LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
-
CIA Funds Both Sides Of War, Uses NY Times For Psyops (Yawn)
David DeGraw at Alternet.org describes how US intelligence ishas been behind both sides of the war on terror and how the media aids the war effort with calculated psyops like the recent “finding” of mineral deposits in Afghanistan that was trumpeted in the New York Times. (more…)
Indian versus Israeli Reactions To Provocation
The Great Bong on the difference between the Indian and the Israeli approach to provocation:
“As someone primarily interested in sub-continental politics, what is most interesting for me however, more than the role of Turkey, is the difference between India and Israel in their reactions to provocation, being in similar boats—- — democratic countries with strong militaries, surrounded by antagonistic countries on many sides, eager to provoke them to conflict over disputed territories.
War: Survival Of The Unfittest
“Only in the case of primitive peoples does war lead to the selection of the stronger and more gifted, and that among civilized peoples it leads to a deterioration of the race by unfavorable selection.”
Through Cowardice We Shall All Be Saved
Cinematical.com (via Greg at Our Holy Cause) has a synopsis of the underrated 1964 movie, “The Americanization of Emily,” with its ironic antiwar message: (more…)
Afghanistan Has Trillion Dollar Deposits Of Iron, Copper, and Lithium
So now we know the real reason for the Afghan war.. I wonder how long the Pentagon has had this information? BBC reports on June 14, 2010:
“Afghanistan may have more than a trillion dollars worth of untapped mineral deposits, a spokesman for the ministry of mines has suggested. The statement came after reports in the New York Times of the work of a team of Pentagon officials and US geologists. They discovered large quantities of iron and copper as well as valuable deposits of lithium. However, questions are being asked about the timing of the release of the latest information.
Experts Trumpet ISI-Taliban Link As Excuse For US “Counter-Measures”
Shock. Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) might be involved with the Taliban.
When the obvious is stated with all the fanfare of a papal decree from such organs of the ruling class as the London School of Economics and our own JFK School of Government (Harvard), can military action be far behind? File this along with my previous post, Mad Dog alerts.
The Associated Press reports (June 13, 2010):
“Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.
Mad Dogs Alert: Saudis To Give Israelis Airspace To Attack Iran
Hugh Tomlinson at The Times Online, June 12, 2010:
“Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.
In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.
To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.”
Read the rest of this article at The Times Online
Israel: Future Turkish Defense Of Aid Ships Will Be Act Of War
“Israeli Army commander and top Likud member Uzi Dayan today warned on Israeli Army Radio that Israel would consider any attempt by the Turkish military to protect future aid ships from attack an “act of war.” With Israeli protesters already condemning Erdogan, is war on the table?
Glenn Greenwald: US No Different From Israel
“One can express all sorts of outrage over the Obama administration’s depressingly predictable defense of the Israelis, even at the cost of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, but ultimately, on some level, wouldn’t it have been even more indefensible — or at least oozingly hypocritical — if the U.S. had condemned Israel? After all, what did Israel do in this case that the U.S. hasn’t routinely done and continues to do?
Gaza Flotilla Like Jewish Refugees In Exodus Says Former Mossad Agent
Victor Ostrovsky in SpyTalk at The Washington Post:
“The Israeli commando attack on a civilian flotilla was “so stupid it is stupefying,” says former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky spent six years in the Israeli navy, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander before Mossad recruited him in 1982. He quit after four years and in the 1990s he wrote two highly critical, first-person books about the intelligence service.
Israeli Historians, Politicians: Israel Was Never In Danger Of Extinction
I’m indebted to Jeremy Hammond (author of the excellent piece, “The Simplicity of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”) for the compilation of these quotes:
“I know how at least 80 percent of all of the incidents there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s speak about 80 percent. It would go like this: we would send a tractor to plowin the demilitarized area, and we would know ahead of time that the Syrians would start shooting. (more…)
State Terror: How Soviet “Socialist” Police Fueled Pogroms
(Cont). The Truth about the Kielce Pogrom:
“The Soviet strategists who were in control of Poland saw significant advantage in fostering an animosity between Jewish and gentile Poles. This animosity was used as a tool to aid in the subjugation of Poland early in its capture into the Soviet empire in 1944. After World War II, Soviet machinations in this regard succeeded in converting the image of Jewish victims of German-Nazi genocide into the image of Jewish oppressors (Kersten, p. 130). This was purposely done to put the Polish gentile population between “a rock and a hard place.” Polish gentiles were left with two options: either don’t respond to the Soviet oppression, or respond to the Soviet oppression and thus appear to be anti-Semitic.
Although the image of Jews as oppressors was spread beyond Poland, this phenomenon was very noticeable in Poland, where there was a steady flow of news and often well-substantiated (if sometimes exaggerated) rumors of executions of anti-communist Poles by Jewish executioners serving in the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. Kersten describes this unfortunate development when Soviet policies created the impression that Jews played the main role in the subjugation of Poland and other satellite countries to the communist system. At the same time, the communist propaganda machine equated opposition to the “socialist” regimes with anti-Semitism. So, if a Polish person opposed the socialist Sovietization of Poland, that person was branded as an anti-Semite. This smoke screen was used successfully to obscure the reality of the Soviet subjugation of Poland by the Soviet Union.
