Vulnerable children in some of New York's poorest districts are being forced to take part in HIV drug trials.
During a nine month investigation, the BBC has uncovered the disturbing truth about the way authorities in New York City are conducting the fight against Aids.
HIV positive children - some only a few months old - are enrolled in toxic experiments without the consent of guardians or relatives.
In some cases where parents have refused to give children their medication, they have been placed in care.
The city's Administration of Children's Services (ACS) does not even require a court order to place HIV kids with foster parents or in children's homes, where they can continue to give them experimental drugs.
GUINEA PIG KIDS
Tuesday, 30th November, 2004
1930 GMT on BBC Two (UK)
Reporter Jamie Doran talks to parents and guardians who fear for the lives of their loved ones, and to a child who spent years on a drugs programme that made him and his friends ill.
Young lives
In 2002, the Incarnation Children's Center - a children's home in Harlem - was at the hub of controversy over secretive drugs trials.
Jamie speaks to a boy who spent most of his life at Incaranation. Medical records, obtained by the This World team, prove the boy had been enrolled in these trials.
"I did not want to take my medication," said the boy, "but if you want to get out of there, you have to do what they say."
He also conveys a horrifying account of what happened to the children at Incarnation who refused to obey the rules. "My friend Daniel didn't like to take his medicine and he got a tube in his stomach," he said.
Powerless
Dr David Rasnick from the University of Berkeley who has studied the effects of HIV drugs on patients - particularly children - says these drugs are "lethal".
"The young are not completely developed yet," he says. "The immune system isn't completely mature until a person's in their teens."
So why are these children targetted? Is it simply because they cannot defend themselves?
At the beginning of this investigation, the ACS said that no child was selected for trials without a long process of decision making, but declined to comment further.
For months, the BBC tried to get information from the people responsible for the trials, but none would comment.
The companies that supply drugs for the trials are among the world's largest, including Britain's own Glaxo SmithKline (GSK).
GSK responded to BBC programme makers, saying that all trials follow stringent stardards and are compliant with local laws and regulations.
Under federal rules, consent for children to take part in drug trials has to be given by their parents.
But what if that child is in the care of New York City authorities, which volunteered it for trials in the first place?
Guinea Pig Kids was broadcast on Tuesday, 30th November, 2004, at 1930 GMT on BBC Two (UK).
VATICAN CITY, Nov 30 (Reuters) - The Vatican on Tuesday blamed the spread of AIDS on an "immunodeficiency" of moral values among other factors and called for education, abstinence and greater access to drugs to fight the disease.
On the eve of World AIDS Day, the head of the Vatican's pontifical health council quoted Pope John Paul as calling AIDS a "pathology of the spirit" that must be combated with "correct sexual practice" and "education of sacred values".
"I highlight his thoughts regarding the immunodeficiency of moral and spiritual values," Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan added in a speech prepared for World AIDS Day on Wednesday.
A United Nations report released last week showed the number of adults and children living with HIV reached 39.4 million in 2004, up from 35 million in 2001.
I saw this on Atrios and was left speechless.
Isn't this the same church where thousands of little boys were raped on a regular basis?
My idea of "correct sexual practice" doesn't have anything to do with buggering little boys and intimidiating their parents.
Maybe they should lecture their priests on abstinance, especially when it comes to teen boys in their care.
Tavis Smiley has opted not to renew his contract with National Public Radio to host his daily one-hour talk show
Hollywood Reporter
Updated: 11:37 a.m. ET Nov. 30, 2004
LOS ANGELES - After nearly three years on the air, Tavis Smiley has opted not to renew his contract with National Public Radio to host his daily one-hour talk show.
Smiley said Monday that his last day on the air will be Dec. 16. In announcing his decision, Smiley criticized NPR for what he characterized as its failure to “meaningfully reach out to a broad spectrum of Americans who would benefit from public radio but simply don’t know it exists or what it offers ... In the most multicultural, multi-ethnic and multiracial America ever, I believe that NPR can and must do better in the future.”
Melanie pointed this out, which kind of went under the radar for a lot of people
I know a lot of people get discomforted when I call NPR the network for college professors and the graduate students they fuck. But it's true. NPR is an elitist organization which is regularly put to shame by the BBC and even PBS.
While I am hardly a fan of PBS, at least it runs a range of diverse programming. NPR is designed to appeal to middle class whites and few others. I would love nothing better than to see Ira Glass and his smug little show beset by a pack of raging wolfhounds. If you take the good of NPR, Terry Gross, vs the repellent of NPR, the Beltway Bandits who run their news programming, there isn't much there. NPR is insular and clubby.
The best thing which ever happened to PBS was Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of Children's Television Workshop, the people who bring you Sesame Street. Not just because it set the gold standard of children's programming, but because it created a diverse television workplace. A place where not only children and adults interacted realistically, no more Father Knows Best, but was a multiracial, multicultural world. But Sesame Street's effect wasn't only those little cards I got in Kindergarten with the alphabet. It set the tone for the entire range of programming on the network. Everything from jazz documentaries to an American Family came from a sense that NPR had to represent a range of views. NPR was founded by a clique and has stayed a clique.
It is hardly surprising that Smiley would grow tired of NPR. He is a singular voice there. Minorties do best on NPR when they don't act like minorities and even then, they tend to move on. Ray Suarez became an anchor on the News Hour.
And let's consider the News Hour for a moment. Their second anchor is a black woman, the others are a hispanic man and a woman, and Red Smith'
s Son Terry. Their commentators are equally balanced. Despite it's stogy nature and reliance on Washington sources, it is the most diverse anchor team on TV. NPR is still largely white. Cable is a blizzard of whiteness.
In short, Jim Lehrer hired a diverse cast of reporters and anchors for his show, while NPR's news cast is the preserve of a clique of white women. Few minorities have ever broken through at NPR. And their program largely panders to their white contributor base. Minorities usually show up on NPR as either victims, success stories or Africans. They love Africans, the poorer the better. But a balanced view of American minorities?
People give NPR a pass because of their "liberal" politics. But when you get past it, Smiley's frustration is evidently clear. NPR doesn't care about minorities, except as news subjects. Instead of a range of programming and new hiring, it's just more lip service.
I can see Smiley moving to bigger leagues sooner rather than later.
While the partition of India is the stuff of epic novels and Masterpiece Theater, the bloody end to British rule in Kenya is often overlooked. The whole nature of the British in Kenya reads like a lurid sex novel, complete with murder. The theft of Kikuyu and Masai lands are of lesser interest to people, since white actresses can't be seen semi-nude in the story of destroying the pastoral life of a people.
The Mau Mau rebellion set the stage for rebellions across black Africa, as long simmering resentment towards British rule finally exploded. Like in other colonies, the British-trained ex-soldiers led the way. However, unlike the Congolese or Indonesians, Kenyans, like their Algerian counterparts, had a good grounding in modern warfare. As members of the 11th East Africa Division, they fought the Japanese in Burma as part of the 14th Army.
The 11th East African Division incorporated battalions of the King’s African Rifles and other forces from Kenya, Uganda, Nyasaland (now Malawi), Somaliland (Somalia) and Tanganyika (Tanzania). These Africans – considered by some of their own British officers to have been undervalued and underused as front-line troops by the British commanders – proved extremely hardy and tenacious in several battles, both as combatant soldiers and as medical staff, carriers and other auxiliary participants.
.............
The Askaris or soldiers of 11 East African Division, which included the Kenyans and the Ugandans of the King's African Rifles, proved notable jungle fighters, especially in the notoriously disease-ridden Kabaw Valley (‘Death Valley’) near the Indian border towards the end of 1944.
......
In December 1944 the 14th Army launched its third and decisive Arakan offensive. The 11th East African Division advance to the River Chindwin, capturing the town of Kalewa.
This solid war record, and the educational efforts used to get the three African divisions (81st and 82nd West African and 11th East African) up to standard would have the effect of creating people who no longer wanted to be ruled by the British. They had fought side by side with the British, beaten the Japanese like the British and wanted to run their own country like the British.
By 1952, disgust with British rule in Kenya would explode in rebellion.
Why did the Kenyans hate the settlers? Well, they lived in a weird fantasyland in which Kenya and Kenyans were mere backdrops.
The place where this happened was Soysambu Ranch, the property of Baron Delamere at the shore of Lake Elmenteita, in present-day Kenya. The region was the most flourishing development pole in British East Africa, home of some of the most prominent families of colonial aristocracy. But behind the shining there is always a shade. In this case, the dark side was known as the Happy Valley, a name that symbolised a place, the White Highlands; a time, the period between the two world wars; and a community, the European settlers under the Union Jack. And mainly, a lifestyle: the ex-pats lived a never-ending and unrestrained celebration where no human instinct was without satisfaction. "Continual flow champagne", described Waugh, only an occasional visitor surprised by the decadent delirium. In those days an expression became popular, "are you married or do you live in Kenya?". Couples swinging was, after hunting and horse races, the main socialisation ritual.
Today, the fifth Baron of Delamere still lives at Soysambu. He affectionately defines his stepmother, the late Diana Delamere, as a nymphomaniac, which in his opinion was due to the fact that she "didn't ovulate well". Now, hold your breath. Diana, née Caldwell, married the fourth Lord Delamere, who passed away bequeathing a good stretch of his land to her, same as had done her previous husband, Gilbert de Preville Colvile, a friend of Lord Delamere who flattered Diana with a mansion bordering Lake Naivasha called Djinn Palace, a.k.a. Gin Palace, original dwelling of "Molly" Mary Ramsay-Hill, married for the second time to Josslyn Victor Hay, twenty second count of Erroll and an inveterate gigolo formerly married to Idina, who wedded five times. Molly had died of alcohol and heroin abuse when Lord Erroll had an affair with Diana, who after Delamere's demise got married to Sir John Henry Delves Broughton, alias Jock, a friend of Erroll. One night, Erroll was found shot dead. Everyone's eyes where then set on Jock, who in fact scarcely fitted into the role of the outraged husband. The night before the crime, Jock had willingly invited his wife and her new sweetheart to supper and had risen a glass of champagne to the lovebirds' happiness. He himself spent the rest of the evening in the company of a female guest, married to be precise, though Jock was by then so drunk that he hardly could introduce her to the local hospitality rules. The executor hand could belong to any of Erroll's numerous lovers, those whose clothes he liked to wear. Or to any of their respective husbands. The story has it that many of them opened a bottle in silence with the breaking news, perhaps defeated by the identity crisis caused on the long run by swinging, perhaps weary of the tremendous physical erosion produced by orgies, perhaps with a deteriorated health by force of using local fauna for purposes other than game hunting. Sure that it could either be crazy Alice, a rich and morphine-addict heir from Chicago, first married to Count Frederic de Janze and later to Waugh's acquaintance Raymond de Trafford, with whom she fell in love after shooting him. After all, it was only her who perplexed all mourners by starring a nasty erotic show with Erroll's dead body for all to see.
Jock was formally accused but finally acquitted, after which he rented the Djinn Palace for Diana in an attempt to recover her which proved useless. Poor Jock committed suicide with a barbiturate overdose. All of them used to meet at Muthaiga Club in Nairobi, "the place of its kind that has seen more fornication", in the words of Nicholas Best, author of Happy Valley, the story of the English in Kenya.
By Laurie Goering
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published October 25, 2004
NANYUKI, Kenya -- For decades, while his cattle have torn scarce nourishment from parched Masai communal grazing lands, Joseph Kuraru has looked through a wire fence at the green pastures of adjoining Lolldaiga Hills Ranch.
Nearly 100 years ago, his forefathers ceded the sprawling 45,000-acre ranch--and much of the high plateau west of Mt. Kenya--to British settlers. Now Kenya's famed pastoralists say 99-year leases on the land, granted by the British colonial government, are up.
In August, Kuraru and his neighbors cut Lolldaiga's fences and herded thousands of their gaunt cattle onto its rocky, green hills. Despite clashes with Kenya's police and ranch owners, they say they have no intention of moving them off again.
"In the next 100 years, we have no problem if we have this land," said Kuraru, 50, leaning on his long spear as his animals grazed around him.
Reclaiming the ranches "is the only solution" to overcrowding and poverty on Masai reserves, he said.
Across Africa, governments are struggling to resolve land ownership disputes that have lingered since the days of colonial seizures. Over the past two years, Zimbabwe's government has confiscated nearly all of the country's white-owned farmland, reapportioning it primarily to government officials. South Africa is slowly buying whites' farmland for resettlement of blacks, or paying compensation to former black owners. Namibia is considering forced buyouts of white-owned ranches
Whites still live in Kenya, still own land. This was the cause of the 1952 rebellion and it remains unsolved today.
Security forces have rounded up more than 10,000 men in the biggest anti-Mau Mau operation since a state of emergency was declared in Kenya 18 months ago.
The British authorities have ordered the clampdown on the Mau Mau, a guerilla movement opposed to white settlers in the East African colony, following a breakdown in law and order.
Those suspects found to be Mau Mau supporters will be sent to detention camps for further questioning.
More than 4,000 British and African troops, Nairobi's entire police force and African loyalists are involved in the operation. They have orders to shoot to kill if there is any armed resistance.
Operation Anvil began at dawn this morning with raids on homes throughout the city. Mau Mau supporters are mostly members of the Kikuyu tribe but any suspects are being handed over for further screening.
Rumours about the impending clampdown have persisted for some time and so it was feared many of the rebels may have already escaped to the countryside. But spotter planes have reported no mass exodus from the city.
.............
Since then the government has launched a major offensive against the Mau Mau, sending RAF planes to bomb areas where the gangs are concentrated.
Last year black activist Jomo Kenyatta was jailed for seven years for his part in the organisation of the Mau Mau movement.
The rebellion soon exploded across the country.
Film footage and commentary paints a vivid picture of Kenya before the uprising, with smug Europeans living a life of idle luxury based on African land and labour. But in the post-Second World War world, resentment against colonial rule increased. One by one, African countries demanded self-rule. John Maina Kahihu from the Mau Mau's political wing said, "In 1942 we had fought for the British. But when we came home from the war they gave us nothing."
The settlers felt themselves immune to the changing times. Willoughby Smith, a district officer in the Colonial Service from 1948 to 1955, testifies to this. "The settler knew a lot about how to use African labour. But he could not see what the use of that labour and the production of money was beginning to bring about. He could not see the political change."
The fiercest opposition to the colonial authorities came from the Kikuyu tribe who, 50 years earlier, had been evicted from their traditional areas to make way for the European farmers. By the end of the Second World War, 3,000 European settlers owned 43,000 square kilometres of the most fertile land, only 6 percent of which they cultivated.
The African population of 5.25 million occupied, without ownership rights, less than 135,000 square kilometres of the poorest land. On the "native reserves" much of the land was unsuitable for agriculture. The poor peasants had been forced to abandon their traditional methods of extensive agriculture and did not have access to the new technology that would make intensive agriculture viable. The population could not feed itself and the peasants were desperate.
The commentary explains, "Rumours began to circulate about the formation of a secret society amongst the Kikuyu, Kenya's largest tribe, one-fifth of the population. It was called the Land Freedom Army (LFA). It was forcing Kikuyu to swear an oath to take back the land the white man had stolen.... Any African who refused the oath or was loyal to the colonialists was likely to be brutally murdered. The secret society acquired a new name, though no one knew where from. It was called 'Mau Mau'."
The designation “Mau Mau” was never used by the Kikuyu and does not exist in their language. It was, most probably, invented by the British as part of an attempt to demonise the Kikuyu people. Professor Lonsdale, an historian, explains how the movement was portrayed by the settlers and the government as "the welling up of the old unreconstructed Africa, which had not yet received sufficient colonial enlightenment and discipline, which proved that colonialism still had a job to do."
The core of the LFA was the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), which was formed in 1924. Its original programme was a combination of radical demands such as the return of expropriated lands and the elimination of the passbook scheme, (similar to the internal passport system in South Africa), with a striving to return to the traditional pre-colonial past. In the late 1930s the KCA led a wave of mass peasant struggles against the forced sale of their livestock to the government.
Much of this political background was not explained in the programme, so it appeared that the Mau Mau arose spontaneously in 1952.
In the 1950s the KCA began conscripting support from the Kikuyu masses, believing it was possible to consolidate their support through the administration of "the oath".
Jacob Njangi, an LFA fighter, explains, "We used to drink the oath. We swore we would not let white men rule us forever. We would fight them even down to our last man, so that man could live in freedom." ..............
Reports of brutality by the British forces began to appear in the press. The Daily Worker carried a report under the headline: "Officer who quit says, 'It's Hitlerism'". The officer concerned was 19-year-old Second Lieutenant David Larder, who after killing an African, chopped off his hand. Afterwards he wrote home in anguish asking, "What has happened to me?"
Other reports told of officers who paid their men five shillings a head "for every 'Mau Mau' they killed". One soldier testified in court that his officer had said he could shoot anybody he liked as long as they were black, because he wanted to increase his company's score of kills to 50.
In late 1953 the British opened a new campaign, code named Operation Anvil, to cut off the supply network to the LFA. The first target was Nairobi, which was believed to be the centre of their organisation. On 24 April 1954, the police rounded up all the African inhabitants in the city—around 100,000 people. The 70,000 Kikuyu were separated and screened. Of them, up to 30,000 men were taken to holding camps. The families of the arrested men were pushed into the already overcrowded native reserves.
In rural areas Kikuyu were forced into fortified villages, where they lived under 23-hour curfew. This policy, known as "villagisation", was claimed to be "purely protective and beneficial for the Africans". It gave the colonial authorities total control over the Kikuyu.
Taking the Mau Mau oath was made a capital offence. Between 1953 and 1956 more than 1,000 Africans were hanged for alleged Mau Mau crimes. Public hangings, which had been outlawed in Britain for over a century, were carried out in Kenya during the emergency
Professor Lonsdale explains, "A mobile gallows was transported around the country dispensing 'justice' to 'Mau Mau' suspects.... Dead 'Mau Mau', especially commanders, were displayed at cross-roads, at market places and at administrative centres."
In 1954 one-third of all Kikuyu men were said to be in prison. These detainees had not been convicted of any crime and were held without trial. The British government insisted that every prisoner had to denounce "the oath" and submit to a "cleansing ceremony"
This brutal repression of the Mau Mau Rebellion only bought time. The British Empire had several ongoing wars at the same time, Korea, Malaya, the Canal Zone, Cyprus, Aden, Suez, Radfan. The empire was falling apart, and the Indian Army was no longer on tap to help solve these problems. By 1960, it was clear the sun was crashing on the British Empire.
Indonesia celebrates 50 years of independence from The Netherlands on December 27th. For the Dutch, it will be an occasion for painful memories and soul-searching. At the official ceremony in 1949, Queen Juliana referred to a ‘transfer of sovereignty'. So it was, but only after the Dutch had tried and ultimately failed to re-impose their colonial power on the country after World War II. In the process, some special units of the Dutch military were guilty of what official records call ‘excesses' In the view of some who were there, these ‘excesses' were nothing less than war crimes.
.....
State of Denial
While Van Nord is brave enough to face up to the truth, 50 years on, the Dutch as a nation are still in what some commentators call a ‘state of denial' about what really took place. To this day, official accounts of the period, as well as school textbooks, do not mention war crimes or atrocities. Instead, all such cases are referred to as ‘excesses' committed by the Dutch troops. And no Dutch veteran of the colonial war has ever been tried for war crimes.
Van Nord, like many veterans, is bitter about the role the government played in the colonial conflict:
"The Dutch went back to their own Dutch Indies, and we tried to keep what was ours. But in trying to keep it, we went wrong. But the government may have been wrong too. They should have realised the time of colonial power was past. Now we know that at that time, government officers knew what was going on. And nobody in the government ever stopped us."
Dutch public misled
Development expert Nico Schulte-Nordholt says that the Dutch government deliberately misled the public in order to gain support:
"There was a manipulation of the situation by portraying Sukharno, the leader of the independence movement, as a collaborator with Japanese fascism. It was easy to get Dutch public opinion behind sending troops to restore law and order against the ‘fascists' in Indonesia."
Schulte-Nordholt says that the state of denial persists largely because many of those involved are still alive:
"You still have the influence of the veterans, and they feel mistreated. And as long as that is not solved, they have a cause. They have very strong connections with the cabinet, with the Royal Family (Prince Bernhard is one of their most influential supporters) and I was told a few years ago by a former minister ‘just let us wait until these old veterans die'. It is for the Dutch in their own best interests to acknowledge their own past".
Have the Dutch come to grips with their crimes in Indonesia?
Criticism of Dutch colonial policy dates back at least to the appearance of Edward Dakker, the Dutch master known as Multatuli's Max Havelaar. At the time of its publication, in 1860, this `J'accuse' was considered a biting attack against the exploitation and abuse of the poor majority of Javanese by their European and local masters. Today, the novel is generally regarded as a classic work of nineteenth-century Dutch literature, its criticisms been neutralised and made safe due to the passing of time.
The period 1945-49 in Dutch colonial history, however, is still highly sensitive. Indeed, this chapter is conspicuous among colonial studies by its absence. Unlike Vietnam, which Hollywood has transformed into an icon of contemporary culture, post-Second World War Indonesia constitutes something of a collective blind-spot in the Dutch psyche. The case of one of the Netherlands' leading historians, the late Jan Romein, is enlightening. His wife, Annie Romein-Verschoor, had grown up in colonial Dutch East Indies. They were both self-confessed Communists. progressive idealists and committed to Indonesian independence. Yet when Jan Romein published his major study of decolonisation, De Eeuw van Azie (The Asian Century) in 1956, Indonesia earned only a superficial mention. Of the 300 pages, twenty-five were on Indonesia, while the bibliography of 267 titles contained only ten relating to it.
In 1980 a leading Indonesian historian, Taufik Abdullah, referring to the loud Dutch silence, remarked that international historiography was the monopoly of the conquerors. After all, far more works have appeared analysing German and Japanese brutality during the Second World War than the Dutch police actions -- actions which took place while Nazi leaders were standing trial for crimes against humanity in Nuremburg. If the Dutch historians were not prepared to do it, announced a historian from Singapore, Yong Mung Cheong, then he would attempt his own analysis of the complex events of 1946-49.
