Even before Chuck Hagel had been confirmed as the new United States Secretary of Defense, opponents to his appointment had declared victory because in their minds victory consisted of much more than preventing him take office.
A few days ago at the neoconservative Commentary, Jonathan Tobin wrote:
The pressure put upon Hagel during the lead-up to his confirmation hearing as well as the difficulty he found himself in when questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee wasn’t merely the usual grind nominees are subjected to. The process reaffirmed a basic truth about the strength of the pro-Israel consensus that was placed in doubt by the president’s choice: support for the alliance with the Jewish state isn’t merely mainstream politics, it is the baseline against which all nominees for high office are measured. [My emphasis.]
That’s an extraordinary statement and all the evidence suggests that it’s true.
For anyone to be considered for high political office in the United States of America, they must first demonstrate their alliance with Israel.
And this isn’t coming from some wild-eyed conspiracy theorist warning about the unfettered power of the Israel lobby. This is coming from the Israel lobby itself, or the “pro-Israel community” as they prefer to be known.
Alliance with Israel isn’t merely mainstream American politics — and the key word here is “mainstream”, which the dictionary defines as “a prevailing current or direction of activity or influence.”
The strength of the Christian Zionist movement notwithstanding, to identify alliance with Israel as mainstream in American politics says much less about the concerns of most Americans than it says about the way Washington works. In other words, the degree to which alliance with Israel is mainstream says far more about the influence of the Israel lobby than anything else.
And to say that alliance with Israel is “the baseline against which all nominees for high office are measured” is to say that Washington has gatekeepers and their overriding concern is not what is good for America but what is good for Israel.
The Hagel opponents who even now are declaring victory see success in the fact that they made their nemesis demean himself and that they have made him weaker.
What they fail to appreciate is that the more transparent they make their agenda, the more resentment they will breed.
Power which was once more effectively exercised in the shadows is now out on open display. And more than anything, this is the power of loudmouths — it is power that can and will be punctured.
Katherine Maher writes: Governments around the world are sounding alarms about the existential threat posed by cyberwar. From hostile foreign regimes to lawless nonstate actors, the threat of attacks on critical infrastructure to the theft of state secrets, the danger of economic warfare to corporate espionage, not a day goes by when cybersecurity is not in the news.
In response, governments around the world are devoting significant financial, military, and personnel resources to developing frameworks for cybersecurity and cyberconflict. Cyberspace is no longer the independent space of the cyberlibertarians; it is now a military domain. And when a freewheeling place like the Internet militarizes, the Internet’s laissez-faire culture of privacy, anonymity, and free expression inevitably comes into conflict with military priorities of security and protocol.
In the United States, the Pentagon has been tasked with the development of rules of engagement for cyberconflict. Just last week on Feb. 12, President Barack Obama issued a long-awaited executive order on cybersecurity and used his State of the Union address to call for new bipartisan legislation on the issue, emphasizing the need to protect U.S. critical infrastructure. The very next day, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) reintroduced CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act — a bill reviled by the privacy and civil liberties community for its lack of credible privacy protections and provisions for warrantless information-sharing.
Make no mistake, cyberhostilities are on the increase. Every day around the world, critical systems come under attack, whether from petty cybercriminals or coordinated state efforts. From Stuxnet, which set back Iran’s nuclear efforts, to Shamoon, which destroyed the control systems of oil giant Saudi Aramco, to the recent compromise of the Washington Post, New York Times, Twitter, and Facebook, we’re witnessing large-scale attempts to penetrate and interfere with both private and public systems.
Many cybersecurity experts, however, disagree on how to best tackle the threats at hand. Many dismiss proposals such as public-private data exchanges, arguing that such solutions erode civil liberties while failing to address critical problems. Others argue that reducing cyberconflict is best achieved through embracing the values of an open Internet: creating transparent norms, such as establishing clear red lines, common terminology, and mutual confidence-building measures. But the most influential voices remain those arguing for greater militarization: investing in the development of strategic exploits or offensive capacity that double down on the idea of the Internet as a domain subject to dominance by state actors.
Like most Iranians, I didn’t watch the Oscars and I haven’t seen the winner of Best Picture, Argo. And like the attendees of a recent conference in Tehran on “Hollywoodism”, I share the view that the American film industry exerts political influence — it is not just part of the entertainment business.
