The History of U.S. – Latin American Relations: An Overview
Nicholas F. Dupree

The history of U.S.-Latin American relations is a long and bloody one checkered by imperialist aggression and exploitation. The United States had a head start building its democratic institutions because it spawned from Britain, a constitutional monarchy whose fledgling parliamentary democracy was far ahead of most of the world at the time, and the U.S. built on that with a constitution and a government based on a revolutionary ideology. American revolutionaries, like the French revolutionaries that followed, were driven to spread their pro-freedom, anti-monarchist ideology, but unlike France’s First Republic, America’s first republic was not only more moderate, it could quickly stabilize amid its isolation and relative lack of competitors for the continent. Surprisingly rapidly, the United States was moving aggressively west and south to spread their revolutionary state and colonize land held by loosely organized indigenous tribes and a Spanish Empire spread thin and in relative decline.

Early on, America’s founding generation had their eyes (and territorial ambitions) pointed South. Presidents Jefferson and John Adams saw Cuba and Puerto Rico as “natural appendages” of North America that should break away from Spanish influence and join the United States. John Quincy Adams thought Cuba an “apple” fallen from the North American tree and that it should end its “unnatural connection” with Spain and rejoin its source, America. (Smith, 2007, p. 25) Thomas Jefferson had an impressive collection of Iberian writers in his library at Monticello, and actively promoted learning of the Spanish language.

“Spanish,” he wrote in a note accompanying a Spanish-language dictionary that he gifted to Peter Carr in 1787; “Bestow great attention on this, & endeavor to acquire an accurate knowledge of it. Our future connections with Spain & Spanish America will render that language a valuable acquisition. The antient [sic] history of a great part of America, too, is written in that language” (Works V: 322).1

But alongside the founding generation’s interest in Latin America, loomed skepticism. The prevailing views of the time included deep doubts about the ability of newly independent Latino populations to adopt republican values and effectively govern themselves, given racial and cultural differences and the dark legacy of oppression and violence from Spanish colonization. “I fear the degrading ignorance into which their priests and kings have sunk them, has disqualified them from the maintenance or even knowledge of their rights, and that much blood may be shed for little improvement in their condition. Should their new rulers honestly lay their shoulders to remove the great obstacles of ignorance, and press the remedies of education and information, they will still be in jeopardy until another generation comes into place, and what may happen in the interval cannot be predicted, nor shall you or I live to see it,” Thomas Jefferson wrote (Smith, p. 46) in an 1811 letter to Dupont de Nemours.2

John Quincy Adams echoed Jefferson’s views (p. 46), and as the United States became a power on the world stage competing for land and resources, it sought to seize them without seizing the diverse populations that lived there. “By the late 1830s, the idea of manifest destiny signified a racist nationalism that preferred to incorporate into the Union ‘unsettled’ and ‘empty’ lands—such as those taken from Native American peoples and, soon thereafter, Mexico.” (Loveman, 2010, p. 57) After the “Mexican Cession” of 1848, in which Mexico “ceded” 55% of its territory to the United States, the limits of Manifest Destiny were undecided, and the question of further annexation was fiercely debated among the varying factions in Congress, especially in the Senate. Seizing “Mexico proper,” including the entirety of the Yucatan peninsula, and Cuba, were both the subject of heated debates, but ultimately they were just too different for Congress and the public to support annexing. Cuba was too black (Smith, p. 26) and Mexico was too Indian: as the New York World wrote, “Mexicans are Indian, aboriginal Indian, and they must share in the destiny of the Indian.” (p. 49) Neither Mexico nor Cuba were incorporated into the United States, despite an unprecedented surge in U.S. imperialism in the 1890s and early 20th century that brought U.S. borders to their greatest territorial extent after Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and more were brought under U.S. control. American militarism and expansion were led by William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt at the helm of a newly modernized and powerful army and navy, and like-minded Republicans like Albert Beveridge and Orville H. Platt at the helm in the Congress. These American imperialists believed, in the words of Senator Beveridge, that “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation. No. …He has made us adept at government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.” (p. 51) This view would have driven even more aggressive expansion had their not been deep anxieties among the people and their Congress over “inferior peoples” becoming U.S. citizens. “Racism cut at least three ways. It inspired and justified American territorial expansion, but it also limited its reach due precisely to the indisposition of many Americans to incorporate into the Union “inferior peoples” as equals and citizens. It also underlay the slave/free divide in American domestic politics.” (Loveman, 2010, p. 57)

Once the United States had emerged as a 20th century world power after McKinley and Roosevelt’s wars of expansion, it was ready to put the Monroe Doctrine’s shaky record keeping European powers out of the Hemisphere throughout the 19th century behind it and enforce a U.S. sphere of influence in the Americas in earnest. The U.S. positioned itself to defend its gains in the new global race for land, resources, arms, military bases, trading-posts and colonies, called the “Great Game” in Britain, and the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was designed do just that: no opportunistic Europeans would bring their game into the U.S.’ backyard. Roosevelt’s Corollary insisted that the United States could intervene in any Latin American republic where instability reigned; the U.S. would send troops anywhere in the Americas where European powers could possibly see an opening due to unpaid debt or revolutionary turmoil. And send troops they did: TR sent troops to seize the “Isthmian Canal” in Panama and took over the customs collections of the Dominican Republic until debt to the U.S. and other great powers (Netherlands and France) were paid in full. (Smith, pp. 56-57) A similar scheme of occupation and repayment was imposed in Haiti with much less success. (p. 60) The customs repayment scheme actually led to war in Nicaragua, where the Americans’ fears of the “Bolshevist” revolutionary government of Mexico establishing its own “sphere of influence” and “primacy” over Central America (p. 67) collided with the Nicaraguan people’s anger and aspirations to be free from the yoke of crushing debt, and a guerrilla insurgency erupted (p. 59). President Coolidge only withdrew the Marines from Nicaragua in 1924 after imposing a fraudulent election that ousted disobedient liberals in favor of pliant “conservatives” led by Adolfo Diaz, who would focus on debt repayment. The Marines came back five months later amid rumblings of possible rebellion against Diaz and further unrest. U.S. efforts to “break kneecaps” in Central American and Caribbean states for payment due didn’t end until the Great Depression and looming threat of World War II necessitated it.

The last Marines withdrew from Nicaragua in 1933, and the Marines’ nineteen-year occupation of Haiti ended in 1934. The Great Depression made such foreign entanglements financially untenable, and Americans looked to the prospects of increased inter-hemispheric trade to aid recovery (p. 74) Soon, the U.S. would concern itself with an even more dire task, countering Axis attempts for world domination; with German and Italian fascists competing to influence fledgling republics in Latin America, Washington could ill-afford its previous “Big Stick” foreign policy. Brazilian trade with Germany was at an all time high, and the Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB) “formed in 1932 as a deliberate imitation of the Fascist parties of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Salazar in Portugal,” (Leonard, 2007, p. 145) had taken over Brazil’s government, given themselves unlimited “emergency powers,” and decreed the Estado Novo, “the new state,” along the lines of Portugal’s integralist Estado Novo. Brazil was obviously part of Hitler’s empire-building strategy; in Congress, a young Fiorello LaGuardia ranted against Brazilian collaboration with Nazi Germany (Smith, p. 76). Chile remained neutral at this time, having strong ties with the German military and an active German-Chilean minority, and still embittered over the Americans’ siding against them in the 1879-83 War of the Pacific and the U.S. adoption of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which had hurt Chile economically. (Leonard, p. 162-165) And Argentina, despite being a “closet ally” who supplied the Allies with crucial food during the war, (p. 184) was bogged down in a power struggle with its Nazi-sympathizing military, who were devoted to ultra-conservative, virulently anti-Semitic Argentine Catholicism (p. 188). Ultimately, Argentina didn’t end diplomatic ties with Germany until January 1944 (pp. 162-163).

But Mexico, so important to U.S. national security for its bountiful oil reserves and immediate proximity along the U.S. border with the American Southwest, was Washington’s most pressing concern in the lead-up to World War II. The Cårdenas administration (1934-1940) was just stabilizing and consolidating control over a Mexican polity that for decades had been in revolutionary flux (p. 17). Mexicans were beginning to interpret the European battle between the communists and fascists, especially the Spanish Civil War, through their unique revolutionary lens, and whether Mexico would side with the United States was unclear during Lázaro Cárdenas’ rule as he remained neutral. “Capitalists, businessmen, Catholics, and middle-class Mexicans who opposed many of the reforms implemented by the revolutionary government sided with the Spanish Falange” (p. 18) i.e., the fascist movement, and Nazi propagandist Arthur Dietrich and his team of agents in Mexico successfully manipulated editorials and coverage of Europe by paying hefty subsidies to Mexican newspapers, including the widely-read dailies Excelsior and El Universal (pp. 18-19).

The situation became even more worrisome for the Allies when the major oil companies boycotted Mexican oil following Lázaro Cárdenas’ nationalization of the oil industry and expropriation of all corporate oil properties in 1938, (p. 19) which severed Mexico’s access to its traditional markets and led Mexico to sell its oil to Germany and Italy (Smith, p. 79). In Mexico and throughout Latin America, Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” was necessary at such a delicate time, and in the case of the Mexicans, ultimately led to the Douglas-Weichers Agreement in June 1941 that secured Mexican oil only for the United States, (Leonard, p. 21) and the Global Settlement in November 1941, a rare example of the U.S. putting national security concerns over fairness for American oil companies (p. 22-23).