......incidents in recent years have further highlighted how painful this whole issue really is. Ponke Princen was a young Dutch man drafted into the army in 1946 and sent to Indonesia. There he deserted and switched sides, fighting for Indonesian independence. For Indonesians he became a hero but to the Dutch he was a traitor. As the decades slipped by many progressive Dutch citizens began to see Ponke Princen as a principled individual who had been sickened by the immoral acts he was ordered to carry out. But when he applied in Jakarta for a visa to revisit his former homeland for the first time in nearly fifty years, all the old cries of `traitor' were heard again. Despite having the support of the Dutch Minister for Foreign Affairs Princen was initially refused entry into the Netherlands.
In 1992 Gra Boomsma published the novel The Last Typhoon. It was the first fictionalised account of the police actions to have appeared in Dutch. In a newspaper interview the young writer made the mistake of saying that Dutch soldiers, while certainly not the same as the SS, could be compared to the SS in some ways. Both he and the interviewer attracted the wrath of the colonial veterans and were charged in court with slander. In June 1994 they were acquitted.
January 1995 saw the appearance of a book of photographs of the Indonesian campaign taken by the late Dutch photographer, Hugo Wilmar. These included shots that had been banned by the military censors at the time. A leading national weekly carried excerpts from the book and the Dutch Photo Institute in Rotterdam held a five-week exhibition. These pictures are in some ways reminiscent of images that we are familiar with from Vietnam; wounded and dead lie on the jungle floor, guerrilla suspects are being interrogated and manhandled by Western troops. For a country that has enfolded a significant part of its past in silence, these are disturbing reminders.
This was followed in July 1995 by the publication of Verboden voor honden en inlanders (No Dogs or Natives), a collection of interviews in which Indonesians who had experienced Dutch colonial rule were given the opportunity to tell their stories. The following month, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands arrived in Jakarta for a ten-day official visit. At home, her visit had been preceded by a bitter debate over whether she should apologise to the Indonesian people for 350 years of colonial rule. Her main speech stopped short of an outright apology. Instead she spoke of feeling `very sad' at the deaths that had been caused by colonialism.
The Dutch make American denials about Abu Gharib seem quaint:
It was a story that was all too familiar to the veterans of the Police Actions, but its effect on mainstream society in the Netherlands was explosive. Finally the long blackout on truth was ended. While some veterans condemned Hueting's testimony and even threatened his life for speaking out, for many others the dam had been broken. Stories of guilt and shame began to leak into the public forum. However, while many soldiers agreed that the Police Actions had been a brutal war of colonialization, and apologized for their role in it, there were others who denied any wrongdoing. They angrily defended their actions, saying they were following orders and fighting for their country.
Even as recently as the 80s when historian Lou de Jong wrote about this period in Dutch history using the words "misdaaden" and "misdrijven" -- war crimes and wrong doings - there was such a public outcry that he was forced to replace them with the officially sanctioned term "excessen" (excesses). According to military historian Dr Petra Groen, the term "war crime" is too connected to the acts of the Nazis and therefore too emotionally loaded to use in the context of the Dutch in Indonesia. "After the interview of Joop Hueting, there was a parliamentary inquiry into Dutch war crimes in Indonesia, and they concluded -- and that's the official army point of view till now --that there were war crimes committed by ordinary soldiers, but they were incidents, there was no structural excessive violence."
No apology
Since then, Indonesia has continued to be the blind spot of a nation that has a reputation for being blunt and straight speaking. The Netherlands has never issued an official apology to Indonesia for the violence. However on an individual level, there has been an effort at atonement. Gus Blok has gone back to Indonesia to visit the place where he was stationed and made a public apology to the assembled villagers. He breaks down as he talks of their applause after his speech. Maarten Schaafsma gathered the signatures of other veterans and officially offered them to the Indonesian Embassy. However according to Joop Hueting, the government itself should have been more forthcoming about its past war guilt. Many believe -- and this is a belief shared by Mr Hueting - that an ideal opportunity would have been the official visit of Queen Beatrix to Indonesia on the 50th anniversary of the country's independence. The visit was the topic of a heated public debate for months beforehand and finally it was decided that the Queen wouldn't attend the ceremonies on the day itself, but would make an appearance a few days after the event. That gesture and her carefully worded speech made it quite clear that no official apology would be forthcoming.
Joop Hueting is still almost apoplectic when he recalls the event nine years ago. "I wrote [to the newspapers] that we should give a big present to show our sorrow and regret to the Indonesian people -- give 'The Nightwatch', give a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh." In fact the Queen presented the Indonesian people with a Friesian cow. "A cow," splutters Mr Hueting. "Very rude. That's part of the Dutch soul, this rudeness."
As the shameful pictures from Abu Ghraib emerge, the stories of these old veterans are even more poignant. And one can't help wondering about the young men and women who have been involved in these acts in Iraq, whether they were backed by higher authorities or not. Will they also, decades from now, sit in their armchairs and try to tell a story that still weighs heavy on their hearts? Will their final image also be that of a group of old people, alone with their shame and their grief?
The sense of denial and cover up is so strong, most Dutch historians won't touch it. Remember, My Lai, Abu Gharib, Gitmo, all hashed out in the press. Even the action of US troops in WWII are now being discussed honestly. We finally admitted that we shot German prisoners out of hand. Yet, the Dutch won't even talk about what were clearly war crimes in Indonesia. And that's not in a vacuum, it was after 250 years of brutality. Americans clearly have their faults, including the inability to hold Bush responsible for his actions.
But what is so disturbing about the Dutch silence about atrocities in Indonesia is that it so contravenes their professed values of liberal tolerance.
People were shocked to see the rise of Pym Fortune and anti-immigrant sentiment in Holland. Well, it's roots were in Indonesia and not only in the way they refused to give up power, but the absolute brutality of their war. People who had resisted the Nazis turned into brutal killers without a pause. Disdain for Muslims is not a surface value in Holland, but at the root of their prosperity. After all, without conquering Indonesia, there would be no Royal Dutch Shell or Philips. Indonesians riches made Holland wealthy.
The long sea voyage to Indonesia was arduous in the spartan conditions aboard. On arrival, Wim's platoon was stationed in Western Java in the Bogor area. Here, as a Dutch soldier he was expected to protect his country's interests by force. He was given the rank of corporal. Wim saw the 'police action' in Indonesia as morally wrong and refused to shoot people. He made his strong views known to his commanding officers and discussed them with a Catholic army chaplain attached to his platoon. The priest simply advised Wim to disregard his own conflicts of conscience In this matter, because he was required to obey the Dutch military authorities. However, Wim could not reconcile killing Indonesians with his Christian principles. He refused to be in a position of some authority and asked to be relieved of his corporal's responsibilities. Accordingly, the commanding officer demoted him to serve as an ordinary soldier.
The three years In the Dutch army in Indonesia were the most unhappy part of Wim's life. The memories connected with experiences of that period were deeply repressed and disturbed him many years later when he was an older man. He witnessed much human misery, saw friends killed and innocent Indonesians slaughtered. Mutilated bodies were a common sight. He suffered mental anguish when some of his colleagues broke down under continual strain; some reacted by indiscriminate killing to avenge their friends' deaths. One particular episode remained vividly etched in Wim's mind. He recalled how he was powerless, too shocked, to prevent a massacre of Innocent Indonesians returning from a weekly market, by a young Dutch soldier, who went berserk. That soldier, deprived of all reason, gunned down entire families, Indiscriminately killing children, women and men walking homewards. Wim stood beside him petrified in utter disbelief and in deep shock, unable to respond to this horrific slaughter.
The living conditions of the Dutch soldiers in Indonesia were extremely primitive in many instances. In Surabaya the soldiers were accommodated in storage sheds on the wharf. There were no showers or sanitation, and in the tropical climate malaria and amoebic dysentery were very prevalent among the Dutch troops. Their natural resistance to tropical diseases was lowered by exhaustion and inadequate hygiene. They were required to undertake guard duties for up to 24 hours at a stretch, with a break of eight hours in between. They were also subjected to prolonged exercises In full military uniform during Intense heat. Wim was severely affected by both malaria and amoebic dysentery. In spite of physical and mental exhaustion, he was required to do guard duties. He presented himself for treatment, but received none until finally he was unable to leave his camp stretcher. Only at that point was he admitted into the sick bay by a male nurse, who realised how ill he was. There Wim was examined by a newly-arrived, conscientious young Dutch doctor, who sent him to the military hospital at Surabaya immediately. Running a very high temperature, Wim remained critically ill, while a consortium of doctors at his bedside deliberated on the possible course of treatment for him. They discovered that amoebic dysentery had destroyed his intestinal lining and that his blood count was extremely low. His body was ravaged by the combined effects of malaria and persistent dysentery. He was informed that he was near death.
In Holland, Wim's brother Ab, a teacher, heard his brother's name mentioned in a radio announcement. Wim was included on the critically ill list of Dutch military personnel in Indonesia. The van der Linden family at home, friends and Ab's pupils began to pray for Wim's recovery. I believe that this strong faith combined with effective treatment in the Surabaya hospital brought astonishing results. Wim was successfully cured of malaria. The emetine injections prescribed for amoebic dysentery gradually brought the disease under control. After several weeks of intensive medication, his health continued to improve until he regained sufficient strength to be discharged from hospital as a convalescing outpatient. When his illness subsided, he was sent to Bandung. There, as he recovered his health, he was given light duties. After a few months Wim was admitted into the Dutch military hospital in Western Java for a second course of emetine injections. In April 1950, still a convalescent, he returned to The Netherlands with other troops from Jakarta in Indonesia. During Wim's time in the army, Indonesia gained independence, on the 27th of December 1949.
On Wim's arrival in Holland he was medically examined and pronounced fit and well enough to be discharged from the Dutch army. The very next day he became severely jaundiced. This necessitated his admission into the military hospital in The Hague, where he remained for three months' treatment, followed by another three months in Arnhem. The amoebae organisms had settled In Wim's liver, affecting its normal functions. As his liver was badly damaged, Wim's recovery was very slow. Following his final discharge from hospital towards the end of 1950, he remained on a very strict diet, high in protein content and low in fat. Regular medical check-ups continued for some time.
Now at 25 years of age, Wim had had no opportunity to work professionally as an engineer. Returned servicemen in Holland had no special privileges of rehabilitation as they did in post-war New Zealand. In fact, Dutch returned servicemen were at a disadvantage, while their compatriots who had missed army recruitment abroad, were well established in their professions in Holland, earning good salaries.
This wall of denial has only increased over time. The soldiers, now elderly, don't want any reminder of youthful crimes and no one wants to link the crimes to the present. Anti-Muslim racism was the foundation of the Dutch empire, not a side effect. They purposely kept the Indonesians as peons and refused to offer them liberation even when it would have served their own interests.
When an exhibit of photos of German Army atrocities was exhibited in Munich, people were pissed. The Dutch haven't even gotten that far. There is a general silence about the murders committed by the Dutch Army in the name of the Dutch kingdom. And after all this was done, they were shoved to the back of the line in terms of employement. Colonialists got the first pick of jobs, because they were no longer welcome in Indonesia.
The quickest way to forget war is to forget the veterans. And considering the kinds of crimes permitted by their commanders, it served everyone's purposes to skip over the 1945-50 period. The veterans who didn't immigrate, didn't need reminders, and the ones who did were forgotten. And the Indonesians, the Ambonese and Moluccians, who fled to Holland, were the ones who sided with the Dutch. The Indonesians were trying to forget their painful past. So no one wanted to ask, no one wanted to find out what happened and no one did.
But the ghosts of colonial misrule and murder linger over Indonesia, even today.
Unlike Burma and the Philippines, Indonesia was not granted formal independence by the Japanese in 1943. No Indonesian representative was sent to the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo in November 1943. But as the war became more desperate, Japan announced in September 1944 that not only Java but the entire archipelago would become independent. This announcement was a tremendous vindication of the seemingly collaborative policies of Sukarno and Hatta. In March 1945, the Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work for Indonesian Independence (BPUPKI) was organized, and delegates came not only from Java but also from Sumatra and the eastern archipelago to decide the constitution of the new state. The committee wanted the new nation's territory to include not only the Netherlands Indies but also Portuguese Timor and British North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula. Thus the basis for a postwar Greater Indonesia (Indonesia Raya) policy, pursued by Sukarno in the 1950s and 1960s, was established..........
On June 1, 1945, Sukarno gave a speech outlining the Pancasila; the five guiding principles of the Indonesian nation. Much as he had used the concept of Marhaenism to create a common denominator for the masses in the 1930s, so he used the Pancasila concept to provide a basis for a unified, independent state. The five principles are belief in God, humanitarianism, national unity, democracy, and social justice.
On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered. The Indonesian leadership, pressured by radical youth groups (the pemuda), were obliged to move quickly. With the cooperation of individual Japanese navy and army officers (others feared reprisals from the Allies or were not sympathetic to the Indonesian cause), Sukarno and Hatta formally declared the nation's independence on August 17 at the former's residence in Jakarta, raised the red and white national flag, and sang the new nation's national anthem, Indonesia Raya (Greater Indonesia). The following day a new constitution was promulgated.
The Indonesian republic's prospects were highly uncertain. The Dutch, determined to reoccupy their colony, castigated Sukarno and Hatta as collaborators with the Japanese and the Republic of Indonesia as a creation of Japanese fascism. But the Netherlands, devastated by the Nazi occupation, lacked the resources to reassert its authority. The archipelago came under the jurisdiction of Admiral Earl Louis Mountbatten, the supreme Allied commander in Southeast Asia. Because of Indonesia's distance from the main theaters of war, Allied troops, mostly from the British Commonwealth of Nations, did not land on Java until late September. Japanese troops stationed in the islands were told to maintain law and order. Their role in the early stages of the republican revolution was ambiguous: on the one hand, sometimes they cooperated with the Allies and attempted to curb republican activities; on the other hand, some Japanese commanders, usually under duress, turned over arms to the republicans, and the armed forces established under Japanese auspices became an important part of postwar anti-Dutch resistance.
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On October 28, 1945, major violence erupted in Surabaya in East Java, as occupying British troops clashed with pemuda and other armed groups. Following a major military disaster for the British in which their commander, A.W.S. Mallaby, and hundreds of troops were killed, the British launched a tough counterattack. The Battle of Surabaya (November 10-24) cost thousands of lives and was the bloodiest single engagement of the struggle for independence. It forced the Allies to come to terms with the republic.
In November 1945, through the efforts of Syahrir, the new republic was given a parliamentary form of government. Syahrir, who had refused to cooperate with the wartime Japanese regime and had campaigned hard against retaining occupation-era institutions, such as Peta, was appointed the first prime minister and headed three short-lived cabinets until he was ousted by his deputy, Amir Syarifuddin, in June 1947.
The Dutch, realizing their weak position during the year following the Japanese surrender, were initially disposed to negotiate with the republic for some form of commonwealth relationship between the archipelago and the Netherlands. The negotiations resulted in the British-brokered Linggajati Agreement, initialled on November 12, 1946. The agreement provided for Dutch recognition of republican rule on Java and Sumatra, and the Netherlands-Indonesian Union under the Dutch crown (consisting of the Netherlands, the republic, and the eastern archipelago). The archipelago was to have a loose federal arrangement, the Republic of the United States of Indonesia (RUSI), comprising the republic (on Java and Sumatra), southern Kalimantan, and the "Great East" consisting of Sulawesi, Maluku, the Lesser Sunda Islands, and West New Guinea. The KNIP did not ratify the agreement until March 1947, and neither the republic nor the Dutch were happy with it. The agreement was signed on May 25, 1947.
On July 21, 1947, the Dutch, claiming violations of the Linggajati Agreement, launched what was euphemistically called a "police action" against the republic. Dutch troops drove the republicans out of Sumatra and East and West Java, confining them to the Yogyakarta region of Central Java. The international reaction to the police action, however, was negative. The United Nations (UN) Security Council established a Good Offices Committee to sponsor further negotiations. This action led to the Renville Agreement (named for the United States Navy ship on which the negotiations were held), which was ratified by both sides on January 17, 1948. It recognized temporary Dutch control of areas taken by the police action but provided for referendums in occupied areas on their political future.
The Renville Agreement marked the low point of republican fortunes. The Dutch, moreover, were not the only threat. In western Java in 1948, an Islamic mystic named Kartosuwirjo, with the support of kyai and others, established a breakaway regime called the Indonesian Islamic State (Negara Islam Indonesia), better known as Darul Islam (from the Arabic, dar-al-Islam, house or country of Islam), a political movement committed to the establishment of a Muslim theocracy. Kartosuwirjo and his followers stirred the cauldron of local unrest in West Java until he was captured and executed in 1962.
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Immediately following the Madiun Affair, the Dutch launched a second "police action" that captured Yogyakarta on December 19, 1948. Sukarno, Hatta, who was there serving both as vice president and prime minister, and other republican leaders were arrested and exiled to northern Sumatra or the island of Bangka. An emergency republican government was established in western Sumatra. But The Hague's hard-fisted policies aroused a strong international reaction not only among newly independent Asian countries, such as India, but also among members of the UN Security Council, including the United States. In January 1949, the Security Council passed a resolution demanding the reinstatement of the republican government. The Dutch were also pressured to accept a full transfer of authority in the archipelago to Indonesians by July 1, 1950. The Round Table Conference was held in The Hague from August 23 to November 2, 1949 to determine the means by which the transfer could be accomplished. Parties to the negotiations were the republic, the Dutch, and the federal states that the Dutch had set up following their police actions.
The result of the conference was an agreement that the Netherlands would recognize the RUSI as an independent state, that all Dutch military forces would be withdrawn, and that elections would be held for a Constituent Assembly. Two particularly difficult questions slowed down the negotiations: the status of West New Guinea, which remained under Dutch control, and the size of debts owed by Indonesia to the Netherlands, an amount of 4.3 billion guilders being agreed upon. Sovereignty was formally transferred on December 27, 1949.
The RUSI, an unwieldy federal creation, was made up of sixteen entities: the Republic of Indonesia, consisting of territories in Java and Sumatra with a total population of 31 million, and the fifteen states established by the Dutch, one of which, Riau, had a population of only 100,000. The RUSI constitution gave these territories outside the republic representation in the RUSI legislature that was far in excess of their populations. In this manner, the Dutch hoped to curb the influence of the densely populated republican territories and maintain a postindependence relationship that would be amenable to Dutch interests......
The consolidation process had been accelerated in January 1950 by an abortive coup d'état in West Java led by Raymond Paul Pierre "The Turk" Westerling, a Dutch commando and counterinsurgency expert who, as a commander in the Royal Netherlands Indies Army (KNIL), had used terroristic, guerrilla-style pacification methods against local populations during the National Revolution. Jakarta extended its control over the West Java state of Pasundan in February. Other states, under strong pressure from Jakarta, relinquished their federal status during the following months. But in April 1950, the Republic of South Maluku (RMS) was proclaimed at Ambon. With its large Christian population and long history of collaboration with Dutch rule (Ambonese soldiers had formed an indispensable part of the colonial military), the region was one of the few with substantial pro-Dutch sentiment. The Republic of South Maluku was suppressed by November 1950, and the following year some 12,000 Ambonese soldiers accompanied by their families went to the Netherlands, where they established a Republic of South Maluku government-in-exile.
The Dutch were as obstinate as the Belgians, but had more resources. The Dutch framed the independence struggle as a fight against collaborators. The Indonesians worked with the Japanese because the Dutch were going to keep their colony. Unlike the Americans, who clearly told the Filipinos they would be free on July 4, 1946. Which meant that Filipino nationalists would fight the racist and cruel Japanese, knowing that the Americans had a leave by date. Sukarno and the Indonesians worked with the Japanese because they felt they had no choice. The Dutch then turned this against the Indonesians who wanted to get 350 years of colonialism off their back.
The parallels between the Dutch in Indonesia and the the US in Iraq are a lot closer than the Dutch would like to consider. They basically launched their return on false pretexts and then fought a brutal, losing war for four full years. The same people who had survived Nazi brutality went on murderous rampages against the Indonesia people.
As we will see, there has NEVER been any accountability for this, despite the problems Indonesia still has. Resentment over the Chinese business class, one created by the Dutch, struggles on Timor, in Aceh, and in the Moluccas all stem from Dutch misrule and cruelty. The lack of democratic institutions and the primacy of the military also come from the refusal of the Dutch to educate anyone decently. Ninety-three percent illiteracy in 1940 was clearly a plan for continued subjugation.
Even the Japanese, who were both racist and cruel, were seen as an improvement over the Dutch, a fact not really discussed in Holland. The Dutch made a deliberate decision to make a weak post-colonial state. We see the effects of those decisions today.
Now, we'll discuss post-colonial warfare another time, and that is where the CIA plays a large and murderous role. But much of Indonesia's problems stems from the way the Dutch were forced to hand over power.
Despite a liberal philisophy at home, the Dutch East Indies saw none of that. They got the back of the Dutch hand and poverty, as the Dutch stole their land and resources and divided their people into competing against each other. And it was Truman who forced their hand, by threatening to end Marshall Plan aid to Holland. The Dutch basically had to be slapped across the head to end their pointless, losing war in Indonesia, and they still tried to game the results.
Simon Jeffery, Mark Oliver and agencies
Monday November 29, 2004
David Blunkett, the home secretary, today denied he was shifting Britain towards an "authoritarian state" as he unveiled plans for identity cards and a national identity database.
From 2008, all passport applicants will be issued with cards, and a decision will be made in 2011 or 2012 as to whether holding identity cards will be compulsory.
An identity database using biometric data such as iris scans and fingerprints will back up the cards and provide further information including photograph, signature, date of birth, address and nationality.
Mr Blunkett - who is at the centre of allegations that he fast-tracked a visa application to help a former lover - said his aim in introducing the scheme was to help to "remove fearfulness from people's lives".
"The national identity card scheme will give people confidence, convenience and security in an increasingly vital aspect of modern life - proving and protecting their identity," he told the Commons.
Ministers argue the project will combat terrorism, illegal working, illegal immigration and the abuse of public services such as the NHS.
The bill contained little new information on the cost of the massive project, previously estimated at up to £3.1bn, but it revealed that card readers required at thousands of benefits offices, GPs' surgeries and government departments will cost up to £750 each.
It also unveiled a series of new offences: a fine of up to £1,000 for failing to disclose a change of address or other important personal details for use in the database and up to 10 years in jail for fraudulent use of the card or tampering with the database.