A New York Times report on the conference quoted Nader Talebzadeh, an Iranian-American filmmaker:
To Mr. Talebzadeh, it was clear that “Argo” was part of a larger plan by the American entertainment industry to remind a younger generation of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. “It’s the only example of aggression they have against Iran,” he said. “ ‘Argo’ just tears open the wounds in order to prepare the minds. This movie is no coincidence. Timing matters.”
Ben Affleck probably didn’t set out to demonize Iran and I don’t think Hollywood is quite as ideologically organized as Talebzadeh suggests. Even so, Argo’s producers could hardly have been oblivious to the fact that at a time when Iran is being demonized, it would not be hard to find support for a thriller in which Iranian revolutionaries threaten American lives. And it would not be unreasonable to expect that such support would come from, among others, Zionists. And yet there remain strong taboos around raising the topic of Jews and Hollywood as this year’s Academy Awards ceremony host, Seth MacFarlane, found out.
Seth MacFarlane found himself at the centre of more scandal on Monday in the wake of his controversial hosting of the Oscars.
The Family Guy comedian caused outrage among viewers when his Ted alter-ego took to the stage at Sunday night’s ceremony with Mark Wahlberg, and told his co-star that if he ‘wants to work in this town’ he’s got to be Jewish.
MacFarlane’s Ted then added to Wahlberg: ‘I was born Theodore Shapiro and I would like to donate to Israel and continue to work in Hollywood forever.’
But the gags, which came as the pair presented the award for Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing, weren’t received well by many Jewish rights groups, with the comedian labelled ‘offensive, unfunny and inappropriate’.
Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement: ‘While we have come to expect inappropriate “Jews control Hollywood” jokes from Seth MacFarlane, what he did at the Oscars was offensive and not remotely funny.
‘It only reinforces stereotypes which legitimize anti-Semitism. It is sad and disheartening that the Oscars awards show sought to use anti-Jewish stereotypes for laughs.’
The League’s Founder and Dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier, added: ‘The Oscars are transmitted to every corner of the globe, even to such places where such hateful myths are believed as fact.
‘Every comedian is entitled to wide latitude, but no one should get a free pass for helping to promote anti-Semitism.’
The old anti-Semitic canards about Jews controlling Hollywood, cavorting in secret cabals and beset by dual loyalties are so shopworn as to no longer be funny. And the jokes are all the more risky coming from someone who isn’t himself part of the given community…
[O]bjecting to the myth that Jews control Hollywood raises serious questions of definition. If anybody can genuinely be said to control Tinseltown, it’s probably the 25 people who run the 12 main film studios — that is, the chairman (in one case, two co-chairmen) and president of each. Of those 25, 21 are Jewish, or 84%. That’s simple math. You could define “control” differently — throw in the top agents and producers, leading directors, most bankable stars and so on — and the proportion of Jews would drop, but it probably wouldn’t get down anywhere near the 50% mark.
The issue in my mind is whether we’re all grownup enough to talk about these things without having pogroms, and I think we are. I’ve written here before that Jewish kinship networks are important professionally; most of my work in journalism has come from Jews with whom I share culture and language (very much the way Jodi Kantor got her job at the New York Times). People have a right to discuss these matters in a critical manner: in the ’60s sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, himself a WASP, helped break down Protestant discrimination against Jews in board rooms and back rooms with a book bewailing discrimination called The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. Nick Lemann also ascribed a religious character to that former establishment when he called it “the Episcopacy” in his book on the meritocracy. So — what’s good for the goose… Lately Ron Unz, a Jewish meritocrat himself, published a study, The Myth of the American Meritocracy, saying that the Ivy Leagues, which he calls “the funnel” for the ruling elite, have student bodies that are 25 percent Jewish in some large part because Jews in the college admissions are looking for people like themselves. When he spoke at Yale in January, and a Southern Baptist in the audience questioned him, Unz established that there were two Southern Baptists in the audience, and said they ought to be better represented in the Ivy’s. He believes Jews are empowered and secure enough in a diverse liberal society to have this conversation. So do I.
Did MacFarlane stoke controversy just for alluding to the fact that Jews control Hollywood, or was the line he crossed one that is laid down specifically for gentiles? If as Weiss says, Jews are ready to have this conversation, is this supposed to be a conversation among Jews or can anyone join in?