But such “Good Neighbor” agreements and “soft power” influence were self-interested in the end, accomplishing the abrupt end of German Fifth Column activities in Mexico, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor, all nine Central American and Caribbean republics declared war on the Axis nearly in unison in a show of seldom-seen Hemispheric solidarity (Smith, p. 86). Unfortunately for Latin America, the United States’ inter-American strategy would drastically shift as soon as their interests did.

The post-war world, with Russia and the United States locked in a Cold War that threatened to involve, if not destroy, every state on the planet, was not kind to the republics of the Americas. Washington soon divided Latin America simplistically along “with us or against us” red lines, and fear of communist infiltration, both real and used as a political football, was rampant. During the 1952 U.S. Presidential Election, Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower accused the incumbent Democratic party of pushing Latin Americans into the arms of wily Communist agents waiting to exploit local misery and capitalize on any opening to communize the Americas (Smith, p. 127). From that point on, the “Big Stick” foreign policy came back to Latin America in various forms and guises until the ’90s, with the U.S. consistently backing the same type of elite-led fascist regimes they were trying to undercut during WWII.

Up to the time of Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal that embarrassed the United States on the world stage, U.S. foreign policy supporting fascist local elites as long as they were suitably pliant and reliably anti-communist was commonplace. One would hope that the current non-interventionist tack toward Latin America under the Obama administration is due to assessment of tough historic lessons learned and not mere economic constraints. Future repeats of the George W. Bush approach to the Americas, with “second acts” for several notorious Iran-Contra figures (see Observers Warn of U.S. Manipulation in Nicaragua) and the CIA’s Venezuelan Coup Attempt of 2002, is certainly cause for concern. The future of U.S.-Latin American relations I’d like to see, is one where Simon Bolivar’s famous statement “the United States seems destined by Providence to bring misery to the Americas in the name of liberty”4 seems something solely relevant for historical background, instead of something that’s directly related to current events and threatens to crop up again in U.S. Foreign policy at any moment.

Works Cited

Leonard, T. M., Bratzel, J. F., Rankin, M., Smith, J. & Scheinin, D. (2007). Latin america during world war ii. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Loveman, B. (2010). No higher law: american foreign policy and the western hemisphere since 1776. Chapel Hill, NC, USA: The University of North Carolina Press.

Smith, P. H. (2007). Talons of the eagle: dynamics of u.s. – latin american relations (RFB&D Daisy Audiobook),

Footnotes:

1: Bauer, Ralph. (2009). Thomas Jefferson, the hispanic enlightenment, and the birth of hemispheric american studies Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, 32(1), Retrieved from http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-11917558/Thomas-Jefferson-the-Hispanic-enlightenment.html

2: Ibid.

3: Garcia-Navarro, L. (2006, November 2). Observers warn of u.s. manipulation in nicaragua. NPR, Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6423982

4: LaRosa, M., & Mora, F. O. (2009). Neighborly adversaries: readings in u.s.-latin american relations [2nd Edition]. (RFB&D Daisy Audiobook),

Dr. El-Kikhia tells Jon Stewart that he had to leave Libya in 1980 after yet another crackdown on Benghazi. He says he was trying to drive to work one day when the police choked off traffic, directing the traffic flow so that all incoming cars had to go past a series of hanging corpses–a message to the people of Benghazi about what will happen to dissidents.

The interview doesn’t have time for details, but one should note that Benghazi and its province Cyrenaica have long hated its rival in the west, Tripoli. I know at one point, Benghazi forced Qaddafi’s troops out and have built a 4-star hotel where the barracks was.

Knowledge of the neighborhood, and of the culture and dynamics of New York City itself, is badly missing from this “debate.” Most of the opposition never frequents these parts of Lower Manhattan; they come from other places, often hundreds of miles away or farther, to protest.

I know that New Yorkers do view the 16 acre (65,000 m2) superblock where the World Trade Center buildings stood as hallowed ground. New Yorkers have been very offended by the petty squabbles between The Port Authority, WTC lease-holder Larry Silverstein and various insurers that delayed any work on rebuilding until April 27, 2006. The planned permanent memorial and visitor center isn’t completed despite promises it would be. The September 11 Families’ Association has often decried the crass commercial activity surrounding the site, with illegal vendors yelling to sell tourists tacky Chinese-made 9/11 memorabilia like Twin Towers snowglobes and bad commemorative booklets with inaccurate Engrish text and pirated photographs, for absurdly high prices. See Hawking History and Cutting Corners for details about the situation.
The fact that the site has shameless vendors hawking tasteless souvenirs but not the promised memorial is a festering wound for a lot of New Yorkers. THAT offends us living in Lower Manhattan, not an Islamic YMCA that might be built two full blocks north (conservatives respond: you’re not offended by this in your neighborhood! we’ll be offended x1000 FOR YOU!)
Insensitive out-of-towners asking everybody on the bus “how do I get to Ground Zero?!” like it’s just another tourist attraction and go to buy those tacky knickknacks is pretty offensive though, and many of us connect those clueless tourists with the clueless out-of-towners (who often take after the willful ignorance satirized here in The Onion) pouring into the city to protest in a neighborhood they’ve never frequented and don’t remotely understand. A recent Marist poll confirms what I’m saying, only 31% of Manhattan residents say the Cordoba House offends them, whereas opposition goes up the further away from the area they poll (53% against if you count all five boroughs, 68% if you ask people in all 50 states). Misunderstanding the situation and hating this is “roughly proportional to distance” from it (from a great Hendrik Hertzberg op-ed).

Yes, the actual World Trade Center site (can we stop calling it Ground Zero, a misused term from douchebag news anchors, please???) is hallowed ground, but the surrounding area? Those surrounding blocks are no different than the rest of this Lower Manhattan neighborhood. It’s a place constantly changing, lots of run down buildings waiting for redevelopment beside gleaming corporate towers, Wall Street titans, tons of office space, churches, mosques, old stores, tacky souvenirs, “adult entertainment,” and more, as market forces (self-interest, competition and supply and demand: AKA the invisible hand of the market) continually puts businesses and other facilities in the city, and because it’s NYC, everything is right next to everything (placed to serve the concentrated demand in such a tight, concentrated space of real estate). That’s right, the blocks surrounding the WTC have STRIP CLUBS, Burger Kings, everything–NOT “hallowed ground.”

What is already here

This is closer to the World Trade Center site than the Park51 project

Very much non-hallowed ground, an Off-Track Betting joint also on Park Place, even closer to the World Trade Center site than the Park51 project

I heard a host on NPR asking an outspoken opponent of Park51 what about the (actually a mosque) mosques also near the WTC, and he said “well, that preexisted 9/11 so they’re grandfathered in” but there should be no FURTHER mosques constructed in the area. When told that the Park51 project is modeled after the 92nd St Y, and is, by no definition (in Islam nor in the dictionary) “a mosque,” this guy brushed it off, disbelieving. What would he have said if told of the strippers, gambling and other low-brow establishments even closer to the WTC site? “How dare you say strip clubs aren’t sacred ground!!!”?? It’s like the opponents of this REALLY BELIEVE that this project (construction not slated to begin until 2015 or later) will be some huge domed mosque with minarets towering over “Ground Zero” and the muezzin’s call to prayer echoing off rubble and skeleton fragments as Taliban wield rifle butts to corral women in burqas. Nothing but fiction!!! It seems NOTHING can penetrate this fictitious narrative that the Right clings to, NOTHING. The machine (political/media machines) must have an enemy. The beast must be fed red meat to survive. The age-old bread and circus to distract the masses. The machine is all that matters–founding principles, the Constitution, even the physical safety of a religious minority BE DAMNED!

And it’s primarily fueled by lies and distortions ginned up by the shameless, ratings whores in cable news.

Is this crap driven by the media? Yes, yes! A thousand times yes!

Violence is escalating now. A Bangladeshi cab driver was asked if he was Muslim and then brutally stabbed in midtown. Five teens were arrested in Waterport, upstate NY for firing at a mosque and disrupting a religious service. This has grown and grown beyond just a media distraction to threaten the peace and stability of our country, as well as our Constitutional principles and national soul.

Is religious freedom and the right of private property trumped by angry mobs ginned up by hate and fear? Are we at war with Islam itself and reject anything related to Islam on U.S. soil? (anti-Islam forces are battling Muslims trying to build on their own private property in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, California…and arsonists attacked the construction in Tennessee.) Are we already at war with 1.5 BILLION believers? if so, time for a draft. What are we at war with? How can we win over Iraq and Afghanistan, which hinges on “hearts and minds,” if we paint all Muslims as terrorists hell-bent on destruction? IT’S DECISION TIME!

Amid all this turmoil, the mainstream media wall-to-wall hate speech, countrymen set against each other, friends de-friending each other on facebook, what should those of us who want a teaching moment about religious liberty, private property and anti-violence DO?

I made the video blog below, my response to the right-wing talking heads on your TVs and internets about this project, really a Y to be built in a disused Burlington Coat Factory IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD! SuperAleja edited in captions for the Nick impaired.

My main points: the Burlington Coat Factory isn’t hallowed ground. Park51 is not a mosque and it is not at “Ground Zero,” and Islam is not evil.

Warning: the clips of right-wing talking heads spewing hate speech I use may be offensive and difficult to watch. Dick Morris paints all Muslims as radical enemies and says “all the other (mosques)” are “command centers for terrorism,” Newt Gingrich calls the people behind the Park51 project “radical Islamists” and compares the building to “a Nazi sign in front of the Holocaust museum” and self-described Christian conservatives are shown burning the Koran. I cringe seeing these clips, but we must recognize the bigotry in this country in order to squelch it and lower the heat of this issue.

Transcript of the video blog:

Hello, this is Nick Dupree for nickscrusade.org. And because I live only 4 or 5 blocks from this proposed Islamic community Center that has consumed all of American politics, I thought I should comment.