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He said the cost of the scheme over 10 years would be a "comparatively small" price to pay if the cards protected Britons against identity fraud, which he said cost the UK £1.3bn a year.
The price of a passport is expected to rise from £42 to £85 when identity cards are introduced.
You want something to worry about, this is it. National ID cards are the first step to an authoritarian state. Especially with a national database behind it.
By the time of the Renaissance, the islands of Java and Sumatra had already enjoyed a 1,000-year heritage of advanced civilization spanning two major empires. During the 7th-14th centuries, the Buddhist kingdom of Srivijaya flourished on Sumatra. At its peak, the Srivijaya Empire reached as far as West Java and the Malay Peninsula. Also by the 14th century, the Hindu Kingdom of Majapahit had risen in eastern Java. Gadjah Mada, the empire's chief minister from 1331 to 1364, succeeded in gaining allegiance from most of what is now modern Indonesia and much of the Malay archipelago as well. Legacies from Gadjah Mada's time include a codification of law and an epic poem. Islam arrived in Indonesia sometime during the 12th century and, through assimilation, supplanted Hinduism by the end of the 16th century in Java and Sumatra. Bali, however, remains overwhelmingly Hindu. In the eastern archipelago, both Christian and Islamic proselytizing took place in the 16th and 17th centuries, and, currently, there are large communities of both religions on these islands.
Beginning in 1602, the Dutch slowly established themselves as rulers of present-day Indonesia, exploiting the weakness of the small kingdoms that had replaced that of Majapahit. The only exception was East Timor, which remained under Portugal until 1975. During 300 years of Dutch rule, the Dutch developed the Netherlands East Indies into one of the world's richest colonial possessions.
Although palm oil, sugar, cinchona (the source of quinine, used in treating malaria), cocoa, tea, coffee, and tobacco were major revenue earners, they were eclipsed during the early twentieth century by rubber and, especially, petroleum. Sumatra and the eastern archipelago surpassed Java as a source of tropical exports, although sugarcane remained important in East Java.
Rubber plantations were established on a large scale in the early twentieth century, particularly around Medan, Palembang, and Jambi on Sumatra, with British, American, French, and other foreign investment playing a major role. A high-yield variety of rubber tree, discovered in Brazil and proven very profitable in Malaya, was utilized. It was during this period that the emergence of small-holder rubber cultivation, which was to play a major role in the Indonesian economy, took place.
Tin had long been a major mineral product of the archipelago, especially on the islands of Bangka and Billiton, off the southeast coast of Sumatra. But petroleum was, and remained, Indonesia's most important mineral resource. Oil, extracted from Sumatra after 1884, was first used to light lamps. In 1890, the Royal Dutch Company for Exploration of Petroleum Sources in the Netherlands Indies (Koninklijke Nederlandsche Maatschappij tot Exploitatie van Petroleum-bronnen in Nederlandsche-Indië) was established, and in 1907 it merged with Shell Transport and Trading Company, a British concern, to become Royal Dutch Shell, which controlled around 85 percent of oil production in the islands before World War II. Oil was pumped from wells in Sumatra, Java, and eastern Kalimantan.
Rapid economic development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries profoundly changed the lives of both European residents and indigenous peoples. By 1930 Batavia had a population of more than 500,000 people. Surabaya had nearly 300,000 people and other large cities--Semarang, Bandung, Yogyakarta, and Surakarta-- had populations between 100,000 and 300,000.
Always conscious of its ethnic and cultural diversity, Indonesian society grew more so as the number of Dutch and other Western residents--especially white women--increased and chose to live European-style lives in special urban areas with wide streets or on plantations. There also were increasing numbers of Indonesians who lived in these Western-style urban areas. Nevertheless, the European trekkers, as they were known in Dutch, were often not much different from their British counterparts described by George Orwell in Burmese Days, longing for the home country and looking on the native world around them with suspicion and hostility. An early twentieth century work described Batavia's European quarter as "well planned, it is kept scrupulously clean, and while the natives in their bright colored clothes, quietly making their way hither and thither, give the required picturesque touch to the life in the streets, the absence of the crowded native dwelling houses prevents the occurrence of those objectionable features which so often destroy the charm of the towns in the Orient."
How did the liberal and tolerant Dutch treat their Indonesian subjects?
In 1918, an advisory council or Volksraad (Peoples Council) was established. It was partially elected, partially appointed. Half of the seats went to Indonesians, of which several were appointed by the government. Although the government did appoint members of several nationalist parties, the recipients were often discredited by being appointed.40a
Instead of lessening agitation, the Volksraad actually stiffened nationalist sentiments because any effort to achieve genuine progress through it was frustrated. Either the European and Indo-European elements, who together formed a majority voted against bills advocating improvements, or the colonial administration ignored the advice given.
Regardless of the Volksraad, the colonial Government remained oppressive. There was a separation between "Herrenvolk" and natives, based on confusing race theories, while at the same time the government did recognise Eurasians as being legally equal to Europeans.4l But as the economy was concentrated in the hands of a few and the government closely tied-in, the result was a type of of "corporate state" based on a capitalist system of exploitation. The Governor-General ruled through "Governor-in-Council" acts. There was no real internal policy making and the principle of trias politica was never recognised.42 Instead, the Colonial Government employed another trinity: the General Prosecutor, the Perintah Alus (Secret Police), and Boven-Digul, a political concentration camp in the swamps of New Guinea. Fascism was popular among the Dutch in Indonesia and in the thirties the Nationaal Socialistische Beweging (National Socialist Movement), the Dutch branch of the Nazi organisation, had many supporters in the colony.
Education catered to the élite only. Indonesians could attend High School if they could speak Dutch and if they could afford the high fees.The result was that only the sons and daughters of wealthy Indonesians received any education beyond elementary school. The Dutch schools ignored, or down-played, the importance of the Indonesian culture. As 1ate as 1940, ninety-three percent of the population was illiterate and in that same year 240 Indonesians, out of a population of seventy million, graduated from High School. Only 630 Indonesians were enrolled in universities.43
Indonesia under Dutch rule was a police state. Terror was kept in check because ultimately there was always the Parliament in Holland, which although it failed to carry out its democratic responsibilities toward the Indonesian, people, at least did not tolerate a terror regime. It failed, however, dismally in democratising the Colonial Government. Until World War II, there were no local ministers, only directors of departments, appointed or dismissed by the Governor-General at will. The Governor-General was appointed by the Colonial Minister in the mother country, and the Colonial Minister was most of the time a member of the conservative alliance in the Dutch Parliament.44
The relationships between the Europeans and the Indonesians worsened after World War I. Before, Dutchmen and other Europeans came to Indonesia for relatively long periods of time. Many Europeans in Indonesia before World War I, were born and educated in Indonesia. They understood the local population to a certain degree and often spoke the local tongue. As the ties with the mother country weakened, these people began to identity more and more with the Indonesian society. As a result they were interested in such.things as an Indonesian rather than a Dutch citizenship.
Between 1920 and 1930, however, there was a great influx of Dutchmen who did not settle for long periods but who only came to the colony to serve their term, make money, get their pensions, and return home. These ''trekkers" as they were called, were not interested in colonial politics, but simply demanded from the government that it keep Indonesia safe for them and their jobs and suppress all political activity that might endanger European enterprises.45 They understood little of the aspirations of the local population. As entrepreneurs they wanted the Colonial Government to expand the infrastructure and raise taxes to pay for it, and nationalist or other agitation was not to interfere with that. They claimed that the infrastructure benefited the local population as well and that the Indonesian radicals were therefore working against the interests of their own people.46 The "trekkers" were blatantly racist and followed a strict colour-line, which in turn stiffened Indonesian opposition.47
This paradise in the sun would be upended by the Japanese, who had their own plans for the oil and the region.
The Japanese occupied the archipelago in order, like their Portuguese and Dutch predecessors, to secure its rich natural resources. Japan's invasion of North China, which had begun in July 1937, by the end of the decade had become bogged down in the face of stubborn Chinese resistance. To feed Japan's war machine, large amounts of petroleum, scrap iron, and other raw materials had to be imported from foreign sources. Most oil--about 55 percent--came from the United States, but Indonesia supplied a critical 25 percent.
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Although their motives were largely acquisitive, the Japanese justified their occupation in terms of Japan's role as, in the words of a 1942 slogan, "The leader of Asia, the protector of Asia, the light of Asia." Tokyo's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, encompassing both Northeast and Southeast Asia, with Japan as the focal point, was to be a nonexploitative economic and cultural community of Asians. Given Indonesian resentment of Dutch rule, this approach was appealing and harmonized remarkably well with local legends that a two-century-long non-Javanese rule would be followed by era of peace and prosperity.
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The occupation was not gentle. Japanese troops often acted harshly against local populations. The Japanese military police were especially feared. Food and other vital necessities were confiscated by the occupiers, causing widespread misery and starvation by the end of the war. The worst abuse, however, was the forced mobilization of some 4 million--although some estimates are as high as 10 million--romusha (manual laborers), most of whom were put to work on economic development and defense construction projects in Java. About 270,000 romusha were sent to the Outer Islands and Japanese-held territories in Southeast Asia, where they joined other Asians in performing wartime construction projects. At the end of the war, only 52,000 were repatriated to Java.
The Japanese occupation was a watershed in Indonesian history. It shattered the myth of Dutch superiority, as Batavia gave up its empire without a fight. There was little resistance as Japanese forces fanned out through the islands to occupy former centers of Dutch power. The relatively tolerant policies of the Sixteenth Army on Java also confirmed the island's leading role in Indonesian national life after 1945: Java was far more developed politically and militarily than the other islands. In addition, there were profound cultural implications from the Japanese invasion of Java. In administration, business, and cultural life, the Dutch language was discarded in favor of Malay and Japanese. Committees were organized to standardize Bahasa Indonesia and make it a truly national language. Modern Indonesian literature, which got its start with language unification efforts in 1928 and underwent considerable development before the war, received further impetus under Japanese auspices. Revolutionary (or traditional) Indonesian themes were employed in drama, films, and art, and hated symbols of Dutch imperial control were swept away. For example, the Japanese allowed a huge rally in Batavia (renamed Jakarta) to celebrate by tearing down a statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the seventeenthcentury governor general. Although the occupiers propagated the message of Japanese leadership of Asia, they did not attempt, as they did in their Korean colony, to coercively promote Japanese culture on a large scale. According to historian Anthony Reid, the occupiers believed that Indonesians, as fellow Asians, were essentially like themselves but had been corrupted by three centuries of Western colonialism. What was needed was a dose of Japanese-style seishin (spirit; semangat in Indonesian). Many members of the elite responded positively to an inculcation of samurai values.
The most significant legacy of the occupation, however, was the opportunities it gave for Javanese and other Indonesians to participate in politics, administration, and the military. Soon after the Dutch surrender, European officials, businessmen, military personnel, and others, totaling around 170,000, were interned (the harsh conditions of their confinement caused a high death rate, at least in camps for male military prisoners, which embittered Dutch-Japanese relations even in the early 1990s). While Japanese military officers occupied the highest posts, the personnel vacuum on the lower levels was filled with Indonesians. Like the Dutch, however, the Japanese relied on local indigenous elites, such as the priyayi on Java and the Acehnese uleebalang, to administer the countryside. Because of the harshly exploitative Japanese policies in the closing years of the war, after the Japanese surrender collaborators in some areas were killed in a wave of local resentment.
Sukarno and Hatta agreed in 1942 to cooperate with the Japanese, as this seemed to be the best opportunity to secure independence. The occupiers were particularly impressed by Sukarno's mass following, and he became increasingly valuable to them as the need to mobilize the population for the war effort grew between 1943 and 1945. His reputation, however, was tarnished by his role in recruiting romusha.
Japanese attempts to coopt Muslims met with limited success. Muslim leaders opposed the practice of bowing toward the emperor (a divine ruler in Japanese official mythology) in Tokyo as a form of idolatry and refused to declare Japan's war against the Allies a "holy war" because both sides were nonbelievers. In October 1943, however, the Japanese organized the Consultative Council of Indonesian Muslims (Masyumi), designed to create a united front of orthodox and modernist believers. Nahdatul Ulama was given a prominent role in Masyumi, as were a large number of kyai (religious leaders), whom the Dutch had largely ignored, who were brought to Jakarta for training and indoctrination.
As the fortunes of war turned, the occupiers began organizing Indonesians into military and paramilitary units whose numbers were added by the Japanese to romusha statistics. These included the heiho (auxiliaries), paramilitary units recruited by the Japanese in mid-1943, and the Defenders of the Fatherland (Peta) in 1943. Peta was a military force designed to assist the Japanese forces by forestalling the initial Allied invasion. By the end of the war, it had 37,000 men in Java and 20,000 in Sumatra (where it was commonly known by the Japanese name Giyugun). In December 1944, a Muslim armed force, the Army of God, or Barisan Hizbullah, was attached to Masyumi
The United Nations Operation in the Congo (Opération des Nations Unies au Congo, or ONUC), which took place in the Republic of the Congo from July 1960 until June 1964, marked a milestone in the history of United Nations peacekeeping in terms of the responsibilities it had to assume, the size of its area of operation and the manpower involved. It included, in addition to a peacekeeping force which comprised at its peak strength nearly 20,000 officers and men, an important Civilian Operations component. Originally mandated to provide the Congolese Government with the military and technical assistance it required following the collapse of many essential services and the military intervention by Belgian troops, ONUC became embroiled by the force of circumstances in a chaotic internal situation of extreme complexity and had to assume certain responsibilities which went beyond normal peacekeeping duties.
1. Establishment of ONUC
The Republic of the Congo, a former Belgian colony, became independent on 30 June 1960. In the days that followed, disorder broke out, and Belgium sent its troops to the Congo, without the agreement of the Congolese Government, for the declared purpose of restoring law and order and protecting Belgian nationals.
On 12 July 1960, the Congolese Government asked for United Nations military assistance to protect the national territory of the Congo against external aggression. Two days later, the Security Council called upon Belgium to withdraw its troops from the Congo and authorized military assistance as might be necessary until, through the efforts of the Government with the technical assistance of the United Nations, the national security forces might be able, in the Government's opinion, to meet their tasks fully. [The Council resolution was adopted by 8 votes in favour (including the Soviet Union and the United States) to none against, with three abstentions.]
In less than 48 hours, contingents of a United Nations Force, provided by a number of countries including Asian and African States began to arrive in the Congo. At the same time, United Nations civilian experts were rushed to the Congo to help ensure the continued operations of essential public services.
2. Operations
Over the next four years, the task of the United Nations Operations in the Congo was to help the Congolese Government restore and maintain the political independence and territorial integrity of the Congo; to help it maintain law and order throughout the country; and to put into effect a wide and long-range programme of training and technical assistance.
To meet the vast and complex task before it, the United Nations had to assemble a very large team. At its peak strength, the United Nations Force totalled nearly 20,000 officers and men. The instructions of the Security Council to this Force were strengthened early in 1961 after the assassination in Katanga province of former Prime Minster Patrice Lumumba. The Force was to protect the Congo from outside interference, particularly by evacuating foreign mercenaries, and advisers from Katanga and preventing clashes and civil strife, by force if necessary as a last resort.
Following the reconvening of Parliament in August 1961 under United Nations auspices, the main problem was the attempted secession, led and financed by foreign elements, of the province of Katanga. In September and December 1961, and again in December 1962, the secessionist gendarmes under the command of foreign mercenaries clashed with the United Nations Force. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld lost his life on 17 September 1961 in the crash of his airplane on the way to Ndola (in what is now Zambia) where talks were to be held for the cessation of hostilities.
3. Termination of ONUC
In February 1963, after Katanga had been reintegrated into the national territory of the Congo, a phasing out of the Force was begun, aimed at its termination by the end of that year. At the request of the Congolese Government, however, the General Assembly authorized the stay of a reduced number of troops for a further six months. The Force was completely withdrawn by 30 June 1964.
Although the military phase of the United Nations Operation in the Congo had ended, civilian aid continued in the largest single programme of assistance undertaken until that time by the world Organization and its agencies, with some 2,000 experts at work in the nation at the peak of the programme in 1963-1964.
The UN was forced to deploy a sizable army to contain the situation which the Belgians didn't only abandoned, but created. They were the ones who had built up these tribal antagonism and refused to provide an infrastructure for a state. They were thinking along the lines of some kind of self-development in 1980, which was a denial of reality which amazing.
The Katanganese were being "aided" by the South Africans, racist Senators in the US and European businesses. Everyone wanted the resources and damn the dead locals. Of course, the rage that those locals felt about a century of Belgian colonialism was vastly underestimated. The Belgians liked a disunited Congo, and pretty much fled the country in a pique in 1960. It took no time for the country to turn into a charnel house.
Why has Belgium never been held accountable for what basically has set the stage for 40 years of war and murder? Why do Belgians feel free to criticize the US over social policy? This is literally a black hole in Belgian history. And the Belgians are hardly alone. We're going to take a look at the Dutch, next (Iraq is at the end of the story, sorry). Because their equally selfish administration created a series of problems there.
Europeans have managed to ignore their colonial past and grow peeved when their former subjects want to live in the home country. Even when you raise the subject, they grow outraged that you bring up the subject. European amnesia about colonialism is so complete that Niall Fergusson can write a book on colonialism equal to Holocaust denial and no one calls it such. Max Boot can talk about "small" wars with no context.
The cost of colonialism is seen every day in AIDS, in wars, in pollution. Yet, few Europeans can or will come to terms with their own bloody histories. It is far easier to point to the Russians or US and decry present evil than to admit the horrors of their pasts.
Why?
The legacy of Hitler.
Hitler was the greatest gift to European moral conscience that has ever existed. Even Stalin's murders and forced deportations pale in comparison to the mass murders which Hitler did. Hitler prevents any real examination of the crimes of Europe in the Third World. After all, the Holocaust is the nadir of human conduct. Even the Gulag wasn't designed to make money off of murdered corpses. Hitler shamed us all and showed exactly how far humans could go.
However, Hitler's evil was so great that even Stalin got a pass. His murders were either hidden or justified by people who should have known better. Both in the US and Europe. The idea that colonialism was a big, fat step on the road to Auschwitz goes unnoticed by Europeans. If they are inclined, they may look back to the Armenian Massacre of 1915, but the ongoing death camp of the Congo Free State and the concentration camps of Namibia remain lost to history. Everything Hitler did to the Poles and Jews in 1942, Gen. Lothar von Trotta did to the Hottenttot and Herero in 1904. No, he didn't turn them into ash, but he sure did build concentration camps and starve them to death. Collective punishment? You bet. Auschwitz was the last step in a chain of human cruelty, not the first. And it didn't start with the Nuremburg Laws. It started with people no one noticed or knew or much cared about, savages. It only dawned on Europeans the evils of colonies when Hitler turned their countries into colonies of Germany. All of the techniques used by the Nazis, forced labor, theft of resources, stealing land, well, it began in Africa and Asia. Hitler just did them to Europeans. Who reacted like the colonized, they fought him tooth and nail. Hitler played divide and conquer as well. Pitting ethinicities against each other, recruiting locals to do their dirty work, taking side in local politics.
In a bit of irony, it was the colonies which provided the Europeans a base to oppose Hitler's imperial plans. Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Bermuda, Canada, all were integral to the war against Hitler. Jamaicans and Australians flew side by side in Lancasters over Germany. Canadians landed on Juno Beach and Canadian officers led Indians in Burma. Algerians and Senegalese liberated Paris. Filipinos led the liberation of their country.
But Europeans have never, to this day, truly faced the bloody legacy of empire building. This doesn't mean Americans have either. But when you hear Europeans exclaim wonder and anazement at US attitude towards Iraq, how many know what Belgians thought about the Congolese or British thought about Kenyans or Malaysians? They were equally as complicit and silent, only a few lonely voices rejecting the horrors of colonialism. Why should Americans be any better or different?
Between now and January, the Bush administration will have to decide whether or not to take the last dignified exit from Iraq. That is, to announce before the Iraqi elections that we will be leaving soon after them. If Bush and his neocon handlers miss this opportunity, our only choice will be to remain in Iraq until we are driven out in a humiliating defeat. Like the kid who knows he has to eat his spinach, we will be better off pretending to choose the inevitable.
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We may, of course, officially deny any role in a strike on Iran, leaving Mr. Sharon to take full credit. But Iran, which expects such an attack and has prepared for it, already has said it will hold the U.S. as accountable as Israel.
Knowing nothing about war, the neocons probably expect any Iranian response to be symmetrical: an air and missile counterstrike. But Iran cannot do much that way, and surely knows it. Why shoot a few ineffective missiles at Israel when you have two juicy targets right next door, in the form of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq?
An Iranian riposte in Afghanistan probably would come slowly, in the form of a guerilla war in that country's Shi'ite regions. That might also be Iran's response in Iraq, where it already has Revolutionary Guard troops in Shi'ite areas. But there is another possibility. Under the cover of bad weather, which winter often provides, Iran could strike suddenly into Iraq with several armored divisions. Our forces are scattered throughout Iraq, and they cannot mass rapidly because Iraqi guerillas control the roads. With skill that is not beyond what Iran might manage (the Iranian army is better than Saddam's was) and a bit of luck, they could roll us up before American airpower could get the clear weather it needs to be effective. America would not only lose a war in Iraq; it would lose an army.
At that point the analogy I have suggested from the outset would have come to full fruition: Athens' Syracuse expedition. Like the Syracuse expedition, a victory in Iraq would have given America little in the war against its real enemies, Islamic non-state forces. But a defeat that resulted in the loss of an entire army would be a catastrophe.
Unfortunately, the only Syracuse expedition most neocons will know about was a college road trip to some school in upstate New York. Take it from me, guys: the hangover this time could be a whole lot worse.
What he's talking about is a repeat of the Chinese intervention of 1950, a scenario I have raised for months. He uses Syracuse, but the spectre he's creating is one of Chosin.
(On the night of November) 28, 6 Chinese divisions attacked the 1st Marines in the area of the Chosin Reservoir. However hard the Marines might fight, they were outnumbered 6-1 or more. The Chinese attacked both at the head of the American lines and 35 miles behind. The Marines thus were forced to fight their way southward and towards the coast. The Marines first fought their way to Hawkawoo-ri, at the south end of the reservoir. Casualties were very heavy, but the battle did not end there. The troops then had to fight their way south. (Marine Gen.) Smith stated: "Gentlemen, we are not retreating, we are merely attacking in another direction." It took the Marines 13 days of heavy fighting to reach the coast. There. they and tens of thousands of North Korean civilians were evacuated to the coast.
