Irish public has been best summed up by social economist David McWilliams:
Why should we trust the people who got us into this mess in the first place? They were wrong then and they are wrong now. The politicians, bankers and developers think they can hand us the bill and walk away from the carnage. They want us follow a route that will make things worse for the ordinary man on the street while saving the bankers at the top of the tree, insisting that there is no other way.
Furthermore, the international financial sector had Eurosceptic elements opposed to the European Union and Eurozone, and utilised the Irish and Greek banking and debt crises as a vehicle to undermine these institutions. One example of this was the downgrading of Ireland ’s credit rating to junk status in July 2011, despite a positive review of Ireland ’s response to the debt crisis by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It would appear that Ireland ’s elites had taken on more than they could handle with the dualistic agendas of the Central European Bank and the non-aligned financial agencies setting the agendas for Irish economic planning for the foreseeable future. Subsequently, a disaffected malaise has enveloped Irish society, with the economic recession causing a further eradication of the social fabric.
Of course, the question remains, where does Ireland go from here? Without doubt, the time has come for a new agenda in Irish politics, one which is at once sustainable and just for all who inhabit the oft beleaguered Emerald isle. It remains to be seen if this new form of politics will emerge from existing grassroots or elite sectors of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, Ireland ’s slow by consistent emergence from the problems of the fiscal crisis will be a journey of rediscovery and reinvention for the Irish people.
Dr. Liam Leonard is a Lecturer in Sociology and Human Rights at the Institute of Technology, Sligo, Ireland. He has written several books on Environmental Justice and Politics. He is the Co-editor of Sustainable Politics and the Crisis of the Peripheries: Ireland and Greece:
2
By the mid-1990s, the historically troubled Irish economy began to move into a phase of rapid growth. Of course, the Irish economy could only improve from lows of the 1980s, but this economic success was measured against the collapse of economies in nations such as Japan. The turn of the decade was characterised by a global recession, and the rise of the Irish economy at this time was likened by some commentators as having similarities with the ‘Tiger’ economies of South East Asia in the late 1980s By 2005, the New York Times was lauding ‘Ireland’s Economic Miracle publishing ‘the amazing story of how Ireland went from sick man of Europe to rich man in less than a generation’ (NY Times, April 25, 2009). Many factors contributed to Ireland ’s phase of accelerated economic growth, some planned, some serendipitous. European Union support and subsidies, low corporation tax rates of 10–12.5 per cent, the high rates of young, well educated, English speaking graduates in the workforce, the cultural links between Ireland and the United States, the Peace Process in Northern Ireland and the support for Ireland provided by successive US Governments, ongoing state support for direct foreign investment, the development of better internal infrastructure and the increase in female participation in the workforce all contributed to growth in the 1990s.
Ireland’s key area of industry was no longer agriculture and domestic manufacturing. By the 1990s, the Irish economy shifted, and high technology based multinationals, financial services and the internet-based knowledge economy supplanted the traditional forms of economy, as the economy boomed. This transformation was facilitated by a number of factors, such as the establishment of the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin , whereas Ireland ’s low corporate tax rate which was far below many European countries. Concerns about some of the factors in such a dramatic transformation began to be voiced by international commentators. These concerns were to be addressed by the establishment of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (IFSRA) in 2003. Of course, Ireland ’s banking sector was itself historically problematic. According to Irish author and Senator Shane Ross:
‘Ireland has a shameful banking history, not a proud one. For over thirty years Ireland has been cursed by banking scandals. While the smaller scandals and the smaller banks have come and gone, the activities of the larger ones suggest that banking skulduggery is endemic’.
Many of the elites in Irish society came under scrutiny in the years either side of the Millennium. Many of Ireland ’s major institutions, such as the political class, Catholic Church and banks were caught up in a series of scandals that involved abuse of power, vulnerable children and financial privileges. A series of costly Tribunals of Inquiry were called to investigate the behaviour of an array of figures and groups in Irish society. A second phase of the economic boom was fabricated through an inflated property market in the early years of the 2000s. However, the vastly overrated pricing of properties and very high rates of lending from the banks led to a ‘casino culture’ in the Irish property market which fuelled the inevitable bust that followed. The economist David McWilliams has claimed that property transactions became a national sport, as nearly half a million properties changed hands in the three years between 2005 and 2008. Wealthy investors developed portfolios of properties in Ireland and the United Kingdom , and across Europe . European banks gave large loans that many Irish recipients were never in a position to pay back.
With the onset of the global economic downturn in 2008, the Irish economy was over exposed to the vagaries of the market, and in many ways the gullible rookies in the Irish investor sector had been duped into a spiral of debt and over priced properties by shrewd and unscrupulous financiers. In 2009, the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) was established, in an attempt to reclaim some of the value of Ireland ’s collapsed property market, with limited success.
The IMF and European Central bank had become involved in Ireland ’s economic affairs in the aftermath of the banking guarantee given by Fianna Fail Finance Minister Brian Lenihan in September 2008. Lenihan had been a part of the coalition that participated in Ireland’s phase with the Presidency of the European Union in the 1990s, and his sense of heightened duty went so far as to bring him to guarantee the debts of not just the Irish banks, but of the speculators and bond holders who take financial risks as a central part of their profession.
The dilemma of ‘who to trust’ which is facing the Irish public has been best summed up by social economist David McWilliams:
Why should we trust the people who got us into this mess in the first place? They were wrong then and they are wrong now. The politicians, bankers and developers think they can hand us the bill and walk away from the carnage. They want us follow a route that will make things worse for the ordinary man on the street while saving the bankers at the top of the tree, insisting that there is no other way.
Furthermore, the international financial sector had Eurosceptic elements opposed to the European Union and Eurozone, and utilised the Irish and Greek banking and debt crises as a vehicle to undermine these institutions. One example of this was the downgrading of Ireland ’s credit rating to junk status in July 2011, despite a positive review of Ireland ’s response to the debt crisis by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It would appear that Ireland ’s elites had taken on more than they could handle with the dualistic agendas of the Central European Bank and the non-aligned financial agencies setting the agendas for Irish economic planning for the foreseeable future. Subsequently, a disaffected malaise has enveloped Irish society, with the economic recession causing a further eradication of the social fabric.
Of course, the question remains, where does Ireland go from here? Without doubt, the time has come for a new agenda in Irish politics, one which is at once sustainable and just for all who inhabit the oft beleaguered Emerald isle. It remains to be seen if this new form of politics will emerge from existing grassroots or elite sectors of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, Ireland ’s slow by consistent emergence from the problems of the fiscal crisis will be a journey of rediscovery and reinvention for the Irish people.
Dr. Liam Leonard is a Lecturer in Sociology and Human Rights at the Institute of Technology, Sligo, Ireland. He has written several books on Environmental Justice and Politics. He is the Co-editor of Sustainable Politics and the Crisis of the Peripheries: Ireland and Greece:
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