The Soviet terror apparatus in Poland included the so-called Polish military counterintelligence. It was initially integrated with the Soviet Smersh [Death to Spies] organization directed against German spying and subversion. However, when the front crossed the prewar Polish territory, Smersh was used increasingly against the significant Polish resistance to Soviet domination. In November 1944, the Polish section of Smersh became renamed Informacja, in which Col. Checinski later served for 10 years. Informacja remained under the close supervision of Smersh and was at first headed by Soviet Col. Nicolai Kozhushko. Soviet officers assigned to the Polish army were considered vulnerable to Polish influence and were under close surveillance by a special Informacja [Information] department. Informacja was clearly a Soviet-led force, not at all an independent force loyal to Poland.
At the time of the most intensive terror, between 1944 and 1955, Smersh used its Informacja branch to have agents pose as members of the military prosecutor’s office. They used this apparatus to conduct political trials in military courts in Poland. Tortured witnesses were “prepared” for these trials and later were secretly executed “to remove any trace of the provocation” (Checinski, p. 57). In that period, of the 120 officers serving in Informacja, only about 18 were Polish-born. Most of these 18 were Polish Jews and the rest were Soviet citizens, some of them Jews.
The Soviets were creative in inventing their own opportunities to manufacture conflict between Polish Jews and gentiles. For example, it was Soviet policy in Poland to change Yiddish names of Jews into Slavic-Polish names. This practice was resented by both Jewish and gentile Poles. An American journalist, Samuel Loeb Shneiderman, who visited Warsaw in 1946, wrote in his book “Between Fear and Hope” (New York, 1946) that under the cover of Polish names Jews were continuing their ethnic identity and must have felt like their ancestors forced into conversion to Christianity during their persecution in Spain (Kersten, pp.76, 108). The name-changing became widespread. It served to deprive the Jews of their cultural heritage in order to form a “progressive Jewish nation,” to use Stalin’s expression.
Checinski describes how Stalin ordered the NKVD to prepare a civilian network of police terror and repression, called the UB [Urzad Bezpieczenstwa), to work in parallel with the Informacja in Poland. The "Polish intelligentsia boycotted the security service, which was treated with universal contempt as an instrument of foreign domination" (Checinski, p. 61). Thus, the NKVD, despite its deep-rooted anti-Semitism, "could not do without Jews. Jewish officials were often placed in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for all of the regime's crimes" (Checinski, p. 62). The Soviet strategy of using people with striking Semitic features as the most visible executioners of Soviet policy in Poland was also aimed at presenting understandable anti-communist feelings within Poland as anti-Semitism. In 1945, the upper echelons of the terror apparatus were staffed with Jews. This created the appearance that many Jews in Poland were members of the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. A public proclamation, made at a convention of Jewish members of the ruling communist party [PPR, Polska Pania Robotnicza] on October 7-9, 1945, stated that in postwar Poland, conditions were created for the Jews to find an outlet for their political, social, and national ambitions. Needless to say, neither Poles nor Jews trusted this official statement. The Zionists openly advocated a massive emigration to Palestine (Kersten, p.80), which for different reasons was also desired by the Soviet leadership.”
and
” Is hatred for a person simply because of his ethnicity more acceptable today, as long as the object of the hatred is a Pole rather than a Jew? And once it is decided that it is important to instill hatred against members of a given ethnic group, can there be any limit to the perpetration of lies, myths, and mischaracterizations to drive the hatred home? And once ethnic hatred is started and nurtured in a people, where will it end? The Holocaust itself unfortunately provides one answer, one such ending point.”
Chinese Propaganda Tactics: Conquering Guo
“Borrow the resources of an ally to attack a common enemy. Once the enemy is defeated, use those resources to turn on the ally that lent you them in the first place.”
—- Chinese strategies for creating chaos, “Obtain Safe Passage To Conquer The State of Guo“
China Defies US And Sells Gasoline To Iran
The Sino-US trade wars are heating up. On Friday, the US announced that it would impose stiff duties on Chinese-made oil country tubular goods, which are steel pipes used in the oil industry.
“According to US data, the OCTG trade case is the largest in US history against China imports valued at more than $2.6 billion in 2008 and about $1 billion last year.”
China responded on Tuesday with anti-dumping duties against the US and Russia:
“China has imposed anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on a U.S. specialty steel product, and also hit Russia with anti-dumping duties in the same case, its customs administration said.
U.S. producers will be assessed anti-dumping duties of up to 64.8 percent and anti-subsidy, or “countervailing,” duties of up to 44.6 percent on the grain-oriented electrical steel, it said on its website on Monday.
Grain-oriented electrical steel, also known as grain-oriented silicon steel, is used for the cores of high-efficiency transformers, electric motors and generators.
The state-backed China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals and Chemicals Importers and Exporters hailed the Ministry of Commerce’s April 10 ruling, which the Ministry has not yet publicly announced, state news agency Xinhua said.
“During the investigation the Ministry found that U.S. producers had received subsidies by the U.S. government, and their unfair competition hurt Chinese producers,” Xinhua said, quoting an unnamed person at the chamber of commerce.”
Meanwhile, China also announced its first trade deficit since May 2004
“According to the statistics from the General Administration of Customs, China’s exports were valued at US $112.11 billion in March, up by 24.3 percent year on year, while the imports were up by 66 percent to US $119.35 billion, trade deficit were US $ 7.24 billion. This is the first monthly trade deficit for China since May of 2004.”
What’s interesting is that this trade row with the US isn’t necessarily a sign of rising protectionism in China, as the media often reports. It seems to signal a move toward more trade with emerging markets in Asia and elsewhere. Thus at the recently concluded Boao Forum for Asia, (the Chinese Davos), the Chinese Vice-President called for open markets and not protectionism. Of course, this isn’t free trade, by any means, but state-driven mercantilism. It remains to be seen whether that is any better than state-driven protectionism.
