Category Archives: Issues

America: ruled by the rich

Nicholas Carnes writes: Elections are supposed to give us choices. We can reward incumbents or we can throw the bums out. We can choose Republicans or Democrats. We can choose conservative policies or progressive ones.

In most elections, however, we don’t get a say in something important: whether we’re governed by the rich. By Election Day, that choice has usually been made for us. Would you like to be represented by a millionaire lawyer or a millionaire businessman? Even in our great democracy, we rarely have the option to put someone in office who isn’t part of the elite.

Of course, many white-collar candidates care deeply about working-class Americans, those who earn a living in manual labor or service-industry jobs. Many are only a generation or two removed from relatives who worked in those fields. But why do so few elections feature candidates who have worked in blue-collar jobs themselves, at least for part of their lives? The working class is the backbone of our society, a majority of our labor force and 90 million people strong. Could it really be that not one former blue-collar worker is qualified to be president?

My research examines how the shortage of working-class people in public office affects our democracy and why there are so few former blue-collar workers in government in the first place. The data I’ve studied suggest that the working class itself probably isn’t the problem. It’s true that workers tend to score a little lower on standard measures of political knowledge and civic engagement. But there are many more workers than there are, say, lawyers — so many more, in fact, that there are probably more blue-collar Americans with the qualities we might want in our candidates than there are lawyers with those traits. If even only half a percent of blue-collar workers have what it takes to govern, there would still be enough of them to fill every seat in Congress and in every state legislature more than 40 times — with enough left over to run thousands of City Councils.

Something other than qualifications seems to be screening out people with serious experience in the working class long before Election Day. Scholars haven’t yet confirmed exactly what that is. (Campaign money? Free time? Party gatekeepers?) But we’re starting to appreciate the seriousness of the problem.

If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress. [Continue reading…]

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Why the U.S. used nuclear weapons against Japan for political, not military reasons

Washington’s Blog: Like all Americans, I was taught that the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end WWII and save both American and Japanese lives.

But most of the top American military officials at the time said otherwise.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman to study the air attacks on Japan, produced a report in July of 1946 that concluded (52-56):

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

General (and later president) Dwight Eisenhower – then Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces, and the officer who created most of America’s WWII military plans for Europe and Japan – said:

The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.

Newsweek, 11/11/63, Ike on Ike

Eisenhower also noted (pg. 380):

In [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude….

Admiral William Leahy – the highest ranking member of the U.S. military from 1942 until retiring in 1949, who was the first de facto Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and who was at the center of all major American military decisions in World War II – wrote (pg. 441):

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

[Continue reading…]

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Christian leaders ask Congress to condition Israel military aid on human rights compliance

Presbyterian News Service reports: Fifteen religious leaders representing many major faith groups in the country, have written a letter to Congress seeking to make U.S. military aid to Israel contingent upon its government’s “compliance with applicable U.S. laws and policies.”

Signers of the letter include Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons.

The signers say they “have worked for decades to support both Israelis and Palestinians in their desire to live in peace and well-being” and “have witnessed the pain and suffering of Israelis as a result of Palestinian actions and of Palestinians as a result of Israeli actions.”

Though they recognize that both Israelis and Palestinians bear responsibility for the prolonged violence in the region, “unconditional U.S. military assistance to Israel has contributed to deteriorating conditions in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories which threaten to lead the region further away from the realization of a just peace. Furthermore, such aid sustains the conflict and undermines the long-term security interests of both Israelis and Palestinians.”

The signers urge an immediate investigation into possible violations by Israel of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act and the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, which respectively prohibit assistance to any country which engages in a consistent pattern of human rights violations and limit the use of U.S. weapons to “internal security” or “legitimate self-defense.”

They urge Congress to hold hearings to examine Israel’s compliance, and request regular reporting on compliance and the withholding of military aid for non-compliance. [Continue reading — full text of the letter follows]

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J Street sells its soul, completes evolution to AIPAC Lite

M.J. Rosenberg writes: It was inevitable. Constantly under pressure from the Jewish center-right (Reform rabbis, for instance), J Street has thrown in the towel. Read its document of surrender.