[O'Reilly clip]

All the arguments against this thing rely on the idea that Islam is somehow related to 9/11. And it would be like putting a statue of Hitler next to a Holocaust memorial; it would be like building a Robert Oppenheim school of nuclear science at Hiroshima. All these arguments are pure crap. Islam has nothing to do with 9/11, any more than Christianity has to do with the KKK. By the same logic, we couldn’t build a church near Atlanta’s Millennium Park because of the Christian extremists who bombed it. Or they say, it’s “hallowed ground”.

Oh no, you must not build on this hallowed ground! Okay, come on. It’s two blocks, two full city blocks, away from the World Trade Center. City blocks in New York City are huge, and there’s an entire culture in each city block different from the other ones. The city blocks around the World Trade Center already have everything–there’s already mosques, there are churches, there are strip clubs, there’s adult bookstores, there’s everything already in the surrounding blocks. And the place that they want to put this thing, is in a disused Burlington Coat Factory, for pete’s sake.

[Burlington Coat Factory commercial]
[NYC landmark commission unanimously ruling that there's no reason to make the old Burlington Coat Factory an untouchable city landmark]

Come on! Stop telling me that the Burlington freaking Coat Factory is hallowed ground! It’s not on the site of the World Trade Center, and, it’s not a mosque, it’s an old Burlington Coat Factory. It’s going to be a community center like a YMCA, you know, with a gym, and a swimming pool, a culinary school, a food court, classrooms….. only a tiny part of it is going to be for prayer. And what’s so wrong about prayer? Don’t we have freedom of prayer, freedom of religion, and our very Constitution?

It’s not a mosque, there’s no minarets towering over the city. There’s no muezzin calling for prayer. It’s a crap argument. It shouldn’t even be a story, it’s a YMCA, for all intents and purposes. And they have the freedom to build what they want on their own property. It’s property rights, and a municipal land-use issue. It should be decided by those in the neighborhood, like myself.
Not the worst bigots in the country from a crazy church that wants to burn the Koran. [local Jacksonville news clip about this church's "Burn A Koran" day]
Pat Robertson [clip of Robertson talking about "Cordoba mosque" (sic) on the 700 Club]
Dick Morris, [clip of O'Reilly interviewing Morris]
Newt Gingrich, [clip of Gingrich spewing hate speech on the Fox News morning show]
should these bigots decide what goes in my neighborhood, or should I decide it? Really it’s a no-brainer. Angry bigots, thousands of miles away, should not be deciding this. I, and the rest of the neighborhood, should decide it. There’s nothing dangerous, there’s nothing sinister, about the people that are behind this project, who are moderates. And they’re being painted, along with the entire religion of Islam, as evil. If we’re going to paint an entire religion of a billion and a half people with the same brush, then why would they make peace with us, why would anything change? So, the hate that we’re hearing all over the media… friends de-friending each other on Facebook over this, it really needs to stop. It’s a YMCA. Please, let the neighborhood decide this.

Please spread this blog post and video. Truth, justice and the American way will only exist to the extent we make it exist.

Nick

PS
This is the 1337th post on nickscrusade.org. 1337!!!

Just as in Kyrgyzstan’s revolution, in Iran, mostly young people, tired of decades of authoritarian rule, took to the streets en masse to overturn a fraudulent election that had ratified the rule of a dictator. In Kyrgyzstan, the protests were so loud, the people so united, that old Soviet boss Askar Akayev saw his power base erode to the point that continuing in office was too risky and untenable; protesters seized the presidential offices, and he ended up escaping to Russia. In Iran, this didn’t happen; the regime didn’t budge. Why? Because the entrenched support base loyal to the regime, especially the Sepah (Revolutionary Guards) and the Basij, wouldn’t allow it.

A photo of Basij volunteers drilling in their drill uniforms. (Credit: Vahid Salemi / AP)

Who are the Basijis? The best way for an American to understand them is as a combination of the Boy Scouts, the revolutionary Minutemen, the Taliban and the legend of the Persian Hashshashins (Assassins) who would take themselves out with their foes. The Basijis are a volunteer militia operated as an auxiliary of the Sepah, and take orders directly from Sepah commanders and the Supreme Leader, not the president. The Basijis are mostly religious youth, and they are charged with protecting the regime, along with Shia Islam and its people’s “virtues.” To show their Islamic virtue they may work in mosques, help elderly people cross the street, give gasoline to people stranded in their cars on the side of the road, or, on the other side of the coin, intimidate and assault Iranians dressed in “immoral” attire, and haul suspected dissidents into the nearest police station. The Basij responds to threats to the regime within and without; they played a key role in the Iran-Iraq war, with mass “human wave” martyr attacks by teenage Basijis to clear minefields and terrify Saddam’s troops, and they have often crushed Iranians citizens’ demonstrations, most notably during the uprising that followed the June 12 rigged election of this year, and the student protests of July ’99.

The founder of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini founded the Basij (pronounced BAH-siege) when he became leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. It was a shrewd move. Khomeini knew that he would always have a lot of enthusiastic extreme-fundamentalist young men on his hands, and it’s smarter to protect your Right flank, honor them and harness their energy to protect the regime, than it is to let them fester ignored until they become something that could overthrow him. In Persian, the Basij (literally, “Mobilization”) are also called Basij-e Mostaz’afin, “Mobilization of the Oppressed,” and there is a clear “class warfare” element to them. The Basijis are mostly poor, young, and fundamentalist, and they are often pitted against the mostly secular, modernizing upper class. President Ahmadinejad was a Basij, with the Basij culture and chip on the shoulder, and he framed the rich elite as decadent, corrupt, and “oppressing” the hard-working, pious, rural poor.

Ahmadinejad and fellow Basij veterans, in ceremonial uniform

For Iran’s rulers, this has them sitting pretty: in addition to having the judiciary, military and local officials firmly behind them, they can rally a religious proletariat to the defense of Islamic government whenever needed, with angry young Basijis as the head of the spear. Despite dissent from other Ayatollahs (Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, Ayatollah Mohajerani, Ayatollah Rafsanjani), the government’s lessened legitimacy and growing feeling in Iran’s cities that the current regime’s enforcers (Sepah, Basij, local police) are no better than the Shah’s brutal secret police (the SAVAK) that they united against in 1979, this regime is deeply entrenched, and the Persian people* will likely be watched over by Ayatollah Khomeini’s evil glare everywhere for years to come.

For more information on the Basij:
The New Yorker: Jon Lee Anderson: Understanding The Basij

Basij Violence In The News:
LA Times: Tehran’s streets erupt after a key cleric speaks

From The Miami Herald, a cartoon showing "New Boss, Same As The Old Boss," the Islamic Republic attacking their own people just as the Shah did

Contrasting brave Iranians willing to protest despite very real risk to life and limb with couch potato Americans doing little for their freedom, I feel like I’m in a nation of proles. Like Iranians, we Americans used to be a proud and revolutionary people. I hope that isn’t completely dead.

Nick

*For the uninitiated, Iranians are sometimes still referred to as “Persians,” and their country was called “Persia” by outsiders from the 5th century BC up until 1935, when Reza Shah Pahlavi issued a decree requesting everyone use Iran, meaning “the land of Aryans,” which Iranians had been calling their country since about 1000 BC. For more information, see Iran Naming Convention. Iranians are an Aryan/Indo-European people, and in physical appearance, look little different from the related Caucasians in the nearby Caucasus region. They are white people. Too many Americans lump Iraq and Iran together and say “bomb all them A-rabs,” which couldn’t be more wrong. Iranians are not Arabs, have a proud history and culture totally distinct from Arabs, speak a language (with grammar similar to many contemporary European languages) unintelligible to those who only understand Arabic, and Iranians’ bitter rivalry and wars with the proto-Arab and Arab peoples of the Fertile Crescent span back to the first written records of the region recorded by Sumerians. Saddam Hussein was infamous for his hate of Persians.

My history professor friend Bridgett and I discussed this on her blog post about Kramer, “Same-sex sexuality in 17th century British North America,” and she explains that real historians can’t “out” people from the past as gay without definitive, absolute proof, or they’ll be filleted by critics, discredited and risk their careers.   Not a problem for Kramer, as he has no historian cred to risk.

To me, his biggest fallacy is that simply because no wives were available for many Jamestown colonists, they would “turn to each other.” It’s not something you can CHOOSE like that, and he of all people should know that. I could no more choose attraction to males amid a girl-shortage than Kramer could choose attraction to women.

Does anyone really believe that whenever there’s a scarcity of women in a society, large amounts of men will “turn to each other?” This made me turn my thoughts to China. Recently, a gay family member told me because of the lack of females in China and the fact that, mathematically, tens of millions of men will never be able to find women to marry (true) that millions will turn to gay sex. I don’t think that’s what will happen — it’s not A CHOICE!

Numerous articles about the gender imbalance in China (caused by abortions of potential girls and infanticide after birth) have been written. I recommend:

• New York Times: Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million

• NBC: China Begins to Face Sex-Ratio Imbalance

• Washington Post: ‘Bare Branches’ and Danger in Asia

In this Washington Post op-ed, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. Den Boer, the authors of “Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population,” wrote:

The old saying goes, “When you pick up one end of a stick, you also pick up the other.” When a society prefers sons to daughters to the extent found in parts of contemporary Asia, it not only will have fewer daughters, but it also will create a subclass of young men who are apt to have difficulty finding wives and beginning their own families. Because son preference has been a significant phenomenon in Asia for centuries, the Chinese actually have a term for such young men. They are called guang gun-er or “bare branches,” because they are branches of the family tree that will never bear fruit. The girls who should have grown up to be their wives were disposed of instead.