I worry less about a destruction of the US Army than a brutal fighting retreat to Kuwait and Turkey. The scale of the disaster would dwarf Chosin because of the loss of billions of modern equipment. The policy defeat would be catastrophic as well. The Europeans clearly would be the dominant power in the Middle East for at least a decade.
a product of british colonialism: Mohandas K. Ghandi
a product of belgian colonialism: Mobutu Sese Seko, kleptocrat
As you can see, there's an ongoing mini-seminar on colonial warfare going on here. There's a lot of ground to cover, so it may go on for a while, but let me recap some of the ideas posted so far.
1) Colonial Warfare is a losing proposition
There are a never ending series of wars which comes with colonies, because people dislike being subjected to the rule of strangers
2) Colonial Warfare rarely brings about the benefits attributed to it.
Unless you can enslave people, the benefits of colonies are rarely seen
3) The rulers rely on the disunity of the ruled.
It is in their interest to keep the ruled at each other's throats and to prefer one group to another. Ethnic strife is the colonial ruler's best friend. They start out picking sides and then divide and conquer.
4) Disorder is the friend of colonial rulers
The more strife they can suppress, the more power they will ultimately have.
5) You have to kill a lot of people to rule a colony
The only way to have a colony is to indiscriminately kill everyone who might oppose you.
When we resume with our history of the Belgian Congo, I will explain how Belgian misrule led to a never-ending crisis in the country. The colonial era set the pattern for future rule, usually misrule.
George Will's column this week is unusually unreflective. I don't often agree with Will, but he is usually a bright and well-informed columnist on the Reaganaut Right. He knows enough to castigate Justice Scalia for saying that Darwinian evolution is "only a theory" (a theory is a robust explanation well grounded in the evidence); and he knows that the Iraq war has been a disaster from beginning to end.
So it is surprising to see him parroting the ridiculous and pernicious line about major universities having few political conservatives in them.
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Exhibit A is William J. Bennet. Bennett has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Texas. If he had been a man of the left, he would be teaching that subject at some small liberal arts college for $70,000 a year. Because he was on the Right, he had an entree to the Reagan administration, and rose to become Secretary of Education and then drug czar.
The vast opportunities open to an intellectual on the Right can be seen in Bennett's career. It is often forgotten that he deserted public service as drug czar after only about a year, leaving all of his commitments unfulfilled. He was able to land at Joe Coors's and Richard Mellon Scaife's so-called American Heritage Foundation. Bennett's opportunities were so many and so lucrative that the hard work of public service, and the ethics rules requiring careful reporting of income, seemed increasingly unappealing. The opportunities are so enormous, if one is willing to oppose affirmative action and support increasing inequality of wealth and bash unions, that it is even hard to keep such persons in high-profile, remunerative public service positions on the Right. They are sucked out of them by the corporate vacuum cleaner.
The next time we meet Bennett, he has somehow made so much money that he can drop $6 million in Las Vegas casinos in a single year (he says he won as much as he lost, which, if true, means he probably cheats). This level of gambling makes him a "whale" in casino terms, given all sorts of perquisites. That is a very different life than teaching in a small liberal arts college, having spent one's youth making in the $20,000s and $30,000s a year (that would have been true of Bennett's generation of academics). And the price of admission to all those riches? Say things like that "homosexuals" have an average lifespan of 42 years, or public education should be privatized, and blame poor people for being poor because they are lazy and immoral and gamble too much.
So, Mr. Will, it is the "pull" factor that explains your conundrum. Liberal academics aren't viciously excluding conservative intellectuals who apply to teach hundreds of students a week for $45,000 a year (nowaday's entry-level salary at a good liberal arts college), after they paid $100,000 for a Ph.D. in English literature from a top-rate university and spent 8 or 9 years beyond the BA toiling away as graduate students on tiny stipends. Conservative intellectuals don't have to put up with that kind of thing (that is how they think of the privilege of teaching). They have other opportunities. They can be whales, and can pontificate on morality to the great unwashed.
As for Wills's argument that academia "has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies." Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations -- except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. " -- it is another instance of blaming the victim.
Academia has not marginalized itself. It has been marginalized. Perfectly reasonable beliefs such as that workers should have a right to explore unionizing without fear of being fired have been redefined by Joe Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife as "out of the mainstream." Thinking that it was a bad idea to invade Iraq (as I said repeatedly in 2002 and early in 2003, even as I admitted Saddam's atrocities) was defined as out of the mainstream and unpatriotic. Corporate media bring in a parade of so-called "experts" (often lacking credentials and saying ridiculous things) from "think tanks," in Washington and New York instead of letting academics speak. (There are some exceptions, obviously, but I am talking about over-all numbers). Wouldn't you like to hear about Ayman al-Zawahiri from someone who actually had read him in Arabic? The universities have such experts. The think tanks mostly just have smelly little orthodoxies of the Right.
CHARD DUWAISH, Iraq, Nov. 28 - As marines aboard fast patrol boats roared up the Euphrates on a dawn raid on Sunday, images pressed in of another American war where troops moved up wide rivers on camouflaged boats, with machine-gunners nervously scanning riverbanks for the hidden enemy.
That war is rarely mentioned among the American troops in Iraq, many of whom were not yet born when the last American combat units withdrew from Vietnam more than 30 years ago. A war that America did not win is considered a bad talisman among those men and women, who privately admit to fears that this war could be lost.
But as an orange moon sank below the bulrushes on Sunday morning, thoughts of Vietnam were hard to avoid.
Marines waded ashore through soft silted mud that caused some to sink to their waists, M-16 rifles held skyward as others on solid land held out their rifle barrels as lifelines.
Ashore, sodden and with boots squelching mud, the troops began a five-hour tramp through dense palm groves and across paddies crisscrossed by deep irrigation canals.
There were snatches of dialogue from "Apocalypse Now," and a black joke from one marine about the landscape resembling "a Vietnam theme park."
But behind the joshing lay something more serious: the sense expressed by many of the Americans as they scoured the area that in this war, too, the insurgents might have advantages that could make them a match for highly trained troops, technological gadgetry and multibillion-dollar war budgets.
The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit conducted the river raid as part of a weeklong offensive billed as a sequel to the battle for Falluja, less than 20 miles upriver from the village where the marines landed Sunday.
The 40-foot river craft they used are called Surcs, for Small Unit Riverine Craft, a high-tech update on the Swift boats used in Vietnam. The craft were flown into Iraq aboard giant C-5 transport aircraft and were first deployed with five-man crews during the battle for Falluja this month, patrolling the stretch of the Euphrates that runs along the city's western edge to prevent attempts by insurgents to escape that way after American troops had thrown a cordon around the city.
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As in so much else about the American venture in Iraq, cultural differences played their part. At one point, Lieutenant Duarte bridled when some of the Iraqis resisted his repeated urging that they spread out along the line, preferring to cluster together, ineffectively, at one end. A Marine sergeant told him that the Iraqis were officers and did not feel that they should be asked to work side by side with common soldiers.
One of the Iraqi officers, asked if he spoke English, replied snappily, "English no good. Arabic good. Iraq good." The message seemed clear.
Actually, they're updated versions of the PBR's used in Vietnam, not Swift Boats, which were ocean going craft.
Patrol Boat River (PBR)
It just seems like Vietnam, with the patrol boats and sullen allies and all. There isn't anything like the close air support the Black Ponies (VAL-4) and Seawolves(HAL-3) provided
OV-10 Bronco flown by light attack squadron (VAL-4) Black Ponies
UH-1 Huey flown by (HAL-3) Seawolves
Nope, all those low and slow aircraft would be blown from the sky today. So the Marines have to have to rely on artillery and high flying gunships. Which takes away an advantage that the US had in Vietnam, near instantaneous air support from a variety of platforms. And of course, there are no dedicated riverine forces to deal with the river. Only a few boats and some suillen Iraqis who are as likely as not to lead them into an ambush.
What people who support the war don't get is how much worse this than Vietnam. NO reliable allies, an allied military shot through with enemy agents, no support from the locals, no intelligence, and a lack of manuever battalions. In that way, Iraq is nothing like Vietnam.
The collapse of Beligian Rule in the Congo would turn into an international crisis within days of the handover.
Independence for Congo followed a strange course of events unlike anything else in the rest of Africa. The Belgian Congo was huge and underdeveloped. After the war, new cultural organisations like ABAKO, Association des Bakongo and the Lulua-Freres, emerged in the 1950's.
But it was the attitude of the Belgians which bred a new political consciousness in the 1950's. In the first place, the Belgians like the Portuguese, were resolutely untouched by the drive towards independence in the early 1950's. De-colonisation was first discussed in 1956, but seen as something that would happen thirty years into the future.
On the eve of independence, the Congo, a territory larger than Western Europe, bordering on nine other African colonies/states, was seriously underdeveloped. There were no African army officers, only three African managers in the entire civil service, and only 30 university graduates. Yet Western investments in Congo's mineral resources (copper, gold, tin, cobalt, diamonds, manganese, zinc) were colossal. And these investments meant that the West was determined to keep control over the country beyond independence.
Handover
Following widespread rioting in 1959, the Belgians to the surprise of all the nationalist leaders said elections for independence could go ahead in May 1960. This in itself caused confusion and a rush to form parties. In the event 120 different parties took part, most of them regionally based. Only one, Mouvement National Congolais or the MNC, led by Patrice Lumumba , favoured a centralised government and had support in four of six provinces.
The actual independence day was a mixture of huge excitement and bad temper on the part of the former colonial power. King Baudouin of Belgian made a patronising speech; and Patrice Lumumba's speech was spirited.
Listen to Patrice Lumumba's announcing Belgian Congo's independence followed by an Independence cha-cha-cha
Within days things fell apart. The army mutinied against Belgian officers. The main mining area, Katanga, declared itself a separate state under Moise Tshombe, but with strategic support and encouragement from Belgian mining interests. Belgian troops then intervened unasked; Lumumba invited UN peacekeeping forces to help but they steered clear of fighting Tshombe's Katanga regime.
No country was less prepared for independence and none reacted as badly to it. And the Belgians were simply unable to comprehend an independent Congo.
Yet, as late as 1959, Belgian officials dismissed any talk of independence for the Congo as wildly unrealistic fantasies. An advisory commission (made up entirely of learned, government-appointed Belgians) felt that a strictly limited form of Congolese self-government would possible in thirty years at the earliest. The commission conceded that local and municipal elections might be appropriate somewhat sooner, but it carefully refrained from setting dates. Unfortunately, what were major concessions in Brussels were already too little, too late in Léopoldville, Luluabourg, and Stanleyville. The Congolese had had enough.
Ten days after the Congo commission delivered its conclusions to the Belgian government, but before the report could be published, Léopoldville exploded. When police banned a gathering of the Alliance de Ba-Kongo (ABAKO), a tribal cultural society cum political party with widespread support in the capital, three days of rioting ensued. Fifty Africans died, 250 were wounded, and, most ominous of all in Belgian eyes, fifty Europeans were injured. A deeply divided Belgian cabinet hastily announced that it would adopt the advisory commission's recommendations. It vaguely hinted that independence was Belgium's long-term goal for the Congo. But it did nothing to alter the behavior of the colonial administration, set no time tables, and made no start at organizing an orderly transition of power.
As a result, the "concessions" only inflamed passions in the Congo. While politicians in Brussels debated over the wisdom of the over-cautious steps they had just taken and wondered how they might get out of their commitments, Joseph Kasavubu, the conservative, nationalist leader of ABAKO, angrily rejected the entire government proposal. He demanded nothing less than immediate, unconditional independence. A broad spectrum of the country's hitherto tentative and splintered political parties coalesced around Kasavubu's position. Belgium was stunned, completely at a loss. That the Congolese might reject Belgian largesse had never occurred to the ministers and deputies gathered in Brussels. As rioting spread to other cities, the colonial administration began to disintegrate. The Belgian police found themselves unable to control events. The territorial army or Force Publique proved unreliable. In Belgium itself, popular opinion barred any intervention from the home land. The unions and the socialist parties rallied round the slogan, "not one soldier for the Congo," while cautious government ministers agreed that no one wanted a huge and costly war of attrition like that being fought in French Algeria.
Faced with this crisis, the government in Brussels reacted with typical decisiveness: it convened another conference to study the matter further. This time, though, it invited various Congolese leaders and foreign representatives to a meeting at Brussels, in January 1960. Belgium probably hoped that lengthy negotiations would let it exploit the ethnic divisions and individual rivalries that had always splintered the African opposition in the past. But the strategy backfired badly. Ably led by Patrice Lamumba, a charismatic leftwing politician from eastern Congo, the Congolese delegation maintained a militantly united front from the first. It never strayed from the fundamental demand expressed in Kasavubu's manifesto: immediate severance of all ties with Belgium. Faced with such unanimity and with little effective opposition from the ill-prepared Belgian delegation, the international conference recommended unconditional independence for the Congo, effective in six months.
Belgium's oppressive colonial policy now came back to haunt it. No elections had ever been held in the Congo. There were no experienced Congolese administrators or civil servants. The entire nation of 14 million people had only 16 university graduates and 136 high-school graduates. There were no native doctors, teachers, or army officers. This would have been bad enough had there been a well-organized, unified political front to take over from the colonial authorities. But political parties had been banned until 1959, and no broad, ideologically based political organizations existed. Tribal hatreds fostered by years of Belgian policy and by the corruption endemic in the administration created a fractured, suspicious polity. Congolese political parties were thus almost entirely based on ethnic and regional loyalties. There were hundreds of tribal and cultural associations led by naive and ambitious local strongmen. Kasavubu's ABAKO drew its support all but entirely from the Ba-Kongo ethnic group. It worked not for a united modern republic, but for a revival of the sixteenth-century Kingdom of Kongo that had once stretched across lower Congo and northern Angola, where many Ba-Kongos still lived. CONAKAT, founded by Moise Tshombe, was the party of the "true Katangans," southerners who opposed incursions by other ethnic groups into northern Katanga province. BALUBAKAT represented the interests of the rival Baluba ethnic group in south Kasai and north Katanga. Only Patrice Lamumba's large Movement Nationale Congolese (MNC) made any serious effort at recruiting members without regard to tribal affiliation. Even so, it drew most of its support from the tribal groups of eastern Orientale and Kivu provinces. Lacking any experience of government and any real sense of nationhood, the leaders of these associations saw political power as a way of advancing tribal interests and personal prestige.
Faced with insurmountable obstacles of its own making and with independence only months away, Belgium simply gave up. The colonial administration did nothing to smooth the transition. It let the Congo slide rapidly into anarchy and barbarism. When its rightwing white commander, Gen. Emile Janssens, announced that independence would have no immediate effect in the Force Publique and that no African officers would be commissioned in the near future, troops mutinied. Units brought in to restore order joined the mutineers, attacked their officers, and turned on the officers' families. Ill-trained and inexperienced Congolese sergeants could not maintain discipline in such circumstances, even when they wished to. Gangs of armed, uniformed troops looted shops, raped women in their homes, and indiscriminately beat and terrorized Europeans in the street. Léopoldville's European population fled en masse across the river to relative safety in Brazzaville. Non-African inhabitants of the interior found themselves under siege. Some were murdered or raped, and many more were robbed and beaten. Nor did the hated "whites" have a monopoly on suffering. In the mounting chaos, many old scores and newborn resentments were settled with machetes, spears, and the rifles and machine guns of mutinous soldiers. In Kasai province, genocidal warfare raged between Baluba and Lulua tribesmen, while well-armed "true"-Katangan paramilitary units systematically massacred Balubas in north Katanga.
This disaster was the result of a Belgian policy of paternalism. While the British and the French cultivated a civil service class in their colonies, the Belgians didn't. They wanted children and that left the resource rich country in utter turmoil. Unlike in India, where there was a leadership of trained lawyers and politicians ready to assume power, the Congo had anger, but no one to run the country. The Belgians had no intent on ever letting the Congolese run their own affairs and liked the factionalism which had kept them in control. Remember, Algerians were not only commissioned in the French Army, but attended the Sorbonne. Indians had attended Oxford and Cambridge, including Ghandi and Nehru. India also had a legacy of both civil and military leadership at the lower levels. There were also Indian pilots and sailors. But in the Belgian Congo, the locals were expected to always need a Belgian master. All intellectual prowess was in Belgian hands. Which would turn into a bloody disaster after independence.
Before we discuss the British in Messapotamia, it would be good to discuss what is widely seen, except in Belgium, as the darkest aspect of colonial history, the creation of the Belgian Congo.
What is so striking is that for the first 30 years of it's history, the Belgian Congo wasn't Belgian. It was the personal property of King Leopold II. One man owned the entire Congo
For almost the entire period of the Congo Free State (1885—1908), the peoples of present-day Congo were subjected to a staggering sequence of wars, repression, and regimentation. The impact of this colonial experience was so devastating, and its aftereffects so disruptive, because the initial shock of European intrusion was followed almost immediately by a ruthless exploitation of human and natural resources. In terms of its psychological impact, the bula matari state left a legacy of latent hostility on which subsequent generations of nationalists were able to capitalize; on the other hand, the sheer brutality of its methods generated a sense of fear and hopelessness, which, initially at least, discouraged the rise of organized nationalist activity.
I.Belgian Paternalism: Underlying Postulates
Reduced to its essentials, Belgian paternalism meant that basic political rights could be withheld indefinitely from Africans as long as their material and spiritual needs were properly met. .......
The darker side of this paternalism was the political control and compulsion underlying Belgian colonial policies. Extensive restrictions affected Africans in their everyday life ranging from prohibition of the purchase of liquor (until 1955) to stringent police surveillance and curfew regulations in the urban centers, and from compulsory crop cultivation to various forms of administrative and social regimentation in the countryside.
II.The Belgian goal
Part of the Belgian goal was to teach Africans to work, not in the "childish" pursuits of their own culture, but in organized, rational routines of productive wage labor in the European manner, for European employers. Such labor was considered to exercise a civilizing influence. A profitable by-product was the provision of cheap labor. The Colonial Charter had declared that no one could be compelled to work, and by 1912 the forced delivery of rubber and other natural products had come to a stop, but until the depression of the 1930s, mining and agricultural companies resorted to recruiting methods little different from forced labor.
The colonial government believed that Africans could be "civilized" through agricultural as well as industrial labor. Agricultural programs began as early as 1917, when the administration first required Africans to raise certain designated crops. The crops most often raised were cotton for export or food crops for towns and mines within the colony, neither of which threatened European interests, nor did either ensure the health and well-being of the indigenous population.
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III.The Apparatus of Control
State, church, and business formed the trinity of powers upon which the royal hegemony rested during most of the colonial era. By virtue of their special relationship with the state, formalized by the 1906 Concordat between the Vatican and Belgium, Catholic missions were the privileged instrument of primary and vocational education for the colony’s people; the operating costs of their educational and missionary activities were almost entirely covered by state subsidies. According to some estimates, the mission establishment had virtually as many personnel as the state and three times as many outposts. The business corporations, involved in plantations and mining, were given virtually a free hand to recruit African labor, to organize food production for the labor camps, and to provide social services for African workers and their families. Both missionary and business interests were given direct access to the state through the appointment of representatives to advisory organs, such as the Government Council in Léopoldville and the Colonial Council in Brussels. The result was a close and, most of the time, mutually supportive relationship between the state on the one hand and the church and business interests on the other.
The colonial state was, of course, the pivotal element in this coalition of interests, because of its unchallenged monopoly of force and highly visible administrative presence. From the time of its creation in 1888 until its dissolution in the wake of the 1960 mutiny, the Force Publique provided the colonial state with a formidable instrument of coercion, whose reputation for brutality was well established. The everyday tasks of administration were mostly performed by a corps of colonial civil servants whose density on the ground was without equivalent elsewhere on the continent. By independence there were some 10,000 European civil servants and officers serving in the Belgian Congo. From the territorial administrators to the district commissioners and provincial governors, the network of colonial functionaries reached out from remote areas of the colony to its administrative nerve center in Léopoldville, where the governor general held court. Except for the 1957 local government reform, the grid of administrative control fashioned by Belgium remained virtually unchanged throughout the colonialera.
Adding to the weight of the European hegemony, a system of native tribunals and local councils was introduced in the 1920s to enlist local chiefs in administration of the colony. Few of the chiefs, however, claimed as much as a glimmer of legitimacy, as most of them acted as the agents of the colonial state. The machinery of African participation in local government was a far cry from the native authority systems established in British colonies, for example. Ultimate control over local affairs always rested with European administrators.
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The Congo Free State was subject to one of the first international human rights campaigns because of the brutal treatment of the inhabitants.
The costs for opening up the country (railroads etc.), pacification and administration were immense. On the other hand, the Belgians (which formed the vast majority of the Congo Free State's white emplotees) found little commerce going on, when they arrived.
The Free State had declared all uncultivated lands state property, a part of which was administrated as state domain, a part of which was given out to private enterprises in form of concessions. A RUBBER TAX was imposed on the native population - they had to collect latex from wild growing rubber lianes and deliver a certain amount of rubber every month. The natives were asked to also plant rubber vines so that future harvests could be secured. RUBBER was the single most important export product of the Congo Free State. In 1903, 47.3 million Franks worth of rubber were exported by the state, which made up for about 90 % of the State's entire exports; the Free State was the world's leading exporter of rubber.
The conditions under which this prosperity was achieved gave rise to criticism; the form in which the rubber was collected was interpreted as both a STATE MONOPOLY virtually excluding commercial competitors and as a form of FORCED LABOUR - the country's jungle was declared state property, and the natives had, in lieu of paying taxation, to collect and deliver natural rubber.
In England the CONGO REFORM ASSOCIATION, presided by E.D. MOREL, vociferously criticized the administration of the Congo Free State. Human rights were systematically abused in the Congo, as the Africans had to regularly deliver certain quotas of rubber, and if they failed to do so, their families were taken hostage; even atrocities (cases of mutilation) were reported. The Africans were not paid appropriate prices for the rubber they delivered.
