HOUSE OF PAINE blog

Our national mythology sees the United States as uniquely successful in world history. We see our success, and our power on the world stage, as inherently tied to superior moral virtue. We are so successful because we are uniquely virtuous, and our national power confirms our morality, in relation to which all other peoples and all other countries can only suffer in comparison. One of the many dangerous and inevitable consequences of this view is an often virulent racism that has been reflected in our treatment of many very numerous groups of people: the Native Americans, the slaves who were brought here and were an integral part of the new country’s economy, Germans in World War I (German-Americans were the "scum of the melting pot," who now needed to be gotten "rid of"), the Japanese in World War II (the "yellow Japs," who were "regularly compared" to "monkeys, baboons, and gorillas"), and a number of other foreigners and immigrants. Very recently, we witnessed the sickening spectacle of this atavistic racism unleashed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

I expressed the relevant part of this national mythology as follows:

In the most extreme (and, one could argue, most consistent) version of this tale, non-Western parts of the world are less than human — and they are subhuman by choice. They are immoral, and sometimes even evil. Since we represent the good and they represent the evil, we are surely entitled to improve them, by invasion and bombing if necessary. If they do not threaten us today, they might at some indeterminate time in the future. And while we might kill many innocent civilians in our campaign of civilization, those who survive will be infinitely better off than they would have been otherwise. Besides, how "innocent" can any of them be — since they are members of inferior, less than fully human civilizations, and since they are so by choice?

One point is crucial: a critical part of our national mythology is the insistence on viewing our nation and ourselves as Americans in comparative terms. When we insist that we are uniquely "good" and "virtuous," this logically necessitates a further conclusion: we are better than everyone else. We are "the Good Guys." The emphasis is not only on "Good," but on "the": we are the Good Guys in a way that no one else is, or can ever be.

There is still another vital point. This kind of perspective arises in large part out of what Chris Hedges calls "mythic war."  Note how Hedges describes this phenomenon (from his book, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning), and note how it tracks the way in which we view ourselves all the time, even when we are nominally at peace:

But in mythic war we imbue events with meanings they do not have. We see defeats as signposts on the road to ultimate victory. We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human. We view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness. Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify their own cruelty. In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other to objects–eventually in the form of corpses.

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When we allow mythic reality to rule, as it almost always does in war, then there is only one solution–force. In mythic war we fight absolutes. We must vanquish darkness. It is imperative and inevitable for civilization, for the free world, that good triumph, just as Islamic militants see us as infidels whose existence corrupts the pure Islamic society they hope to build.
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The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. … By turning history into myth we transform random events into a chain of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude. We march toward nobility. And no society is immune.

This in turn ties directly into William Pfaff’s point that Americans "think that history has an ultimate solution, and that the United States is meant to provide it" — a solution which is unique and so supremely good that we are obliged to share it with others, by force as necessary.

I want to emphasize that this mythology about America is one that, in its central components, arises out of a perspective based on endless, violent conflict: in this sense, we see our country and ourselves as being eternally and perpetually at war. This is a matter of considerable consequence. Given events of the last several years, we can see that it is not at all inaccurate to observe that when wars which are necessary for our self-defense do not manifest themselves, we must invent them. In large part, this explains why Americans acquiesced in our criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq — and why there is now no massive public demand that we end it immediately. In terms of our mythology, we see ourselves as always being at war, with peoples and countries that are always our inferiors. In this manner, we ensure that what we perceive as an "existential" threat to our nation’s continued survival is always present. And so we very frequently are at war (and if not war conducted openly, we engage in an endless series of covert interventions).

Through a series of events that constitute in large part only an historical anomaly, we are now the sole superpower in the world. Needless to say, for many Americans this only serves as further proof of these beliefs, which are treated as unquestionable axioms. After all, only the best and most virtuous nation could become the sole superpower. This set of interlocking and mutually reinforcing beliefs is shared by almost our entire governing class, regardless of party affiliation, and it serves as part of the foundation of our foreign policy in its broadest outlines. Because of our sole superpower status and the underlying mythology to which it connects, we as a nation are at an exceptionally dangerous moment historically, one which has no antecedents in certain ways.

Let’s return to this notion of Americans as "the Good Guys." As I’ve noted before, the first international episode which established the pattern for U.S. interventions overseas occurred with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. The following excerpts are from Paul A. Kramer’s The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines. If you hold the belief that we are uniquely good and virtuous in almost all our actions, see how that conviction fares as you read the following (the highlights are mine, and I’ve omitted the numerous footnotes):

On the ground, racial terms like "gugu" and "nigger" both reflected and enabled a broadening of the enemy. In their letters and diaries, U.S. soldiers sometimes attached them to descriptions of combat status — such as "nigger army" — which, in effect, made them racialized terms for "insurgent." In some cases, they continued to distinguish combatants and non-combatants, referring to the latter as "natives" or "Filipinos." But in other cases, soldiers used both "gugu" and "nigger" to refer explicitly to noncombatants. "At meals [sic] times there are always a lot of little ‘gugus’ around, each with his tin can, begging scraps to eat," wrote Perry Thompson. Peter Lewis described how "the Niggers keep going to Church" on Easter. …

Racial terms and exterminist sentiment were at the center of the most popular of the U.S. Army’s marching songs, which marked the Filipino population as a whole as the enemy and made killing Filipinos the only means to their civilization.

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One Nebraskan soldier boasted to his parents of his comrades’ bold, aggressive fighting spirit, restrained only by officers’ reticence. "If they would turn the boys loose," he wrote, "there wouldn’t be a nigger left in Manila twelve hours later." …

Racial exterminist impulses were also in evidence in U.S. soldiers’ descriptions of violence against prisoners and civilians. The American torture of prisoners — some fraction of which appeared in soldiers’ letters, newspaper accounts, and court-martial proceedings — was often, if not always, justified as a means of intelligence-gathering. The most notorious form of torture by the American side, if far from the only one, was the "water cure," in which a captured Filipino was interrogated while drowned with buckets of filthy water poured into his mouth. The scale of its practice and the frequency of death remain difficult if not impossible to establish. Later blamed almost exclusively on the United States’ Macabebe Scouts [a Filipino group with whom the U.S. Army closely collaborated, just as the Spanish colonial army had previously "recruited" them], it was in fact the tactical expression of the military policy of attraction, undertaken in many cases by U.S. and Filipino forces working together both secretly and with the tacit approval of U.S. officers. In the context of guerrilla war, the water cure would simultaneously cure Filipinos of their unknowability and Americans of their ignorance.

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Along with torturing them, U.S. soldiers also killed Filipino prisoners. Rumors of "no-prisoners" orders were common. Arthur C. Johnson of the Colorado Volunteers, for example, reported as early as February 1899 that Manila’s prisons were already overflowing, and "the fiat is said to have gone forth that no more prisoners are to be taken"; he anticipated that "the Filipino death list promises to correspondingly increase." …

The ultimate form of exterminist war was the killing of acknowledged noncombatants. As early as April 12, 1899, an entry in Chriss Bell’s diary took derecognition to its furthest extension: Filipinos had already "caused so much trouble & murdered so many of our boys" that U.S. soldiers "recognize them no longer but shoot on sight all natives. Natives will not or cannot understand kind & civilized treatment. If you treat them as equals they will think you are afraid of them & murder you."