Another example.
While some top oil-exporting countries have curbed their exports to Iran to avoid penalties from the US, state-owned Chinaoil has sold two cargoes of gasoline to Iran in defiance of the US, the first direct sales since January 2009.
As Russia has hardened its position and moved closer to the European and US stance, the Chinese move has become crucial for Iran. Iran continues to be the fifth largest exporter of crude in the world, but US sanctions have meant that its refineries have suffered from lack of foreign investment and it now relies on the world market for its gasoline needs.
UK Foreign Office Warning to Travelers About Israeli Passport Forgery
I didn’t have time to complete this post from a week ago, but with the really bizarre story of the Polish plane, I thought I should revisit it, as is:
At the end of March, Haaretz (March 31) reported that the British Foreign Office issued a travel advisory last week to citizens traveling to Israel and Palestine, “hours” after it decided to expel an Israeli diplomat.
“The risk applies in particular to passports without biometric security features,” the warning on the [UK foreign office] Web site said. “We recommend that you only hand your passport over to third parties including Israeli officials when absolutely necessary.”
This follows confirmation last week that killers of a Hamas operative in Dubai used forged passports from multiple countries, including the UK, Australia, France, Ireland, and Germany.
An editor at the Guardian notes that this is the lowest point in Anglo-Israeli relations since 1988, when an Israeli diplomat was expelled for being an agent of the Mossad.
Current relations with Israel are already strained, because senior Israeli officials visiting the UK have been threatened with arrest for alleged war crimes.
[Note:
The Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in January in a hit that Dubai police have said they are 99 percent certain was the work of Israel's spy service, Mossad. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied this.
Dubai has named 27 alleged conspirators in the pursuit and killing of the Palestinian, and has claimed that they used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports to enter and depart from Dubai. More than half of the people identified share the names of foreign-born Israeli nationals].
Earlier, UK foreign secretary David Miliband had said there were “compelling reasons” to believe Israel was responsible and had called the use of 12 forged British passports “intolerable,” according to an earlier report by the BBC (March 23).
Meanwhile, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, confirmed there would be no diplomatic retaliation, but expressed disappointment at Miliband’s decision. Israel has previously said there is no proof it was behind the killing at a Dubai hotel.
Israel claims the Australians are also going to follow suit, says this report:
“Official Israeli sources told The Australian newspaper that there is a high chance that Australia will follow Britain’s lead and also expel a high ranking Israeli diplomat. “It appears that Israeli officials have received indications in Canberra that Australia is preparing to expel a diplomat,” it said in the newspaper.”
Meanwhile, according to The Australian (March 31) ECAJ president Robert Goot told The Australian: “I think it would be an extreme reaction or possibly an overreaction (to expel an Israeli diplomat). The Jewish community would hope the Australian government might adopt a more nuanced position, depending on the outcome of the (Australian Federal Police) investigation.”
That’s not likely, now that former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky has told ABC Radio that the spy agency had used Australian passports for previous operations before last month’s hit on a top Hamas commander in Dubai that has been blamed on Israel. (see the Sydney Morning Herald (Feb 26, 2010)
Israel has previously dismissed claims from Ostrovsky, who has detailed various accusations against the country in his books. He said Mossad prefers to use “false flag” passports, as Israeli papers frequently invoke suspicion in the Middle East.
“They need passports because you can’t go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world,” he said.
“So most of these (Mossad) operations are carried out on what’s called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you’re trying to recruit from.”
Ostrovsky said Mossad had a “very, very expensive research department” dedicated to manufacturing the fake documents which simulates different types of paper and ink.
The Australian newspaper also said Ali Kazak, a former Palestinian representative to Australia, had warned in 2004 that a Mossad agent in Sydney had obtained 25 false Australian passports.
According to The Age (Feb 26, 2010), in Dec 2004, a second secretary in the Israeli embassy in Canberra was recalled because he was suspected of ties to passport fraud in New Zealand, where in March 2004 two suspected Mossad agents were convicted for fraudulently trying to get local passports. The New Zealand case eventually led to the downgrading of diplomatic ties and the canceling of Israeli PM Moshe Katsav’s visit.
The same report notes that Mossad used forged Canadian passports in 1997 in a bungled plot to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshal.
Then, as now, the Israeli prime minister, who has to approve all assassination attempts, was Benjamin Netanyahu.
Barack Obama: The Case For Impeachment
David Lindorff lays out the grounds for impeaching President Obama:
Let’s start with the war in Afghanistan, which Obama has taken full ownership of with an escalation that will bring the number of US troops in that country (not counting mercenaries hired by the Pentagon and CIA) to 100,000 by this August.
The president has authorized the use of Predator drone aircraft for a program of bombing conducted against Pakistan which has illegally expanded the Afghan War into another country without any authorization from Congress. These pilotless drones are known to kill far more innocent bystanders than enemy targets, making them fundamentally illegal on principle as weapons. Furthermore, this wave of attacks in Pakistan is a war of aggression against another nation if the word “war” is to have any meaning at all, and as such it is illegal under the UN Charter. Indeed initiating a war of aggression against a country which does not pose an immediate threat to the invader is described in the Charter and in the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter as the gravest of all war crimes.
The president, as commander in chief, has also, in collusion with Attorney Eric Holder, blocked any prosecution of those who authorized and perpetrated torture against captives in the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, and the so-called War on Terror–notably Federal Appeals Court Judge Jay Baybee, and Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, who as Justice Department attorneys authored the legal briefs justifying torture– and has in fact continued to permit the application of torture against captives. All of this is in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which as a signed set of treaties, are part of the law of the United States. Under those treaties, failure on the part of those up the chain of command to halt or to punish those who commit torture are themselves guilty of the crime of torture.