Ironically, if people like Abe Foxman had a little more humor and sophistication and a lot less appetite to gag their critics, they would have seized on the fact that MacFarlane was free to make his joke — proof, arguably, that Jews don’t control Hollywood.
The Telegraph reports: The apes, which are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, seem to get the same level of satisfaction out of solving brain teasers as their human evolutionary cousins.
A study published by the Zoological Society of London shows that six chimpanzees who were given a game which involved moving red dice or Brazil through a maze of pipes enjoyed solving the puzzle whether they got a reward or not.
The researchers claim this suggests they got the same kind of psychological reward as humans get when solving problems.
Most problem solving witnessed in the animal kingdom, where animals use tools or navigate mazes, are with the aim of reaching food. Hyenas, octopuses and birds such as crows all show the ability to solve problems.
Chimpanzees have also been witnessed in the wild using tools such as a stick to forage for insects or honey in hard to reach places like tree stumps.
But ZSL researcher Fay Clark said their research said they could be motivated by more than just food.
She said: “We noticed that the chimps were keen to complete the puzzle regardless of whether or not they received a food reward.
“This strongly suggests they get similar feelings of satisfaction to humans who often complete brain games for a feel-good reward.”
It seems like research repeatedly demonstrates that we share more similarities with other primates than we previously recognized, and as I’ve suggested before, this says as much about our preconceptions about human uniqueness as it says about the human-like qualities of our close relatives. Moreover, in this case, just as the research indicates chimps experience a human-like satisfaction in problem-solving, I suspect that in both instances this trait relates to something shared by all animate creatures: an interest in discerning order.
Chaos is immobilizing and the ability to turn one direction rather than another rests in part in the ability to see patterns and repetition. In pure pristine perception, every moment would be unique, but in reality, the ground of perception is not blank — present is mapped onto past.
The Washington Post reports: Chuck Hagel’s bid to become the next defense secretary cleared a major hurdle Tuesday, beating back a Republican effort to block his nomination almost two weeks after GOP senators launched a filibuster.
On a 71 to 27 vote, easily clearing the 60-vote threshold, the former Republican senator is poised for confirmation later Tuesday afternoon, overcoming Republican objections to his views on Middle East security.
Eighteen Republicans supported moving to a final vote, joining 53 Democrats. Some of the Republicans who supported ending the Hagel filibuster — including his chief opponents, Sens. John S. McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — are expected to oppose him on the final vote, which will only require a simple majority for his confirmation.
The vote marked a foreign policy victory for President Obama, who pushed the nomination of his old friend from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee despite warnings of a rough confirmation process. Hagel, an Army infantryman who was awarded two Purple Hearts during the Vietnam War, will become the first enlisted man to ever go on to lead the Pentagon.
Former British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, writes: ‘All options remain on the table”, goes the mantra. This is code for saying that the West retains the choice of using military force to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. We’ll hear it repeated this week, as negotiations between Iran and the “P5 +1” (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany) resume in Kazakhstan. On occasions, I’ve used the phrase myself. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve become convinced that it is a hindrance to negotiations, rather than a help.
If Iran were to attack Israel, or, say, one of its Arab neighbours, international law is clear: the victim has the right to retaliate. But such an attack is highly improbable. Under Article 42 of the UN Charter, the Security Council can authorise military action where there’s a “threat to international peace and security”. Such resolutions were the legal basis for the actions against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and Libya in 2011. But there are no such Article 42 resolutions against Iran; and there won’t be – China and Russia would veto them.
There are Security Council resolutions against Iran under Article 41, but this Article explicitly excludes measures involving the use of force. These resolutions have progressively tightened international sanctions against Iran, because of its lack of full co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With even tougher measures imposed by the US and the EU, sanctions have severely restricted Iran’s international trade, and led to the collapse of its currency, and high inflation.
The negotiations which restart today are the latest round of a 10-year effort by the international community to satisfy itself that Iran is not embarked on a nuclear weapons programme. This initiative was begun in 2003 by me and the then foreign ministers of France and Germany, Dominic de Villepin and Joschka Fischer, when it became clear that Iran had failed to disclose much of its activities to the IAEA, in breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which it adheres. I visited Tehran five times as foreign secretary. The Iranians are tough negotiators, more difficult to deal with because of the opacity of their governmental system. (When I complained to Kamal Kharrazi, the Iranian foreign minister, about this, he replied: “Don’t complain to me about negotiating with the Iranian government, Jack. Imagine what it’s like negotiating within the Iranian government”). They have not helped themselves by their obduracy.