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One of the most banal and brutal manifestations of racialization was U.S. soldiers’ imagination of war as hunting. The Manila occupation and "friendly policy" had frustrated martial masculinity; the metaphor of the hunt made war, at last, into masculine self-fulfillment. All at once, a language of hunting bestialized Filipinos made sense of guerrilla war to American troops, and joined the latter in manly fraternity. "I don’t know when the thing will let out," wrote Louis Hubbard one week into the war, "and don’t care as we are having lots of excitement. It makes me think of killing jack rabbits."

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The most notorious orders of indiscriminate killing were Gen. Jacob H. Smith’s late October 1901 instructions to Marine Maj. Littleron W.T. Waller, following Filipino revolutionaries’ successful surprise attack against U.S. soldiers at Balangiga on the island of Samar, to make reprisals against the entire population of the island. "I want no prisoners," he had directed. "I wish you to kill and burn." Smith ordered "all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States." When Waller had asked the general for clarification, Smith stated that he considered any person over the age of ten "capable of bearing arms." The interior of Samar must be made "a howling wilderness!" The direct result of these instructions was systematic destruction and killing on a vast scale.

The genuinely shocking similarity of all these details to what has unfolded in Iraq, and what continues to unfold in that devastated country every day that we remain, is so obvious that I need not belabor the point. But the similarities do not end there. There were some attempts to publicize the horrors of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, in hopes of stopping them. Then, as now, such efforts had almost no success at all:

If racialization encouraged U.S. soldiers to broaden the war toward exterminism, race also legitimated this process from above, undermining moral and legal claims against U.S. soldiers accused of wartime atrocities in the halls of American governance, in press debates, and in courts-martial. Race would not only justify the ends of the war — especially as the necessary response to Filipino savagery and tribal fragmentation — but would be used to justify many of the "marked severities" employed by U.S. soldiers to bring it to its desired conclusion.

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In both the press and the Senate hearings, the army’s defenders repeatedly held that atrocities were rare; that where they occurred they were swiftly and thoroughly punished; and that testimony to the contrary was exaggerated, partisan, cowardly, and traitorous. But racial arguments, of at least four varieties, were crucial to defending the war’s means, just as they had been to the justification of the war’s ends. The first variant claimed that the Filipinos’ guerrilla war, as "savage" war, was entirely outside the moral and legal standards and strictures of "civilized" war. Those who adopted guerrilla war, it was argued, surrendered all claims to bounded violence and mercy from their opponent. …

In their effort to depict Filipino combat as savage, the war’s defenders made much of what they considered evidence of a Filipino "race war" against whites. Racial exterminism by whites, it seemed, was merely the inevitable, progressive working out of history; race war took place only when nonwhites resisted white domination, in violation of the natural order. … The Filipinos’ race war, it appeared, contrasted sharply with the war of civilization waged by the United States.

If the first argument defined U.S. actions as outside the moral and legal frameworks of civilized war, a second one distanced American atrocities from U.S. initiative: Civilized men might reluctantly adopt savage methods to defeat savages, but they could do so without surrendering their civilization; guerrilla war was tactical for whites, ethnological for nonwhites.

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If U.S. atrocities were not a matter of race, they must be a matter of emulation: Americans appropriated what little savagery they had undertaken from their immediate surroundings. … Where forced to concede that American soldiers had participated in torture, apologists claimed they were merely mimicking or assisting Macabebes. Torture by whites, then, was not morally or racially essential but temporary, contingent, and contextual.

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A third argument attributed U.S. atrocities entirely to Macabebe collaborators organized into Scout units. While the emulation argument suggested that Americans were merely subject to the tutelage of savages, this third argument was that atrocities had been committed almost entirely by cooperating Filipino troops over whom American officers had little or no control. Call it a policy of outsourcing savagery; where the Macabebes had been hailed as "Filipinos in Uncle Sam’s Uniforms" during their recruitment, they were represented during atrocity investigations as a kind of mad unconscious that could neither be dispensed with nor fully harnessed. …

A fourth argument, that of "degeneration," made U.S. atrocities the by-product of civilizational meltdown. Inextricably a medical, racial, gendered, moral, and sexual discourse, "degeneration" had attained its greatest explanatory power at this moment on a vast, Euro-American and interimperial scale. Discourses of "degeneration" had been common throughout the war, emerging from anxious discussions of tropical heat, disease, and exhaustion, as well as contact between "races." It was unsurprising, then, that it came to play a key role in rationalizing U.S. atrocities: rather than "emulating" their human and physical environments, American soldiers had collapsed into them.

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The unit’s moral "degeneration" is … a mirror of its surroundings. Cut off from civilized associations, they are imprinted with — indeed penetrated by — their savage surroundings. Here, perhaps, was an eerie reversal of the water cure, in which Americans were being forced to consume the Philippines against their will.

Most Americans know nothing of this history. Large-scale public ignorance is necessary to the perpetuation of a fundamentally false national mythology. Today, more than one hundred years later, all of this is repeated again, in precisely the same form. An honest observer knows that we learn only of some of the worst atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Iraq, those that cannot be denied or covered up. There are countless acts of barbarism about which we will never learn anything. And even when we cannot deny the occurrence of monstrous acts, we minimize and "explain" them using identical, contemptibly dishonest mechanisms.

Our mythology is crucially tied to our conception of our self-worth. For most of us, it is life itself. Dispense with the lies and death ensues, at least that is how many Americans experience it psychologically. I think only a monumental shock to these illusions — in the form of a major economic collapse, a conflict of horrifying devastation, or by some other means — will ever pry most Americans from these dangerous and destructive fables to which they cling with increasing desperation. In the meantime, the death and destruction will go on, exactly as they have before — and most of us will do precious little to try to stop them.

Tragically, the truth for many Americans is still worse. In an essay about the alleged policy justifications for the Philippine occupation, "The Old Theme — A ‘Redeemer Nation,’ with Some Explaining to Do," I offered some excerpts from Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples At Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. The final passage from Jacobson that I included was this one:

When we recall and squarely face U.S. conduct in the Philippines at the dawn of Pacific empire in 1899, we [cannot] pass off the U.S. rise to global predominance as blind, unintentional, or accidental. Despite some opposition, the United States consciously chose imperial power along with the antidemocratic baggage and even the bloodshed that entailed; and many Americans–none more than Teddy Roosevelt–liked it.

To which I added:

And too many Americans like it still.

And that, dear reader, is the simple, infinitely awful truth.

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Two or more decades ago I wrote an article in which I suggested that, while the collapse of our civilization would ultimately prove beneficial to the productive purposes of society, the transition would, in the short-term, not be pretty to watch. The threat to the established order would be devastating, a challenge that would elicit the most violent and desperate efforts to defend the status quo. Wars, increased police powers, the enhanced regulation of and restrictions on alternative social systems, would become the norm. A society so constituted could well be symbolized as a faceless SWAT team member shoving his automatic rifle into the face of a cowering peaceful demonstrator.

By its very nature, the established order and the state enjoy a mutuality of purpose. The state – defined as a system with a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory – exists to maintain the interests of those desirous of resisting any fundamental change threatening to its position. The state never defines itself this way, of course. Even today, high-ranking government officials babble the bromide that their purpose is to protect the interests of workers, families, and – as a spokesman for BP recently expressed it – “the small people.”