While the Congo Free State long attempted to describe abuses as singular events, which would be investigated and dealt with, both exaggerated and made-up stories on atrocities in the Congo and their consequences were published by the Anti-Congo Campaign. Writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain held King Leopold II. personally responsible.
The main historical document frequently quoted is the report by British Consul Roger Casement. Britain, at that time, was very critical of the Congo administration, regarding the factual Congolese rubber collecting monopoly a violation of the principle of Free Trade; British merchant houses were eager to secure a share in the Congo basin's lucrative rubber export.
The Congo Free State, due to it's large share in the world rubber production, was a profitable enterprise, in contrast to most colonies in Africa, and the (enforced) use of natives as workforce provided the foundation of that wealth. The campaign against the atrocities, real as well as alleged, in the Congo Free State served not only philanthropist goals; it was supported by Liverpool trade houses keen on gaining a share in the Congolese rubber trade, and by the British foreign office (which in the Boer war of 1899-1902 just had annexed two other lucrative Free States in Africa - Orange Free State and the Transvaal).
Casement, who was later exposed as gay and executed because of his involvement in the 1916 Easter Uprising, wrote a detailed report on the conditions in the Congo.
Life under free state rule was as brutal as the German General Government in Poland
Complaints as to the manner of exacting service are . . frequent . . . If the local official has to go on a sudden journey men are summoned on the instant to paddle his canoe, and a refusal entails imprisonment or a beating. If the Government plantation or the kitchen garden require weeding, a soldier will be sent to call in the women from some of the neighboring towns. . .; to the women suddenly forced to leave their household tasks and to tramp off, hoe in hand, baby on back, with possibly a hungry and angry husband at home, the task is not a welcome one.
I visited two large villages in the interior . . wherein I found that fully half the population now consisted of refugees . . I saw and questioned several groups of these people . . . They went on to declare, when asked why they had fled (their district), that they had endured such ill-treatment at the hands of the government soldiers in their own (district) that life had become intolerable; that nothing had remained for them at home but to be killed for failure to bring in a certain amount of rubber or to die from starvation or exposure in their attempts to satisfy the demands made upon them. . . . I subsequently found other (members of the tribe) who confirmed the truth of the statements made to me.
. . . on the 25th of July (1903) we reached Lukolela, where I spent two days. This district had, when I visited it in 1887, numbered fully 5,000 people; today the population is given, after a careful enumeration, at less than 600. The reasons given me for their decline in numbers were similar to those furnished elsewhere, namely, sleeping-sickness, general ill-health, insufficiency of food, and the methods employed to obtain labor from them by local officials and the exactions levied on them.
At other villages which I visited, I found the tax to consist of baskets, which the inhabitants had to make and deliver weekly as well as, always, a certain amount of foodstuffs. (The natives) were frequently flogged for delay or inability to complete the tally of these baskets, or the weekly supply of food. Several men, including a Chief of one town, showed broad weals across their buttocks, which were evidently recent. One, a lad of 15 o so, removing his cloth, showed several scars across his thighs, which he and others around him said had formed part of a weekly payment for a recent shortage in their supply of food.
. . . A careful investigation of the conditions of native life around (Lake Mantumba) confirmed the truth of the statements made to me--that the great decrease in population, the dirty and ill-kept towns, and the complete absence of goats, sheep, or fowls--once very plentiful in this country--were to be attributed above all else to the continued effort made during many years to compel the natives to work india-rubber. Large bodies of native troops had formerly been quartered in the district, and the punitive measures undertaken to his end had endured for a considerable period. During the course of these operations there had been much loss of life, accompanied, I fear, by a somewhat general mutilation of the dead, as proof that the soldiers had done their duty.
. . . Two cases (of mutilation) came to my actual notice while I was in the lake district. One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of rifles against a tree; the other a young lad of 11 or 12 years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist. . . . I both these cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth, and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber regime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit.
[A sentry in the employ of one of the concessionary private companies] said he had caught and was detaining as prisoners (eleven women) to compel their husbands to bring in the right amount of rubber required of them on the next market day. . . . When I asked what would become of these women if their husbands failed to bring in the right quantity of rubber . . , he said at once that then they would be kept there until their husbands had redeemed them
However, the end of the Congo was even worse than it's creation.
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Monday November 29, 2004
The Guardian
Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.
The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.
Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man's head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.
But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.
The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to "play something sad" while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.
It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.
But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.
The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. "What about Majdanek?" he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.
The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.
Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust".
"Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust," he wrote.
"If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."
Colonial warfare was a bloody affair on both sides, but the colonized usually got the worse for it, even when they had a victory
Surprised and outnumbered, Company C was nearly wiped out during the first few terrible minutes. But a small group of American soldiers, a number of them wounded, were able to secure their rifles and fight back, killing some 250 Filipinos.
Of the company's original complement, 48 were killed or unaccounted for, 22 were wounded, and only 4 were unharmed. The survivors managed to escape to the American garrison in Basey.
Captain Bookmiller, the commander in Basey, sailed immediately for Balangiga with a force of volunteers in a gunboat. They quickly dispatched some bolomen on the shore with a gattling gun and executed twenty more they found hiding in a nearby forest. As the American soldiers were buried, Captain Bookmiller quoted from the Book of Hosea, "They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind."
Thus ended the short-lived policy of benevolent assimilation in Balangiga.
The methods used to repress colonial warfare are well known to Americans.
Hand-to-hand combat ensued as the soldiers clambered up the ladders to get at their rifles. Blood flowed in streams on the floor and dripped through the bamboo floor of the hut. Meyer had left his service pistol in a shelf behind his bunk and he fought his way towards it. Just he was about to reach it he received a crashing blow on the wrist with a club. As he tried to fend off other attacks with his other arm, he received additional cuts in his arms and body. Unable to reach his weapon, Meyer grabbed one of the attackers in a bear hug and both crashed to the floor. Holding on for dear life, Meyer felt that his life's end was near when he suddenly heard a shot beside him.
Corporal Burke who was wriggling about on the floor on his back, kicking wildly at Sanchez and another attacker, managed to find a revolver under a cot pillow. Grimly holding the big .45 in both hands he let loose several shots. Sanchez, shot squarely in the face, catapulted backwards. He shot another attacker who had his weapon raised. Another saw the revolver in the soldier's hands and fled through a window.
The soldiers in the mess tents were one of the first prime targets of the attack. The bolomen burst in screaming and slashing. A bolo made a swishing sound through the air and a chunking sound as it hit the back of Sergeant Martin's neck, which, severed from the body , plopped into his plate of hash. As the soldiers rose up and began fighting with chairs and kitchen utensils, the attackers outside cut the tent ropes, causing the tent to collapse and envelope the struggling men. The natives ran in from all directions to slash with bolos and axes at the forms struggling under the canvas.
Captain Connell was awake and sitting near a window reading his prayer book when the rebels burst into his room. Armed with a stool, he fought bravely for his life. Forced back by the sheer weight of numbers, he leapt from his window into the street and ran. He was soon overtaken and chopped down with bolos. Later in the day, the bolomen came back and chopped off his head and threw it into a fire. Another rebel bit off his ring finger to get his West Point ring.
The survivors of the attack, some 36 men, boarded five barotos at the beach and set off for Basey. The survivors did not reach Basey until early next morning. Forty-seven men of Company C were killed in the assault, 10 severely wounded, 12 slightly wounded and only 5 uninjured. Captain Edwin V. Bookmiller, commander of Company G of the 9th Infantry at Basey, boarded a gunboat with his company and steamed to the site of the massacre. There he found the that dead of Company C had been stripped and many were horribly mutilated.
It was after this incident that Waller issued his "kill and burn" directive. Chafee also instituted harsher policies in the other remaining guerilla stronghold, located in Batangas province in southern Luzon. On November 30, 1901, he sent his best field commander, Brig. Gen. Bell, to take command of the area, directing him to use whatever means necessary to end the rebellion in the area. Similar to Samar, the army burned villages and herded the population of Batangas into the major cities or concentration camps. Noncombatants were forced and restricted into designated zones, where they were ordered to remain as long as fighting continued. All areas outside the camps were labeled "dead zones"and the U.S. Army operated under minimal restraint and pursued the enemy relentlessly. According to Glenn May, "Freed from most of the prohibitions under which they had earlier operated and pressed by Bell to get quick results, many officers and enlisted men appeared to feel that, as long as they were successful, their actions were likely to be condoned. " The water cure as well as other forms of torture were used extensively on captured Filipinos. Death rates soared in the province of Batangas as many civilians perished in the concentration camps. Glenn May estimates that 8,344 people died in Batangas in the short period of January to April 1902.
In a testimony before the U.S. Senate, William Howard Taft denied that U.S. rule in the Philippines was harsh and cruel. He acknowledged "that cruelties have been inflicted; that people have been shot when they ought to not have been; that there have been... individual instances... of torture.. all these things are true." but despite these occasional outrages, Taft asserted that the military and civilian officials did everything in their power to prevent atrocities.
The Filipinos had lost more against the Americans that they did against the Spaniards in the number killed and property lost. Such was the price they paid and would keep on paying in their struggle to be free.
While this is unknown history to Americans, it was a defining moment to Filipinos. The American drive to colonize the Philippines was far bloodier than any of the campaigns in the West. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were murdered to control the islands and that control was tenuous at best.
Colonial War leads to murder and repression as the only valid tools of control. Anything less will be ineffective, and the locals will wait a century to evict you.
When the Portuguese arrived in Africa late in the 15th century, they were the first European colonial power to establish itself on the continent. When they left in 1974, they were among the last to leave. The last fifteen years of this long and unhappy sojourn were marked by unrelenting guerilla warfare throughout the African colonies. Portugal was ruled by a dictatorship that dated back to the 1920s. Faced with monetary, diplomatic, and human costs that no small, relatively poor country could long bear and with the seeming success of France's operations in Algeria before it, Portugal's saw aviation as the key to the preservation of its overseas territories and its claims to a place among the world's first-rate powers.
Portugal was something of an accidental colonial power in Africa. Portuguese sailors first stopped in Africa for water during their great trading voyages to the Orient. They returned for slaves, a traditional feature of the African economy that could be used to fill the labor needs of Portugal's Brazilian plantations. The slaves were supplied by a powerful, native kingdom, Bakongo, in what is now northern Angola and far southwestern Congo. At first, Bakongo could meet the demand by selling prisoners of war it had taken in day-to-day disputes with its neighbors. But the swelling demand from Brazil soon depleted the supply of prisoners and forced Bakongo into more and more wars. As the number of its enemies grew, Bakongo needed more modern weapons, especially guns, which in turn had to paid for with still more slaves. It was a vicious circle. Inevitably, the Bakongo state became over-extended, suffered reverses on the battlefield, and suffered dissension at home. Within 50 years or so, the kingdom had collapsed and its great cities had been swallowed by the jungle. Almost reluctantly, Portugal took charge of the country in order to protect its watering stations and its source of slaves. The Portuguese made little attempt to colonize the territory, and, as the demand for slaves waned and the routes to the East lost their crucial importance in the world economy, the colonies gradually lost their importance to the home country. By the middle of the nineteenth century, all but autonomous.
So things stayed until the early 1930s. In May 1926, rightwing army officers overthrew the Portuguese government and, in 1932, installed António Salazar as de jure prime minister and de facto dictator, a position he retained until 1968. Salazar had a rather old-fashioned notion of what constituted the wealth of nations, and his single-party New State and infamous secret police (Polícia Internacional de Defesa de Estado or PIDE) saw to it that he never heard anything more up-to-date. For Salazar, colonies were what made a modern nation great. Colonies provided captive markets for home-produced goods, ready sources of cheap raw materials and foodstuffs, and an outlet for the homeland's surplus population. Accordingly, from 1930 on, Salazar did all he could to integrate the African colonies into the nation. He encouraged colonization on a large scale, using generous subsidies, free housing, and land grants as inducements. For the first time, Portuguese settlers began to arrive in large numbers in Angola and Mozambique.
While African- and European-born residents of the territories enjoyed theoretical equality as citizens of the Portuguese state, and while the ideological, doctrinaire racism of Anglo-Dutch southern Africa was rare, Africans had many legitimate grievances. Chief among these was the practice of extorting involuntary, uncompensated labor from indigenous citizens. Until 1962, when it was belatedly abolished, the colonial administration justified this part-time slavery by pointing to the cash taxes that European and well-to-do African citizens paid. The rural African could not pay in money, so, the argument went, he paid in kind. The reasoning was entirely specious, of course. The burden imposed on subsistence farmers and day laborers was in actuality enormous compared to the modest assessments paid by those who had money. The arrival of European colonists in large numbers during the '30s made the plight of rural poor considerably worse. Europeans expected a European-style road and rail infrastructure. .....
..... In 1961, repression provoked a large-scale rising in Angola. Guerillas from the outlawed MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) attacked police barracks and prisons across northern Angola, in hopes of freeing the political prisoners that the PIDE had seized. Their example inspired spontaneous attacks on rural government offices, isolated European-owned plantations, and Catholic missions. Four hundred Portuguese were killed. Wealthy Europeans fled, while panicky poor and lower middle-class Portuguese formed vigilante squads and indiscriminately terrorized their African neighbors. Often these groups operated with the connivance of police and army units. As many as 40,000 Africans were killed. Rebellions quickly sprang up in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique as well.
Portugal found itself ill-equipped for this sudden and unexpected crisis. It was now a poor nation, with a small population. Captive markets had not produced the bonanza that Salazar's economic theories predicted, and the colonial subsidies now made the colonies a drain on the treasury, even without the added expense of combat. There was little spare cash for armaments and little spare manpower for the army. The war zones were far from the home country, and transport was woefully inadequate. The dictatorship was not particularly popular either in Europe or in the United States, so no extraordinary aid could be looked for from either quarter. Yet aid for the insurgents would undoubtedly be plentiful, given the newly independent African states that now surrounded Portuguese holdings and the readiness of Russia and China to supply arms to insurgent movements.
There was never peace in these colonies. There was always some kind of rebellion going on and the methods to repress them were brutal.
"Peace would be the equivalent of my death and the extinction of my nation." Hendrik Witbooi 1905.
Peace came to the Wiboois in a most ironic way. Theodor Leutwin was replaced by Friedrich von Lindequist as governor of the colony and Lieutentant General von Trotha was replaced by Colonel Dame. The German government vacillated between sending 5000 more troops or attempting to negotiate terms of peace with the Hottentots. The German national sentiment had turned against a continuation of hostilities and the German colonists needed to resolve the peace almost as badly as the Witboois.
When Hendrik Witbooi lay dying he related his last wish, "It is enough. The children should now have rest." Neither Witbooi nor the Hottentots could know how close they were to winning the war. When Isaak Witbooi, Hendrik's son, was elected principle chief, the Hottentot coalition began to fall apart. A significant part of the tribe broke away under Samuel Isaak and surrendered to the Germans. This included 74 warriors, 44 women and 21 children. The rest of the tribe surrendered on December 24th. Even Cornelius led his 86 warriors, 36 women and children into captivity on March 2nd, 1906.
So ended the free Witbooi nation. For two years, 1200 poorly armed warriors had fought 20,000 well armed German soldiers. There had been nearly 200 military engagements and the Germans had lost 1000 men. Like the Herero, military defeat was only the beginning of the suffering and death that awaited in the "death camps."
Colonial war kills the colonized in large numbers.
The anti-colonial struggles of 1904 - 08 were characterised by what have traditionally been referred to as the Herero and Nama uprisings. In January 1904, war broke out between a united Herero nation and the German colonial administration. The colonial power was caught by surprise and suffered many defeats in the early stages of the war. After about six months, however, the picture was changing. The battle at Hamakari, near the Waterberg, on August 11 1904, marked the beginning of the end for the Herero, who fled in their thousands into the dry Omaheke sandveld, perishing in high numbers. A couple of hundred Witbooi fighters had been conscripted by the German forces to take part in the fighting against the Herero leading up to the battle of Hamakari. A number of these deserted, fleeing back to the south where they told gruelling tales of mass-murder and racism. These stories were one of many factors that led to Hendrik Witbooi's rebellion against his former German allies. With the Witboois up in arms, much of the south soon followed suit, resulting in a further three years of armed conflict in the territory.
Concentration camps
With large parts of the Herero nation either dead or in exile and the south in a state of war, the German colonial venture was facing a considerable labour crisis. Newly confiscated lands could not be properly utilised without labour, nor would any other wheel in the colonial machine be able to turn without access to unskilled and inexpensive labour. There were therefore two options for the German administration: either Herero still hiding in the country and those in exile be lured back into German territory and forced to labour, or alternatively a military expedition be launched against the Owambo kingdoms to enable a more systematic labour recruitment there. The former was deemed the more sensible model as the German army, already facing fierce resistance in the south, did not want to fight a war on two fronts.
The first step to encourage the repatriation of Herero was a promise that those who returned would have nothing to fear. The German officer Von Estorff wrote: "I do not lie, I will issue letters to you so that nothing will happen to you". Under this assumption many Herero came out of the bush. Most were directed towards the collection points at Otjihanena and Omburo which, to emphasise the 'peaceful' German intentions, were run by the evangelical mission. Missionaries were the only Europeans that had any credibility left with the Herero.
According to Missionary Dannert of Omaruru, the response of a Herero elder to a proposed return from the bush was: "We know our Omuhonge (teachers), they will not try to trick us". He was wrong. From the collection points and mission stations, starved and demoralised Herero were sent directly to the nearest concentration camp under military escort.
The largest of the concentration camps were found in Swakopmund, Karibib, Windhoek, Okahandja, and Luderitz. In these camps the prisoners would typically be fenced in, either by thorn- bush fences or by barbed wire.
Thousands of people were cramped into small areas: the Windhoek Camp held a little under 5 000 prisoners-of-war in 1906. Rations were minimal, consisting of a daily allowance of a handful of uncooked rice, some salt and water. Disease was uncontrolled as the lack of medical attention, unhygienic living quarters, insufficient clothing and high concentration of people meant that diseases such as typhoid spread rapidly.
Beatings and maltreatment were also part and parcel of life in the camps - the sjambok often swung over the backs of prisoners who were forced to work. The mortality figures of these camps are comparable only to losses suffered during the Holocaust. In statistics compiled by the German High Command in 1907, 7 682 prisoners-of-war are calculated to have died. Of an estimated 17 000 prisoners, that's a mortality rate of 45,2 per cent. The frightening part is that these were mere estimates, other official figures were even higher, and some camps were not closed down for another two to three years, leaving further casualties to be added to the morbid list.
[Mel Gilles, who has worked for many years as an advocate for victims of domestic abuse, draws some parallels between her work and the reaction of many Democrats to the election.-- Mathew Gross]
Watch Dan Rather apologize for not getting his facts straight, humiliated before the eyes of America, voluntarily undermining his credibility and career of over thirty years. Observe Donna Brazille squirm as she is ridiculed by Bay Buchanan, and pronounced irrelevant and nearly non-existent. Listen as Donna and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality. Watch them awkwardly quote the bible, trying to speak the new language of America. Surf the blogs, and read the comments of dismayed, discombobulated, confused individuals trying to figure out what they did wrong. Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, “Why did they beat me?”
And then ask anyone who has ever worked in a domestic violence shelter if they have heard this before.
They will tell you, every single day.
The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers. We can call it hate. We can call it fear. We can say it is unfair. But we are looped into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence.
As victims we can’t stop asking ourselves what we did wrong. We can’t seem to grasp that they will keep hitting us and beating us as long as we keep sticking around and asking ourselves what we are doing to deserve the beating.
.............
First, you must admit you are a victim. Then, you must declare the state of affairs unacceptable. Next, you must promise to protect yourself and everyone around you that is being victimized. You don’t do this by responding to their demands, or becoming more like them, or engaging in logical conversation, or trying to persuade them that you are right. You also don’t do this by going catatonic and resigned, by closing up your ears and eyes and covering your head and submitting to the blows, figuring its over faster and hurts less is you don’t resist and fight back. Instead, you walk away. You find other folks like yourself, 56 million of them, who are hurting, broken, and beating themselves up. You tell them what you’ve learned, and that you aren’t going to take it anymore. You stand tall, with 56 million people at your side and behind you, and you look right into the eyes of the abuser and you tell him to go to hell. Then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you, and you start a new life. The new life is hard. But it’s better than the abuse
And this is ridiculous twaddle.
I've seen this around for a while and ignored it, thinking people couldn't be as so stupid as to actually take this nonsense seriously.
First, Donna Brazile thinks Clarence Thomas is a good guy. Most black people wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire. And she's a freaking friend of the Buchanan family. Her and Bay are thick as fucking thieves.
Hasn't anyone noticed that if you judge politics by Beltway Bandit standards, this is what you get. Chuck Schumer is Senator for Life and has to actually bring home things for New York. So he can pontificate, he's got his job for another three terms. He won by a 50 point landslide.
Second, I guess Gross doesn't know any abused women. I do. The GOP didn't come into my home and say "I love you" and knock me up. I didn't decide that I needed a strong, aggressive man in my home, or that I didn't mind being lied to. I never trusted the GOP and I worked for them. So did my family. I always knew that they never had my best interests at heart.
This sort of pathetic appeal to victimhood is revolting on it's face and innaccurate as hell.
No, we're not victims, any more than when you play football and one side cheats their asses off. Having seen this for real, you're first stunned, then you appeal to the refs, then you figure out, one, they ARE going to cheat, two, the refs will NEVER call it, and three, you better protect your own ass and get your shots in.
I play in a fall football league and the first few years, we were sloppy, lazy, and got our asses handed to us. We used to get bad calls all the time. People used to cheat. Did the refs step in? Fuck no. They didn't do shit. Finally, we figured out that we better get our shots in and stick up for ourselves. You know, it only matters if you win.
You wanna be a victim, go fucking hide. Because you're useless, you've handed someone power over you. I don't believe for a second the GOP had power over me, treats me unfairly. They treat me the way they think is fair and acceptable. It is up to me to disagree and do something about it.
They play dirty, because that is what they do, no one will stop them unless we do. The media isn't going to save us. Appeals to fairness aren't going to save us.
So, do you know what we did? When they threw cheap shots, we threw cheap shots. When the refs missed calls, we told them. In short, we played like they did. And if people didn't like it, tough shit, they started it.
You know why we stopped bitching about the refs? Because it didn't do a damn bit of good. We had to figure out how to win.