In response to the letter from Christian denominations urging that aid to Israel be compliant with U.S. law, J Street has joined Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation league and the half-million a year hacks that run the other Jewish organizations to blast the Christians. (See Foxman letter).

J Street agrees with them that aid to Israel is an entitlement. It must never be questioned unless you also add “criticism of Israel’s behavior with appropriate criticism of, for instance, rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli civilian areas.” You must also “put the present situation into a historical or political context that might provide a fuller appreciation for the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over many decades.”

Blah, blah, AIPAC, blah. The church letter is about the $2.5 billion aid package to Israel. As far as I know, the U.S. does not provide the rockets fired from Gaza. [Continue reading…]

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Did Foreign Policy run a false story — leading to an Israeli diplomat getting kicked out of Washington?

Philip Weiss writes: Here’s some high level intrigue, with the stakes being no less than Our Next War.

You might have seen the bombshell piece by Foreign Policy editor David Rothkopf, “A Truly Credible Military Threat To Iran,” saying that Obama and the Israelis are at last getting on the same page for a surgical strike on Iran that would only last a couple of hours and bring regional benefits to everyone.

The article was a bombshell because it seemed the first real evidence of joint military planning. But it has apparently mislanded, and led to a clash inside the Israeli embassy between Michael Oren and his former deputy, Baruch Bina, and in turn led Israeli P.M. Netanyahu to dismiss Bina.

Here’s the story as I understand it.

Rothkopf’s piece electrified D.C. because it had the kind of detailed, nuanced language that usually accompanies a well-sourced and authoritative account. And indeed, Rothkopf is a Washington insider. He is the former roommate of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren.

The money graf:

Indeed, according to a source close to the discussions, the action that participants currently see as most likely is a joint U.S.-Israeli surgical strike targeting Iranian enrichment facilities. The strike might take only “a couple of hours” in the best case and only would involve a “day or two” overall, the source said, and would be conducted by air, using primarily bombers and drone support. Advocates for this approach argue that not only is it likely to be more politically palatable in the United States but, were it to be successful — meaning knocking out enrichment facilities, setting the Iranian nuclear program back many years, and doing so without civilian casualties — it would have regionwide benefits.

Of course we Americans would be doing the heavy lifting:

While this approach would limit the negative costs associated with more protracted interventions, it could not be conducted by the Israelis acting alone.

And here’s the rosy neocon vision. A joint strike, Rothkopf wrote, would have a

“transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.”

Rothkopf’s article first made headlines in Israel as a piece of investigative journalism, but doubts ensued. “A Truly Credible Threat” was soon being retailed as an opinion piece. It slid off the front page of the Times of Israel; and even Foreign Policy seemed eager to let the scoop disappear. Comments on the piece were turned off.

What happened? [Continue reading…]

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Shut up about the Jews already…

Eric Alterman writes: Self-identifying American Jews constitute just 1.7 percent of the voting population, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. This compares with 51.3 percent Protestant, 23.9 percent Roman Catholic and 16.1 percent “no religion.” Of the tiny percentage of American voters who are Jewish, roughly 7 percent put Israel at the top of their list of political concerns. So, overall, 7 percent of 1.7 percent — or pretty close to 0 percent — say they vote on the basis of policies related to Israel. And of this minuscule percentage, many are hawkish, but many others are dovish, and still others are in between or change their minds depending on the situation. Jews, you may have heard, have been known on occasion to disagree with one another, and even with themselves. But more than 80 percent of Jews polled share the view that the United States should play “an active role in helping the parties to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict” — roughly the same number who agree that a “two-state solution is necessary to strengthen Israeli security.”

And yet it’s nearly impossible to find a story in a mainstream media outlet that reflects this reality. Almost without exception, one reads of the danger to Obama of losing Jewish voters, with the reason being their alleged unhappiness with his (equally alleged) lack of sympathy for Israel. But Obama is not losing Jewish voters to Mitt Romney: they continue to support him, in every significant poll, at the rate of approximately 70 percent. And if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be because of Israel, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. The numbers are just too tiny.