A bill quickly being whisked through Congress – while the mainstream media distracts our attentions with updates on the death of a girl on Aruba, or “remembering Michael Jackson” – would give to the president a “kill switch” that would allow him to shut down the Internet on his whim. The supporters of this measure gurgle assurances that its purpose is only to protect the nation’s “security” in the face of a “terrorist” attack. Since 9/11, Boobus has been conditioned to accept any and every intrusion in the name of resisting “terrorism,” not wanting to know that it is the American government that is the major promoter of terrorism in the world. As the late George Carlin might well have expressed it, our government must fight the terrorist activities of other groups as a way of keeping its monopoly on the use of violence. Terrorism “is our job,” I could almost hear him declare.

The Internet is a destabilizing force to established interests in the world. It is premised on the free exchange of information which, in turn, is an expression of the liberty of individuals to act in furtherance of their particular interests. Government schools, the mainstream media, and other institutional voices, relentlessly work to condition the minds of people to think and to act within limits that are consistent with institutional purposes. Ideas or actions that do not challenge established interests may be welcomed (if supportive of such ends) or tolerated (perhaps as entertainment). But as the institutional order continues its decentralizing collapse into alternative social systems and practices, its domination of humanity continues to weaken. The struggle confronting mankind comes down to the question of whether human beings are to be the masters of their own lives, or whether they are to remain as resources to be exploited for institutional ends.

The Internet – like the printing press before it – is not the cause of the transformations in society, but only the vehicle through which free minds can explore alternatives to the inhumane, destructive, inefficient, anti-life implications from which institutions are unable to separate themselves. The question before us is whether life is to belong to the living, or to long-revered systems that insist upon their authority to control and destroy life for organizational interests.

Those seeking to direct the state’s coercive machinery against the Internet don’t even seem to have a clear grasp of how this system operates. The legislation seeking to choke the autonomous and spontaneous life from the Internet is labeled the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act.” Referring to it as a “national asset” suggests it is some sort of collective form of property, a thing – like a building or a park – in need of “protection.” But the Internet is neither a physical object nor a place, but a process, a way of acting upon and within the world with others. To treat it as some material “thing” is as absurd as regarding evolution as a “national asset” over which the president is to be given a “kill switch.” It falls into the same kind of goofy thinking as was exhibited, a number of years ago, by a state legislator who wanted to make it a criminal offense for a person to “alter one’s consciousness” (i.e., to learn).

Of course, the violent powers of the state are never directed against material things themselves, but always against the people who own them. The “war on drugs,” for instance, does not criminalize drugs, but the people who use them. While speaking to the protection of a “national asset,” the bill is really directed at the owners of the assets through which the Internet operates. It gives the president the power to shut down the Internet by ordering Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to comply with his edicts. Those who refuse to do so will be subject to criminal penalties. But ISPs are part of the kinds of interconnected networks that are increasingly coming to reflect the horizontal systems that so threaten the structured order. Given the creative and fruitful nature of the Internet, I suspect there will be many young people who will find effective ways to circumvent the vertical logic upon which all political authority is based. In so doing, they may create more ways of connecting to and generating a more flexible Internet that looks quite different from the one we know today. Perhaps an analogy can be drawn from the world of viruses and bacteria who, without any top-down structuring, and despite the hundreds of billions of dollars of deadly pharmaceutical weaponry directed at them, manage to evolve their own responses that not only allow them to survive, but to become even more vibrant. A reading of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds may prove instructive.

The bill’s principal author, Sen. Joe Lieberman, revealed his preferences for political despotism in telling us that “China . . . can disconnect parts of its Internet, and we need to have that here too.” How wonderful! The model around which Americans are to rally as a vision is not the Declaration of Independence, but a communist state best known for its “Great Leap Forward” that led to the deaths of close to twenty million people. I can imagine the day when the American state recreates its concentration camps – in the name of “national security,” of course – accompanied by Oberführer Lieberman’s cooing reassurances that Germany once had concentration camps, but that they were only temporary measures!

Do not allow yourself to be misled as to what is at stake in all of this. The established order is fighting to preserve its preeminence over all of humanity, and no appeals to traditional liberal sentiments or humane values, or constitutional or moral principles, will be allowed to stand in the way of this institutional imperative. Those who pay attention to what is implicit in events are quickly discovering that, regardless of the forms under which they operate, every state system is grounded in the exercise of arbitrary force. The enjoyment of its monopoly on the use of violence cannot exist alongside any principle that would limit its arbitrariness. This is why police brutalities, international war crimes, and other political atrocities will continue unabated. If state action was subject to review or reversal, its coercive monopoly would shift to such appellate agency which, in its turn, would enjoy this unrestrained power. The naïveté of those who look to the United Nations, or other forms of world government, as solutions to the inherent nature of all political systems, overlooks this essential point.

A state system that is fighting for its existence must be expected to regard wars, nuclear annihilation, torture, imprisonment without trials, concentration camps, destructive taxation and economic regulations, and the present Internet “kill switch” attack on free expression, as nothing more than options available for employment in its continuing war against human beings and the entire life process. The question, as always, comes down to how we – you and I – will respond to all of this.

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What a macabre title! Yet so true…

I am “privileged” to be a witness of the Iraqi tragedy. Privileged is not the right word, but maybe it is…

Privileged to be alive, privileged to bear testimony, privileged to have learned some hard truths the very hard way…at a very heavy price…a deadly price…

But some important lessons only come that way…this is what I am left to conclude…and if I don’t use this experience in a positive way, it will kill me too.

So what is positive about it? In itself nothing at all…quite the opposite…the only positive thing and again am not sure if positive is the right word — but short of a better word that is probably eluding me right now — the tearing away of myths and the awareness I was given by the force of circumstances, can be considered positive…and maybe I am to send a message to the world, an imperfect, incomplete message but a message nonetheless…

Tell me who you worship and I will tell you who you are. This is what am left with from the Iraqi tragedy…

I have realized that men worship Death…seriously am not kidding…the male gender loves killing, loves inflicting death – they worship the power they feel when they can terminate life…by any means…

Men worship Power…they are the disbelievers, the arrogant ones who will not humble themselves in front of Creation…and its Creator…

Not all forms of power are negative…self defense is an obligation, a lawful one, but this not the power am talking about…the kind of power we are witnessing in this new world order is indeed a lethal one…a cowardly one…at least in bygone days men were men, they used a sword and faced their opponents in the eye, they did not hide in super jets dropping bombs, nor did they hide behind guns, nor was gunpowder their smokescreen….

And why am I mentioning men here ?

I noticed that wars and occupations are led by men. I noticed that rape and torture are committed by men. I noticed that governments, industries, corporations, big business…the whole system is upheld by men…and the women who follow in their footsteps…

I noticed that men blame the “system” but that they contribute to it, perpetuate it, are part and parcel of it…

I, as a woman cannot divorce Iraq’s tragedy from the male gender…or maleness…

I am no feminist,I don’t need to be one…and I don’t believe that all patriarchal systems are necessarily, inherently evil…nor are all patriarchs…but from what I have witnessed, I can tell you for sure that modern day man is the source of much evil…

And when am talking of modern day man — am referring to all men, from all religious backgrounds and all nationalities….yes am generalizing…and I have every good reason to.

I am not into surveys and trying to fish out the good ones from the majority…I am talking of trends…and am talking of consequences…real palpable, tangible ones…am talking about Reality.