Resolving the current impasse will require statesmanship of a high order from both sides. From the West, there has to be a better understanding of the Iranian psyche. Transcending their political divisions, Iranians have a strong and shared sense of national identity, and a yearning to be treated with respect, after decades in which they feel (with justification) that they have been systematically humiliated, not least by the UK.
“Kar Inglise” – that “the hand of England” is behind whatever befalls the Iranians – is a popular Persian saying. Few in the UK have the remotest idea of our active interference in Iran’s internal affairs from the 19th century on, but the Iranians can recite every detail. From an oppressive British tobacco monopoly in 1890, through truly extortionate terms for the extraction of oil by the D’Arcy petroleum company (later BP), to putting Reza Shah on the throne in the 1920s; from jointly occupying the country, with the Soviet Union, from 1941-46, organising (with the CIA) the coup to remove the elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, then propping up the increasingly brutal regime of the Shah until its collapse in 1979, our role has not been a pretty one. Think how we’d feel if it had been the other way round. [Continue reading…]
Helen Epstein writes: America’s new drone base in the West African city of Niamey, Niger, announced by the White House on Friday, further expands our counter-terrorism activity in Africa. It’s also consistent with the militaristic emphasis of the Obama administration’s engagement with the continent. This may help contain the spread of jihadist violence in specific cases, but by failing to address persistent abuses of human rights by our African military allies, America is also undermining its own development investments that are intended to lift millions of people out of poverty and ensure the continent’s peace, stability, and economic growth.
The administration’s neglect of human rights in Africa is a great disappointment, since the president began his first term by laying out ambitious new goals for the continent. In July 2009, when his presidency was only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries to end the tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their populations, and to build strong institutions that serve the people and hold leaders accountable. The speech seemed to extend the message of his much-discussed Cairo address a month earlier, in which he called for a new beginning for Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence and mutual respect. Many thought that the policies of the new president, himself of Kenyan descent, would depart from those of the Bush administration, which provided a great deal of development aid to Africa, but paid scant attention to human rights.
After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to advance the idealistic goals of his Ghana speech. The US finally suspended military aid to Rwanda last year, after it was forced to accept evidence of Rwandan support for the brutal Congolese rebel group M23, but has otherwise ignored the highly problematic human rights situation in that country. In Uganda, the US looked on for years as President Yoweri Museveni’s cabinet ministers gorged themselves on American and other foreign aid intended for impoverished farmers, war victims, roads, and health care. US diplomats have recently begun expressing support for Uganda’s many oppressed civil society groups, but one wonders what took them so long. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Uganda is a vital US military ally in Somalia, where Ugandan troops helped oust the Islamic militant group al-Shabbab from Mogadishu last year.
Meanwhile, Kenya, another important US ally in Somalia that is soon to be receiving drones from the Pentagon, is preparing for national elections on March 4. But some observers say the country is more violent now than it was in 2007, when post-election ethnic clashes left 1000 people dead and caused economic chaos across East Africa. Presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto have both been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes connected with those events. It’s not clear what the US will do if Kenyatta wins, but it often seems as if Obama will work with any African leader who furthers America’s military aims, regardless of how that leader treats his own people. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: A surge of rebel advances in Syria is being fueled at least in part by an influx of heavy weaponry in a renewed effort by outside powers to arm moderates in the Free Syrian Army, according to Arab and rebel officials.
The new armaments, including anti-tank weapons and recoilless rifles, have been sent across the Jordanian border into the province of Daraa in recent weeks to counter the growing influence of Islamist extremist groups in the north of Syria by boosting more moderate groups fighting in the south, the officials say.
The arms are the first heavy weapons known to have been supplied by outside powers to the rebels battling to topple President Bashar al-Assad and his family’s four-decade-old regime since the Syrian uprising began two years ago.
The officials declined to identify the source of the newly provided weapons, but they noted that the countries most closely involved in supporting the rebels’ campaign to oust Assad have grown increasingly alarmed at the soaring influence of Islamists over the fragmented rebel movement. They include the United States and its major European allies, along with Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two countries most directly involved in supplying the rebels. Security officials from those nations have formed a security coordination committee that consults regularly on events in Syria, they said.