The reason these facts, while available to all, remain so difficult to discern in our political coverage is that while Jews remain liberal and dovish — even on Israel—many Jewish funders and neoconservative pundits do not. Although these people are deeply out of step with the vast majority of Jews, they wish to create a media narrative that suggests the opposite. They are aided in this task by the largely conservative leaders of “major” Jewish organizations, who work with these same funders (most famously right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, currently under investigation) — funders who also happen to pay their extremely generous salaries. Money, you may also have heard, has a way of talking when it comes to politics. The fact that the policies these organizations push and the politicians they support and nurture represent views antithetical to those of the very same people they profess to speak for might be a problem in, say, an Israeli kibbutz or a Park Slope food co-op. In the world of professional Jewish organizations, however, it barely rises to the level of an inconvenience. [Continue reading…]

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Shut up and play nice: How the Western world is limiting free speech

Jonathan Turley writes: Free speech is dying in the Western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony.

In the face of the violence that frequently results from anti-religious expression, some world leaders seem to be losing their patience with free speech. After a video called “Innocence of Muslims” appeared on YouTube and sparked violent protests in several Muslim nations last month, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that “when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others’ values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected.”

It appears that the one thing modern society can no longer tolerate is intolerance. As Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard put it in her recent speech before the United Nations, “Our tolerance must never extend to tolerating religious hatred.”

A willingness to confine free speech in the name of social pluralism can be seen at various levels of authority and government. In February, for instance, Pennsylvania Judge Mark Martin heard a case in which a Muslim man was charged with attacking an atheist marching in a Halloween parade as a “zombie Muhammed.” Martin castigated not the defendant but the victim, Ernie Perce, lecturing him that “our forefathers intended to use the First Amendment so we can speak with our mind, not to piss off other people and cultures — which is what you did.”

Of course, free speech is often precisely about pissing off other people — challenging social taboos or political values.

This was evident in recent days when courts in Washington and New York ruled that transit authorities could not prevent or delay the posting of a controversial ad that says: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.”

When U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer said the government could not bar the ad simply because it could upset some Metro riders, the ruling prompted calls for new limits on such speech. And in New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority responded by unanimously passing a new regulation banning any message that it considers likely to “incite” others or cause some “other immediate breach of the peace.”

Such efforts focus not on the right to speak but on the possible reaction to speech — a fundamental change in the treatment of free speech in the West. The much-misconstrued statement of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that free speech does not give you the right to shout fire in a crowded theater is now being used to curtail speech that might provoke a violence-prone minority. Our entire society is being treated as a crowded theater, and talking about whole subjects is now akin to shouting “fire!”

The new restrictions are forcing people to meet the demands of the lowest common denominator of accepted speech, usually using one of four rationales. [Continue reading…]

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Why are Americans so easy to manipulate and control?

Bruce E. Levine:

What a fascinating thing! Total control of a living organism! — psychologist B.F. Skinner

The corporatization of society requires a population that accepts control by authorities, and so when psychologists and psychiatrists began providing techniques that could control people, the corporatocracy embraced mental health professionals.

In psychologist B.F. Skinner’s best-selling book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), he argued that freedom and dignity are illusions that hinder the science of behavior modification, which he claimed could create a better-organized and happier society.

During the height of Skinner’s fame in the 1970s, it was obvious to anti-authoritarians such as Noam Chomsky (“The Case Against B.F. Skinner”) and Lewis Mumord that Skinner’s worldview — a society ruled by benevolent control freaks — was antithetical to democracy. In Skinner’s novel Walden Two (1948), his behaviorist hero states, “We do not take history seriously”; to which Lewis Mumford retorted, “And no wonder: if man knew no history, the Skinners would govern the world, as Skinner himself has modestly proposed in his behaviorist utopia.”

As a psychology student during that era, I remember being embarrassed by the silence of most psychologists about the political ramifications of Skinner and behavior modification.

In the mid-1970s, as an intern on a locked ward in a state psychiatric hospital, I first experienced one of behavior modification’s staple techniques, the “token economy.” And that’s where I also discovered that anti-authoritarians try their best to resist behavior modification. George was a severely depressed anti-authoritarian who refused to talk to staff but, for some reason, chose me to shoot pool with. My boss, a clinical psychologist, spotted my interaction with George, and told me that I should give him a token—a cigarette—to reward his “prosocial behavior.” I fought it, trying to explain that I was 20 and George was 50, and this would be humiliating. But my boss subtly threatened to kick me off the ward. So, I asked George what I should do.