We have already seen in China the resurrection of evils such as the kidnapping and selling of women to provide brides for those who can pay the fee. Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages — money, skills, education — will marry, but men without such advantages — poor, unskilled, illiterate — will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population.

Should the leaders of these nations be worried? The answer is yes. Throughout history, bare branches in East and South Asia have played a role in aggravating societal instability, violent crime and gang formation.

Though the existence of sizable numbers of bare branches is not a necessary condition for instability — the sex ratios of Rwanda in 1994 were normal, for example — it plays a significant role in the amplification of levels of instability and threat.

Consider the fact that in the mid-1800s, a predominantly bare-branch rebel group in the north of China called the Nien, in combination with rebel groups farther south, openly attacked imperial troops and forts, taking control of territory inhabited by 6 million Chinese citizens before it was quashed by the government years later.

More recently, Indian scholars have noted a very strong relationship between sex ratios and violent crime rates in Indian states, which persists even after controlling for a variety of other possible variables. And worldwide, more violent crime is committed by unmarried young adult men than by married young adult men.

According to sociologists, young adult men with no stake in society — of the lowest socioeconomic classes and with little chance of forming families of their own — are much more prone to attempt to improve their situation through violent and criminal behavior in a strategy of coalitional aggression with other bare branches.

Historically, governments facing a growing population of bare branches find themselves caught in a dilemma. They must decrease the threat to society posed by these young men but at the same time may find the cost of doing so is heavy. Increased authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth can be one result.

At some point, governments consider how they can export their problem, either by encouraging emigration of young adult men or harnessing their energies in martial adventures abroad. There are very few good options for governments that find that their greatest threat emanates not from an external source but from an internal one.

Years ago I saw Hudson and Den Boer’s book discussed on CNN, and in that segment, they argued that the explosive growth of Islamic conquests…

This map shows the expansion of the Islamic Caliphate. In dark red, is territory conquered by Mohammed himself (from 622-632 he consolidated all of the Arabian Peninsula), in pink are the territories conquered in 632-661 by the "Patriarchal Caliphate" (all of the Levant, Egypt, present-day Libya, Iraq, Iran and present-day Georgia in the South Caucasus) and, in beige, the lands taken during the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750; much of Central Asia, including Samerkand, present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and all of the Maqreb of West Africa and Spain).

…in the 7th and 8th centuries wasn’t just “to spread the faith by the sword,” but, because the prevalence of polygamy on the Arabian Peninsula made it impossible for large numbers of angry young fundamentalist males with swords to ever find wives. Large groups of them invaded Egypt, Persia, etc., where the population of widowed women had just grown considerably from the war. Hudson and Den Boer suggested a similar phenomenon may happen in China.

We are already seeing the consequences of gender imbalance in China that Hudson and Den Boer’s research predicts: increased sex trafficking, prostitution becoming more widespread and more lucrative. Will we see China invading neighboring countries as well?

What do you think? Please comment below.

Nick

PaulCanning forwards an urgent request from IRAQI LGBT:

IRAQI LGBT started to establish a network of safe houses inside Iraq in March 2006.

As of today, we have only one safe house, we had to consider closing down three of them in the last couple of months, because we are unable to keep paying the rent and other expenses.

The members of our group inside Iraq urgently need funds to open at least five safe houses. These funds will allow us to keep the five safe houses running, and provide safety, shelter, food and many other needs for our LGBT friends inside Iraq. Any funds we receive that go beyond what we need for these five safe houses could be used to open more safe houses in the near future. We desperately need to add more because we have so many urgent cases in other cities. We receive requests for shelter every day, but we are not able to help yet.

Source: http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2009/05/support-safe-houses-project-for-lgbt.html

In recent months, Iraq’s mullahs have directed a vicious purge of gay Iraqis. Evidently, the Sadrist movement (who have plenty of supporters within the current regime) and the Iraqi government reached an agreement, and if gays aren’t simply shot by militiamen, they are jailed, executed, or tortured to death by the authorities. Many have died via extrajudicial execution, while others were officially imprisoned and executed by hanging. Still others (about 200 in Baghdad) are on death row awaiting hanging.

Activists will protest for the human rights of LGBT Iraqis Sunday outside President Obama’s home in Chicago, and implore him to act.

This year in Chicago, the Gay Liberation Network (GLN) is organizing the city’s IDAHO event as a protest against the Obama administration’s continuing silence about rampant anti-gay violence in U.S.-occupied Iraq. The protest will take place at 2 PM, Sunday, May 17th outside of the Obamas’ Chicago residence at the corner of Hyde Park Boulevard (5100 S.) and Greenwood (1100 E.).

Over the past month, several news outlets have reported an escalating, officially sanctioned campaign to torture and execute gays in Iraq, promoted both by Shi’ite clerics and by the Shi’ite-dominated government which is closely allied with the United States.

As the New York Times reported April 7, “In the past two months, the bodies of as many as 25 boys and men suspected of being gay have turned up in the huge [Baghdad] Shiite enclave of Sadr City, the police and friends of the dead say. Most have been shot, some multiple times. Several have been found with the word ‘pervert’ in Arabic on notes attached to their bodies, the police said.” And as the Huffington Post reported May 3rd, “According to Iraqis and human rights workers interviewed for this post, some sort of understanding was reached between the Iraqi government and the Mahdi Army to ‘cleanse’ Iraq of homosexuals.”

Tortures committed reportedly include gluing the anuses of gay men shut, and then force-feeding them diarrhea-inducing medications which cause agonizing pain followed by death.

Back in 2005, the country’s leading Shi’ite cleric said that gays and lesbians should be “punished, in fact, killed” and that “the people should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.” After some protests this language was removed from the cleric’s website, and the anti-gay campaign appeared to subside.

However, over the past month, the campaign in Iraq to murder gays has ramped up again as “Sadr City’s Muslim clerics have reportedly urged the faithful to destroy homosexuality in Iraqi society and police have undertaken an effort to arrest and jail gay men,” said United Press International.

Source: LGBT asylum news: Chicago protest about anti-gay pogram in Iraq

Nick’s Crusade, strongly believing that disability rights activists shouldn’t be stuck in their traditional “silos,” but should be supporting the inalienable human rights of all people, endorses this protest Sunday. Obama should take heed, and, if he can’t pull strings in Baghdad, at the very least he could grant asylum in the U.S. to those who are now hiding in fear.

I don’t have any money (I know; I’m a charitable case myself) but if I did, helping LGBT Iraqis who’re running for their lives is a very worthy cause.    For more information, see the IRAQI LGBT blog.

Regardless of your opinions on the gay issue, if you have friends and family that are gay (I do) and wouldn’t want them killed, you should pay attention to the persecution of gays around the world, and raise awareness.

Nick

Cartoon by R.J. Matson

How is Obama’s Afghanistan plan supposed to work, when similar plans were EPIC FAIL for the Soviets, British, Alexander the Great and others?

Former CIA Mideast operative Robert Baer (played by George Clooney in Syriana) writes in TIME Magazine:

The Pashtun are a big, sprawling, insulated tribal people. There are some 40 million of them, but no one knows for sure because the central governments in Kabul and Islamabad have never felt safe enough to take a proper census. The Taliban are overwhelmingly Pashtun. The Pashtun have never had their own country, but they share a common language and identity.

And most importantly, they’re willing to shed their blood for each other. The Pashtun have a long history of uniting to face a common, external threat. They held up Alexander the Great for years — if for no other reason than pure belligerence. Something like that seems to be happening today. In February, the Taliban organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to put aside their differences, and combine forces to fight NATO in Afghanistan. What incited the alliance was the Obama Administration’s plans to send an additional 17,000 troops.

Baer believes the only way that we can glean a modicum of success from this nearly eight-year, open-ended war, is if we focus on the foreign al-Qaida elements, root them out, come to an accommodation with the Taliban/Pashtun tribes, and exit the region as soon as possible.

The British learned the hard way, after three unsuccessful wars in “Pashtunistan” (one campaign was chronicled in great detail by a young Winston Churchill), that accommodation with the Pashtun tribes (also called Pathans or Pukhtoons by the Brits) is the only option. The British eventually cut a deal with the Pashtuns to leave them alone, and, in exchange, the tribes would protect British India from northern invaders. Even after the western provinces of British India became Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistanis continued the arrangement to leave the Pashtuns their autonomy.

I feel the president, as well as the voting public, are woefully uninformed about the enemies we’re facing. Alexander the Great couldn’t conquer Afghanistan. The British, much more adept imperialists than we are (they make the neo-con attempts at empire look positively milquetoast) could never pacify the region, even given extraordinary brutality. The Soviets, who had the might of modern military technology (tanks, an air force, helicopters, missiles, etc.) on their side, and often resorted to “scorched earth” tactics, nonetheless suffered a complete defeat in Afghanistan. The Russians are chuckling at us now as we follow in their footsteps and sink into the quagmire.

No nation-state has ever controlled the Pashtun tribes. The Pashtun are the largest tribal society still intact today, and will follow their traditional network of clan leaders, local headmen and tribal elders, not a parliament or president. For rural Pashtuns, decrees from leaders hundreds of miles away aren’t relevant compared to the decisions of the local jirga. And nothing will trump Pashtunwali, the ancient code of honor Pashtuns live by; the reason they’ve never given up bin Laden is that they can’t break the rule to protect guests seeking asylum (just as Lot protected visiting angels from a mob), no matter the rewards offered to do so. Another part of Pashtunwali: balad, or revenge. Pashtuns must exact revenge for any insult for 1000 years, on the offender or his nearest male relative, until a resolution is reached.