Now, you can go along with Gross and feel sorry about the mean ol' GOP smacking the shit out of innocent little us, people who just want to do good, or you can say "fine, you wanna cheat? Fuck you. If those are the rules, then they're the rules and we'll play by them too."
It takes time to realize that you're playing dirty. You don't get it at first, or even second, It takes a while, because you think everyone is like you and has your values. You don't do cheap shots. You don't lie to the refs. But when you wake up and realize, well, this is football, then you start to find ways to win. Because once you know the rules, especially the unwritten ones, things become a lot easier.
You're no goddamn victim. You've just been in a game with people who will cheat to win.
WASHINGTON — I've been surprised, out on the road, how often I get asked about my family. They're beyond red - more like crimson. My sister flew to West Virginia in October to work a phone bank for W.
People often wonder what our Thanksgiving is like.
It's lovely - if you enjoy hearing about how brilliant Ann Coulter is, how misguided The New York Times's editorial page is, and how valiant the president is as he tries to stop America's slide into paganism.
....................
"Ladies and Gentlemen,
Now, just as four years ago, I breathe a huge sigh of relief and rejoice in the common sense of the American voting public. Congratulations to President Bush for winning re-election in a poker game played with a stacked deck. No candidate, including Richard Nixon, ever had to endure the biased and unfair tactics of our major media in their attempt to influence the outcome of an election. ... He never complained, just systematically set about delivering the same consistent message. You may remember that four years ago, I felt physically ill watching the Democrats try to legislate their way to the presidency. ...
A very big thank you to Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Rob Reiner, Bill Maher, Barbra Streisand, Alec Baldwin, Al Franken and Jon Stewart for your involvement. You certainly energized the base. Now, please have the courage of your convictions and leave the country.
To Bob Shrum - Cut your fee.
To Mike McCurry, Joe Lockhart and Paul Begala - You don't seem quite as smart without a great candidate.
To The New York Times and The Washington Post - If Bush and Reagan were so stupid, how did they both go four for four in elections involving two of our biggest states and the presidency without your endorsement?
We do not live in a secular country. There are all sorts of people of faith that place moral values over personal freedoms. They are not all 'wacky evangelicals.' They are people who don't like Howard Stern piping a hard porn show over the airwaves and wrapping himself in the freedom of the First Amendment. They don't like being told that a young girl does not have to seek her mother's counsel about an abortion. They don't like seeing an eight-month-old fetus having his head punctured and his brains sucked out. They don't like being told the Pledge of Allegiance, a moment of silent prayer and the words 'under God' are offensive to an enlightened few so nobody should be allowed to use them. ... My wife and I picked our sons' schools based on three criteria: 1) moral values 2) discipline 3) religious maintenance - in that order. We have spent an obscene amount of money doing this and never regretted a penny. Last week on the news, I heard that the Montgomery County school board voted to include a class with a 10th-grade girl demonstrating how to put a condom on a cucumber and a study of the homosexual lifestyle. The vote was 6-0. I feel better about the money all the time.
To Dan Rather - Good luck in your retirement.
To Gavin Newsom - Thanks for all of the great shots of the San Francisco couples embracing their mates at City Hall in direct defiance of the law.
To P. Diddy - 'Vote or Die' might need a little work.
To John Edwards - Thanks for being there.
To my friends - only 1,460 days until the next election. Stay vigilant. The Democrats, CBS, the NY Times and the Post may think Hillary is the perfect antidote for all those 'stupid' voters out there.
Best regards, Kevin"
Mind you, Maureen Dowd knows the Bushes. Wrote a book on them. Is known by name at the White House. She makes her living covering politics.
And she had to put up with this shit on Thanksgiving. Her family has no problem maligning her bosses, her very fucking workspace. It's one thing to avoid politics, but this is a personal insult. I wonder if she just sucked down scotch or started a well deserved fight. Look, I'm all for family peace, and I don't think you should bring politics into the home. But I will be goddamned if I'd be insulted by my family members on something I do for a living.
It's not just politics. It's like kicking you in the balls and laughing.
Of course, and I have to remember this when reading such an infuriating piece, she just made her brother look like an asshole in print and garnered a lot of sympathy. A lot of people will see him at work and just shake their heads. Thinking, "gee, what an asshole." He insults his sister for a lark. However, I would have humiliated him by simply telling him he was talking out of his ass and telling every nasty Bush story I had and dared him to call me a liar.
It would not have been pretty. But then, I have a nasty habit of not backing down when challenged. Which is why I don't talk politics at home.
Reading the newest Harper's (December issue; not on-line yet, more's the pity). A review by Greg Grandin of Niall Ferguson's Colossus: The Price of America's Empire. According to Grandin, there's quite a price to be paid.
Ferguson's argument is that we (Americans) just aren't ruthless enough, yet. Which means, yes, we could have won in Vietnam, if we'd just had the belly for it. Now America faces "the growing power of liberalism" (don't you all feel better now?), which prevents us from exercising our true authority as the benevolent Empire the Romans...oh, sorry, the British, once were.
How to overcome this and other obstacles to the Pax Americana? Apparently by reining in the deficit by cutting Social Security and Medicare spending. The "less privileged" (Grandin's words, now) would be made: "leaner and meaner, more willing to shoulder the burdens of empire. Just as poverty drove the Irish and Scots into Britain's colonial army, 'illegal immigrants, the jobless,' and 'convicts' could help fill the ranks of Washington's imperial legion." (Apparently Jonathan Swift and Jeremiah were both wrong: poverty is good for sovereigns!). "Ferguson is especially enthusiastic that African Americans might become 'the Celts of the American Empire.' And once he dispense with what here passes for social democracy, he sets his sights on political democracy. Successful empires, Ferguson writes, require 'the resolve of the masters and the consent of the subjects.'"
According to Grandin, Ferguson is the "darling of the American media." Great. Wolf Blitzer's late night reading, I suppose. Makes one glad Bush isn't much of a reader; but he's surrounded by people who are, and who would take this half-baked crock of "thought" seriously. Which is what worries me. The "fringe" is moving more and more toward the center; which means, indeed, that the center cannot hold.
Too bad Mr. Ferguson only got the edited version of colonial warfare. The one where the British won. Because that isn't the real history.
Here are some maxims of colonial warfare the US will painfully relearn:
1.Most Arabs don't want to be `liberated' or what President Bush calls `freedom.' They want freedom from US occupation, and freedom for Palestine.
2.People will accept misrule, robbery, abuse, and torture by their own fellow citizens — but not by foreigners.
3.The occupying power will always find locals ready to cooperate and join the colonial police and army for money. Ten percent will serve loyally; 50% will do nothing. The rest will covertly fight the occupiers, provide the resistance with intelligence, or quietly sabotage the occupation.
4.Most of those who cooperate with the occupation will maintain secret links with the resistance. Massive defections will occur the minute the occupiers show the first signs of thinking about withdrawal.
5.Tribal, clan, ethnic and religious loyalties will also prove stronger than political ones imposed by the occupier. You cannot buy loyalty; you can only rent it.
6.An inevitable byproduct of colonial adventures is an unwanted, usually massive influx of people from the conquered country.
7.Colonial occupations almost always cost far more than planned and produce negative earnings for the invader. Occupying Iraq and Afghanistan now costs at least US $6 billion monthly. The costs of garrisoning and running colonies usually exceeds what can be looted from them.
8.It's always cheaper to buy resources than plunder them. The Soviets thought they would pay for their invasion of Afghanistan by stealing its natural gas. The Washington neo-conservatives who engineered the Iraq war ludicrously claimed its stolen oil would fully cover the costs of invasion and occupation.
9.Guerilla wars waged among civilians inevitably produce hatred for occupiers and corrupt the invaders. Torture, brutality, mass reprisals against civilians, and black marketeering become epidemic, even among the best-discipline troops. The longer occupation troops stay on, the more they become corrupted, brutalized, and addicted to drugs — so do the nations that sent them.
10.Americans make poor colonialists. They lack the historical and cultural knowledge, subtlety, patience and Third World street smarts to be first-rate colonizers, like the French or British. They lack the ruthlessness and brutality of Dutch, Japanese, Spaniards, or Russian colonialists. Or the ability to blend with the local population, as did Portugese.
Colonial Wars were bloody long and only temporarily quelled uprisings.
Here's a list of the 19th Century's colonial wars
Africa
Cape Frontier Wars
1834-1878
The Great Trek
1835-40
British in Abyssinia
1868
1st & 2nd Ashanti Wars
1873-4/1900
Egyptians in Abyssinia
1875-6
Zulu War
1879
Rise of the Mahdists
1880-4
Transvaal or 1st Boer War
1880-1
Arabi’s Revolt
1882
Zulu Civil War
1883-4
Gordon Relief Expedition
1884-5
Mahdist Invasion of Abyssinia
1887-9
Mahdist Invasion of Egypt
1888-9
The French in Dahomeay
1890-2
The Batetelan Uprisings
1895/1897-1900
Mozambican Revolts
1895-99
Italian Invasion of Abyssinia
1896
French Conquest of Chad
1897-1914
Great (2nd) Boer War (South African War)
1899-1902
Fall of the Mahdists
1899-1900
Mad Mullah
1901-4
India Afghan Invasion of the Punjab
1837
Baluchistan
1839-41
Annexation of Sind
1843
Sikh Invasion of Tibet
1841-2
1st Afghan War
1839-42
1st & 2nd Sikh Wars
1845-6/1848-9
2nd Burmese War
1852-3
Persian War
1855-7
Indian Mutiny
1857-8
2nd Afghan War
1878-80
Police Actions in Burma
1887-92
Russian Invasion of Afghanistan
1885
3rd Burma War
1885-6
China
1st Opium War
1839-42
Taipeng Rebellion
1851-65
2nd China or Opium War (Arrow War)
1860
Sino-Japanese War
1894
Boxer Rebellion
1900
Russo-Japanese War
1904-5
North America
Navajo Wars
1846-64
Cayuse Wars
1847
Rogue River Wars
1851-6
Sioux Wars
1854-90
Southern Plains War
1860-79
Apache Wars
1861-1900
The Maximillian Adventure/French Intervention in Mexico
1862-7
You know, I watch a lot of TV, as do most people who write from home. And while most of it is silly, you can learn a lot if you pay attention.
American TV provides a number of critical life lessons, for those who watch.
1) Only some sex counts
See, if you think a man is the baby's daddy, no matter what the child looks like, than it must be him. The other guys you fucked don't count, unless you have the wrong baby's daddy on stage
2) Fat girls look really hot in spandex and tank tops with spagetti straps
No matter how desperate or unattractive a teenage girl might be, or how overweight, toss her in skimpy clothing and she's "all that". She knows she looks good, despite all available evidence. And the fact that she has multiple sex partners is even more proof of that
3) 14 year olds are perfectly capable of making mature decisions
Parents should not be concerned when their 14 year old is stripping and "smoking weed". They need to mind their own damn business and let these girls live their own lives
4) Lie detector tests are always wrong
When he says he didn't cheat, the test is wrong, he's not lying. Even when they catch him on videotape with a decoy. The test is wrong. You didn't do the babysitter.
5) Gay men can steal your man
If he wears tight enough clothes, a gay man will be attractive to your man. Especially if he's fine. And he will steal him because of his tight booty. The fact that he has a single male friend who is clearly effeminate means nothing. Of course, he will only reveal this in the most embarassing way possible.
6) Only scheming hoes get pregnant
She's after the man's money. She's been with my (cousin, friend, uncle, brother). The whole neighborhood has taken a ride. It's not his kid, because she's a ho.
7) Housewives are really desperate
America's suburbs are filled with anorexic, dope selling cheating wives. They're so miserable that they have to puke up their food daily and stalk married men that they give blowjobs to.
8) Cell phones are really expensive
Did you know lending a relative a phone can cost you several hundred dollars? For some reason those phones can really be expensive, especially when given to deadbeat relatives and ex-lovers.
9) Any money lent to a boyfriend is a gift
See, you don't lend boyfriends money, you give it to them, mostly because they are in financial trouble. They promise to pay it back, but that doesn't mean anything because they are your boyfriend.
10) Best friends are the best lovers, for your spouse
Nothing says friendship like having sex with your best friend's man. It's even better when you do your sister's man and it doesn't get much better than when your mom steals your boyfriend. Keeping it in your family is the way to go. Why sleep with strangers when you can sleep with people you know.
As I was watching TV tonight, Style has a series called "Diary of an Affair". On one show, this guy, who cheated on his wife with hookers, in chat and with girlfriends said he thought his wife could do better with her new boyfriend.
"I don't think they make a great couple. She could do much better."
My reaction to this was "motherfucker, you had a vote, but you fucked that up. Now, who gives a shit what you think."
Too many people take American TV too seriously. I mean, I like Dr. Phil just fine, but the people who complain he's doing therapy are nuts. Have they seen the collection of spoiled babies he has on his show? People who aren't ill, but who need a smack in the head. Like the doctor who cheated with a nurse and knocked her up. He didn't seem to understand what the problem was. He didn't know whether he wanted to stay with his wife. That's not therapy. That's common sense. Hell, Larry Elder does the same thing and he's a lawyer. If it were legal, I'd let Dr. Phil beat the shit out of half of these freaks. Oh, and they're just the ones on TV. We all know nimrods who would make Springer blush
America has created a generation which has no foresight, no vision and some scary personal morals. I mean, you see this parade of dysfunction and you don't have to wonder about a lot of things. Vote for Bush? Shit, I wish that was the extent of the damaged they cause, but when mom is picking her new husband off the internet, and he turns out to be a loser alcoholic, you have to wonder what the hell is really going on.
And the best part? These crazy ass people on my TV think they're Christians and upstanding people.
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As the election recedes, there's good news and bad news. And we're not going to like any of it.
Welcome to the world of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, whose remarkable career has been bookended by two of the most shameful events in America's military history: My Lai in Vietnam, a story he broke as a free-lance reporter, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, a story he broke for The New Yorker.
During his 38-year career, Hersh has written eight books, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer and a host of other prizes. His sources serve at the highest levels of many governments, including our own.
In person, Hersh is tall, stooped, rumpled, gray-haired and bespectacled. He speaks rapidly and intensely in a deep voice. Currently touring to "pimp," as he put it, his newest book, "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," he spoke last week at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., to a rapt audience of about 900 people. They greeted him with applause; he said, "Thank you, but you'll be less happy once I'm done."
Hersh's message is simple and frightening: "(George W.) Bush is an ideologue, a Utopian," Hersh said. "He wants to clean out the Middle East and install democracy. He doesn't care how many body bags come back home. There's nothing more dangerous than an ideologue who is completely bonkers and no one is going to tell him."
President Bush is committed to perpetual war, Hersh said.
"He risked his presidency on this war," Hersh said. "He could have gotten more votes if he backed off. But he insisted he hasn't made any mistakes."
Hersh has talked privately with many in the military and CIA, including some who have recently resigned. All told him that if the Iraq war had gone "right" - say, if the Americans had been greeted as liberators - our military would have marched "right and left" - to Syria and Iran.
Oil is a big factor in this war, Hersh said, and so is Israel, but to the President it's about ideology: "Whether this man communicates with God, or is on a crusade, or really is a neo-con, or if he thought that his father's not taking Baghdad was a mistake - in any case, I think he is absolutely committed to staying in Iraq to the end."
After 9/11, Hersh said, America had some good choices.
"Early in 2002, the Taliban was split," Hersh said. "About 50 percent of the Taliban leadership hated Osama bin Laden and wanted him out. We could have worked with them. But we went ahead and treated the Taliban as one entity. The Taliban has survived. Al Queda has survived. We wanted to eliminate crazy people who want to fly planes into buildings. But instead we dehumanized everyone in Afghanistan and Iraq."
After March 2002, the question about Iraq was not if, but when.
"They started moving secret units, the commandos, the Delta Force, secret British elite forces, into the Middle East staging areas," Hersh said. "They were pulling people away from a war which was much more important - against al-Qaida - and putting them in a staging area for Iraq."
See, while Hersh is predicting a collapse, I think the Europeans are a wee bit wiser than that. They need a functioning US. But one which increasing has to play by their rules. While Congress lives in LaLa land and blessed by Jesus, and Bush pretends that things are just peachy-keen, the Europeans will smile as they turn the screws on us.
Our first problem will be when the Shia take to the streets. Election in January my ass. If the Sunnis don't show up, it's a joke, and if Sistani is made to look like a chump, which is why the Sunnis suddenly no longer want an election, he and his people will not take it well. Hersh, by nature, is cynical. He can't help it. But compared to the Iraqis, he's a piker.
I think there is a clear line Bush can't cross, and he knows it: the draft.
That's the one issue which has zero support in the US and as the Army reaches 10 percent casualities, something has to give. He may want to stay in Iraq to the end, but when Sistani finally plays his cards, the end will come quickly. And we'll spend the next decade rebuilding the Army. The GOP will do everything possible to avoid the draft, but one day, either they will trial balloon it, freaking out middle class America or face withdrawal from Iraq.
Americans support the war as long as their privledged kids aren't sent there. Or they oppose it, fantasizing that they can sneak their kids into Canada. Either way, no one wants do deal with the reality of a draft. They list other options to get soldiers, but as the war gets worse, and it will, because our Fallujah operation was a miserable failure, and the guerrillas grow in confidence, disaster is only a matter of time.
Let me put it simply, the new draft will have limited exemptions, will draft overseas residents with American citizenship, will draft men and women, will probably go up to 34 years old for some skills. In short it will be a near total mobilization not seen since WWII. However, that draft passed by one vote in 1941. One. If Bush proposes a new draft for Iraq, do you think people will go along? Especially when escape will not be an option. Oh, you can live in Toronto, but they'll still send your mail there. This leftist parental fantasy that merely leaving the US will save their kids is dead wrong. They could be arrested and deported on any number of charges, and the odds of them finding legal work will be small. Remember, Europe has their own rootless teens to deal with. They are under no obligation to deal with yours to avoid military service. Europeans will not be all that sympathetic, you know.
And being a fugitive in the US or facing jail time if you return isn't really an option.
Of course, you'll actually fight to save your kids from Iraq, shut down DC and the like, but hey, it beats watching them go to Iraq.
Every time the so-called Christian Right has tried to turn this country into a theocracy, those pesky federal courts have stymied things.
So now — according to the liberal Americans United for Separation of Church and State — the right-wingers have come up with a new scheme. All they plan to do is to strip the federal judges of their right to hear cases involving the separation of church and state.
Reportedly, such leaders as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Republican Rep. John Hostettler of Indiana, flush with what they see as a successful right-wing revolution, believe they can make the federal courts virtually powerless.
Rep. Hostettler, addressing a special legislative briefing of the Christian Coalition last month in Washington, reportedly talked at length about a bill he plans to introduce. It would deny federal courts the right to hear cases challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, which bans same-sex marriage.
"Congress controls the federal judiciary," Rep. Hostettler was quoted as saying. "If Congress wants to, it can refer all cases to the state courts. Congress can say the federal courts have limited power to enforce their decision."
Apparently, the Hoosier congressman has not heard of the balance of power among the three arms of our government. He was quoted as telling the Christian Coalition members:
"When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy... The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We're not saying they can't do that. At the end of the day, we're saying the court can't enforce its opinions."
Another congressman, Alabama Republican Robert Aderholdt, was quoted as advocating court stripping as a means to protect state-sponsored Ten Commandment displays, such as the one erected by former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.
And then there was Sheila Cole, executive director of the Republican Study Committee, a group of ultra-conservative House members. She said federal judges who refuse to listen to Congress might well be impeached.
Others in attendance at the session called for more direct action to render the federal courts powerless. During a question-and-answer period, a member reportedly said that in such cases as the Ten Commandments display, people should form a human barrier, if neccessary, to prevent removal.
When I say this isn't a fascist dictatorship, I mean that. But when you have Congressmen who no longer believe in the rule of law, you're taking a step on that road.
Democracy HAS to be defended. There are ALWAYS threats to our freedom, always have been. Some by the misguided, some by the rational and well-meaning.
If an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void, does it, notwithstanding its invalidity, bind the courts, and oblige them to give it effect? Or, in other words, though it be not law, does it constitute a rule as operative as if it was a law? This would be to overthrow in fact what was established in theory; and would seem, at first view, an absurdity too gross to be insisted on. It shall, however, receive a more attentive consideration.
It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each.
So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution, disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty.
If, then, the courts are to regard the constitution, and the constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature, the constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.
Those then who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that the courts must close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law.
This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions. It would declare that an act which, according to the principles and theory of our government, is entirely void, is yet, in practice, completely obligatory. It would declare that if the legislature shall do what is expressly forbidden, such act, notwithstanding the express prohibition, is in reality effectual. It would be giving to the legislature a practical and real omnipotence, with the same breath which professes to restrict their powers within narrow limits. It is prescribing limits, and declaring that those limits may be passed at pleasure.
I don't care what wingnuts think they can do. This was the first decision of the SCOTUS. The Congress does not get to determine what is and is not constitutional. And the federal court has an ample network of law enforcement to ensure the law is followed. I'd send this to my free-market conservative friends. They're letting people who are deeply unpatriotic decide the future of this country. Not obey the law? Impeachement? Well, yes, they WILL be impeached.
These folks think they now run the country. Despite opposition to this wackiness within their own party. This is pushing the tipping point where even conservatives will no longer support this kind of theocratic wackiness. The Founding Fathers were not idiots. They knew what power did to people. They won by 3 million votes, not 30 million. These folks are overestimating their power to a foolish degree. If they want to rewrite the constitution, they might try having a convention first. Which wouldn't happen.
Aid is finally flowing into Falluja, following the heavy US-led offensive that began nearly three weeks ago to wrest the city from rebel control.
The Iraqi Red Crescent told the BBC it was delivering aid on a daily basis.
But a spokesman says it is feared more than 6,000 people could have died in the assault and thousands of families are in critical need of assistance.
Meanwhile, Iraqi and US politicians have insisted elections will go ahead in January despite a plea for a delay.
US ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte said the poll must go ahead on time.
Citizens emerge
Convoys carrying food, water, medicine and blankets are moving around Falluja but there is still no running water or electricity.
According to the Red Crescent, 60 people came out to get assistance in one street alone.
The organisation's president, Dr Said Haqi, said it had now set up an office close to the city centre.