George, fighting the zombifying effects of his heavy medication, grinned and said, “We’ll win. Let me have the cigarette.” In full view of staff, George took the cigarette and then placed it into the shirt pocket of another patient, and then looked at the staff shaking his head in contempt.

Unlike Skinner, George was not “beyond freedom and dignity.” Anti-authoritarians such as George—who don’t take seriously the rewards and punishments of control-freak authorities—deprive authoritarian ideologies such as behavior modification from total domination. [Continue reading…]

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A vote drive in Israel may violate U.S. election law

Mairav Zonszein reports: in In mid-July, two prominent Republicans were enjoying the goods at a boutique winery in the Israeli settlement Psagot in the West Bank. Former George W. Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and Republican Jewish Coalition director Matt Brooks weren’t on vacation, but touring Israel in an effort to lobby American citizens to vote for Mitt Romney in November. Their hosts? “iVoteIsrael,” a group aiming to get Americans in Israel to cast ballots in the upcoming presidential election.

Launched by a group of American immigrants, iVoteIsrael believes Israelis “need a president in the White House who will stand by Israel in absolute commitment to its safety, security and right to defend itself.” The campaign facilitates online registration and collects absentee ballots at its many drop-box locations — including in settlements like Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion — which will then be mailed to the U.S. on voters’ behalf. But iVoteIsrael’s close ties to Republican officials, demagogic messaging and pro-settlement proclivities all point to a partisan bent — and their handling of absentee ballots may be in violation of U.S elections law.

The campaign comes at a fraught moment in the U.S.-Israel relationship, with Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at loggerheads over Iran policy, just as they clashed over settlements two years ago. Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, on the other hand, said he would never criticize Israel publicly or take any policy decisions without consulting with Netanyahu. Romney’s contention that Obama “threw Israel under the bus” because of public opposition to settlements and insufficient bellicosity toward Iran aligns him with positions held by Netanyahu and the Israeli right, including Israel’s decidedly Republican Jewish-American population.

With 163,000 eligible American voters living throughout Israel and the West Bank — as many as 10,000 registered just in the crucial battleground state of Florida — a strong showing of absentee voters from the Holy Land could swing the election. And iVoteIsrael knows it, spotlighting slim electoral margins in its messaging and citing the controversial 2000 Gore-Bush standoff decided by a few hundred absentee ballots in Florida. [Continue reading…]

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New diplomatic push aims to defuse Iranian nuclear crisis

The Guardian reports: Six global powers will launch a new diplomatic push after the US elections aimed at defusing the Iranian nuclear crisis in the next few months and avoiding the eruption of a new Middle East conflict next year.

A “reformulated” proposal will offer limited relief from existing sanctions and other incentives for Iran to limit the level of enrichment of its uranium stockpile. A new attempt will be made to sequence the steps required to reach a deal to overcome the mutual distrust that helped sink previous rounds of negotiations, where each side appeared to wait for the other to make the first major concession.

“We recognise that the Iranians need something more with which they can sell a deal at home, and we will expect real change on the other side. It is about getting the sequencing right. That is what this next round will be about,” a European official said.

“If Iran is prepared to do enough, sanctions will be on the table,” another western diplomat said. “It shouldn’t expect the [the six-power group] to blink first – but if it’s ready to take genuine steps we’re ready to respond. This could include sanctions relief – but only for the right moves by Iran. Sanctions are biting in Tehran and we’re not going to lift them without making solid progress on our concerns.”

If the step-by-step approach fails there could be an attempt to “go big” with an ambitious, comprehensive settlement that would allow Iran to continue producing uranium at low levels (under 5%) of enrichment but under stricter international monitoring and controls. [Continue reading…]

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America’s new modesty in the Mideast

Rami G Khouri writes: The past month, during which I have had the opportunity to interact with thousands of Americans across the United States, has also been one of the most difficult and volatile in the American-Middle Eastern relationship. This has reflected the lively, occasionally violent, reactions to the anti-Islamic film that took place across the world, the exaggerated rhetoric of the American presidential elections, and the spirited, provocative rhetoric at the United Nations by Iranian and Israeli leaders. Passions are high all around, as Arabs, Americans, Turks, Israelis and Iranians all struggle with sharp rhetoric, violence, death, deep antagonisms and ongoing or threatened wars. The mass media and political classes everywhere tend to focus on the negatives that they see in others, giving the impression that we are on the verge of a catastrophic global war due to inflamed emotions and feelings of existential vulnerability by many of these parties.