As commander in chief, President Obama has also overseen a strategy in Afghanistan of expanded attacks on civilians in Afghanistan. As in Iraq under the Bush administration, this current phase of the war in Afghanistan is seeing more civilians killed than enemy combatants, because of the widespread use of weapons like helicopter gunships, aerial bombardment, fragmentation bombs, etc., as well as a tactic of night raids on housing compounds where insurgents are suspected of hiding–raids that frequently lead to the deaths of many women and children and innocent men. It is significant that even the recent execution-style slaying of nine students, aged 11-18, by US-led forces, has not led to an investigation or prosecution of a individual. Rather, the incident is being covered up and ignored, with the clear acquiescence of the White House and the leadership at the Pentagon.
It is also widely believed that under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is known to have directed a large-scale death-squad operation in Iraq before moving to his current position, a similar death-squad campaign of assassination is being conducted now in Afghanistan--a campaign that like the notorious Phoenix Program in the 1960s in Vietnam, is almost certainly resulting in the deaths of many innocent Afghans.
Domestically, the president has continued to allow the policy of detention without trial of hundreds of captives in Guantanamo Bay and other prisons, including Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and his director of national security has even stated that it is the policy of this administration that American citizens deemed by the administration to be enemy combatants or terrorists may be targeted for summary execution. Such officially sanctioned state murder is a blatant violation of the Constitution’s insistence that every American has a right to a presumption of innocence and to a trial by a jury of his or her peers.
The president has also continued and in some ways even expanded the Bush/Cheney administration’s program of warrantless spying by the National Security Agency on the electronic communications of millions of Americans. A part of that program, the monitoring of communications of a now defunct Islamic charity, was just declared illegal by a federal judge in a case that was brought against the Bush/Cheney administration, but which continued to be defended by the current administration. There has not been a decision as yet by the Obama administration about whether to appeal that decision. While the case in question does not represent a crime by the Obama administration, it is clear that it only represents the very tip of the huge iceberg of domestic spying, and the administration’s vigorous efforts to shut down this case or to win it are clear evidence that the NSA is continuing to do the same thing on a vast scale. In fact, the only reason this case even got to trial is because of a government error that resulted in a memo describing the monitoring being mailed inadvertently to the victims of the spying.
While we’re at it, I would also suggest that there is ample evidence to call for the impeachment of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who appears, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, to have colluded in an effort to cover up a massive fraud at Lehman Brothers, and who has subsequently as Treasurer, participated in unprecedented giveaways of taxpayer funds to several of the country’s largest banking institutions.
The above enumeration of criminal and Constitutional transgressions makes it clear that this president, like his predecessor, has, almost since his first day in office, continued down a road of criminal and unconstitutional behavior that threatens the survival of Constitutional government in the United States.
Let me state it simply: President Barack Obama, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Treasury Secretary Geithner, should be impeached for war crimes and high crimes against the Constitution.”
Blair’s “Oily” Deals Greased His Iraq War-Mongering
Turns out Tony Blair had his hand in the oil jar, while he was talking up the Iraq war….and after. The Daily Mail (UK) reports:
Last night Tory MP Douglas Carswell said of Mr Blair’s links to UI Energy Corporation: ‘This doesn’t just look bad, it stinks.
‘It seems that the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been in the pay of a very big foreign oil corporation and we have been kept in the dark about it.
‘Even now we do not know what he was paid or what the company got out of it. We need that information now.
“This is revolving door politics at its worst. It’s not as if Mr Blair has even stepped back from politics, because he is still politically active in the Middle East.
‘I’m afraid I have no confidence at all in the committee that vets these appointments. It’s no good telling us these deals may be commercially sensitive - we are talking about the appointment of our former Prime Minister and the public interest, rather than any commercial interests, must come first.’
Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said: ‘These revelations show that our former Prime Minister is for sale - he is driven by making as much money as possible.
‘I think many people will find it deeply insensitive that he is apparently cashing in on his contacts from the Iraq war to make money for himself.’
“The committee said yesterday that Mr Blair had taken a paid job advising a consortium of investors led by UI Energy in August 2008. The exact nature of the deal is unknown, but UI Energy is one of the biggest investors in Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdistan region, which became semi-autonomous in the wake of the Iraq war.
“Mr Blair’s fee has not been disclosed but is likely to have run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“The secrecy is particularly odd because UI Energy is fond of boasting of its foreign political advisers, who include the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and several prominent American politicians.
“Mr Blair successfully persuaded the committee that the appointment was ‘market sensitive’ and could not be made public.”
Kurt Tucholsky On Love Of Country
“We have just written “no” on 225 pages, “no” out of sympathy and “no” out of love, “no” out of hate and “no” out of passion - and now we would like to say “yes” for once. “Yes” - to the countryside and the country of Germany America. The country where we were born and whose language we speak. (…)
And now I would like to tell you something: it is not true that all those who call themselves ‘national’ and who are nothing but gentrified militants have taken out a lease on this country and its language just for them. Germany America is not just a government representative in his tailcoat, nor is it a headmaster, nor is it the ladies and gentlemen of the steel helmets. We are here too. (…)
Germany America is a divided country. We are one part of it. And whatever the situation, we quietly love our country - unshakably, without a flag, or a street organ, no sentimentality and no drawn sword.”