He described how one man in his mid-50s had approached them after staying in his house for the past month - apparently living on water and sugar.
In comments reported by the UN information network Irin, spokesman Muhammad al-Nuri said the Red Crescent believed more than 6,000 people may have died in the fight for Falluja.
He said it was difficult to move around the city due to the number of dead bodies.
"Bodies can be seen everywhere and people were crying when receiving the food parcels. It is very sad, it is a human disaster," Mr Nuri reportedly said.
A burqa-clad mother queues up with her child outside a cinema in southern India, looking forward to seeing her favourite Bollywood star, Sharukh Khan, in the new Bollywood blockbuster, Veer-Zaara.
Policemen are frisking ticket holders at the gates as a security measure in the wake of threats to disrupt the first screenings of the film in the city.
The film has been screened in defiance of an unofficial moratorium imposed by the local film industry on new films not made in Kannada, the language of Karnataka state.
Police are taking no chances as the threat is real.
This ban on Hindi, English and other language films is taking place in the city of Bangalore, often presented as the modern face of India.
The hawkish stand of Kannada-language organisations stems from a fear of being reduced to a minority because of a big influx of people, particularly from the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu.
Tamils form over 30% of Bangalore's six million population.
'Bad image'
Underneath the gloss and glitter of Bangalore's hi-tech life, there is what many see as a streak of intolerance, reflected in the crackdown on films of languages other than Kannada.
"It gives the city a bad image," says Samuel, a software engineer.
This cosmopolitan city is the most favoured destination for multinational companies like IBM, Motorola, Intel and Philips.
It is also home to Indian global information technology giants Infosys and Wipro besides various ethnic and linguistic groups from all over the country
"Where is the spirit of tolerance? How can you impose such an order?" asks K Subramaniam of the film ban.
As a Tamil, he has other reasons to be opposed to those promoting the Kannada language.
He and other Tamils are fighting a legal battle to unveil a statue of Tamil saint Thiruvalluvar.
The statue has been covered in sackcloth in central Bangalore for more than a decade because of opposition from some Kannada organisations.
'Anti-social'
Prominent socialist politician, AK Subbaiah, is a strong critic of the ban on non-Kannada language films.
"It is anti-constitutional, illegal, and anti-social. Nobody can justify such a ban," he argues.
The Supreme Court in Delhi has ordered that the ban be lifted.
But cinemas across Bangalore fear adverse consequences if they do not toe the pro-Kannada line.
Only three of the 108 theatres in Bangalore have dared to screen Veer-Zaara - and they have had police protection
Immigration and reactions to it are not only issues in the US and Europe. This is as nativist as anything done in Belgium or on the US border.
Friday, November 26, 2004 Posted: 7:23 PM EST (0023 GMT)
MONTE SERENO, California (AP) -- For six years, Alan and Bonnie Aerts transformed their Silicon Valley home into a Christmas wonderland, complete with surfing Santa, jumbo candy canes and a carol-singing chorus of mannequins.
Visitors loved it.
Last year, after NBC's "Weekend Today" featured the $150,000 display of custom-designed props, more than 1,500 cars prowled the Aertses' cul-de-sac in this upscale San Jose suburb each night.
This year, though, the merry menagerie stayed indoors. Instead, on the manicured lawn outside the couple's Tudor mansion stands a single tiding: a 10-foot-tall Grinch with green fuzz, rotting teeth, and beet-red eyeballs.
The Aertses erected the smirking giant to protest the couple across the street -- 16-year residents Le and Susan Nguyen, who initiated complaints to city officials that the display was turning the quiet neighborhood into a Disneyesque nightmare.
Alan Aerts, who makes sure the Grinch's spindly finger points directly to the Nguyens' house, says the complaints killed the exhibit. They also violated the Christmas spirit, he said.
"When I grew up, people decorated everything -- it was wonderful to be a kid," said the 48-year-old soft drink distributor and philanthropist. "If you can't even put up a display these days, what kind of people have we become?"
..................
So Alan Aerts, a 6-foot-5 amateur body builder, commissioned the $2,500 motorized Grinch statue, which waves its arms and emits steam as a raspy tenor belts out, "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch."
Susan Nguyen, 52, is unmoved.
"It was oppressive," she said. "Maybe not if you just spent 10 minutes admiring it from your car, but if you lived next door, it was definitely oppressive."
I feel bad for the Nguyens. I really do. Because the hang up calls, death threats and nasty letters have just begun. They will wish to God they hadn't said a word about this, because when a story like this hits the news, well, all manner of shit follows. People get outraged when you even look like you're messing with their holiday.
Pain in the ass? Sure. But nothing like the PITA which will come. Bad publicity on talk radio, articles, and the shitstorm that follows. People will get their address and then the fun really begins.
I would be shocked if this didn't get evil quickly.
If it were me, I would have filed the permit needed, as a fuck you, if nothing else. Oddly enough, the permit and the Grinch Statue cost the same amount.
Let me put it this way, if the Nguyens are still living there next year, they won't mind the displays. The hate mail alone will make that a much better alternative.
Two US marines have been shot dead in the Iraqi city of Falluja.
Lt Gen John Sattler said a group of marines was ambushed during house-clearing operations and returned fire, killing three insurgents.
Meanwhile, Iraqi troops in Falluja are reported to have found a laboratory with explosives materials and instructions for making anthrax.
Iraq's interim security minister said 2,000 people had been killed in the US-led offensive in the city.
Kassim Daoud also said 1,600 people had been detained in the operation.
Rebel claim
Mr Daoud said a man described as a key aide to the Islamic militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been arrested in the northern city of Mosul. He gave few other details.
A US army intelligence officer has said the assault on Falluja has not turned up any new leads on the whereabouts of the fugitive Zarqawi, who is alleged to have used the city as his base.
Maj Jim West told the Reuters news agency the objective of the assault was "not Zarqawi, it was defeating the insurgents for the people of Falluja".
A rebel organisation claiming to be from the city has told an Islamist website it has regrouped to mount new attacks on US forces and their Iraqi allies.
.............
Lt Gen Sattler said US-led troops had now cleared about half the houses in the city.
"We will continue to clear out houses till every one is secure, We've taken more and more of their safe houses. They're running out of places to hide," he said.
US marines have said it may be several weeks before civilians who fled the city can return.
Lt Gen Sattler vowed that the city would be safe in time for January's elections. "We want every Fallujan to vote from their house," he said.
More than 50 US marines died and more than 400 were wounded in the assault.
NEW YORK As the toll of Americans killed and wounded in Iraq in November approaches record levels for one month in this war, is the press only telling part of the story?
The Pentagon's latest official count, provided on Wednesday, listed 1230 American military killed in Iraq and another 9300 U.S. troops wounded in action. How seriously? More than 5000 of them were too badly injured to return to duty. More than 850 troops were reported to have been wounded in action in Falluja so far.
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Some of these Landstuhl cases are not serious but according to "60 Minutes" only 20 percent of the evacuees return to their units in Iraq.
None of the non-ositle injuries are included in the casualty count, "leaving the true human cost of the war something of a mystery,” 60 Minutes states.
The total number of casualties is about 25,000, plus the more than 1,200 killed. Since about 300,000 men and women have served in Iraq, it makes for a casualty rate of about 9%.
Thousands of demonstrators have laid siege to government buildings in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in protest at the presidential election results.
Support for opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko appears to be growing as police cadets and TV stations openly show their allegiance, say observers.
Outgoing president Leonid Kuchma urged "this so-called revolution" to end.
He will meet Mr Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych - winner of the disputed poll - later on Friday.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus will be present, said Mr Solana's spokeswoman.
Ukraine's Supreme Court has suspended the presidential poll result while it considers the opposition's complaints.
According to the official election result, the pro-Russian Mr Yanukovych won with 49.46% of the vote against Mr Yushchenko's 46.61%.
But supporters of Mr Yushchenko, who favours closer ties with the EU, say the authorities oversaw massive fraud and independent observers reported widespread abuses.
Buildings surrounded
Hundreds of thousands of protesters are gathered in central Kiev, waving banners and singing after spending their fifth consecutive night on the streets.
Western observers report:
Abuse of state resources and "overt media bias" in favour of Mr Yanukovych
State workers pressured to give absentee voting certificate to their superiors
Intimidation at some polling stations
Suspiciously high turnout - 96% - in the key pro-government region of Donetsk
About 10,000 protesters have also now gathered in front of Kiev's main railway station.
Government supporters, including several thousand miners, have held rival but smaller rallies.
"Calm your passions," Mr Kuchma appealed to the gathering crowds in a televised address.
"Any revolution must end with peace. The sooner this revolution, this so-called revolution, is over, the better it will be for the people whose fate concerns us so much."
So heavy handed, and it looks like Pooty-poot is going to wind up on the short end of this stick. The cops and the Army aren't going along. They should have used American voter suppression, not outright ballot stuffing and intimidation. They left too much evidence.
Everyone is missing the obvious call here. Mypoic Americans are focusing on the fraud, the Europeans don't want a civil war, but no one is stating the obvious: Moscow paid for this. This is the grossest interferrence in a free election since the US jumped into Indonesia in 1965. Those goons had to be paid by someone, and it's not Kiev. The Russians made an exceutive decision to steal this election for their man. And it's blowing up in their faces.
Are they going to funnel money to the miners to hamstring the new government with a strike?
Everyone is dithering and missing the point that Moscow is playing hardball to keep Ukraine out of the west. This was no accident. Not for a second. Putin wants a loyal, subservient Ukraine and just spent millions to ensure that. The problem was that the move was so transparent and obvious. Now, it's a shit storm he can't quiite control
So, if there’s a big protest march, I’ll be there, just because I like to put my body where it may do some good and be counted. But I also think we need to consider other ways to make our displeasure known. And that’s where economics come in.
I don’t know for sure if this last election was stolen, although I know what my gut tells me. This study certainly gives me pause. However, the point of this thread isn’t to restart the why-did-Kerry-concede-why-isn’t-Atrios-screaming-about-Diebold debate. Here’s what I do know for sure and think everyone can agree upon: it’s important for all Americans, including those whose candidate didn’t prevail, to be able to have faith that our elections are carried out fairly and honestly. And the current situation doesn’t allow us to have that faith. Instead, what we have is a patchwork of fallible systems that appears designed more for the purpose of allowing skullduggery than for the purpose of ensuring fair elections. And that, I believe, is worth an economic protest.
This year, I’m urging everyone I know to refuse to spend money for Xmas as a protest. Stay out of the stores. For Goddess sake, don’t run up credit card debt. Give your family and friends the gift of your time and attention rather than a new sweater that they won’t wear or some object to clutter-up an already over-cluttered life. But just not buying isn’t enough. You’ve got to contact the retailers and credit card companies and tell them: I’m not going to be buying Xmas stuff and I’m not going to be charging Xmas stuff until this country has a system in place that ensures fair and verifiable elections. Reader Kate has done the research and discovered that The National Retail Federation “is the world’s largest retail trade association . . . .” Write to Their Vice President for Legislative and Political Affairs, Katherine Lugar. Here’s her contact info:
National Retail Federation
325 7th Street, N.W.
Suite 1100
Washington, D.C. 20004
Phone: 1-800-NRF-HOW2
Fax (202) 727-2849
Write to your credit card companies and tell them the same thing. You can find the address on the back of your latest bill. And, heck if you’re really angry about this last election, write to the large department stores that you patronize, or at least cc them on your letter to the National Retail Federation. CC your Senators and Congressman or Congresswoman as well.
Do it for my friend Arlo, who reminded us that there’s strength in numbers:
You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it's a movement. And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar.
And pass the idea on to everyone you know. Merry Xmas.
Thanks, Kate!
This is like smacking you sister because the dog bit you.
Excuse me, but unless they also have the Secretary of States as charter members, how exactly will this insane protest idea help change state law?
Why?
First of all, eight year olds don't care about elections and do care about Game Boy Advance SP. I haven't a sane parent yet who has the balls to do this. Like spiteful donations, this is negative, loser thinking. Like a tanturm over peas, most people won't care. So even if a million people do this, they will just shrug and Wal Mart will make their numbers.
Exactly what positive action are retailers supposed to take? Are they going to endorse new candidates for secretary of state, are they going to sponsor transparent election laws and paper ballots? I just don't see the point. It's like not going to see the Cowboys because of Tom Craddock messing with an election.
I've seen this crap before and it doesn't work. Black nationalists used to do this every year and people nodded their heads, agreed with them, and went shopping.
People think that the Montgomery Bus Boycott worked because of a negative action. Well, in reality, what happened was that black people went back on their secondary systems of personal transport, ones they used when they needed a lift before. It's not like white cabs stopped for them. They had alternate systems.
Jesus, people have to think this through. I don't want retailers and credit card companies demanding election law reform. Because their lobbies do as much damage as possible NOW.
Don't let your frustration be your guide, because it leads you down blind alleys.
You want to make a statement, don't act like a spoiled child, do something positive. Don't shop at Wal-Mart. Just don't do it. Shop at Costco and Target, places which treat their workers a lot better than Wal-Mart does. That's an affirmative statement. You don't need to ask the irrelevant to do the impossible, do the relevant and right thing.
If sending a message is your concern, make sure Wal-Mart has a shitty Christmas and Target, Costo and Toys 'R Us have good one. Make a positive market decision, not a negative one.
I won't buy anything sounds great, but to a six year old, it's pretty mean. To your parents, it's mean. To people who care about you, it's mean.
We can decry consumerism, and I have gotten and given homemade gifts. Jen made me two bottles of preserved lemons and I made her spice rub. Cute, right. I also bought her a gift. Food gifts are nice.
But this? No. Let's not be negative for once. Let's not whine and go after the wrong people. Let's be positive and make an affirmative statement. And all you have to do is not shop at Wal-Mart and avoid their American job-killing low, low prices.
You want election law reform, you target the legislators who run the committees in your state and the people who give them money. You get good candidates for Secretary of State. You propose new laws. You don't do this. Even if they could do something, would you want them to? I wouldn't.
The scene in Donetsk is the mirror image of the scene in Kiev.
Here people are celebrating victory - the victory of Viktor Yanukovych. There is a party atmosphere with music every evening in the central square.
On Thursday, a small group of about 100 supporters of Viktor Yushchenko held a rally in the square before the discotheque started up.
The staff of Mr Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party and the Socialist Party had nothing to do with it, on the grounds that it could provoke violence.
The demonstrators shouted "Yushchenko! Yushchenko!" and "We are for honest elections!" as a group of young men stood by shouting "Yanukovych! Yanukovych!" and casting insults.
They told me they had just returned from demonstrating in Kiev, where they were a small minority, compared with the vast crowds of Yushchenko supporters.
There was no fight, but there could have been. The authorities here supported Mr Yanukovych, and they might not try very hard to prevent attacks on Yushchenko supporters.
Local man
People in Donetsk voted for Viktor Yanukovych because he is "our man". He was born here, he worked here, for five years he was governor and they know him.
If, at any point, Mr Yushchenko is declared president the situations in Kiev and Donetsk will reverse
Mr Yushchenko is a stranger. He is seen as nationalist, partly because he speaks Ukrainian instead of Russian, the native language of people here.
People also associate him with America and the West, whereas the mood here is pro-Russian.
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Everyone knows this, but Mr Yanukovych often draws attention to the fact and argues that the region's wealth should be spent here instead of feeding the rest of the country - he made a lot of this during the election campaign.
People do not accept allegations made by his opponents that he is linked to the "Donetsk Mafia". They see things differently - they think it is good that he has lobbied in Kiev over the years on behalf of local businesses.
Moreover, they resent the fact that Mr Yushchenko, in his time as prime minister, scotched Mr Yanukovych's attempts to set up a regional energy company, independent from the rest of the Ukrainian energy system.
If, at any point, Mr Yushchenko is declared president the situations in Kiev and Donetsk will reverse.
The Donetsk miners - who of course did not answer Mr Yushchenko's strike call - will stop work and go to Kiev, leaving the country without coal in the middle of winter.
Toy shopping is a a pleasure which I was denied for a few years. But now that Black Friday is upon us, commenting on toys, well, it seems like the right thing to do before I retake Rome and play Warhammer 40K.
You can find dangerous toys at www.toysafety.net. But that's mostly for the toddler set.
However, with older kids, those over eight, too many parents let vital decisions about appropriate entertainment be made by these same kids. The same kids who can't decide whether to eat ham and cheese or pb&j can bring in highly violent games to their homes because parents buy blind or on their recommendation with no research.
There is a very simple thing you can do to find out if a video game is age and content appropriate:
Rent them.
Blockbuster has video games to rents as well as consoles to play them on. So if you have a question about the appropriateness of a game, play it yourself. Ratings, are, at best, a weak guide to what game is acceptable. But you can play the game before you buy it. Don't take someone's word for it, or a review. Now some games, like GTA: San Andreas may be hard to get, but rentals are a great way to prevent purchases of subjects you don't want in your home.
It also will shut the kids up. Because you know the games.
First, games are more complex morally and technically than anything we played in our youth. Yet, many parents leave technical decisions in the hands of kids. Not just with games, but in all aspects of technology. Computers, mp3 players, kids buy them and parents cluelessly permit this.
Too many parents remain shockingly uninvolved in their child's tecbnological decisions. You only get busybodies trying to make their decisions on what you can see when you don't do the work to control your own home.
Some things are clearly not for kids, and it is your moral responsibility to control what comes into your home, not Lou Shelton, not the government and not Toys 'R Us. You.
Second, some games are just too complex for kids to play. Sure, eight year olds want Tony Hawk 2, but can your kid use the controls?
Third, once you open a game and play it, most stores will NOT take it back. They will exchange title for title, but you buy it, you own it. So if you think GTA:AS is vile, well, you better hop on ebay to sell it. That's why this is foreknowledge is so critical. You need to know what comes in your home before it does, because it's not a coat, a return is usually not possible.
It's simple, rent the games your kids want, send them away for the weekend or go to a friend's house on a weekend, play the games for an hour or so and then make your decisions. If you need to, rent the console as well.
Why? Because I'm tired of ignorant parents running to everyone screetching about how bad these games are. Play the fucking things before you buy them and you won't have anyone to blame. Squeeze that hour or so to make sure your kid is exposed to the values you want in your home.
And gaming systems are different.
Nintendo Game Cube appeals best to the 5-12 set. You don't have to worry about too many M rated games for Game Cube. My nephew had a PS 2, and was saving to buy a Game Cube for a year. He was pretty close with $60, too. Nintendo is geared towards kids with Pokemon, Dragonabll Z and Beyblade games, as well as sports. The Pokemon games are exclusive to their systems.
XBox, with it's concentration on sports and Halo 2 is mostly for teenagers. Games come later to Xbox for some titles, like GTA. Microsoft has a pretty cautious approach to some titles.
PS2, which I bought for Jen, is geared more for adults. The M titles come out first for PS2 or PC. Now, there are many PS games for kids, and if you have different ages at home, this is clearly the best system.
Another thing, don't let your kid buy a game you haven't approved. If you can't play it, get reviews of it. I know little kids have more money than we could imagine. My nine year old nephew regularly gets money for Christmas, enough to buy an additional game the day after Christmas. But that is a piss poor excuse for letting something in your home you do not want. You're the adult, you are responisble for what your kids see, read and do. Don't blame the store for selling M rated games. Blame youself for not being aware that's in your house.
Now, personally, I think most kids don't like realistic violence. They like the fighting of Dragonball Z and Pokemon, they don't want to play Manhunt or Shellshock Nam '67. Younger teens tend to like sports games. My nephew likes racing games especially. There are literally thousands of games around. Before people judge them, they need to play them and understand what how they work.
Why so much commentary on console games? Because they are a major part of our entertainment dollar and we spend far more time playing them than watching movies or TV.
They have an up side and a down side. The positive side is that they are goal focused, even educational entertainment which fosters cooperation (in online play) and problem solving. The down side is that kids stay in the house focused on a game and not being the game.
But what is completely unacceptable is the way parents let kids decide what values are in their home, only objecting afterwards.
State Rep. Talmadge Heflin asked the state House of Representatives today to overturn the results of his failed re-election bid and either order him returned to the Legislature or call for a new election.
Heflin's attorney, Andy Taylor, said the election results in state House District 149 in southwest Harris County were fraught with voting irregularities and potential fraud, most of which occurred in predominantly Democratic precincts.
"The true outcome of this election was stolen from the voters in House District 149," Taylor said Tuesday. "We will prove that Representative Talmadge Heflin was re-elected."
Heflin, a Republican member of the House since 1983 and chairman of its Appropriations Committee, lost to Democratic businessman Hubert Vo by 32 votes earlier this month. But Heflin's campaign alleges that those election results include at least 248 irregularities that could have altered the outcome.
Taylor said he will file notice today that the Heflin campaign intends to contest the election in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. That will require that House Speaker Tom Craddick order a House committee to investigate Heflin's allegations.
After the committee reports its findings, the full House will decide whether to seat Vo or Heflin or call for a new election. The House's decision will be binding, said a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state's office.
A decision by the House committee, which would have subpoena power and take depositions, would likely come no sooner than late January. The Legislature is scheduled to convene Jan. 11, and Vo would be limited to voting only on procedural matters until the dispute is resolved, the secretary of state's spokesman said.
Although there have been several election contests in the Texas House in recent years, none has reversed an election result, and most were withdrawn after they were filed.
Officials with the Vo campaign have said they are confident that their candidate won a fair election and have called on Heflin to concede.
Taylor said a review of county voting records from the Nov. 2 election shows that 101 voters were allowed to vote in the district illegally despite having moved out of Harris County. Twenty-seven voters were allowed to cast their ballots twice, he said — once in early voting and again on Election Day.
The Heflin campaign also found at least 120 other cases in which ineligible voters were allowed to vote or eligible voters were not allowed to cast ballots, Taylor said. The overwhelming number of those irregularities occurred in Democratic-leaning precincts that supported Vo's election, he said.
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The number of such complaints is usually too small to affect an election's outcome, he said, although it could have an impact in an election as close as the Heflin-Vo race.
Let them prove their charges. They've tried to drill this dry well for a decade. Illegal immigrant voting, false registrations. Well, let them investigate and prove their case.
My bet is that they won't be able to.
They have to hope it comes down against Vo. It may not.