Too many Americans JUST DON’T GET what we’re up against. The chances that the U.S. will fare better than the British did are slim and none. We need education, education, education. Unless the West gets wise about other peoples and their histories, we’ll continue to fail.

Vizzini's wisdom: "never get involved in a land war in Asia!"

“NEVER GET INVOLVED IN A LAND WAR IN ASIA!”

Most recently, in response to an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges, Bashir ejected all the aid workers from Sudan so that the remaining refugees are left without food or water and will die.

This weekend, the Arab League rewarded Bashir with the red carpet treatment at their summit in Qatar and a public hug and kiss session. They also drafted a resolution rejecting the ICC warrant for his arrest and continue to protect this wanted criminal.

Sudanese President Bashir Laughing It Up At The Arab League Summit

Bashir Laughing It Up At The Arab League Summit

It’s unbelievable that a war criminal of this magnitude would be so embraced by his Arab neighbors, and allowed to happily jet outside his country unfettered. Ugh! Arab League, you have forever lost credibility in my eyes.

Nick

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer
Wed Aug 22, 8:58 AM ET

DAMASCUS, Syria – Iraq’s prime minister lashed out Wednesday at U.S. criticism, saying no one has the right to impose timetables on his elected government and that his country “can find friends elsewhere.”

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki blamed the U.S. presidential campaign for the recent tough words about his government, from President Bush and from other U.S. politicians.

Bush on Tuesday said he was frustrated with Iraqi leaders’ inability to bridge political divisions. But he added that only the Iraqi people can decide whether to sideline al-Maliki.

“Clearly, the Iraqi government’s got to do more,” Bush said. “I think there’s a certain level of frustration with the leadership in general, inability to work — come together to get, for example, an oil revenue law passed or provincial elections.”

Full article: AP: Iraqi PM lashes out at U.S. critics

Then the next day I saw this story:

CRAWFORD, Texas (CNN) — A powerhouse Republican lobbying firm with close ties to the White House has begun a public campaign to undermine the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, CNN has confirmed.

This comes as President Bush is publicly taking great pains to reiterate his support for the embattled Iraqi leader.

Al-Maliki’s government has come under sharp criticism and scrutiny from Washington lawmakers and officials, as reflected in Thursday’s National Intelligence Estimate.

A senior Bush administration official told CNN the White House is aware of the lobbying campaign by Barbour Griffith & Rogers because the firm is “blasting e-mails all over town” criticizing al-Maliki and promoting the firm’s client, former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, as an alternative to al-Maliki.

But the senior administration official insisted that White House officials have “absolutely no involvement” in the campaign to remove al-Maliki, nor have they given it their blessing.

“There’s just no connection whatsoever,” the official said. “There’s absolutely no involvement.”

When asked whether the White House will ask the prominent Republican lobbying firm to stop lashing out at al-Maliki, the official said, “I don’t rule it out.”

Pressed on why allies of the White House would be contradicting the president publicly, the senior administration official said of the lobbyists, “They’re making a lot of money.”

Full article: CNN: Powerhouse GOP firm working to undermine Iraqi PM

So basically, al-Maliki got a little rebellious under all the withering criticism, and also he won’t hand over the oil.

The next day, a major GOP firm is handed a fat contract to agitate against al-Maliki.

Coincidence? I think not.

And where would exiled former PM Allawi get that kind of money?
*cough* CIA *cough*

The lobbyists have even parked the domain name AllawiForIraq.com.

Hillary Clinton also said we should throw al-Maliki under the bus. As usual, she is on the same page with the neo-cons.

I would HATE to be al-Maliki. Worst job EVAR.
He’s surrounded by a zillion impossible catch 22s and is simply stalling.
Poor bastard.

I hope he flees before a bullet makes the decision for him.

Nick

The Western powers, angry at being cut out of the oil money, and fearing the wave of anti-corporate sentiment would allow Iran to fall under Soviet influence, imposed crippling sanctions on Iran, plunging their people into poverty and the country into chaos. Then the UK and U.S. decided to stage a coup d’etat.

Operation Ajax, led by the CIA, deposed and imprisoned Prime Minister Mossadegh, and installed sympathetic general Fazlollah Zahedi in his place. Not only did BP retain a hold over Iran’s oil, but Shell oil and other corporations got a piece of the pie.

Imagine what could’ve happened if Mossadegh had succeeded? Democracy may have spread from Iran all over the Middle East.
We stopped democracy cold. We don’t want democracy in the region.

In 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued an official U.S. apology to the Iranian people for the overthrow. “We deposed your democracy. Sorry about that.”

CIA documents about the coup were also released in 2000, and they contained the first use of the term “blowback.”
And man, was there major blowback from Operation Ajax. It created deep and lasting rage that led directly to the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and continues to be reflected in the body counts of U.S. troops in the various wars in the region since then.

Happy un-democracy anniversary, Iran!

Nick

This testimony is riveting. She is very angry, screen-melting angry, about America invading her country. She is furious at the chaos, lack of water, and the WMD that the U.S. is using in Iraq (depleted uranium, napalm, white phosphorous). It’s such an inflammatory speech, I was initially reticent to post it here, but it is so compelling I had to. I consider her viewpoint unassailable, since she saw what’s happening in Iraq with her own eyes and we didn’t.

She says the Jewish motto “NEVER AGAIN” (never again should a people be destroyed) must extend to Iraqis too. I think this is the only moral approach.

If we’re in Iraq (supposedly for humanitarian purposes) without Iraq’s consent, isn’t that like rape, and doomed to fail?

Nick

Did you know we prop up the evil dictator in Ethiopia to the tune of $500 million a year? The New York Times did some stunning boots-on-the ground reporting last week on what the Ethiopian regime is doing to repress a rebellion in its Somali province–torturing women with pliers, etc.
Ethiopian-Americans are writing Congress and saying please stop funding this tyrant, Meles Zenawi (here is a YouTube video about this, it is awesome that dissidents are using the web to get the truth out). Expatriate dissident bloggers say the foreign aid only benefits Meles’ Cayman Island bankers. But Bush insists Ethiopia is an important ally in the “war on terra.”

Did you know we’re sending $120 million of taxpayer dollars to the government of Uzbekistan, that is universally regarded as one of the most corrupt, repressive regimes on Earth? To call these regimes EVIL is no exaggeration. Uzbekistan’s Saddam-style tyrant, Islom Karimov, is infamous for boiling dissidents alive, but we prop him up because he is “tough on terror.”

This is Uzbekistan dictator Islom Karimov. He enjoys counting foreign aid money, long walks on the beach, and boiling opponents alive.

Bush has increased U.S. foreign aid by $5 billion, with the Democrats giving him standing ovations.
Don’t get me wrong, the Dems are not exempt from my ire. Clinton was just as bad about funding tyrannical regimes, and there are some liberals right now begging for more aid to authoritarian dystopias like Zimbabwe, and those people need to check themselves.

There seems to be a strange unanimity on both sides of the aisle that propping up “pro-American regimes” is “in U.S. interests,” no matter how brutally repressive their governments are. I would argue that letting one dime from the U.S. treasury assist despots who torture their own people is extremely damaging to American interests, and proves our rhetoric about “making the world safe for democracy” is crap.

Here’s what sparked my interest in this topic: on Bill Moyers Journal Friday, they had an incredible exposé about how DC lobbyists are perfectly willing to aid and abet evil dictatorships. Harper’s magazine investigative journalist, Ken Silverstein, posed as a representative of Turkmenistan, one of the most notorious Stalinist regimes ever, and talked to two major lobbying firms. These firms bent over backwards to get multi-million dollar contracts to do PR, damage control and lobbying for Turkmenistan. They said they work through fake front groups and set up phony events.

Watch and listen to this report

“Although there are distinct limits to what they can achieve, lobbyists are the crucial conduit through which pariah regimes advance their interests in Washington.” — Ken Silverstein

Advance their interests in Washington–i.e. legally bribe public officials to get huge aid packages of OUR MONEY for dictators.

Are American lobbying firms like the ones described in this story responsible for the millions in aid to these regimes? According to what Silverstein is reporting, yes.

We are a nation founded on the idea of destroying tyranny, not helping it.

Where the hell are the candidates running on a platform of “NO MONEY FOR TYRANTS!!” ???
I see no candidate stepping up to the plate.

This should make everyone FURIOUS!

And I don’t want to hear another word from politicians talking about “cost-cutting” and “unsustainable” social programs (Dems too) unless every single despotic scumbag is cut off the dole FIRST! Yes Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, this means you.

What happened to our own people mattering most? what happened to “America First?”
what about priorities?

Services and infrastructure for Americans is being cut to the bone, while we buy new palaces for dozens of new Saddams.

I AM OUTRAGED!

Nick

In 1957 our president was Eisenhower and Israel’s PM was David Ben-Gurion. Say what you will about them, but they were competent. They weren’t bumblers or fools.

In 2007 Israel is headed by the failed mayor of Jerusalem and the U.S. is run by the Clown Car Administration. The Bushies could hardly govern their way out of a paper bag, much less effectively manage the myriad of complex crises we’re facing.

And this isn’t just an issue for the U.S. and its allies. There is a worldwide crisis of leadership now.

Europe has largely been led by various ineffective center-left or center-right coalitions that haven’t led their countries to greatness (i.e. where’s your cure for cancer, bitches? where’s your extraterrestrial colonization?)

Asia and Africa are largely ruled by regimes similar to that Uzbekistan dictator who boils dissidents alive. Russia is going fascist. Where is Iraq’s Thomas Jefferson? Al-Maliki was the best they could do?