Men, the male gender is RESPONSIBLE for much of the tragedies, pain and suffering inflicted on this planet…

From wars of occupation, to prisons, to torture, to rape, to crimes, to polluting the earth….male power and its misuses are at the core of our downfall….and downfall it sure is…

By substituting himself for a God, the male allows himself all kinds of transgressions, all kinds of offenses…by abusing his role of “vicegerent” on earth, men have turned this place into a hell…a living hell…

Whether he is a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian, an Atheist, or Agnostic, or anything else..it does not matter anymore…he is leaving the ugliest footprints behind him, he’s leaving a legacy of pain, grief, corruption and death…a spiritual, moral, physical death…

Everything he seeks to build with one hand, he destroys with the other…he can wipe away years of hard work with one destructive lethal act…he can break hearts, souls and bodies rendering them useless, impossible to piece together again…

He has worshiped himself as a God, has turned God into his own image, and has turned religion, ideology and the rest to suit his own destructive instincts…

Imbued with self, or more aptly illusions of self, a disconnected self, drunk with power, the male gender has wrecked havoc on all fronts….

A slave of his own ego, his own greed, his own lust, he believes himself to be free…when he is nothing but a slave…

Masquerading behind religion, principles, ideologies…he is nothing but a clown that can’t even make you laugh no more…he will wear a thousand masks as long as he is not asked to look into himself, his gender, his own masculinity and what it means to be a man…he will continue day in, day out, like a robot, like the machines he constructs daily…until it breaks down…until he breaks down…then he cries out for help, only to realize that he is so alone and has always been so alone…

His refusal to look within and ask the hard questions, his egomania, his lack of connectedness with the Source of all Living things has turned him into a soulless, dead being himself…and I don’t really care how many churches, temples or mosques he attends….and I don’t care how many books he has read, and I don’t care how many articles he has written….

You see am a typical female – I don’t care much for your God, your Jesus Christ, your Elohim, your Hindu Divinity, your Buddha, your Marx, your Engels, your Darwin, or whatever other false god you worship…I look at your deeds, your acts and I check if they match/follow your words…basically I look if you walk the talk…and hardly any of you do…

You see am a typical female – I look at end results. And when I do so, I see men laboring day and night to crack some invention, some genetic code, some discovery, some formula, some equation…and I see their work serving Death…

You see am a typical female – I see the morgues, the prisons, the torture marks, the rapes, the mass graves, the blood, the explosions, the weapons, the toxins, the poisons, the widows, the orphans, the deformed infants and I see your male hands everywhere…behind these pictures…I see your male hands and the women who follow you in your shadows…

You see am a typical female – I give Life and you have given nothing but Death…

Layla Anwar

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While a report by a highly respected Israeli think tank has been widely condemned [1] for advocating that the Israeli government use its intelligence services to attack and sabotage non-violent human rights advocates, the report is worth detailed study because it is chock full of admissions of illegitimate features of the Israeli government it desperately seeks to protect.

The report, “Building a Political Firewall Against Israel’s Delegitimization,” is the product of a year of research by a team of Tel Aviv-based Reut Institute [2] investigators and includes contributions from more than 100 individuals in Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While the Israeli government did not commission the report, Reut officials gave a PowerPoint presentation, “The Challenge of Delegitimacy to Israel’s National Security,” to the Israeli Cabinet in February 2010 and to a large conference of Israeli government officials in March 2010.

The report describes the “new strategic threat” created by the human rights activists’ “fundamental delegitimization” of the Israeli government.

But the report also:

Validates two of the three demands of the rapidly growing Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign: for ending the occupation and for equal rights for all Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel

Admits the concern that Israel will become a pariah state if it fails to end the occupation and provide equal rights

Asserts that “earnest and consistent commitment to ending occupation” and “to the equality and integration of its Arab citizens” are critical to combating delegitimization

Notwithstanding the previous points, asserts that the demand for equal rights is one that “unbundles Israel’s elimination,” and therefore, actually providing equal rights is incompatible with the Israeli government’s continued existence

Admits that the Israeli government requires the ability to continue unilaterally launching “harsh” militarily attacks

Admits that the delegitimization crisis is “crippling” the Israeli government’s freedom to launch such military attacks

Admits the crucial importance for the Israeli government to overcome that crisis to restore its unbridled freedom to act militarily

Admits that in the past the Israeli government was successful at using peace moves to obtain the legitimacy it needed for its next war

Admits that its widely publicized withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 were not effective to achieve legitimacy for its attack on Lebanon in 2006 or its most recent massive attack on Gaza

Admits that the failure of those peace moves to achieve legitimacy for the attack on Gaza had consequences that accelerated the delegitimization. Admits that “following Operation Cast Lead,” the intense criticism of the government “was expressed in the Goldstone report and in legal proceedings against IDF officers and Israeli politicians.” Admits that the legal proceedings restricted Israel military and political leaders’ freedom to travel “due to application of universal legal jurisdiction.”

Admits that “the Jewish world is growing more distant from Israel” and that “criticism of Israel is more prevalent within the Jewish world than in the past”

Admits that “too few of our people … are able to effectively respond to Palestinian claims or to campaigns which seek to de-legitimize the moral basis for Israel”

Admits that the so-called “delegitimizers” are a loose network of non-violent activists who “punch above their weight”

(Read the article)

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George Bush hasn’t suffered at all over the monumental suffering, death, and horror he has caused…no matter how many American soldiers have died on a given day in Iraq (averaging well over two every day), he is always seen with a big smile on his face that same or next day.

Vincent Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, 2008

Ramsey Clark will arrive in the Canadian oil-patch city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, this coming June 6th and 7th, mounting pressure on Judge Manfred Delong, who is presiding over the sentencing process in an epochal trial which some have dubbed: “The trial of Splitting the Sky versus George W. Bush.” Splitting the Sky (STS) on the advice of legal experts Ramsey Clark, Gale Davidson and Anthony J. Hall attempted a citizen’s arrest on George W. Bush on March 17, 2009 when the former US president was addressing an audience of business people at the TELUS Convention Centre in the downtown of Calgary.[2] In his March 2010 trial STS invoked the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes legislation, which was enacted by the Canadian parliament in 2000, to submit to the court that he was implementing the law by seeking to apprehend Bush, and was unjustly arrested by police who were in effect “aiding and abetting a credibly accused war criminal.” Former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney came to Calgary to attempt to testify in the March trial but was prevented from doing so as the judge shut down the trial earlier than anticipated. Instead McKinney spoke at the University of Calgary in support of Splitting the Sky.[3] It is hoped by supporters of justice that the arrival of Ramsey Clark in Calgary will help to publicize this unprecedented case in Canadian legal history, the knowledge of which the state and their media accomplices have made a concerted effort to suppress and censor from the public domain.

Ramsey Clark has a long history of being a thorn in the side of those political elites who would seek to apply the law expediently rather than unanimously. Born in Dallas, Texas, the son of prominent jurist Tom C. Clark, Ramsey Clark witnessed as a young man the Nuremberg trials following World War II. Clark would go on to graduate from the University of Chicago law school and become Attorney General of the United States under the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Clark worked tirelessly throughout his career as an outspoken Civil Rights attorney advocating for many prominent activists and political dissidents. After the 1971 Attica Prison debacle Clark replaced William Kunstler as Splitting the Sky’s legal advocate. STS’s charges were acquitted as a result of Clark’s relentless advocacy.