(Kurt Tucholsky, Heimat, in Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Berlin 1929, p. 226)
Israel-Palestine Problem Exhibits Wound Of PTSD
At Forward, Leonard Fine puts his finger on the emotional trauma underlying the intellectual and political impasse in the Middle East:
“From time to time in this space, I’ve made passing reference to the post-traumatic stress disorder that afflicts Israelis (and the Palestinians, too). It may be a bit of a stretch, but there is a growing literature that suggests that not only individuals, but social institutions, can suffer from PTSD. Thus, for example, Loren and Barbara Cobb, in an article entitled “The Persistence of War,” argue that “specific symptoms of untreated PTSD are particularly troublesome for the social institutions of a society suffering from epidemic levels of these disorders. These symptoms are: hypervigilance, emotional numbing, denial and avoidance, seeing the world in black and white, magical thinking, and apocalyptic thinking.”
They go on to quote Dr. Jonathan Shay, widely regarded as among the giants in the study of PTSD: “Democratic process entails debate, persuasion, and compromise. These presuppose the trustworthiness of words. The moral dimension of severe trauma, the betrayal of ‘what’s right,’ obliterates the capacity for trust. The customary meanings of words are exchanged for new ones; fair offers from opponents are scrutinized for traps; every smile conceals a dagger.”
In the American military experience, PTSD most often arises when a soldier has witnessed the deaths or terrible wounds of his or her comrades. That happens in Israel, too, of course.
But in Israel, whole societies are the witnesses, and the word “post” is, alas, premature. The traumas are very much ongoing, and we do not yet have the clinical vocabulary to comprehend them.
For Jews, the great trauma is, of course, the Holocaust itself, the systematic and ultimately incomprehensible slaughter of one-third of world Jewry. That left a wound that will never quite heal, but that might by now have formed a bearable scab.
But mini-traumas ever since have picked at that scab, rendered the wound ever-raw. The excruciatingly painful list of suicide attacks, the hateful rhetoric, Sderot and the entire aftermath of the withdrawal from Gaza, and now, around the corner, Iran.
And then there have been and are the politicians who whether out of conviction or for purposes of dreadful exploitation pick at the scab and refresh the trauma. For Menachem Begin, Beirut was Berlin and Yasser Arafat was Adolf Hitler; for Benjamin Netanyahu, this is 1938, Tehran is Berlin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Hitler. It was ever thus, it will ever be thus, hence it is here, now: They hate us. “Never again” may be our common oath, but “always, everywhere” is our common belief. The wound will not heal.
And the Palestinians? Betrayed by the corruption of their own leadership, theirs is not only the Nakba of defeat and displacement in 1948 and again in 1967; it is daily humiliation both thoughtless and intended, new bypass highways for the Jewish settlers in their midst, still more than 500 checkpoints and barriers to clog or block their own roads and travel, a security fence that slices and snakes through their fields and their farms and their villages and their cities, reminding, reminding, insulting.
Over Gaza, a sky from which at any moment death may be launched; in the streets of the West Bank, raids and roundups. Ongoing trauma, ongoing disorder. The wounds will not heal.
The Palestinians say: Without justice, there will be no peace. The Israelis say: Without peace, there will be no justice. Both sides are stuck with their wounds and their traumas; they need not only diplomacy, they need therapy. Their empathic capacity has been battered. They cannot place themselves in the shoes of the other, nor can they see themselves as the other sees them.”
Mark Twain: the War Prayer
Mark Twain’s satirical “War Prayer”:
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
Tom Woods On Pro-War “Progressives”
The always thoughtful Tom Woods unmasks so-called “progressives”:
“Just weeks ago, Think Progress, after a one-sentence summary of my career that (as usual) left out the past 16 years, actually quoted Max Boot against me, as if Boot’s opposition to my work was sufficient to bury me forever. So instead of an antiwar libertarian, these progressives prefer neocon Max Boot, who according to Juan Cole “never saw a war he didn’t love, never saw a conquest he didn’t find exhilarating, never saw an occupied land he didn’t think could be handled.” They approvingly quoted Boot’s dumb-guy propaganda line that “Woods’ sympathy extends not only to slave-owning rebels but also to German militarists” (because, like 99 percent of people who have studied the matter, I think Woodrow Wilson’s conduct during the early years of World War I was based on a double standard between Britain and Germany). This is the same sense in which Ron Paul “sympathizes” with al-Qaeda because he doesn’t buy U.S. war propaganda. (I did reply to Boot, by the way.)
And these are the progressives”
More at Lew Rockwell...
US Support For White Phosphorous In Gaza
Eileen Fleming in Op-Ed News:
“The Ileana Ros-Lehtinen/AIPAC driven House Resolution 867 boiled down to a call for censorship of the Goldstone Report without “any endorsement or further consideration” from the Obama Administration, rife with inaccuracies and undermines support for the universality of human rights.
“It is no surprise that Congress is trying to cover their culpable asses for during the 23 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault were decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza. [1]
One of the few who have been to Gaza, Congressman Baird D-WA, wrote, “H.Res. 867 is very serious business. If, as Goldstone asserts and the evidence I have seen supports, there were in fact gross violations of international law and human rights on all sides, we cannot in good conscience support H.Res. 867.
“This is about much more than just another imposed political litmus test that we are all too often asked to perform. This is about whether we as individuals and this Congress as an institution find it acceptable to drop white phosphorous on civilian targets, to rocket civilian communities, to destroy hospitals and schools, to use civilians as human shields, and to deliberately destroy nonmilitary factories, industries and basic water, electrical and sanitation infrastructure. This is about whether it is acceptable to restrict the movement, opportunities and hopes of more than a million people every single day.