Although the Obama administration continues to refuse to directly arm the rebels, the administration has provided intelligence assistance to those who are involved in the supplies, and it also helps vet opposition forces. U.S. officials declined to comment on the new armaments.
The goal of these renewed deliveries, Arab and rebel officials said, is to reverse the unintended effect of an effort last summer to supply small arms and ammunition to rebel forces in the north, which was halted after it became clear that radical Islamists were emerging as the chief beneficiaries.
“The idea was to get heavier stuff, intensify supply and make sure it goes to the good guys,” said an Arab official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation. “If you want to weaken al-Nusra, you do it not by withholding [weapons] but by boosting the other groups.”
Louay al-Mokdad, the political and media coordinator for the Free Syrian Army, confirmed that the rebels have procured new weapons donated from outside Syria, rather than bought on the black market or seized during the capture of government facilities, the source of the vast majority of the arms that are in the hands of the rebels. But he declined to say who was behind the effort. [Continue reading…]
The Christian village of Maaloula, in the hills outside Damascus, Syria, the last remaining community where Aramaic is maintained as an everyday language.
The linguist, Geoffrey Khan of the University of Cambridge, was nominally in town to give a speech at Northwestern University, in Evanston. But he had another agenda: Chicago’s northern suburbs are home to tens of thousands of Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Christians driven from their Middle Eastern homelands by persecution and war. The Windy City is a heady place for one of the world’s foremost scholars of modern Aramaic, a man bent on documenting all of its dialects before the language — once the tongue of empires — follows its last speakers to the grave.
The tax preparer, Elias Bet-shmuel, a thickset man with a shiny pate, was a local Assyrian who had offered to be our sherpa. When he burst into the lobby of Khan’s hotel that morning, he announced the stops on our two-day trek in the confidential tone of a smuggler inventorying the contents of a shipment.
“I got Shaqlanaye, I have Bebednaye.” He was listing immigrant families by the names of the northern Iraqi villages whose dialects they spoke. Several of the families, it turned out, were Bet-shmuel’s clients.
As Bet-shmuel threaded his Infiniti sedan toward the nearby town of Niles, Illinois, Khan, a rangy 55-year-old, said he was on safari for speakers of “pure” dialects: Aramaic as preserved in villages, before speakers left for big, polyglot cities or, worse, new countries. This usually meant elderly folk who had lived the better part of their lives in mountain enclaves in Iraq, Syria, Iran or Turkey. “The less education the better,” Khan said. “When people come together in towns, even in Chicago, the dialects get mixed. When people get married, the husband’s and wife’s dialects converge.”
We turned onto a grid of neighborhood streets, and Bet-shmuel announced the day’s first stop: a 70-year-old widow from Bebede who had come to Chicago just a decade earlier. “She is a housewife with an elementary education. No English.”
Khan beamed. “I fall in love with these old ladies,” he said.
Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world. People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China. Parts of the Bible and the Jewish Talmud were written in it; the original “writing on the wall,” presaging the fall of the Babylonians, was composed in it. As Jesus died on the cross, he cried in Aramaic, “Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”)
But Aramaic is down now to its last generation or two of speakers, most of them scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished. In their new lands, few children and even fewer grandchildren learn it. (My father, a Jew born in Kurdish Iraq, is a native speaker and scholar of Aramaic; I grew up in Los Angeles and know just a few words.) This generational rupture marks a language’s last days. For field linguists like Khan, recording native speakers — “informants,” in the lingo — is both an act of cultural preservation and an investigation into how ancient languages shift and splinter over time.
In a highly connected global age, languages are in die-off. Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to go silent by century’s end. We live under an oligarchy of English and Mandarin and Spanish, in which 94 percent of the world’s population speaks 6 percent of its languages. Yet among threatened languages, Aramaic stands out. Arguably no other still-spoken language has fallen farther. [Continue reading…]
Ella Habiba Shohat writes: I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the U.S. Most members of my family were born and raised in Baghdad, and now live in Iraq, Israel, the U.S., England, and Holland. When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the ’50s, she was convinced that the people who looked, spoke and ate so differently–the European Jews–were actually European Christians. Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness. My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of “us” as Jews and “them” as Arabs. For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been “Muslim,” “Jew,” and “Christian,” not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that “Arabness” referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences.