Clark took his human rights advocacy from the domestic realm to the international arena when he made a provocative visit to North Vietnam in 1972 as a protest against the illegal bombing of Hanoi by the US military. Clark’s pro-human rights and anti-war stances led him to become the attorney for a number of political nemeses of the military-industrial-complex. Clark’s clients included American Indian prisoner Leonard Peltier, members of the PLO, Camilo Mejia the US soldier who deserted his post in March 2004 in protest against the illegal invasion of Iraq, Slobodan Milosevic former president of Serbia, and Saddam Hussein former president of Iraq, to name a few. Clark has been particularly critical of those seeking to impose “victors justice” upon the vanquished opponents of Anglo-American expansionism. Of the “trial” of Saddam Hussein he stated: “it failed to respect basic human rights and was illegal because it was formed as a consequence of the United States’ illegal invasion,” going on to call for an “absolutely fair” trial for the deposed Iraqi leader.[4]

In recent history, Clark was unflinching in his attempts to have George W. Bush impeached. In 2002, Clark founded “VoteToImpeach” an organization whose ostensible goal was to see members of the Bush administration brought before a court of law for their misdeeds. The Independent reported: “Clark said there is a website, www.votetoimpeach.org, dedicated to collecting signatures of U.S. Citizens who want President George W. Bush impeached, and that approximately 150,000 have signed to impeach.”[5] Clark also helped found the protest organization A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism).

On April 3, 2010 Clark was elected at a meeting of over 150 lawyers, legal scholars and human rights campaigners, to be the chairperson of a new international campaign to investigate the alleged crimes against humanity committed by the Bush regime. Global Research reported: “Ramsey Clark emphasized that it is the imperative responsibility of the American people to relentlessly pursue this investigation, and to seek prosecution and indictment inside of the United States…Ramsey Clark made the point that all the war crimes and crimes against humanity flow from the commission of the most supreme crimes which he identified as the Crimes against Peace. This was the finding at the Nuremberg trial, and it is enshrined in the Nuremberg Principles.”[6] Clark’s reference to precedents set at Nuremberg, a German city once infamous for its right-wing extremism, encourages those of us who would like to see Calgary’s image in the world evolve from one of Harperite cowboys and vulture-capitalists into a city where law enforcement agencies set precedents in human rights jurisprudence and international law with the support of the polity’s residents. Perhaps such a paradigm shift would ignite a necessary atonement for the state-endorsed despoliation of the Indigenous Peoples of the region’s ancestral resources, lands and waters which has been unpardonably gifted to mainly Texas-based oil and gas conglomerates.

How Judge Manfred Delong will be influenced by Clark’s arrival in Calgary is yet to be seen. Will Judge Delong compound the Culture of Impunity afforded to credibly accused war criminals emanating from Anglo-America – which the Harper-minority government and their equivalents around the world have supported – by “setting an example” and sentencing STS to spend two-more years of his life behind bars and burdening him with a fine of up to $5000? Or will he realize the broader implications of this trial and dismiss the case before the court that STS “obstructed a police officer”?

Certainly it will be important that citizens of Calgary who are able to attend Clark’s upcoming lecture at the University of Calgary to show solidarity with this Peoples’ Process and attend. The more citizens who mobilize in solidarity with STS the less able the state and their media accomplices will be to sweep the profound juridical questions being raised by STS, Clark and others, under the carpet. The proceedings are as follows:

Ramsey Clark arrives in Calgary, June 6, 2010. He will speak at the University of Calgary Murray Fraser Hall Room 164, 4pm – 6.30pm.

The sentencing of Splitting the Sky commences on June 7, 2010 at the Calgary Courts Centre.

Joshua Blakeney is Media Coordinator of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge

Notes

[1] Vincent Bugliosi, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.” 2008. excerpt quoted: http://www.prosecutionofbush.com/excerpt3p1.php

[2] Anthony Hall, “Bush League Justice: Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary Alberta to be Tried for International Crimes?” Voltairenet. March 9, 2009. http://www.voltairenet.org/article159233.html and Gail Davidson, “Barring Bush From Canada: Time for the Law to Step in.” Global Research.ca http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15733

[3] Anthony Hall, “Cynthia McKinney Meets Splitting the Sky.” Global Research.ca. March 14, 2010. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18115

[4] “Chaos Mars Saddam Court Hearing.” BBC News. Monday, 5 December 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4498102.stm

[5] Josh Davidson, “Ramsey Clark Speaks Out Against War at College.” The Independent. March 19, 2003. http://independent.gmnews.com/news/2003-03-19/Front_page/013.html

[6] “Ramsey Clark Chosen to Head Commission to Investigate Bush Crimes.” Global Research.ca. April 14, 2010. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18610

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OBFUSCATION 1: Israelis and Zionists never target Jews

REALITY
“about 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, mostly because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs [referring to the bombings done at Synagogues and other areas of Jewish public concentration]” Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jew in his book: Ben Gurion’s Scandals (Flushing: Glilit Pub. Co., 1995).

On November 25, 1940, Zionists attacked with explosives in Haifa Harbor the S.S. Patria carrying illegal Jewish immigrants. The attack was meant to embarrass the British and was also a result of rivalry among Zionist groups. In that incident 268 Jewish immigrants drowned. See these books for details on many more of these issues.

-The Transfer Agreement (Edwin Black)
-Original Sins (Benjamin Beit-Hallami)
-Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power (Dr. Marc H. Ellis)
-Ben-Gurions Scandals (Noam Giladi)
-Unholy Alliance (Marc H. Ellis)
-Ending Auschwitz (Marc H. Ellis)
-Selected essays in the compendium “Walking the Red Line” (ed. Deena Hurwitz). For example, the essay “Living Comfortably with —-Taboos” by Rabbi Gary Nitzan-Ginzberg, asserts that many aspects of Zionism in theory and as practiced can be categorized as racist.
-The Seventh Million (Tom Segev)
-The Holocaust Industry (Norman Finkelstein)- Perfidy (Ben Hecht)
-The Holocaust Victims Accuse (Neturei Karta)
-Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust (Shabbtai Teveth)
-Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Lenni Brenner)
-51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (Lenni Brenner)

OBFUSCATION 2: “We don’t start wars: This war was forced on us. Arafat is responsible for all. He made his strategic decision of terrorism to reach diplomatic achievements by murdering. In this, he chose terrorism.” Ariel Sharon, December 2, 2001

REALITY
In a Los Angeles Times column published October 13, Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote:
“The preponderance of responsibility lies with Israel and with an international media that continue to obscure the basic realities facing the Palestinian people, and continue to treat the death of Israeli soldiers enforcing a brutal occupation as somehow more outrageous and barbarous than the killing of many times as many Palestinian teenagers who were resisting the occupation.”
See also http://al-awda.org/media/myths.html

OBFUSCATION 3: Zionism is a rational discourse in a world of turmoil

REALITY
” You would like me to look at it objectively. Objectively, I agree: we are only breeding more hatred and violence. You want me to imagine how I would feel if I were a Palestinian. I suppose that if I were, I might want to kill Israelis myself. But I am not objective and I am not a Palestinian. It’s not that the lives of Palestinians don’t matter to me. But Israeli lives matter more. I know this doesn’t sound terribly enlightened. And it certainly doesn’t lead to any of the political solutions that we both know are necessary if this horror is going to end.” Hillel Halkin ,?Objectivity is morally overrated?, Jerusalem Post, 14 November 2002. Also on the web at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1037248935749

OBFUSCATION 4: Israel is a state like any other state

REALITY
“The Jewish State cannot exist without a special ideological content. We cannot exist for long like any other state whose main interests is to insure the welfare of its citizens.” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, New York Times, 14 July 1992

A 1975 resolution of the Organization of African Unity stated that “the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being.”