“At the end of the day, this is also about our own domestic security. If we are seen internationally as condoning violations of human rights and international law, if our money and our weaponry play a leading role in those violations, and if we reflexively obstruct the findings of someone with the credentials, history and integrity of Justice Goldstone, it can only diminish our international standing and our own security.“-Rep. Brian Baird (D) represents Washington’s 3rd district.” [2]
Army Suicide Level Rises to “Epidemic Levels”
Jason Ditz at Antiwar via Christian Peacenik:
“Calling 2009 a “painful year,” the US Army announced today that it faced a record number of suicides among Army personnel, with 160 active-duty soldiers taking their own lives.”
Christian Peacenik goes on to comment:
“This surpassed the previous record of 140 in 2008, and the previous record before that was 115 in 2007. The Army has been keeping track of suicides since 1980, with the level suddenly rising to epidemic levels in recent years.”
In an attempt to cope, many soldiers turn to drugs and alcohol, and many others, as Friday’s AP story reminds us, end up killing themselves. Needless to say, the effects of this psychological destruction remain even after one leaves the service. As Dahr Jamail points out, “A 2008 court case in California revealed a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) email that revealed 1,000 veterans who are receiving care from the VA are attempting suicide every single month, and 18 veterans kill themselves daily.”
But again, the American idiocracy, with all its meaningless symbols and gestures, doesn’t want to hear any of this. Which is why we need to bring this to the idiocracy’s attention and explain why it’s yet another reason to bring our troops home.”
KGB Operations Against The US
Last week, I blogged Douglas Valentine on the secret history of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, a long history that involved revolutions, coups, torture, assassinations, and subversion. Today, the CIA is probably far larger than any other spy agency, but until 1991, the Soviet Union’s KGB was a good match. The excerpt that follows is from a face-off between former CIA counter-intelligence chief Paul J. Redmond and former major-general of the Soviet KGB, Oleg Danilov Kalugin, and was hosted by the University of Delaware on March 12, 2003.
(Note: The KGB was disbanded in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has been replaced by the Russia security force, the FSB).
“We conducted a clandestine war with assassination if necessary,” he [Kalugin] said. “Our mission was to do everything we could to have a war without the fighting. This was seen as amoral in America, but it was our ideology.”
Kalugin infiltrated the United States as a journalist, attending Columbia University in New York City as a Fulbright Scholar in 1958. From 1965-70, he served as deputy resident and acting chief of the residency at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., quickly becoming the youngest general in the history of the KGB. Eventually, he became the head of worldwide foreign counterintelligence, serving at the center of some of the most important espionage cases, including the Walker spy ring.
Finding that the KGB’s internal functions had little to do with the security of the state and everything to do with keeping corrupt Communist Party officials in power, Kalugin retired from the KGB in 1990 and became a public critic of the communist system. He currently teaches at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.
Kalugin said one of his most effective spying techniques was pitting American citizens against their own government.
“We appealed to pacifists and told them, ‘You cannot have peace unless you stop the internal situation of the U.S.,’” he said. “We got environmentalists and told them, ‘Capitalists spend any amount of money even if it does destroy your precious nature.’ Well, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most polluted country in the world,” he joked.
Kalugin listed several astonishing facts from a classified KGB report, proving just how much the organization is committed to counterintelligence. He said that in 1981 the KGB reported that they had funded or supported 70 books, 66 feature and documentary films, more than 100 television stations, 4,865 articles in magazines or newspapers, 300 conferences or exhibitions and 170,000 lectures around the world.
“Friendship, companionship—that is fine,” Kalugin said, “but national interests remain. Counterintelligence will never cease to exist. The U.S. remains priority number one.”
Pankaj Mishra On The Strength Of Passivity
The old world, with its failures, weaknesses, and poverty, has at least a proper estimation of the limits of human action, says writer Pankaj Mishra in an oped in the New York Times, last August:
“India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
The Machinery of Habit
A piece I wrote four years ago, The Burgh: Downsizing,” examines the nature of change and habit in relation to urban economies transformed by globalization and war.
“The boys come in and the beer flows. Ricardo tells us about training. Four-mile runs, 200 push-ups every morning, wall-climbing. “They break you, man,” he shakes his head. “They make you tough.
“I said I hoped so, considering where he was going. But Melanie, who studies the theology of the medieval anchoress Juliana of Norwich and sells papers on a corner in Oakland for the Socialist Worker, is more worried about his getting into what she calls killing mode. I ask her if a mode is the same as a habit. It takes time after all to form a habit. A mode on the other hand sounds like a gearshift on an Audi. And if you can shift into a gear, you can shift out. Maybe it’s really a question of what sort of habits. Learning, retraining, moving need effort. They don’t come easily. But war is a machinery that moves on its own and blood-lust, like a winter flu, might be easy to pick up and impossible to get rid of.
War and demolition come too easily to human nature. And take away too much. Anything worth pursuing, on the other hand, needs to be stalked through the years with the patience and vigilance of a hunter, cultivated through seasons of scarcity and remembered in times of forgetting. In our sophistication we laugh at those who buy dear and hold dearer. Who stay when they should have left. Bag holders. Fools. Who step into the river and expect the waters to stay the same. The immobilized in our mobile society. What is the value of an abandoned church, an obsolete mill, an aging worker? Flux, we shrug, is the only certainty. Change is the first law of nature.
“People talk about joining but they don’t,” says Ricardo, “I’m the only one who did.” He sounds proud.
“I ask him if he thinks good health insurance and tuition money are worth risking his life for. He laughs.