This is a real down stroke, a moment of malaise (or outright malevolence) in history.

There have been countless periods like this throughout human history, but rarely in my lifetime has it been so noticeable. I’m feeling that Jack Johnson song “Where’d All The Good People Go?”

Where is our Gandhi? Where is our Martin Luther King? Where is our John Adams? Where is our Abraham Lincoln? Where is our FDR? Hell, I’d settle for a solid President Taft at this point.

What is causing this global shortage of competent leaders?

Is it solar flares?

Worldwide conspiracy to erode government and allow more lawlessness and corporate looting?

Global warming? The lack of pirates?

A historical law of diminishing returns? (Jamie’s suggestion)

Is it covert sabotage by time traveling zombies?

What do you think is causing the global shortage of good leaders?

On the horizon I don’t see a lot of hope either. I’ve been following the presidential primaries very closely (I’m fascinated by the issues and the debates) and the reaction the candidates elicit from me range from “ok” to “meh” to “NOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

But I can still be sold.

Nick

Check out this story from the AP wire, Iraqi Insurgents Now Fighting Each Other. It describes how some of the Sunni insurgents are turning against al-Qaida:

MUQDADIYAH, Iraq — At least two major insurgent groups are battling al-Qaida in provinces outside Baghdad, American military commanders said Friday, an indication of a deepening rift between Sunni guerrilla groups in Iraq.

U.S. officers say a growing number of Sunni tribes are turning against al-Qaida, repelled by the terror group’s sheer brutality and austere religious extremism. The tribes are competing with al-Qaida for influence and control over diminishing territory in the face of U.S. assaults, the officers say. The influx of Sunni fighters to areas outside the capital in advance of the security crackdown in Baghdad may have further unsettled the region.

The Iraqis are going to work it out. They will crush al-Qaida and inevitably find some stability. We can best accelerate this process if we stop kicking the hornet’s nest and get out of the way.

As this Staff Sgt. put it, “this is our generation’s Vietnam,” and they are caught in a civil war they can’t win.

Is it “supporting the troops” to keep them in such an untenable situation?

American commanders cite al-Qaida’s severe brand of Islam, which is so extreme that in Baqouba, al-Qaida has warned street vendors not to place tomatoes beside cucumbers because the vegetables are different genders, Col. David Sutherland said.

Such radicalism has fueled sectarian violence in Iraq and redrawn the demographics of many mixed Sunni-Shiite towns in Diyala, where tens of thousands of Shiites have been forced to flee large population centers.

These guys are CRAZAAAAY!! Fruit segregation is nowhere in the Koran, but evidently this is something extremist groups are pushing. Check out this video:

The Iraqi people aren’t buying what the al-Qaida types are selling; they have nothing to offer but neurotic religious stringency and authoritarianism, and almost no one wants to live under that. Al-Qaida is already being marginalized and would have no meaningful support at all if there were no Western “Crusaders” in the region to attack (antipathy toward Europeans from Medieval times runs so deep that some Arabs paint houses blue to ward off “the blue-eyed devils”).

“Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country.” —George W. Bush
The president was jabbing at the Iranians here; he has no ability to detect the irony of saying this while commanding 160,000+.foreign people in Iraq.

We toppled Saddam, our military was victorious. Now it’s a political clash between competing factions and, unfortunately, there’s little more we can achieve other than exacerbating the violence.

It’s past time to leave Iraq! No more wasted blood and treasure, please!

But of course, guys like Congressman Don Young say you should be executed for treason if you want to pull out. How do we find solutions in that climate?

Sadly, we will likely be bogged down in Iraq for years to come.

Nick

The real T.E. Lawrence

It should almost go without saying that America is failing in Iraq today mainly due to our woeful ignorance of history and the nature of the region and its people.

We can learn a lot from the British Empire’s mistakes in their Mandate of Mesopotamia.

1) There is a natural tissue rejection of any foreign body. The Iraqis in 1919 and 1920 revolted against British rule. The Ayatollahs in Karbala and Najaf declared jihad against the English. The Kurds resisted as well. The area was only controlled with heavy bombing from the Royal Air Force and use of poison gas.

2) Subjugating people who don’t want to be subjugated is ugly. It was ugly when Saddam did it, it was ugly when the British did it, and it is ugly with our new version Subjugation 2.0 that we’re attempting today. It is immoral, and lends itself to atrocities. Facing the 1920 rebellion in Iraq, Winston Churchill wrote, “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” And use gas on tribes they did. “gas was used against the Iraqi rebels with excellent morale effect,” Churchill said. Phosphorus bombs were also employed. The West today acts outraged that Saddam gassed the Kurds, but had no problem selling Saddam said gas, nor with gassing rebellious tribes themselves decades earlier.

3) Iraq, and Arabs, are not what people think. Iraq is a fake construct, and though Iraqis are now attached to the current territory, the borders were drawn by the British in such a way to engender instability and dependence on foreigners.

Everyone should watch Lawrence of Arabia. While it is flawed, it did win seven Oscars (including Best Picture) and it gives real insight into the turbulent birth of modern “Arabism” and the struggles with it today.

What struck me most in Lawrence of Arabia was that the concept of “Arab” is also a new construct, and an identity, to an extent, also imposed by outsiders. The line in the movie when the Bedouin chieftain Auda abu Tayi says “what’s an Arab? I am Howitat!” says it all. Not only did he not have a unified Arab national identity, he did not know what an Arab was!!! He knew only a tribal identity.

Then after Lawrence and the chieftains seized Damascus from the Ottoman Turks, the Howitat and the Harith tribes can’t agree who will control what city services. Water is offline because the Howitat who control electricity won’t coordinate with the Harith who control water and need power to run the pumps (or visa versa). “Being an Arab will be thornier than you suppose, Harith!” Auda abu Tayi says. They blame each other and despise each other. I don’t know what happens, I think they end up giving the British the water duties and eventually the Imperialists play the tribes off each other as further pretext for foreign rule, but Lawrence says “There may be honor among thieves, but there’s none in politicians” and leaves Damascus.

The Damascus situation and the failure of the independent Arab state post-WWI seems like an eerily similar forerunner of the disturbing reports coming out of Baghdad lately, with tribes in gridlock and some areas devoid of basic government services like water and trash collection because sectarians will attack anyone working for the government as a “collaborator.” One of the most powerful quotes in the movie that hits home today is when Lawrence says, “So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people – greedy, barbarous, and cruel…” and while this statement had plenty of imperialism behind it, it’s hard not to see insight in it given the current tribal bloodbath in Iraq.

Though decades of nationalist rule created a strong Iraqi identity (check out Hometown Baghdad for a great vlog by ordinary Iraqis) and many Iraqis demand the old borders and stability be maintained, much of the population seems to have reverted to the same kind of pre-national tribalism and sectarian infighting seen in Lawrence of Arabia. Once tyranny is removed, whether it be Saddam or the Ottomans toppled, Arab society seems to inexorably revert to the more basic tribal forms. When in crisis, you go with what you know.

WWI created the outlines for all the disasters that we have in the Mideast today. The British stacked up the House of Cards that was Iraq. Now the U.S. has toppled it, but doesn’t know what the cards and identities even mean as they try to stack something back up, and are probably just making it worse.

We would do well to heed the lessons of history, and abandon our fruitless quest to pacify and remake the Middle East. It’s 2007, and we should know better than to retrace British blunders.

Leave Iraq to Iraqis; it’s the only way.

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana.

Nick

I whipped up this simple, amateur animation to make a point.

India and Europe are roughly the same land area, but India is considered a subcontinent. Why is Arabia dubbed a “peninsula” and not a subcontinent? These are all pretty arbitrary designations based on little but cultural history.

We forget that about 40% of humanity are either Chinese or Indian. That’s 2 out of 5 humans on Earth.

We don’t get much information on the bulk of our brethren.

We barely know anything about them.

We don’t hear that millions of Muslims have lived in relative peace for centuries in India and China, we just hear what a “threat” Islam is, how they are all “savages.”

We don’t understand China, even as they emerge as a hegemon.

I myself don’t know about the dozens of languages in India and how they communicate.

You can begin to scratch the surface here:

Wikipedia – India

Wikipedia – China

We gotta remember we are all ONE. From above there are no borders, no nations, no anthems. From above there is only a beautiful green planet, and what the dominant species on her chooses to be.

Nick

At a President’s day celebration Tuesday, “President Bush linked the ideals of the first president to the war being fought by the 43rd” (full story here).

This was so incredible, the disembodied spirit of George Washington ripped through the space-time continuum and said:

Bush In Vietnam – The Irony Is Too Much

The Irony Is Just Incredible

In Vietnam, Bush cites lessons for Iraq, saying Vietnam war teaches us “we’ll succeed unless we quit.”
WHAT?!
You realize you’re sitting under a giant statue of Ho Chi Minh, right? You’re citing a non-example example?

President Bush is in Vietnam saying the lesson of ‘Nam is “we’ll succeed unless we quit”??? While simultaneously hailing the communist government as a great success?!

If an author had penned this as fiction, he would be laughed out of his chair for something so unrealistic and bizarre.

MY G-D, THE IRONY IS SO INTENSE IT’S EXCRUCIATING!

Why can’t journalists even mention how insane and incoherent Bush’s “lessons learned” from Vietnam are?
Why is this not treated as a major gaffe?

What the hell was he trying to convey? Why is he in Vietnam lauding them for their newfound love of capitalism if he thinks we never should have abandoned the Vietnam war and is saying “we succeed unless we quit?” Can he really have this level of cognitive dissonance?