The reality, fortunately, seems less frightening, as I have always sensed from my routine life and work in the Arab world, and as I am discovering from my extensive discussions with Americans this month. The many Americans I have engaged in conversations seem more realistic and sober than ever before about Middle Eastern issues and peoples. I have also sensed much less arrogance on the most appropriate role for the U.S. in the region, and in most cases a greater sense of humility about the limits of what the U.S. can and cannot do in this fast-changing region, where local actors drive events and the global powers tend to respond to rather than initiate change.

An important consequence of this is that more Americans now seem to view the Middle East, and react politically to its people and leaders, in a more pragmatic and nuanced manner than in recent years, when a more cartoon-like mentality prevailed that saw the region as a single lump with good guys and bad guys and nothing in between. Some new research tends to confirm this.

This week has seen the publication of a poll-based study entitled “Americans on the Middle East: A Study of American Public Opinion,” headed by Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull, of the University of Maryland’s Anwar Sadat Chair and the Program on International Policy Attitudes. They explored how Americans across the board felt about several key, current issues in the Middle East, including the Libyan and Egyptian governments, foreign aid, Iran, Syria and the importance of U.S. relations with the Muslim world and dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Is the White House really considering a military strike on Iran?

Tony Karon writes: Have some members of the Obama Administration been quaffing a ten-year-old jug of Kool Aid left in a White House basement fridge by Bush Administration officials? That’s certainly an impression conveyed by one unnamed source briefing Foreign Policy magazine’s David Rothkopf on talks between the Administration and the Israeli government. According to Rothkopf’s sources, Washington is now considering plans for a limited U.S.-Israeli raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a strike so “surgical” that it could be over in a matter of hours. This ostensible military cakewalk would, according to “one advocate” cited by Rothkopf have a “transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.”

Both the language and the thinking in that quote are reminiscent of the giddiest fantasies of the Bush Administration’s Iraq-war zealots. It appears that for some, at least, the failure of the Iraq invasion to transform the Middle East and assure “American ascendancy” simply requires a shock-and-awe do-over.

Rothkopf’s piece on the ostensible emergence of a war-lite option on Iran begins from the premise that President Obama is vulnerable to political attacks from Mitt Romney over his handling of Iran, and might benefit from letting it be known that he’s considering a “surgical strike” on Iran — a scenario ostensibly more believable because it supposedly requires less of a military commitment. “It may be that the easiest way for the Obama team to defuse Romney’s critique on Iran is simply to communicate better what options they are in fact considering,” Rothkopf writes. “It’s not the size of the threatened attack, but the likelihood that it will actually be made, that makes a military threat a useful diplomatic tool. And perhaps a political one, too.”

But that assumes Obama faces a major political problem on Iran — an assumption unlikely to be shared by the president’s reelection team at this stage: In most mainstream campaign analyses, being branded “soft on Iran” doesn’t rank particularly prominently among the many reasons why Obama might lose his reelection bid, even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had once hoped to leverage campaign concerns to press Obama towards Israel’s positions on Iran. [Continue reading…]

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10 questions Obama and Romney won’t have to answer in the next debate

Playwrite David Macaray indulges in some creative scripting for a presidential debate.

1. What was the most difficult class you took in college? Good question. Gives them a chance to come off as pleasantly humble. If they say Organic Chemistry, we know they’re not lying. If they can’t recall even one class that gave them trouble, it’s not going to ruin them, but they’ll come off as inattentive or evasive.

2. What trait or talent does your opponent possess that you most admire or wish you possessed? Wouldn’t we all like to know this? Mitt might say he wished he could debate or play basketball as well as the President, and Obama might say he envied Mitt because, as a Mormon, he gets to wear magic underwear.