“Look — I ain’t gonna die. Most of the guys who teach me, they’ve been there. They got through. More chances I’d get shot in a ghetto. So some guy’s lost an arm…or a leg. So what? All this new technology now, reconstruction…they can make you another leg; it’s really no big deal.”At 26, you can think of that as a good trade. An amputation of the body or the mind is all it takes to keep up with change. Like those translucent lizards which shed their tails seasonally as they wait immobile and vigilant for flies on dusty window sills, we might grow new limbs just as good. New memories to replace old ones. Here in the hills, at the confluence of three rivers, we have learned not to resist the laws of nature.
“But perhaps we don’t live by nature alone. Perhaps, as Juliana of Norwich said, we also need mercy and grace.”
“The need to change and the machinery of habit that makes it difficult - a theme I find myself returning to , over and over, especially when I’m confronted with the depressing spectacle of people going back to the same propaganda, the same bogus assertions that caused this global catastrophe in the first place.
Going back, like dogs to vomit.
I’m sorry if that sounds ugly, but what’s happening now in DC is ugly….and very very dangerous.
Bush Redux: The Obama Doctrine
Glenn Greenwald on the Obama Doctrine:
“Indeed, Obama insisted upon what he called the ”right” to wage wars “unilaterally”; articulated a wide array of circumstances in which war is supposedly “just” far beyond being attacked or facing imminent attack by another country; explicitly rejected the non-violence espoused by King and Gandhi as too narrow and insufficiently pragmatic for a Commander-in-Chief like Obama to embrace; endowed us with the mission to use war as a means of combating “evil”; and hailed the U.S. for underwriting global security for the last six decades (without mentioning how our heroic efforts affected, say, the people of Vietnam, or Iraq, or Central America, or Gaza, and so many other places where “security” is not exactly what our wars “underwrote”). So it’s not difficult to see why Rovian conservatives are embracing his speech; so much of it was devoted to an affirmation of their core beliefs.
The more difficult question to answer is why – given what Drum described – so many liberals found the speech so inspiring and agreeable? Is that what liberals were hoping for when they elected Obama: someone who would march right into Oslo and proudly announce to the world that we have a unilateral right to wage war when we want and to sing the virtues of war as a key instrument for peace? As Tom Friedman put it on CNN yesterday: ”He got into their faces . . . I’m for getting into the Europeans’ face.” Is that what we needed more of?”
Government Democide: The Power That Kills…
R. J. Rummel on democide:
“This is a report of the statistical results from a project on comparative genocide and mass-murder in this century. Most probably near 170,000,000 people have been murdered in cold-blood by governments, well over three-quarters by absolutist regimes. The most such killing was done by the Soviet Union (near 62,000,000 people), the communist government of China is second (near 35,000,000), followed by Nazi Germany (almost 21,000,000), and Nationalist China (some 10,000,000). Lesser megamurderers include WWII Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, WWI Turkey, communist Vietnam, post-WWII Poland, Pakistan, and communist Yugoslavia. The most intense democide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where they killed over 30 percent of their subjects in less than four years. The best predictor of this killing is regime power. The more arbitrary power a regime has, the less democratic it is, the more likely it will kill its subjects or foreigners. The conclusion is that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.“
No Check Points in Heaven
Palestinian activist Ramzy Baroud writes about his father’s struggles, and eventual death, in Gaza:
“My father’s reputation as an intellectual, his obsession with Russian literature, and his endless support of fellow refugees brought him untold trouble with the Israeli authorities, who retaliated by denying him the right to leave Gaza.
His severe asthma, which he developed as a teenager was compounded by lack of adequate medical facilities. Yet, despite daily coughing streaks and constantly gasping for breath, he relentlessly negotiated his way through life for the sake of his family. On one hand, he refused to work as a cheap labourer in Israel. “Life itself is not worth a shred of one’s dignity,” he insisted. On the other, with all borders sealed except that with Israel, he still needed a way to bring in an income. He would buy cheap clothes, shoes, used TVs, and other miscellaneous goods, and find a way to transport and sell them in the camp. He invested everything he made to ensure that his sons and daughter could receive a good education, an arduous mission in a place like Gaza.
But when the Palestinian uprising of 1987 exploded, and our camp became a battleground between stone-throwers and the Israeli army, mere survival became Dad’s new obsession. Our house was the closest to the Red Square, arbitrarily named for the blood spilled there, and also bordered the ‘Martyrs’ Graveyard’. How can a father adequately protect his family in such surroundings? Israeli soldiers stormed our house hundreds of times; it was always him who somehow held them back, begging for his children’s safety, as we huddled in a dark room awaiting our fate. “You will understand when you have your own children,” he told my older brothers as they protested his allowing the soldiers to slap his face. Our ‘freedom-fighting’ dad struggled to explain how love for his children could surpass his own pride. He grew in my eyes that day.
It’s been fourteen years since I last saw my father. As none of his children had access to isolated Gaza, he was left alone to fend for himself. We tried to help as much as we could, but what use is money without access to medicine? In our last talk he said he feared he would die before seeing my children, but I promised that I would find a way. I failed.”
Trauma and Brainwashing
Since I’ve been posting about media spin and the brainwashing of the public, here’s an enlightening post at Humble Libertarian on post-traumatic stress disorder among vets, apparently at near-epidemic levels
What has that to do with brainwashing? Everything, as the video above shows.
Early victims of US brainwashing techniques were US army personnel, as experimentation in the CIA brain-washing program, MK-Ultra shows. They still continue to be victims of it.
Also read the CIA’s notorious Kubark manual on torture - which analyzes different techniques to induce compliance in subjects.