I don’t understand why he doesn’t realize we lost Iraq for the same reason we lost Vietnam: we didn’t have the troops to hold territory nor prop up a regime the indigenous population didn’t want. If the population doesn’t want it, we can’t make it happen. But yeah Mr. President, if we just send our boys into the quicksand for another decade or two, the Sunnis fighting for the return of the Caliphate and the Shias fighting for the Islamic Revolution will begin to just lurrv representative democracy, right?

And does it bother anyone else that our leadership is now in bed with China and Vietnam, the new capitalist utopias where most of the stuff we buy is made using slavery, child laborers and exploitation in sweatshops?
And if China and Vietnam have now fused the totalitarianism of Chairman Mao with unfettered corporatism, how is that not fascism?

I don’t know whether to cry or to LMAO.

Nick

An Addendum To U.S. Vows To Punish Nicaragua For Elections

As I reported in detail in the aforementioned post, the U.S. administration has recently been meddling in Nicaraguan affairs by openly supporting the Contra-type opponents of former Sandinista Daniel Ortega’s leading presidential bid, sending Oliver North to Nicaragua to stump for the Contras last week and threatening to cut off humanitarian aid and block trade if the election doesn’t go their way.

Update: Ortega won.

See Ortega appears to win Nicaragua election.

Condoleezza Rice is saying they’ll wait and see what policies Ortega pursues before they decide what actions to take against Nicaragua

Ortega is promising to be a good little moderate and support loathsome administration policies like CAFTA, and not rock the corporate gravy boat.

Prediction: Ortega will toe the line or face a coup attempt like Chavez, or get assassinated.
I don’t expect he’ll cross the line.

Nick

This post is based on the NPR report, Observers Warn of U.S. Manipulation in Nicaragua

It’s so sickening to see our government continuing to support the dark side in Latin America: these corporate feudalist, Jesuit assassinating Contra-types. I went to Spring Hill College, a Jesuit college, so I heard the stories of the priest and nun murdering, peasant-repressing Contras from the horse’s mouth. The president of Spring Hill College received ordination along with one of victims, and SHC, including sometimes Fr. Lucey himself, protests the School of the Americas each year, which is the U.S. military school that trained the Central American death squads that killed the Jesuits. The government, Newsweek reports, may also have trained Iraqi death squads who are now torturing and killing with impunity.

Anyhow, in the Reagan years, America backed the rightist Contra death squads against the leftist Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua’s peasant revolt against the misery and extreme poverty wrought when only a handful of families control all the land and wealth. With the infamous Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan’s administration got in serious trouble for secretly funneling money gained from selling weapons to Iran, to the Contra militias, breaking the law banning aid to Contras, as well as violating Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution, which says all earnings must be publicly documented in the treasury.

Now, 15 years or so into a relatively peaceful democracy in Nicaragua, former Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega has apologized for past demons, adopted a more moderate platform, found Jesus, and he is now running for president on a unity ticket, with a former enemy, ex-Contra spokesman Jaime Morales, as his vice presidential nominee. They are running with a theme of national reconciliation, and could accomplish great healing and uplift for their impoverished people.

But the U.S. is still supporting the Contra-types, and, fearing Ortega will ally with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and curb corporate expansion, is actively interfering in the elections. Administration officials, along with House hemispheric affairs chairman Dan Burton (R-IN), is loudly threatening Nicaragua with a Cuban-style trade embargo, pulling investment, and ending humanitarian aid if the election doesn’t go their way. The U.S. ambassador is openly backing and advising Ortega’s Contra-type opponents.

Convicted Iran-Contra mastermind Oliver North went to the Nicaraguan capital this week to blast Ortega. Want to bet his trip was to do more than stump for Contras? I’m seeing suitcases of money changing hands.

“Democracy on the march,” eh, Mr. Bush?

Why don’t they understand democracy? Being for democracy only when you win isn’t democracy. It’s hypocrisy. It’s autocracy. And it strips our pro-democracy claims of any legitimacy among developing countries. Nicaraguans now know we don’t want voter freedom; we want a pro-corporate government.

I’m no supporter of Hugo Chavez, and am especially angered by his recent anti-Semitism and courting of Iran and Hezbollah. But should we really be surprised Chavez would militarize, radicalize and embrace all things anti-American after we tried to overthrow him and the Religious Right suggested his assassination? If we really care about democracy, we shouldn’t try to subvert the democratic will of the people, even if we don’t agree with them.

I’m disgusted and appalled that in 2006, not 1986, our government is still pursuing a pro-Contra agenda. We’re openly vowing to punish Nicaragua for their elections; what could be more unAmerican than that?

Nick

More Revelations In Marianas Scandal Show GOP Chairman Involved

Yesterday, I shed light on the disgusting Republican effort to protect deplorable labor conditions on the American-controlled Northern Marianas Islands, where Chinese immigrants are kept in sweatshops with little to no pay and not allowed to leave. Basically, the definition of slavery.

The party that abolished slavery under Lincoln has now resorted to extraordinary measures to keep slavery and forced abortions in place in the Northern Marianas Islands.

It has now been revealed that Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Mehlman conspired with Jack Abramoff to protect the slavery racket there. He intervened and got a State Department official fired for trying to enforce labor laws on the islands.

In related news, China, tired of similar sweatshop operations, has drafted a new law to crack down and empower labor unions. The American response? Instead of applauding the Chinese effort to change their horrendous human rights record, U.S. corporations reacted angrily that their exploitation may be curbed, and are lobbying against this and threatening to stop opening factories there. Check out
China drafting law to protect workers, regulate sweatshops
Foreign firms hint they’ll build fewer factories if it passes (link).

It should be clear to everyone now that these sweatshop corporatists only care about profit, and the dignity of the human person is but another liability to be reduced and mitigated.

It should be clear to everyone now that a vote for Ken Mehlman’s party is a vote supporting his unabashed efforts to keep Marianas slavery and sweatshop exploitation shielded from U.S. regulation.

Three weeks until the Congressional elections. Stay alert, and VOTE!!!

Nick

Filed Under: Politics and Government

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana

Steven Pressfield recently wrote an in-depth piece on Iraq, Why We Will Never See Democracy in the Middle East. His main thesis that we are operating in Iraq while largely ignorant of
its culture and history is something our leadership needs to hear badly, and his statement that “to understand the nature of the enemy in the Middle East and to evaluate the prospects for democracy and peace, we need to extend our gaze not five years into the past, but five hundred and even five thousand” is very true. History couldn’t be more relevent right now. It’s clear our leaders, invading a country totally unrelated to 9/11 with some broad verbal brushstrokes and comments like Trent Lott’s: “Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me,” are woefully ignorant of the Middle East.

Pressfield, who recently penned two books about Alexander the Great’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, draws upon his knowledge of the East-West clash back then to draw conclusions about the conflict today, and concludes the worldview of tribalism and the tribesman is simply
irreconcilable with worldview of democracy and the citizen. And this is completely unrelated to religion. Pressfield’s citizen vs. tribesman formulation has some major flaws (Arabs aren’t the only
ones with a tribal mentality, anyone remember Hatfield and McCoy?) and we know that
any culture, no matter how tribal, can develop democratic institutions. But the argument is fascinating, and has some valid and very important aspects: mainly, it’s very apparent that Western pluralism and capitalism is incompatible with tribalism. The tribesman, as Pressman points out, owes loyalty only to his tribe and group, not a nation-state. He has no interest in a corporate economy of working for rich guys; he works for his family and tribe only, and his livelihood is
primarily goat and camel-based. The American right-wing made a miscalculation of historic proportions when they preemptively invaded Iraq on the premise that we would be “greeted as liberators” like when we liberated Holland from the Nazis in WWII. It is a laudable goal to want to overthrow tyrants and liberate people, but Holland had a centuries-old liberal tradition they were yearning to revert back to; Arab tribesmen don’t have Western values and aren’t particularly interested in them, nor should we expect them to want them. They certainly won’t come to Western values by the sword, and if we would learn from history, we would know Alexander and the Greeks couldn’t convert pre-Islamic Mesopotamia into Hellenized citizens even though they put much more direct effort into the project than we are, British colonialism couldn’t convert Islamic Mesopotamia to Western values no matter what they tried, and on and on. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Study the interactive flash map above of the history of Imperial conquest in the Mideast. It’s a fantastic resource and really puts the current conflicts into a wider perspective.

What drew my attention in the animated map are:
First, empires expanding to massive proportions, encompassing many diverse cultures through force, then collapsing. We should see what’s coming.

Second, the colonial borders creating artificial nation-states in the 20th century! OMG! Am I the only one that sees this is causing the bulk of the Mideast’s problems? What we’re seeing now is the violent cramping from a century of colonialist border constipation. We’re experiencing the severe, severe consequences of the British Empire arbitrarily drawing crayon borders on their colonial “holdings” all over the globe without regard to natural ethnic and regional divisions. Enclosing people who have little in common and hate each other into the same country is not a good idea. It means violence. I talked about this in my last blog on Iraq.

Random crayoning in of Kurds, Sunnis and Shias into the artificial country of Iraq leads to a bad situation that has never functioned without a brutal tyrant holding it together. Before Saddam, it was another despot, and before that, a British-installed monarch. As we speak, Iraq is rapidly and violently breaking down into three nations. With the tribal mentality, Shia militias are going, “are you my tribe? (Shia)? Oh, you aren’t?” *SHOOTS YOU IN THE HEAD*

And visa versa with Sunni vs. Shia. It’s no coincidence that the most mixed area of Iraq, Baghdad, is also the bloodiest.