Americans are often amazed to discover the existentially nauseating or charmingly exotic possibilities of such a syncretic identity. I recall a well-established colleague who despite my elaborate lessons on the history of Arab Jews, still had trouble understanding that I was not a tragic anomaly–for instance, the daughter of an Arab (Palestinian) and an Israeli (European Jew). Living in North America makes it even more difficult to communicate that we are Jews and yet entitled to our Middle Eastern difference. And that we are Arabs and yet entitled to our religious difference, like Arab Christians and Arab Muslims.
It was precisely the policing of cultural borders in Israel that led some of us to escape into the metropolises of syncretic identities. Yet, in an American context, we face again a hegemony that allows us to narrate a single Jewish memory, i.e., a European one. For those of us who don’t hide our Middle Easterness under one Jewish “we,” it becomes tougher and tougher to exist in an American context hostile to the very notion of Easterness.
As an Arab Jew, I am often obliged to explain the “mysteries” of this oxymoronic entity. That we have spoken Arabic, not Yiddish; that for millennia our cultural creativity, secular and religious, had been largely articulated in Arabic (Maimonides being one of the few intellectuals to “make it” into the consciousness of the West); and that even the most religious of our communities in the Middle East and North Africa never expressed themselves in Yiddish-accented Hebrew prayers, nor did they practice liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial codes favoring the dark colors of centuries-ago Poland. Middle Eastern women similarly never wore wigs; their hair covers, if worn, consisted of different variations on regional clothing (and in the wake of British and French imperialism, many wore Western-style clothes). If you go to our synagogues, even in New York, Montreal, Paris or London, you’ll be amazed to hear the winding quarter tones of our music which the uninitiated might imagine to be coming from a mosque. [Continue reading…]
E.O. Wilson writes: Evolutionary biologists have searched for the grandmaster of advanced social evolution, the combination of forces and environmental circumstances that bestowed greater longevity and more successful reproduction on the possession of high social intelligence. At present there are two competing theories of the principal force. The first is kin selection: individuals favor collateral kin (relatives other than offspring) making it easier for altruism to evolve among members of the same group. Altruism in turn engenders complex social organization, and, in the one case that involves big mammals, human-level intelligence.
The second, more recently argued theory (full disclosure: I am one of the modern version’s authors), the grandmaster is multilevel selection. This formulation recognizes two levels at which natural selection operates: individual selection based on competition and cooperation among members of the same group, and group selection, which arises from competition and cooperation between groups. Multilevel selection is gaining in favor among evolutionary biologists because of a recent mathematical proof that kin selection can arise only under special conditions that demonstrably do not exist, and the better fit of multilevel selection to all of the two dozen known animal cases of eusocial evolution.
The roles of both individual and group selection are indelibly stamped (to borrow a phrase from Charles Darwin) upon our social behavior. As expected, we are intensely interested in the minutiae of behavior of those around us. Gossip is a prevailing subject of conversation, everywhere from hunter-gatherer campsites to royal courts. The mind is a kaleidoscopically shifting map of others, each of whom is drawn emotionally in shades of trust, love, hatred, suspicion, admiration, envy and sociability. We are compulsively driven to create and belong to groups, variously nested, overlapping or separate, and large or small. Almost all groups compete with those of similar kind in some manner or other. We tend to think of our own as superior, and we find our identity within them.
The existence of competition and conflict, the latter often violent, has been a hallmark of societies as far back as archaeological evidence is able to offer. These and other traits we call human nature are so deeply resident in our emotions and habits of thought as to seem just part of some greater nature, like the air we all breathe, and the molecular machinery that drives all of life. But they are not. Instead, they are among the idiosyncratic hereditary traits that define our species.
The major features of the biological origins of our species are coming into focus, and with this clarification the potential of a more fruitful contact between science and the humanities. The convergence between these two great branches of learning will matter hugely when enough people have thought it through. On the science side, genetics, the brain sciences, evolutionary biology, and paleontology will be seen in a different light. Students will be taught prehistory as well as conventional history, the whole presented as the living world’s greatest epic.
We will also, I believe, take a more serious look at our place in nature. Exalted we are indeed, risen to be the mind of the biosphere without a doubt, our spirits capable of awe and ever more breathtaking leaps of imagination. But we are still part of earth’s fauna and flora. We are bound to it by emotion, physiology, and not least, deep history. It is dangerous to think of this planet as a way station to a better world, or continue to convert it into a literal, human-engineered spaceship. Contrary to general opinion, demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. We are self-made, independent, alone and fragile. Self-understanding is what counts for long-term survival, both for individuals and for the species.