Repeatedly traumatizing someone (and sexual humiliation and violence are the easiest avenues to do this), breaks down their sense of identity. In all but the strongest people, it produces compliance, refusal to accept reality, escapism, psychosis, and addictions of all kinds.
In the strongest, it produces resistance. Either lawless resistance to the state, which is what we call criminal, or, in rare cases, the fierce concentrated resistance of the social or political activist, the revolutionary…and even the saint…
The victims produce the fodder that the state manipulates.
The survivors become the excuse for the state to ratchet up control.
Either way, the state grows.
Memorial Day Salute
My Comment
I had a hard time finding a video that expressed my complicated feelings about the military, the war in Iraq, dead soldiers, dead civilians, militarism, patriotism, sacrifice and everything else that is part of Memorial Day.
There were the ‘patriotic’ videos - lots of images of the flag, with the eagle brooding above it. Marches, squadrons in flight, tanks rolling, symbols of victory, power, dominance. They didn’t suit. There are times to fight, but the last fifty odd years of fighting haven’t been defensive. We’ve had military adventures. We’ve had ideological battles. We’ve had covert operations. We’ve slaughtered and starved civilians, flattened cities, assassinated national leaders. What you think of these depends on your world view and your ability to stomach reality, but simple flag-waving doesn’t cut it.
Then I tried music. Maybe articulating what can’t be articulated was the problem. That didn’t work either. I tried country singers. They sounded sentimental and their nasal voices offered nothing of insight into the dark attraction of militarism. I tried Johnny Cash. But the old ragged flag didn’t do it for me. I tried swooping renditions of Amazing Grace. Too emotional. I wanted something drier and terser.
I thought of posting pictures of the actual war in Iraq - the dead and mutilated children, the bombed out buildings. But Memorial Day is the wrong day for that. There are times when conventions are right. Memorial Day is about the service men and women. I could make it something else. But that wouldn’t be right, coming from an immigrant. So I didn’t do it. Besides, wounds are wounds and deaths are deaths. Giving a voice to the American dead is not denying a voice to the Iraqi dead.
Anyway, Memorial Day is older than the Iraq War, so I shelved that idea.
I also couldn’t bring myself to do a piece about militarism, like Mike Gogulski at Nostate. Mike’s post from last year was a savage one - F*** the Troops. It was brave, but somehow it missed the point. Paying attention to the pain and suffering of the troops, their sacrifice, if you will, isn’t about supporting war or militarism or any of those things. It’s a human gesture. It may be, as he writes, that they sometimes died for unworthy goals and ends. It may be they’re sometimes complicit in whatever crimes were committed. It may also be that there were among them fools, opportunists, and thugs. That too is beside the point. But what the point is I’m unable to say. I just know it intuitively.
I liked the clips of buglers playing Taps best. There was a lonesome dignity to them. But they kept stopping in the middle, so I couldn’t use them. There was also one of a military salute, with gunfire, that I liked. War is about guns and death. At least one of the two should be on a Memorial Day video I thought.
Some of the more interesting videos were by peaceniks and antiwar activists. But I didn’t want to politicize this. Something from the Vietnam War also seemed too political. [I mean, political in terms of party politics]. Videos with mothers weeping, girls singing, crucifixes in the ground (what about the non-Christians and atheists?), all had little things about them I didn’t like. And they were about other people, not about the troops.
There was one video of an old vet reminiscing about his mates in World War II, which got close to the feeling I wanted to convey, but the commentary took a while to make its impact. And it was too understated. I wish there were more videos made by vets. I’d rather not take their own words or experiences away from them.
I had a thought after all of this. Everything has music behind it these days. We all live our lives as though an Oscar-winning soundtrack were playing behind us. We create story-lines even when there aren’t any. That’s human nature, and it may be our redemption, but it’s also a reason why we mythologize things.
In the end, I decided to just post a video of a memorial ceremony at Arlington. Some things can’t be expressed.
Over a Million Refugees in Somalia
In the news on Friday, May 22:
“Martin Bell, former BBC war correspondent and current UNICEF UK Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies, recently concluded a three-day trip to the north-east zone of Somali to report on the situation of children and women affected by conflict, drought, displacement and other hardships – and to shed light on UNICEF’s efforts to provide them with crucial services.
In Bossaso, one of the country’s busiest ports, Mr. Bell visited settlements for displaced people and saw firsthand the dire conditions in which they live. Displaced populations form a group of chronically vulnerable people here, lacking even the most basic social services and livelihood opportunities.
Bossaso hosts 27 camps where 40,000 people have sought refuge from other parts of the country. Over 1 million people in Somalia are internally displaced, mainly due to the conflict and insecurities in the central and southern regions..”More at Relief Web.
Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres reports that more than 270,000 have fled to Northern Kenya, to camps operated by the UN High Commission for Refugees, where rations have been cut by 30% and malnutrition runs at over 22%, well above the emergency threshold. That’s driving many of the refugees back to the war-zone.
My Comment
This was sent to me by a young Somali friend, who urges everyone to help in any way they can.
Now, my focus in this blog is on mass thinking, but the organization of crowds (through state propaganda, coercion, and surveillance) has as its other face, the dis-organization of crowds in times of crisis, often state-produced crisis, such as at New Orleans during Katrina, or here. Among people on the move in large groups, refugees are probably the largest group.
What is amazing to me about crowds of refugees is that they move peacefully, giving the lie to fear-mongering imagery of masses of people overwhelming civilization. That’s the sort of imagery usually conjured up by authoritarians when discussing mass migration or mass movement of any kind.
Recent Comments