The newly adopted Iraqi constitution creates ethnic regions with basically all the power, and federal authority has few powers, so the groundwork for new nation-states has been laid. I’ve heard people moaning that the Iraqi Prime Minister isn’t stopping the violence, but how can he if the constitution gives him little power? The constitution was like a divorce document and armistice accord between the three factions. We already have, for all intents and purposes, an independent Kurdistan. We may end up, after a few more decades of bloodshed, with an independent Sunnistan and Shiastan.

In Afghanistan, the same problem of walling in completely different ethnic groups with random British crayon borders is creating constant violence today.

Iraqis aren’t greeting us with flowers, they’re greeting us like this. The latest polls show that 65 percent of Baghdad residents want an immediate pullout of U.S. forces (Washington Post).

If we really wanted democracy, we’d lean on all the Arab nations to allow a pan-Arab referendum. I bet Arab tribesmen would overwhelmingly vote to dissolve colonial boundaries and revert back to some sort of pan-Arab Caliphate, just as Holland yearned to revert back to what they were familar with, democracy, post-Nazi occupation. But we love propping up the oil monarchies who enforce the old British borders to preserve their reason for existing, so we would never sincerely push real voter freedom in the Middle East. And Bush has no new plan to hold together Iraq, nor the additional troops needed to actually hold territory, so it will continue to dissolve along sectarian lines, with the Shia region already a client state of Iran. Great work, Bush!

The Galbraith plan that I discussed in my last blog on Iraq, addresses the three factions and the reality on the ground of three new nations violently forming. Unfortunately, our leaders will not discuss any other plan besides “stay the course” of aimless bloodshed, but a new Iraq is emerging either way.

Another thing that popped out at me on the animated map was Israel. Jews have lived in Israel throughout 2000-years of foriegn domination. The most famous Jewish Kabbalistic scholarship was in Safed, Israel in the 16th century, where many fled after the 1492 explusion from Spain. The Jews established the Middle East’s first printing press there in 1578. The Jerusalem Talmud was written by Jews in Jerusalem in the 2nd century. Not too long prior to that we built the second Temple and a Jew named Jesus walked the Earth. The Jews have had a presence in Israel long before the mass Jewish immigrations of the 1890s and 1940s. We’ve always been in our ancestral homeland, Israel, and always will be, notwithstanding all the “expel the Jews” BS. The difference is that Jews are now a self-governing majority, since such a huge population fled the Holocaust and previous Russian explusions, whereas before, as the map so vividly illustrates, Jews in Israel were governed under the boot of the Assyrian Empire, Babylonian Empire, Persian Empire, Roman Empire, Greek Empire, the Caliphate and half a dozen huge Muslim Empires, the Crusaders, then the Ottomans, then the British Empire. Jews, especially the Orthodox, are wary of relying on the colonial powers. Yet miraculously, our tiny tribe has survived and kept our identity despite all that and the recent mass Holocaust. We’ll live on. Like our cousins, the Arabs, we are also very tribal, and will continue to cling to our tribal homeland. I identify with those Iraqis caught in another conflict with a superpower. May peace come to ALL PEOPLES of the world very soon.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Nick

Filed under: Politics and Government

We’re digging up fossil fuels and pumping them into the air like never before, and the government still denies mass carbon emissions are causing global warming. All the smog that’s increasing children’s allergies and asthma worldwide on a scale heretofor unimaginable, is being ignored.

I just clicked on Yahoo News, and this is what I saw:

Arctic ice melting rapidly, study says

Two new NASA studies are saying the Arctic sea ice is melting far faster than has ever been seen in history, “a new and alarming trend that researchers say threatens the ocean’s delicate ecosystem.”

This is real science by real scientists.

And I saw this:

Europe’s extreme summer weather to be norm – study

This is about a new study in the prestigious science journal Nature that says Europe’s recent heat waves and flooding will become the norm.

As a result, central and eastern Europe will suffer a “positive feedback mechanism” — in essence, a vicious circle in which higher temperatures cause the soil to evaporate more and vegetation to breathe out more moisture.

In damp regions, more airborne moisture and warm air help to fuel the precipitation cycle, causing more and more rainfall and thus boosting the risk of flooding.

This is solid science.

And then I saw this:

China’s Next Big Boom Could Be the Foul Air

Nor does China’s air pollution respect borders: on certain days almost 25 percent of the particulate matter clotting the skies above Los Angeles can be traced to China, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental experts in California predict that China could eventually account for roughly a third of the state’s air pollution.

This is a serious, serious crisis here.

To be fair, the Earth has handled much more carbon in the past, from huge volcanic eruptions. Three times in Earth’s history, the last one 640,000 years ago, nearly the entirety of Yellowstone National Park went up in the “Yellowstone Super Volcano” which caused a myriad of species to die off and the climate to drastically change, but Earth is still here. Of course, human beings didn’t exist then. Today, humanity covers the globe and we are precariously dependant on a sensitive ecosystem. While the carbon we’re producing today is just a fraction of a percent of a catastrophic volcanic event, humans are so overpopulated and so reliant on the Earth’s climatic balance, as well as clean air and water, we cannot afford to accrue more and more micro volcanoes in our atmosphere each day. We cannot afford to monkey with Earth’s thermostat.

More and more Americans are realizing this, especially since Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth has been in theaters, and are speaking up that we need to be good stewards of our environment. Even Pat Robertson now says he believes. As does Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

So when will we get a government concensus not beholden to the fossil fuel industry who will believe, and do something about it? Not until the White House is beachfront property? lol!!

Nick

Filed Under: Politics and Government

In my last 9/11 blog, I commented on how raw the event still feels to me. How close it feels. How fresh the wound still is.

But it is also so very far away.

Isn’t it amazing that the second-graders who were reading “The Pet Goat” to the president when the attacks happened are now teenagers?! Wow.

Schoolchildren recall 9/11 with Bush

It’s a common (though minor) misconception that Bush read to the children on 9/11. They read to him.
And yes, the president really is holding the book upside down. That’s not an altered photo. The book really is upside down.

Those children are now teenagers.

9/11 is distant in that people have moved on, the feeling of unity following the attacks was fleeting, quickly and crassly exploited, and is now only a memory.

That the media and many people are dwelling and memorializing mostly has to do with something deeply ingrained in the human animal insisting that 5 and other anniversaries with round, finger-count fufilling numbers (10, 15, 20, 25, etc.) are deeply significant. The fifth anniversary is getting wall-to-wall coverage whereas the fourth got nearly none.

My last 9/11 post, “September 11: Still Too Raw For Me,” provoked some interesting responses from my MySpace readers. One mentioned that the elementary class she helps drew pictures of the WTC, and some of the kids had been taught to hate Muslims. Another comment said: “This isn’t a time to be sad. This is a time to be angry.”

And I totally can see that point. I have some anger too, that 9/11 has become more a political slogan than an event. The memory of 9/11, something sacred, has been so exploited it’s tragic. It’s now more a cynical political weapon than anything else. In that way, it’s now very distant and meaningless, just a soundbite. You want checks and balances on the president? “You’ve failed to learn the lessons of 9/11″ Bush keeps repeating. He even held his political convention in NYC. And he has used 9/11 to justify torture, secret and indefinite imprisonment without trial, the new Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, warrantless wiretaps and his invasion of Iraq, even when it is now proven Saddam had no link to 9/11 at all. A Justice Dept. memo said it all:

Thus, the president has no boundaries, no checks on his power. For the War on Terror, anything goes. Warrants? Rule of law? Geneva Convention? “Rendered quaint,” Attorney General Gonzales wrote. And this is a sharp break from the American traditions of liberty we’re so accustomed to. “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security” Benjamin Franklin is oft-quoted as saying. Sadly, the nonsensical preserving of “freedom” by taking away freedoms, abandoning the American ideal is what 9/11 has come to mean to many of us.

Right after we invaded Iraq, I was talking about how we were blowing up civilians too much, and one of my Alabamian nurses said “have we killed as many as they killed on 9/11 yet?” Bush had made it sound like THEY (Iraqis) had attacked us, and THEY (they’re all the same) had to pay. Even the score. And the ignorant masses lapped it up.

Well ironically on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, we’ve accrued 2,974 war dead in the unrelated Iraq war, just over the 2,973 lost to real terrorism on 9/11.

“And so here we are five years later. Fearmongering remains unceasing. So do tax cuts. So does the war against a country that did not attack us on 9/11. We have moved on, but no one can argue that we have moved ahead.”
- Frank Rich, 9/10/2006

Keith Olbermann says it better than I ever could:

This was Olbermann’s most powerful commentary yet. I don’t do it justice with this snippet. Be sure to see his whole speech here.

We were so united after 9/11. We could’ve done anything with that unity. And it breaks my heart and makes me sick at myself to now be writing about it as just another slimy political wedge like the president’s made it.

That’s what makes it distant. That’s what makes it business as usual. That’s what tells us the world is not any different than before. It’s probably even worse with vile corruption.

Fight the vile with the holy. Fight the power by bringing more goodness into the world. Fight the power.

Nick

Filed Under: Politics and Government

The UN Disability Rights Treaty has been approved! It is the first human rights treaty of the new millenium, and is aimed at protecting the planet’s estimated 650 million disabled people. It bans discriminatory laws and practices, and it is supposed to spur a revolutionary change in the customs of the world’s nations, only 45 of whom have laws protecting their disabled population, and replace the ineffective “welfare and charity” model with solid “rights and freedoms.” It is sorely needed.

But the United States has REFUSED TO SIGN. With our strict “don’t tell me what to do” attitude, it was a miracle the US loosened resistance to the treaty enough to let it pass at all. Ben on MySpace picked up the story from me and did an incredible job covering this outrage.

Check it out.

Nick

Filed Under: Health care and Disability Rights