Der Spiegel reports: The global war on drugs has cost billions and taken countless lives — but achieved little. The scant results finally have politicians and experts joining calls for legalization. Following the journey of cocaine from a farm in Colombia to a user in Berlin sheds light on why.
“Pablo Escobar said to me: ‘One shot to the head isn’t enough. It has to be two shots, just above the eyes.'”
Jhon Velásquez, nicknamed “Popeye,” is sitting on a white plastic chair in the prison yard. “You can survive one shot, but never two. I cut up the bodies and threw them in the river. Or I just left them there. I often drove through Medellín, where I kidnapped and raped women. Then I shot them and threw them in the trash.”
Three guards are standing next to him. He is the only prisoner in the giant building. The watchtower, the security door systems, the surveillance cameras — it’s all for him. The warden of the Cómbita maximum-security prison, a three-hour drive northeast of the Colombian capital Bogotá, has given Popeye one hour to tell his story.
The experience is like opening a door into hell.
Popeye was the right-hand man of Pablo Escobar, head of Colombia’s Medellín cartel. Until his death in 1993, Escobar was the most powerful drug lord in the world. He industrialized cocaine production, controlled 80 percent of the global cocaine trade and became one of the richest people on the planet. The cartel ordered the killings of 30 judges, about 450 police officers and many more civilians. As Escobar’s head of security, Popeye was an expert at kidnapping, torture and murder.
Velásquez acquired the nickname Popeye while working as a cabin boy in the Colombian navy. He kidnapped Andrés Pastrana, the then-candidate for mayor of Bogotá and later president. He obtained the weapon that was used to fatally shoot Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán in 1989. He was involved in a bombing attack that was intended to kill former Colombian President César Gaviria. Popeye, acting on the orders of Escobar, El Patrón, even had his beauty-queen girlfriend Wendy murdered.
“I’ve killed about 250 people, and I cut many of them into pieces. But I don’t know exactly how many,” Popeye says. “Only psychopaths count their kills.”
Popeye is a pale, 50-year-old man with a shrill voice — a psychopath who doesn’t count his kills.
The longer Popeye talks — about his murders, the drug war and the havoc he and Escobar wreaked and that is currently being repeated in Mexico — the less important my prepared questions about this war become. I realize that I might as well throw away my notepad, because it all boils down to one question: How can we stop people like you, Popeye?
He pauses for a moment before saying: “People like me can’t be stopped. It’s a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you’ll even blow up an aircraft because you believe the Colombian president is on board. I don’t know what you have to do. Maybe sell cocaine in pharmacies. I’ve been in prison for 20 years, but you will never win this war when there is so much money to me made. Never.”
I’m sitting face to face with a killer: Popeye, an evil product of hell. And I’m afraid that the killer could be right.
The drug war is the longest war in recent history, underway for more than 40 years. It is a never-ending struggle against a $500 billion (€378 billion) industry. [Continue reading…]
Bruce Whitehouse writes: Last week I took part in a “teach-in” organized by Michigan State University devoted to the ongoing crisis in Mali. A half-dozen Africanist scholars joined a pair of retired U.S. ambassadors to discuss the origins and consequences of that country’s state collapse, ethnic tensions, the rebel takeover and French military intervention. The audience, mostly MSU students and faculty, included several Malians. One recurring subject was the Tuareg people and their place in the Malian nation. Various non-Malian participants spoke of the need to grant the Tuareg some kind of autonomy, while Malians in the room rejected such an arrangement. At one point a Malian graduate student in attendance stated flatly, “There is no ‘Tuareg problem’ in Mali.”
This remark reminded me that listening to Tuareg and non-Tuareg Malians talk about their intertwined history can be like listening to Israelis and Palestinians talk about theirs: the two groups’ respective visions of the past they share are fundamentally divergent, with each group casting itself as victim.
In a magazine feature article for the New York Times published last May, Luke Mogelson described the medical care provided by Emergency, an Italian-based nonprofit that opened its first surgical center in Afghanistan in 1999. He also described the ‘criminal’ discharge policies being applied to Afghans who get treated at NATO hospitals.