“In Israel for example, several laws are explicitly discriminatory. These can be traced back to Israel’s foundation in 1948 which, driven primarily by the racist genocide suffered by Jews in Europe during the Second World War, was based on the notion of a Jewish state for Jewish people. Some of Israel’s laws reflect this principle and as a result discriminate against non-Jews, particularly Palestinians who had lived on the lands for generations. Various areas of Israeli law discriminate against Palestinians. The Law of Return for instance provides automatic Israeli citizenship for Jewish immigrants, whereas Palestinian refugees who were born and raised in what is now Israel are denied even the right to return home. Other statutes explicitly grant preferential treatment to Jewish citizens in areas such as education, public housing, health, and employment.” A report on “Racism and the Administration of Justice”, Amnesty International (2001), also found at
http://www.amnestyusa.org/stoptorture/racismreport.pdf.

OBFUSCATION 5: Israeli leaders tell the truth when speaking about the Israeli Palestinian Conflict

REALITY
Binyamin Netanyahu, a leader of the Likud Party and an ex-prime minister of Israel had an interesting advice to Israelis. He was giving a speech to dozen’s of Likud Party members in Eilat. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (7/15/01) reported that: “…giving his audience a bit of advice on how to deal with foreign interviewers [Netanyahu said]: ‘Always, irrespective of whether you’re right or not, you must always present your side as right.’ ”

OBFUSCATION 6: Israel is a reliable ally and a true friend of the US

REALITY
Time and time again, Israel has been shown to be a strategic liability for America and counter to America’s national interest. By being associated with Israel’s actions, America’s standing in the entire Muslim world is damaged.

Israel routinely spies on the United States and carries out espionage and political assassinations on the soil of America’s allies.

And on June 8, 1967, with no other combat taking place nearby, Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats repeatedly attacked the U.S. intelligence ship Liberty off the Sinai coast, killing American sailors and wounding 171. Though Israel insists the attack was an accident, abundant evidence has surfaced that Israel deliberately attacked the ship, fearing it would monitor Israeli preparations for an attack on the Golan Heights the next day. In 1991, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak discovered that the US embassy in Beirut had intercepted Israeli radio traffic in which an Israeli pilot reported: “It’s an American ship.” The Israeli command ignored the report and ordered the pilot to press the attack.

Even in commercial areas important to a few in the US, Israel has become a major competitor of the US by selling American technology given free to Israel to others (this includes military and military related high tech sales which are now Israel’s biggest exports).

Research has also shown that Israel’s cost to US taxpayers ranged from a few hundred billion dollars to nearly $4 Trillion.

OBFUSCATION 7: Israel seeks peace based on International law

REALITY
” It seems almost inevitable that the United States will initiate new peace efforts, but it is unlikely that real progress can be made on any of these issues as long as Israel insists on its settlement policy, illegal under international laws that are supported by the United States and all other nations. There are many questions as we continue to seek an end to violence in the Middle East, but there is no way to escape the vital one: Land or peace?” President Jimmy Carter, Washington Post, November 26, 2000

Israel is currently in violation of 69 UN Security Council resolutions and countless UN General Assembly resolutions.

OBFUSCATION 8: Zionism was a rational response to anti-Semitism of Europe

REALITY
Zionism and Nazism were twins in their narrow nationalism and even collaborated against the public. The Zionists thus found no reason not to collaborate with the Nazis in the mid-thirties to rid Europe of its Jews. The details of this transfer agreement were given by Edwin Black’s book, The Transfer Agreement: the Untold Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich & Jewish Palestine (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1984). After commencement of attacks on Jews under German control, the British, in the hope of easing the pressure for increased immigration into Palestine, proposed that thousands of Jewish children be admitted directly into Britain. Ben-Gurion, the recognized leader of labor Zionism at the time was absolutely against the plan, telling a meeting of Labour Zionist leaders on 7 Dec. 1938:

“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel” Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (Zed Books, 1984). cites as reference no. 23: Yoav Gelber, ‘ Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-42)’ Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, p. 199.

Below are two other relevant quotes.

“It is inconceivable from a physical point of view, that a Jew born to a family of pure Jewish blood over several generations can become adapted to the spiritual outlook of a German or a Frenchman. A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-racial type are Jewish … And a man whose body is Jewish can not possibly mold within himself the spirit of a Frenchman … It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than his own” Vladimir Jabotinsky (ideological father of Sharon’s Likud party), ‘A Letter on Autonomy, 1904′, reprinted in Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (New Jersey: Barricade, 2002) p. 10.

“Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people, which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans. And whatever doubts I may still have nourished were finally dispelled by the attitude of a portion of the Jews themselves. Among them there was a great movement, quite extensive in Vienna, which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews: this was the ZIONISTS (emphasis in original)” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, reissue edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 56.

OBFUSCATION 9: Zionists tried to accomodate the native people in their colonization efforts

REALITY
” Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population ? an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs.” Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs” First published in Russian under the title “O Zheleznoi Stene” in Rasswyet,” November 4, 1923. Translated by Lenni Brenner. It can be downloaded at http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” Golda Meir statement to the Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz, 3 November 2000:

“Terrible things were done [even] after the War of Independence, too; for example, in the town of Majdal in 1950. …Some 10,000 Palestinians lived in Majdal before the war ….In 1949, Yigal Allon demanded “to transfer all the Arab inhabitants.” Ben-Gurion objected. An inter-ministerial committee for the “transfer of Arabs from place to place” — yes, we had one of those as well — decided to thin out the population somewhat; another ministerial committee — “on abandoned property” — decided to settle Majdal with Jews. From committee to committee, Majdal was “Judaized,” until, with 2,500 Jewish residents, it became known as Migdal-Ad. In December 1949, more Arabs were deported so as to vacate a few more houses — “abandoned property” — for a few more discharged soldiers. The IDF made the life of those Arabs who remained a misery, hoping they’d get the message. The new commanding officer of the Southern Command, Moshe Dayan, rekindled the ideas of his predecessor, Yigal Allon. ‘I hope that perhaps in the coming years, there will be another opportunity to transfer these Arabs [170,000 Israeli Arabs - G.L.] out of the Land of Israel,’ he said at a meeting of the Mapai faction, outlining its ideas while in uniform. Dayan backed up his words with actions: He submitted a detailed proposal for “the evacuation of the Arab inhabitants of the town of Majdal.” the chief of staff agreed and Ben-Gurion authorized the plan.

The government was circumvented, the Histadrut labor federation objected, and Rabin informed the residents. The transfer began at the beginning of 1950, although the “official operation” took off in June. There were still those who spoke of dispersing the Arabs around the country; in the end, they were deported to Gaza. They were loaded onto trucks and dropped off at the border — “deliveries,” as they were termed. Just to remind you again, the state already existed. The last delivery of 229 people left for Gaza on October 21. Back in Israel, the officials pondered over how to distribute the “abandoned” houses, most of which went to individuals who had some political clout. In 1956, Migdal-Ad changed its name to Ashkelon. To this very day, the former residents of Majdal live in the shacks and shanties of the refugee camps in Gaza. But, there were also incidents in which they shot — oh, how they shot — and didn’t weep at all. And lied. This is the picture that emerges from the chapter about the Israeli press at the time of the Kibiya affair, which expresses the dark side of the then already five-year-old state: no longer a community struggling to establish a country, but an orderly, victorious state, thought of as a democracy, with David Ben-Gurion, who lies, poker-faced, and its press, which brazenly conceals scandalous information from its readers and even lies knowingly – all for the glory of the State of Israel.”