3. With the exception of your wife or mother, what woman has had the most profound effect on your life? Tough question, especially being sprung without warning. That’s why it would be fascinating to hear their answers.

4. Who are your favorite writers? They better have some, otherwise they’re going to sound uninformed, uninquisitive and uncultured….positively Palinesque.

5. Who are your favorite singers or musical groups? We’d all like to know this. Wouldn’t it be shocking if Obama said he liked the Carpenters and Eagles, and Romney admitted to being a fan of Lil’ Kim?

6. Do you believe that, even with its atrocious human rights record, we should continue to give financial aid to Ruwati? A trick question meant to test their honesty. There is no such country as Ruwati. Would these guys admit to having never heard of the place, or would they try to bullshit us? [Continue reading…]

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Colonised and coloniser, empire’s poison infects us all

George Monbiot writes: Over the gates of Auschwitz were the words “Work Makes You Free“. Over the gates of the Solovetsky camp in Lenin’s gulag: “Through Labour – Freedom!”. Over the gates of the Ngenya detention camp, run by the British in Kenya: “Labour and Freedom”. Dehumanisation appears to follow an almost inexorable course.

Last week three elderly Kenyans established the right to sue the British government for the torture that they suffered – castration, beating and rape – in the Kikuyu detention camps it ran in the 1950s.

Many tens of thousands were detained and tortured in the camps. I won’t spare you the details: we have been sparing ourselves the details for far too long. Large numbers of men were castrated with pliers. Others were raped, sometimes with the use of knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels and scorpions. Women had similar instruments forced into their vaginas. The guards and officials sliced off ears and fingers, gouged out eyes, mutilated women’s breasts with pliers, poured paraffin over people and set them alight. Untold thousands died.

The government’s secret archive, revealed this April, shows that the attorney general, the colonial governor and the colonial secretary knew what was happening. The governor ensured that the perpetrators had legal immunity: including the British officers reported to him for roasting prisoners to death. In public the colonial secretary lied and kept lying. [Continue reading…]

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The maimed

Chris Hedges gave this talk Sunday night in New York City at a protest denouncing the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. The event, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was led by Veterans for Peace.

Many of us who are here carry within us death. The smell of decayed and bloated corpses. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of children. The sound of gunfire. The deafening blasts. The fear. The stench of cordite. The humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life. The loss of comrades and friends. And then the aftermath. The long alienation. The numbness. The nightmares. The lack of sleep. The inability to connect to all living things, even to those we love the most. The regret. The repugnant lies mouthed around us about honor and heroism and glory. The absurdity. The waste. The futility.

It is only the maimed that finally know war. And we are the maimed. We are the broken and the lame. We ask for forgiveness. We seek redemption. We carry on our backs this awful cross of death, for the essence of war is death, and the weight of it digs into our shoulders and eats away at our souls. We drag it through life, up hills and down hills, along the roads, into the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us. Those who know us best know that there is something unspeakable and evil many of us harbor within us. This evil is intimate. It is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war.

We do not speak of war. War is captured only in the long, vacant stares, in the silences, in the trembling fingers, in the memories most of us keep buried deep within us, in the tears.

It is impossible to portray war. Narratives, even anti-war narratives, make the irrational rational. They make the incomprehensible comprehensible. They make the illogical logical. They make the despicable beautiful. All words and images, all discussions, all films, all evocations of war, good or bad, are an obscenity. There is nothing to say. [Continue reading…]

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Arkansas GOP candidate, endorses death penalty for rebellious children

The Huffington Post reports: Charlie Fuqua, the Republican candidate for the Arkansas House of Representatives who called for expelling Muslims from the United States in his book, also wrote in support for instituting the death penalty for “rebellious children.”

In God’s Law, Fuqua’s 2012 book, the candidate wrote that while parents love their children, a process could be set up to allow for the institution of the death penalty for “rebellious children,” according to the Arkansas Times. Fuqua, who is anti-abortion, points out that the course of action involved in sentencing a child to death is described in the Bible and would involve judicial approval. While it is unlikely that many parents would seek to have their children killed by the government, Fuqua wrote, such power would serve as a way to stop rebellious children.

Here’s the passage in Deuteronomy 21:18-21 that calls for child killing:

18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:
19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;
20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.
21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

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