In April, I traveled to Sayad, a town in Kapisa Province, to meet a 14-year-old boy named Zobair, who had recently been discharged from a hospital at Bagram Air Base, one of the largest American military installations in Afghanistan. Zobair’s uncle Nasir had taken him to Sayad in a borrowed Toyota hatchback, its rear seats folded forward to accommodate the green U.S. Army litter on which Zobair reclined. We were parked on the bank of a wide river with small wooden platforms extending over the water’s edge, where you could order lunch from local fishmongers. My interpreter and I arrived early and bought food for Zobair and Nasir — a gesture that felt ridiculous now, in light of Zobair’s condition.
Both of his legs were gone, and wounds covered his hands, arms and back. He was nauseated and fevered; every movement elicited a grimace. “Most of the pain is in my stomach,” Zobair told me as soon as we met. His eyes were half-shut, heavy with fatigue, and he spoke so softly that I had to lean close to catch his words. Without a wheelchair, Zobair had no way to reach the landing where we had set up the meal. When Nasir climbed into the back of the Toyota and raised Zobair’s shalwar kameez, he revealed a pouching system attached to a stoma and four pink tubes sticking out of Zobair’s sides. Fifty-two metal staples held together an incision running the length of his abdomen.
Zobair and Nasir were from Tagab District, where French troops have struggled for years to dislodge a deeply entrenched insurgency, without much success. In February, a French airstrike, mistaking them for insurgents, killed seven boys while they were herding sheep not far from Tagab. A few weeks later, according to Zobair and his family, Zobair was sitting outside his house with four cousins, watching the sun go down, when two low-flying helicopters approached from the distance. Helicopters have long been a daily occurrence in Tagab, but something about the way this pair hovered near the house made Zobair nervous. He said as much to his cousins, who mocked him for being overanxious.
Zobair stood up and began to walk away. He does not know what kind of ordnance or ammunition the helicopter fired. Given the damage, it was likely a Hellfire missile. Two cousins — ages 14 and 18 — were killed immediately. Zobair, who had taken about four steps before the explosion, was thrown into an irrigation ditch. Villagers rushed the survivors to the French military base in Tagab, where another of Zobair’s cousins soon died. In response to my questions about the helicopter strike, a representative for the French military told me that they had conducted an investigation, the conclusions of which were “full positive”: “On that day, after having checked there were no civilians in the area, one helicopter fired at a group of five insurgents with hostile intentions.”
The last thing Zobair remembers before losing consciousness was a foreigner sticking him with a needle. He woke up “in a white room with white walls,” he told me. “They wouldn’t tell us where we were.” Back in Tagab, no one from the base would inform Nasir where Zobair had been taken; it was generally known, however, that casualties from Kapisa were often airlifted to Bagram. “We came to Bagram several times to write our names and give them to the interpreter at the gate,” Nasir said. “Sometimes the interpreter told us, ‘Yes, he is here.’ Sometimes he told us, ‘No, he is not here.’ Zobair called us one time. He told us: ‘I am in a hospital, but I don’t know where. I’m not allowed to tell.’ ” When I asked NATO why Zobair was not allowed to speak with his family, a representative replied, “We know there is a policy on this and are seeking more information at this time.” I was later told that he should have been allowed to call home.
After 23 days, Nasir received a call from an interpreter at Bagram, who told him to come pick up his nephew. At the airfield, Zobair was carried out from the hospital and put into the ambulance, accompanied by an Afghan interpreter. The interpreter told Nasir that they should go to the Red Cross in Kabul so that Zobair’s amputated legs could be fitted for prostheses. She then handed Nasir some papers detailing, in English, the treatment that Zobair received.
If Nasir had been able to read the papers, he would have learned that American surgeons at Craig Joint Theater Hospital saved Zobair’s life with a battery of sophisticated procedures. The incision on Zobair’s abdomen was from a laparotomy that enabled the doctors to repair his lacerated spleen, colon and kidney; the pouching system was to collect feces from an ileostomy, where a section of damaged intestine had been removed; and the four tubes sticking out of his sides were internal compression sutures helping to hold his abdomen together. Curiously, the only future treatment recommended for Zobair was to “follow up with a surgeon in six months to have the ileostomy takedown” — that is, to have the intestine reattached and the temporary pouching system removed. According to Nasir, he was not given any guidance about what to do for the internal sutures and 52 metal staples, though both were meant to remain in place no longer than a week or two, after which they posed a risk of becoming infected. Continue reading →
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