OBFUSCATION 10: Asking for Palestinian refugee return is unreasonable and is not conducive to peace

REALITY
http://www.al-awda.org/therefugeeprimer/
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/651/op11.htm

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Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
~ Gen. William Westmoreland

What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
~ Adolf Hitler

In a recent commencement address, President Obama declared that “information becomes a distraction, a diversion” which puts “pressure on our country and on our democracy.” Technological innovations – including the Internet – produces a “24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter.” He added that “with so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, and on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all – to know what to believe, to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not.” Hillary Clinton expressed similar concerns a few years ago when she suggested that a “gatekeeper” be created for the Internet, to prevent just anyone from putting their opinions out into the public.

A book I am currently writing addresses the epistemological question: how do we know what we know? This is doubtless the most important question ever to confront mankind, a question we nonetheless fail to ask because our institutional mind-keepers find such an inquiry too volatile and threatening to the maintenance of their status quo interests. If institutions are organizations that have become their own reasons for being, our inquiry into how we came to accept such thinking could be devastating to such systems.

Life itself is dependent upon our capacity for creative adaptation to changing surroundings. It is resiliency – not rigidity – that sustains life. But in order to act purposefully to achieve life-enhancing ends, we must be able to identify, analyze, and act upon the conditions that confront us. This is why liberty is central to human survival, for it allows people to respond to circumstances as their individual judgments best inform them. But how effective they are will depend upon their capacities for clear thinking, as well as the realistic and accurate nature of the information upon which they are to act.

The problem we encounter is that information is a very elusive, incomplete, and subjectively-defined quality. Each of us looks for, discovers, and assesses information according to the demands of our prior experiences. Added to this, the study of “chaos” tells us that our universe is far too interconnected with networks of variability to allow us to know all of the influences at work upon our decision-making. Our ability to predict outcomes requires a “sensitive dependence upon initial conditions,” which translates into our being able to not only identify all of the factors that influence events, but to measure the precise degree of their influence. (If you doubt this, try predicting the precise events that will occur in your life for the next seven days.)

As uncertain as it is, the quality of the information available to us is a principal factor in determining how well we are to live. One of the main characteristics of an entrepreneur lies in his or her abilities to identify and act upon information that others do not see. If I have located a source of widgets that I can purchase for $10 apiece, and I know of a sizeable group of people who (a) are not aware of this source, (b) are willing to pay me $20 for each widget, and (c) my costs in getting them to this market amount to only $1 per widget, I will likely have a successful business.

Information is also at the core of our social and political behavior. A tribal leader established his authority over our more primitive ancestors by telling them of threats from others – known only to himself – and of his special pipeline to the gods who would assist him in his rule. As we have seen more recently, fear causes us to huddle together around those who promise us protection. This is due to our innocent belief that our alleged “protectors” have more information available to them than do we.

In time, information provided not only by others, but from our own experiences, tell us not only that those we have empowered enjoy no greater access to “truth” than do we but, further, that most of the fears of which they warn us have been fabricated and propagandized by the power-seekers themselves. Do you remember all of those “weapons of mass destruction” with which the Iraqis planned to attack us? Have you heard of the contrived “coming ice age” (oops, “global warming,” oops, “climate change”) that continues to be modified and employed in political efforts to control our daily lives?

Johann Gutenberg demonstrated to the world that the free flow of information is very liberating. His invention of movable type permitted men and women to read and inform their own minds, without a need for authority figures to tell them of the nature of things. Gutenberg’s efforts were responsible not only for the Reformation, but for much of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific age, and, ultimately, that most creative and liberating of all periods, the Industrial Revolution.

Over time, humans began to see just how personally relevant information was to the quality of their lives. At the same time, the political racketeers whose interests depended upon their victims remaining in a state of institutionally-controlled ignorance, saw the threat to their rule. In one form or another, the control-freaks embraced censorship and the burning of books. It was people’s minds, not just their bodies, that got burned at the stake. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 shows how far a totalitarian state might go to preserve its control over the minds of people. Mark Twain expressed the proposition more humorously when he said: “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.”

Computerized technologies continue to innovate new systems for the creation and communication of information, the most familiar of which is the Internet. Begun as an in-house network for military agencies, it quickly spread – like a genie released from a bottle – into the rest of society. Tens of millions of people were soon communicating with countless others whatever material they chose to send and receive. The model of vertically-structured information flow one found in schools, religions, the media, and the government – premised on the idea “we will tell you what we want you to know” – collapsed into horizontal networks run by nobody who had a monopoly power to control content. Your Uncle Harlow or niece Marcia could become sources of information to others who chose to read their opinions.

But the liberating influence of free-flowing information has proven troublesome to members of the corporate-state establishment whose authority over others depends upon the maintenance of a mindset of subservience. Information gets people thinking about the arrangements in their lives. They begin to see the lies, corruption, deceit, violence, and looting that have been employed – with the help of propaganda supplied by schools and the major media – to keep them in their servile state. Like the disillusioned denizens of Animal Farm, the herds have begun to break up. Sheep are deserting their pens; the cattle are stampeding to greener pastures.

The establishment’s presidential sock puppet warns Americans that the “distractions” produced by the free flow of information and opinions will create more “pressures.” A dictionary defines “pressure” as “the action of a force against an opposing force.” The ruling classes cannot tolerate such countervailing influences that would upset the status quo they wish to maintain. To do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of interests other than their own. Besides, efforts to distinguish “truth” from “falsehood” place a great burden upon the individual mind. Most of us are content to allow others to bear this burden for us; to have the schools and the media provide us that optimal level of knowledge and understanding with which we can function in our assigned stalls as useful institutional servo-mechanisms. The keepers of our thoughts could summarize their message to us in the words implicit in Pres. Obama’s address to college graduates: “confine your thinking to what is in our interests to have you know. We will keep you informed.”

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Lately many have characterized this administration as socialist, or having strong socialist leanings. I differ with this characterization. This is not to say Mr. Obama believes in free-markets by any means. On the contrary, he has done and said much that demonstrates his fundamental misunderstanding and hostility towards the truly free market. But a closer, honest examination of his policies and actions in office reveals that, much like the previous administration, he is very much a corporatist. This in many ways can be more insidious and worse than being an outright socialist.

Socialism is a system where the government directly owns and manages businesses. Corporatism is a system where businesses are nominally in private hands, but are in fact controlled by the government. In a corporatist state, government officials often act in collusion with their favored business interests to design polices that give those interests a monopoly position, to the detriment of both competitors and consumers.

A careful examination of the policies pursued by the Obama administration and his allies in Congress shows that their agenda is corporatist. For example, the health care bill that recently passed does not establish a Canadian-style government-run single-payer health care system. Instead, it relies on mandates forcing every American to purchase private health insurance or pay a fine. It also includes subsidies for low-income Americans and government-run health care “exchanges.” Contrary to the claims of the proponents of the health care bill, large insurance and pharmaceutical companies were enthusiastic supporters of many provisions of this legislation because they knew in the end their bottom lines would be enriched by Obamacare.

Similarly, Obama’s “cap-and-trade” legislation provides subsidies and specials privileges to large businesses that engage in “carbon trading.” This is why large corporations, such as General Electric support cap-and-trade.

To call the President a corporatist is not to soft-pedal criticism of his administration. It is merely a more accurate description of the President’s agenda.

When he is a called a socialist, the President and his defenders can easily deflect that charge by pointing out that the historical meaning of socialism is government ownership of industry; under the President’s policies, industry remains in nominally private hands. Using the more accurate term – corporatism – forces the President to defend his policies that increase government control of private industries and expand de facto subsidies to big businesses. This also promotes the understanding that though the current system may not be pure socialism, neither is it free-market since government controls the private sector through taxes, regulations, and subsidies, and has done so for decades.

Using precise terms can prevent future statists from successfully blaming the inevitable failure of their programs on the remnants of the free market that are still allowed to exist. We must not allow the disastrous results of corporatism to be ascribed incorrectly to free market capitalism or used as a justification for more government expansion. Most importantly, we must learn what freedom really is and educate others on how infringements on our economic liberties caused our economic woes in the first place. Government is the problem; it cannot be the solution.

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The study of economics, properly understood, develops an understanding of the role of incentives in human action. Americans who have heretofore focused their attentions on who the next “American Idol” will be, have suddenly been introduced to the cost/benefit considerations of what has come to be known as “health care.” Those who approached the nationalization of this major industry with only the superficial awareness provided by politicians and their lapdog media, are now beginning to grasp its broader implications for the control of human life.

The politicians who supported this measure are likewise discovering that the benefits they received – from whatever sources – from this legislation, carry with them costs unwanted by those whose lives will be burdened by it. A number of people – not all of them operating as agents provocateurs – have reportedly threatened these politicos with bodily harm for having supported the measure. With such overwhelming public opposition from their constituents to this bill, it should not be surprising that those who naively assumed that elected officials represented them – rather than the institutional interests that stood to benefit from it – would become angry. What the congressional sock-puppets are experiencing is the social application of Newton’s “third law of motion”: that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

With the government schools performing as they do, it may be understandable that such a basic principle of physics would not have been introduced to them. Nonetheless, life experiences do provide empirical evidence of the universality of such an idea. Intelligent minds have slowly awakened to the role of Newton’s third law in the World Trade Center attacks: if you engage in violence against others, your victims will have an incentive to retaliate. If you contravene the wills of those who elected you to represent their interests, you should not be surprised to discover that they are angry with you!

The response of the politicians to these isolated threats reveals the utterly dishonest nature of all political systems. CNN informs us that “Democrats discuss concerns with police, FBI.” If these legislators truly believed that they were acting in the interests of those who voted for them – instead of the corporations and governmental bureaucracies who promoted the measure – why don’t the “Democrats discuss concerns” with their alleged constituencies? Why do they not attend a genuine “town hall” meeting – instead of the staged and well-scripted charades – and explain to an angry electorate how government-controlled medicine will work to their benefit? Perhaps veterans of military hospitals – such as Walter Reed – might show up to relate their experiences.

That congressmen would instinctively call upon the police and FBI for protection is a clear admission of who such agencies are designed “to serve and protect.” Media voices – intent on keeping their jobs – warble in unison the refrain “violence, and threats of violence are unacceptable” in society. What this means, of course, is that “violence” and “threats” that have not been sanctioned by the state are “unacceptable.” Government is defined as an agency that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence within a given geographical territory. The state does not operate as a peaceful, voluntary system, a fact that is quickly discovered by the reading of statutes: “violation of any provision of this Act shall be punishable by a fine of $X and/or imprisonment.” Every act of government rests on the threat that violators will meet with violence – even death – should they disobey. Try explaining to the men, women, and children of Iraq and Afghanistan that “violence, and threats of violence are unacceptable” to the American government!

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On the occasion of this seventh anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq on March 20, I am reading a book: Cultural Cleansing in Iraq. Why museums were looted, libraries burned and academics murdered. The basic thesis is that the purpose of the war was, from the onset, the destruction of the Iraqi state. But there is more: cultural cleansing, tolerating the looting of museums, the burning of libraries and the murder of academics was part of the war strategy, the authors argue. State ending will certainly become established as a concept, alongside genocide and its derivatives, such as urbicide (destruction of cities), sociocide (destruction of social fabric) mnemocide (destruction of collective memory). We can only hope because, unfortunately these concepts and their intertwinement do not only apply to Iraq.

There was a lot of press coverage about the looting of the museums, albeit press reports didn’t put responsibility with the occupying powers, as the international laws of war stipulate; and without identifying it as a strategy of “mnenocide”. In contrast, after all these years a deafening silence has reigned on the hundreds of academics who have been victims of targeted assassinations in Iraq. Strange. In the first three months of the occupation 250 academics were killed. The Brussels Tribunal has now a list of 437 casualties, a list that serves as a worldwide reference. Because the professors who documented these killings and disappearances have been killed or forced to flee the country, it is increasingly harder to keep this list up to date. According to the Christian Science Monitor, by June 2006, already 2500 academics were killed, kidnapped or driven out of the country. Nobody knows how many have been murdered until today. We do know that thousands have been threatened — often by envelopes containing bullets — and fled. Alongside academics also media professionals, doctors, engineers and spiritual leaders have been targets of intimidation, kidnapping and murder. It is important to know that, in the case of academics, it’s not about sectarian killing, because statistics show that there is no pattern in the murders. Professors in leading positions have especially been targeted, and not just Baathists.

These murders have never being investigated, the culprits never found let alone prosecuted. How come? Perhaps because both the occupiers and the new rulers in Iraq thought it was not important. Or maybe because death squads are part of their strategy, like formerly in El Salvador. That is what the book claims: the murder of academics was and is part of the “Salvador Option”.

Conclusion of the authors? The goal was to liquidate the intellectual class, which would naturally be the basis for a new democratic state. It is that sinister. So sinister that it is difficult to believe. And yet it is true: the elimination of academics and other professionals from the middle class served the first and highest war aim: the destruction of the Iraqi state. “State-ending” instead of “nation building”. According to the editors of the book, this war objective was a decision taken when three parties aligned: the neoconservatives who wanted permanent bases in a geopolitical strategy of military domination; Israel that did not want a powerful state in its backyard; and the oil industry that wanted to lay its hands on one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

Worldwide protests from the academic community would be nice. But one minute of silence for their murdered colleagues will not suffice. Because, and that makes it so overwhelming, all this is just the tip of the iceberg: the children who are born severely deformed by the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium, the lack of potable water, electricity and health care, the destruction of the educational system which results in a lost generation, the 1.2 million deaths and five million refugees — all these things combined make the Iraq war the biggest war crime and the largest man-made humanitarian catastrophe in decades. And it continues. There is little or no hope of improvement, especially not after the recent elections. Add to this the countless bombings and the sectarian disintegration of the country and you have a picture of hell. And we, we all look more and more the other way.

Even Bush has been proven right with his famous quote shown on the deck of the USS Lincoln that first May of 2003: “Mission accomplished”.

Indeed, Iraq is destroyed.

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