Ukraine's opposition has appealed to the supreme court to overturn the presidential election result, as the country braces for a general strike.
Liberal opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko called for the stoppage after election officials declared Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych the winner.
Thousands of opposition supporters are protesting for a fourth day in sub-zero cold in the capital, Kiev.
The Polish and Lithuanian presidents have been asked to mediate.
Former Polish President Lech Walesa has already gone to Kiev to help resolve the crisis.
A staunch Yushchenko supporter, he said on Thursday "it is possible to arrive at a compromise".
Legal challenge
Mr Yushchenko's supporters say the authorities were guilty of massive fraud in Sunday's election.
"Today we filed a complaint to the Supreme Court over the actions of the Central Electoral Commission," an official at Mr Yushchenko's headquarters said.
The US has said it "cannot accept" Sunday's poll result as legitimate.
Outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma - who backs Mr Yanukovych - called on world leaders not to interfere, warning that civil war "could well become a reality at the present time".
Mr Walesa and other figures of Poland's anti-communist resistance say they want to help Mr Yushchenko because they remember how much Western support helped them in the 1980s.
EU-Russia tensions
Ukraine's crisis is also set to dominate an EU-Russia summit at The Hague later on Thursday, after the two sides adopted strikingly different stances on the election.
(Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists; OUN), a nationalist Ukrainian organization with an antisemitic ideology. When the Civil War in Russia came to an end and the 1920 peace treaty with Poland was signed, the Ukrainians had to give up their hopes for independence. The greater part of the Ukraine became a Soviet socialist republic, and its western part was incorporated into the Polish republic. On August 30, 1920, a group of Ukrainian exiles, former officers and men of the defeated Ukrainian National Army, met in Prague and established a new organization, under the leadership of Col. Yevheni Konovalets, which they named the Ukrainska Viiskova Orhanizatsyia (Ukrainian Military Organization; UVO).
The UVO, with the help of German intelligence, founded its own underground cells in Poland, and tried to form similar cells in the Soviet Union. In February 1929 representatives of the UVO and of other Ukrainian nationalist groups formed a new body, which they called the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. This movement, one of whose leading ideologists was Dmitri Dontsov, sought to follow in the footsteps of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. It expressed support for the application of totalitarian principles in public life and government and adopted the fuhrerprinzip (leadership principle), which obligated every member of the movement to obey its leader unconditionally. The OUN saw in communism and the Soviet Union the principal enemies of the Ukrainian people; as time went on, the organization, under the influence of Nazi ideology and traditional Ukrainian hatred of Jews, also adopted antisemitism in its Hitlerite version. This identity of ideologyand political aims between the OUN and Nazi Germany led to close contacts. The OUN moved its headquarters to Berlin, where it was given financial and other kinds of support. At the same time, in the Soviet Ukraine, millions of people died as a result of the collectivization drive. In Poland, the Ukrainian people were discriminated against in national and economic terms under the policy of the Polish government, with the legal Ukrainian political parties unable to make any headway in their efforts to advance the lot of their people. Under the impact of these developments, the younger generation of Ukrainians adopted extremist political views, and many of them joined the OUN underground cells. On May 23, 1938, the head of the movement, Konovalets, was assassinated; another colonel, Andrei Melnyk, took his place as providnik (leader).
Collaboration with the Nazis. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the OUN made a successful bid for the creation of a Ukrainian military unit. A 600 - man unit was formed, with Roman Sushko as its commander, and it was given the task of assisting the Germans in their contacts with the Ukrainian population. As it turned out, the German army did not enter the western Ukraine at this time, and the unit was disbanded; its personnel joined the police in the generalgouvernement.
Following the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union prior to the German invasion (see nazi - soviet pact), Ukrainian political parties in both areas of occupation were outlawed. The OUN kept up its underground activities in the Soviet - occupied western Ukraine, while in German - occupied Poland the organization was permitted to operate in the open, as a trusted ally of Nazi Germany. At a 1940 congress of the movement in Krakow, the OUN split into two. The activist majority, headed by Stefan Bandera, called for the expansion of underground operations and for preparatory steps to be taken for an uprising in the Soviet - occupied area; this faction was called OUN "B" (Bandera). The other faction, headed by Melnyk and accordingly called OUN "M, " felt that it was preferable to preserve whatever strength the movement had for the moment, and in the meantime to cooperate unconditionally with the Germans.
The Roland and Nachtigall Battalions. During the preparations for the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the OUN took part in the formation of two Ukrainian battalions within the German army, the nachtigall battalion and the Roland Battalion. The battalions' commissioned and noncommissioned officers were chosen from among OUN members. Another group of Ukrainian units was the Pokhidni Grupy (Mobile Units), which were attached to the combat units of the Wehrmacht and provided them with interpreters. The mobile units were also given the task of setting up the Ukrainian administration and police in all the towns and villages, to be made up of loyal members of the movement.
Rearguard Actions. In the initial stage of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, at the end of June 1941, the armed underground cells of the OUN were activated and attacked the retreating Sovietforces from the rear. Once the Soviet local government had withdrawn, OUN activists and teams from the mobile units established the Ukrainian civil administration and police force in the German - occupied territories.
The Ukrainian National Government. On June 30, after the conquest of lvov, the Bandera faction of the movement announcedthe establishment of a national Ukrainian government, headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, with the blessing of the head of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) church, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. This step, however, conflicted with the Germans' plans for the Ukraine; the SD (Sicherheitsdienst; Security Service) promptly arrested the members of the "government, " as well as Stefan Bandera, and sent them to Germany, where they were kept under house arrest. The OUN leadership had to go underground, but its members continued to cooperate with the Germans in the administration and the police.
The Split in the OUN. The split between the two factions of the OUN became increasingly pronounced; from time to time there were armed clashes and mutual assassinations. When the SS - Schutzendivision Galizien (SS Rifle Division Galicia) was formed in the spring of 1943, it had the support of the Melnyk faction of the OUN and of other Ukrainian groups, while the Bandera faction did not want Ukrainians to join the division.
Strategy for the Postwar Period. The Third Congress of the OUN underground movement, held on February 21, 1943, came up with the following political and military analysis of the situation at the time: both sides would be greatly exhausted by the war, at which point a new war would break out between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. That would be the moment for the rise of an independent Ukrainian state. In order to achieve this goal, the congress resolved to establish a Ukrainian Liberation Army (Ukrainska Vyzvolna Armyia). Beforelong its name changed to ukrainska pov - stanska armyia (Ukrainian Insurgent Army; UPA), although its popular name was Banderovtsi. As this new force gained in strength, the OUN became its political arm. At a meeting held from July 11 to 15, 1944, it was decided to broaden the scope of the OUN's national base by establishing a Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (Ukrainska Holovna Vyzvolna Rada).
Ukrainian dissidents Rebet and Bandera were killed by the same KGB assassin -- Bogdan Stashinsky -- in the late 1950s. In 1957, the KGB trained the 25-year-old Stashinsky to use a spray gun that fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampule. The gas was designed to induce cardiac arrest, making the victim's death look like a heart attack
So what does a long dead Nazi collaborator have to do with modern Ukranian elections?
Well, to start with, Bandera merely switched paymasters, and went to work for the CIA. But Bandera represented a western-leaning tendency in Western Ukraine which can be seen in the division of the current vote. The Eastern Part of Ukraine is heavily industrialized, the Donetsk Basin comes to mind, while Western Ukraine is farmland. It was also home to Stalin's forced collectivisation and subsequent famine. When you say hunting kulaks, you mean killing Ukrainians.
If the Nazis had been less racist, most Ukrainians would have gladly joined the Nazis for all the Jew-killing they could stand. But Ukrainians split, some joined Stalin, albeit with some prompting like rape and murder, and some joined the Nazis to kill, rape, and murder Russians and Jews. The Ukranian resistance lasted until the 1950's, when the survivors jumped on the Nazi ratline and came west.
The idea of a pro-Western Ukraine makes Putin nervous enough to give Yushchenko the Bandera treatment. Bad sushi my ass, unless it was fugu. His face looks like the ass-end of the moon. Clearly Moscow wants a loyal Kiev. Yushchenko want to join the EU like the Balts. That scares Moscow to no end. They want an eastern Ukrainian running things.
The problem was that they were so hamfisted in their election theft, it backfired. Intimidation, roving bands of vote stealing mafiya members, waving guns around. Only an idiot could question that there was theft. We're not talking Diebold and voting patterns here, but ballot stuffing in plain sight. Who paid for this? Do the letters SVR come to mind? The successor to the KGB, anyone?
This could lead to civil war because there is no mechanism to change the decision of the election commission. The much maligned US electoral college serves as a buffer to this kind of outright manipulation because the electors can always vote their conscience. Here, the government can call all the shots. Also, the opposition is playing a dangerous kind of brinksmanship. This isn't the Georgian elections where it was clearly stolen, but street protests there would not have led to a civil war. It was clear the people had a majority. Here, you have a bare majority with an evenly divided electorate based on regional issues.
Also, because the issues are regional control, the orange/blue regions are not analogous to America's red/blue divide. There are no swing states here. You have two regions, living together, but not even speaking the same language, Eastern Ukraine largely speaks Russian. Which has caused no end of nationalism problems with Western Ukraine. It is the kind of situation which could tip over into mob violence and all that repressed history comes to the fore. It is much more serious because Ukrainians have issues which have never been clearly addressed and that orange/blue divide is one which represents basically two different countries in one skin. If it isn't resolved peacefully, Chechnya will become a footnote to a struggle which is a clear and present danger to Russia. If Ukrainians decide to kill each other, Iraq moves to number two on the worry scale. Ukraine, it should be remembered, has plenty of nukes.
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - Braving snipers, Falluja residents walked past demolished homes to an aid distribution centre but American granola bars and Frosted Flakes cereal failed to raise hopes of a brighter future.
"We have no water and this is the only food we get. We still have the feeling that our homes can be bombed at any time," said Muhammad Ali, 58, one of the few civilians who stayed in Falluja during this month's U.S.-led offensive against rebels.
"How can our life improve? The Americans are back and the guerrillas and the people of Falluja will not accept them so we will have more death."
The American assault, which crushed insurgents and foreign Muslim militants, was designed to help the Iraqi interim government stabilise Falluja, Iraq's most rebellious city, 32 miles west of Baghdad.
"We will never accept the Americans in Falluja. It will never be calm as long as they are here," said plumber Bilal Guthman, 23.
Most of Falluja's 350,000 people fled before the offensive began on November 8. Those who stayed were mostly men who wanted to protect their homes against theft.
Some of them gather every day at the aid station and walk away with a bag of cereals, granola bars and bagel chips.
On Tuesday, Marine lawyer Major Tim Hansen promised compensation for houses damaged in the fierce offensive.
"We will do our best to help the Iraqi people," he said, adding that the Americans had started employing local people to clean the streets, creating jobs around the aid centre.
But Hansen was bombarded with questions by Iraqis still worried about their every step in a dangerous city.
"There are dead dogs in front of our homes. They stink. Do we have the right to move away?" asked one man. "Are a group of friends allowed to gather in one home at night to feel safer?" asked another.
A third elderly man who said his house was completely destroyed walked away shaking his head when he was told to ask a Marine lawyer in his neighbourhood about compensation.
................................
A member of the U.S.-backed New Iraqi Army said there was only one way to pacify Falluja.
"As soon as the Americans leave, Falluja will be a happy city," he said declining to give his name.
the gilliard family holiday dessert, bread pudding
Ah, thanskgiving.
First, happy holidays everyone.
Shopping for food on Thanksgiving is an event.
I started on Sunday, when I watched football. Ran across the street from the bar to pick up the basics, macaroni, stuffing, eggs. The regulars looked at me oddly, but hey, it had to get done. They were chowing down on good Mexican food anyway.
So Tuesday, the only day I had free, I went to Fairway.
I had breakfast at Big Nick's, which I like to do because they have a variety of sausages. Although cheddar in the omlette was a mistake. Too rubbery. Then it was off to Westside Market. I like their bread over Fairway's. So I picked up some bagels.
Fairway was crowded. Even on a Tuesday morning. People were picking up pies, turkeys and veggies. Fairway is the second best thing to the Greenmarket at Union Square. That wasn't an option unless I wanted to go at 9 AM Wednesday, which I didn't. I like the fresh herbs and produce. So as I was shopping, dodging shopping carts, and manuvering around the elderly, stay at home moms and guys with the day off. You know how hard it is to avoid old ladies who weigh 100 lbs? It takes some skill.
Unfortunately for me, they didn't have turkey parts. They had expensive turkey breasts, but the closest I came to turkey there was the sandwich I bought. I would have to make a second trip. I did not want to make a second trip out. But I had no turkey. And chicken isn't a substitute on Thanksgiving. So I went home, with my produce and sandwiches and Dr. Brown's black cherry soda and Sparking Cider. But no turkey.
After a couple of hours, it was up to Pathmark. If Fairway was crowded, Pathmark was the Lincoln Tunnel after a Jets game. Could barely move. An old guy looks at me and says "hey, it was worse yesterday."
So ladened down with apple cider, a turkey breast frozen like a brick and more eggs, I returned home, sweaty, tired and satisified.
Ok, everybody has a family tradition.
My entire family comes from the area around Charleston, SC. So never has a white potato darkened our table on Thanksgiving. We eat rice. Always rice on Thanksgiving. Then there's baked macaroni, which is macaroni and cheese baked. A couple of years ago, I went to Fairway and asked th guy behind the counter for cheddar cheese. He said all he had was white cheddar. I said "I would die if I brought home white cheese for macaroni and cheese." He laughed and pointed me towards the pre-cut cheese. Always extra sharp. Mild doesn't work. And it has to be fresh. No Cracker Barrel.
Then, there is sweet potatoes. We like sweet potatoes. Take them out of the can and toss them in the oven. They firm up nice.
But the best part of my family's thanksgiving is bread pudding. We don't like cakes or pies for holidays. But bread pudding.
This year, I brought a challah bread with raisins. Which was a time saving measure. Need some raisins in bread pudding. So I'm lazy. But bread pudding is a perfect desert, great hot, warm or cold. We eat it as dessert and as breakfast.
I wouldn't know what a jello mold or green bean casserole was if you hit me with it. And mashed potatoes. I always wondered why they came in those TV dinners.
where democrats need to be, working at a food bank
Recently, I've seen all kinds of proposals from people, from sending donations to groups your conservative relatives oppose to shopping only at No Sweat. Now, seccession.
Some I greet with weary disdain, some with outright irritation.
Why?
Because as a 40 year old black man, I've seen this all before. The strident politics, the boycotts, the call for seperation.
You know the most successful relic of this entire era of black nationalism?
Kwanzaa.
A made up holiday by black radicals who thought Christmas wasn't black enough.
What is it now?
A cute holiday for kids.
When people talk about Christmas boycotts and shopping at No Sweat (which is a fine option) and donating money to groups which your relatives don't support, it's a sad, mournful refrain, tools of the weak and desperate.
First, a donation to Planned Parenthood or Doctors without Borders or whatever, should be made from a generous heart, not spite. It shouldn't be used to get back at people. Instead, I would just buy phone cards and send them to Walter Reed. You can make a point, do something good and not be so strident. Most people would think that a lovely gesture. Even if you're tossing their support of George Bush and his war in their face.
Second, I've seen black seperatists in action. Would you trust Louis Farrakhan to secure your rights? Malcolm X wanted his share of states. Why did black people ultimately reject this? Because we were Americans, not some alien race which had to be isolated. Louis Farrakhan got a million black men to march on Washington and then he went on about the Mother Wheel. Talk about a lost opportunity. Instead of calling for an number of social changes, or movements, he went back into the wacko file and lost a moment for national credibility.
Third, so a few people don't shop. I doubt anyone would notice. My parents stayed home every November 1st on Black Solidarity Day. Sure, it made a point, but people started to ignore it as I grew older.
I'm tired of negative spitework and calling it a protest. It isn't. It doesn't change minds. It makes you look and seem strident.
Protest is for January 20th.
I have some ideas on how to do positive things, which makes a point and a real statement.
Nov. 23--It could be the last big hurrah for Toys "R" Us.
In a last-ditch effort to fight off intense price competition from big discounters like Wal-Mart and Target, the troubled toy retailer said yesterday the discounts it has embraced will be the rule for the rest of the holiday season.
CEO John Eyler said the company won't be "outdone on pricing," during the holiday sales rush, though he cautioned he also won't engage in a "price war" by slashing deeply.
"I am finding good prices, though they could always be better," said Mary Clarke of Washington Heights, browsing the doll section for a gift for her niece at the company's Times Square store yesterday.
Amid swirling reports that it may junk the toy business to focus on its more profitable Babies "R" Us unit, Toys "R" Us said it lost $25 million for the three months ended in October. That's better than the $46 million loss in the same period last year, thanks to a big cost-cutting effort. The announcement boosted Toys shares 42 cents to $19.78 yesterday.
Still, sales fell 1.7 percent, making analysts question whether it can rebound from the industry price squeeze from the big discounters.
"I think Toys 'R' Us is destined for oblivion -- it can't stand up to the discounters," said Kurt Barnard of Barnard's Retail Trend Report.
The company also will face renewed competition on the high end from FAO Schwartz, the bankrupt retailer launching a big Thanksgiving Day re-opening on Fifth Avenue.
Toymakers like Mattel and Hasbro, whose profits have also suffered from Wal-Mart's market power, have given Toys "R" Us a hand this year by offering it 21 exclusives -- such as Hokey Pokey Elmo and Big Air Ball Tower, a 5-foot-tall construction toy set -- a quarter of the chain's inventory.
Wal-Mart wants to drive yet another American business into the dirt and then offer fewer choices to the consumer.
Simply put, support companies which support American workers and your values. You don't have to jump up and down about it, just make it clear that you rather shop elsewhere and encourage people to do the same. Not giving Wal-Mart your money is a positive statement. Telling others to avoid them as well is a positive statement. Not a boycott, but a market choice.
2) Give positively
Supporting the USO and injured soldiers is a positive activity. One which celebrates the season and makes a point about the war. We haven't forgotten the wounded and damaged. Volunteering at the local VA or homeless shelter does the same thing. Support the poor and desperate in a meaningful, generous way. You can get a dig in, if you need to, but help people first. Hard hearts help no one. Toys for Tots is another positive act.
3) Do charity work
If you're a member of a meetup or Democracy for America chapter, do something positive. Hold a party for foster kids or pregnant teens. Do an event at an elder center. The idea is not to push politics, but to be seen as active members of the community. Be public minded citizens, and make it clear that you're doing your civic duty. Of course, shirts with donkeys on them wouldn't kill. I remember reading about a Dean for America chapter which cleaned up a park. That's the kind of thing people need to carry forward.
My point is that we need to start demonstrating our beliefs. If we want a better America, one where cruelty isn't in fashion, we need to do things which represent our values. Positive, helpful things which make us look like civic minded citizens who care about their community. I've seen how negative talk paralyzes a community, and fossilizes discussion. It eventually makes those people irrelevant as well. We need to represent a positive face to the community. Get positive stories out there about groups of Democrats helping people who need it.
If I'd lived in a red state, I'd go to a conservative, poor place and give their kids a party. I'd go to a blue county or town as well. I'd walk into a fundie church and ask for their help.
Why?
I want them to think, when they needed help, who helped them. The GOP, who took their vote and ignored them afterwards, or the Dems, who do not ever expect their vote, helped their kids. I'd want one on one contact with people. You can't change everyone but you want to at least talk to them as humans, and let them see you the same way. It may not work, but if you can establish trust, that will be to your credit.
Many of us do individual charity. It's time to brand what we do.
Politics is public service. You can't change minds when all people see are sterotypes. Sure, some people may refuse. And some people may be too pissed to do this. But when was the last time political people helped anyone but themselves? If you help people's kids, they may actually listen to you when other things come up.
The reason that fundies hold such sway is that there are few places for single moms to get support. They're there, they create community. If we can show that we're care too, and we do, that they might listen to us for a school board vote or local council race.
If you've never been poor and alone, you have no idea what a single act of kindness can mean to a desperate mom and her kids. Christmas is a hard time for them in this society, seeing things they can't afford. An act of kindness is not only a good thing, it also says they're not alone, that more than the church cares for them.
Think about it. When was the last time the GOP backers outside of churches did anything to help anyone but themselves? If you want a different America, let's build it one person at a time.
LOS ANGELES Nov 24, 2004 — Robert Townsend first caught the film industry's eye with 1987's "Hollywood Shuffle," a clever satire about black actors trapped in demeaning roles. Now he wants the country to pay attention to what he calls a new kind of television, entertaining but with a sense of responsibility, especially toward young black Americans.
Black Family Channel, which Townsend joined as president and chief executive officer of production five months ago, is starting an ambitious slate of eight new programs geared for children, teenagers and families.
"With this network, we want to give people a sense of quality, integrity programming that speaks to them," Townsend said. "We don't want to be an old-school network where people don't want to tune in, but we want to get back to some of those old-fashioned values."
He cites Bill Cosby as an inspiration, both for Cosby's groundbreaking '80s sitcom and for his provocative argument that black youth is being undermined by factors including poor parenting and attitudes toward language.
"Everything that Bill Cosby is saying about families working together … (that) we've got to reprogram these kids and we've got to shake it up, that's what we're doing," Townsend told The Associated Press.
It's as big a change for the channel as it is for Townsend, who moves from writing, directing, acting and producing to steering a rare minority-owned and operated TV channel (co-founders include boxer Evander Holyfield, baseball's Cecil Fielder and attorney Willie E. Gary.)
The major competitor is BET, Black Entertainment Television, owned by media giant Viacom Inc. and criticized in the past for giving viewers more music programming flash than substance.
...................
Townsend said the channel is not solely for black viewers and suggested it may consider a name change sometime in the future.
"Ultimately, we want it to be colorless. We want it to be the human channel human emotions, comedy, drama. If you want something you can identify with, tune in," he said.
If you don't know the story of how people hate BET, this is not a big story.
But considering that people are sick and tired of the rap videos, low brow humor and exploitation that BET sells to black kids. BFC is a welcome change. A company looking to spend money to develop content which doesn't rely on nearly naked women airing at 9 AM. Townsend is doing what so many people wanted Bob Johnson to do for so long.
I don't like censorship from any quarter. But I also think if you build a network to appeal to blacks, you do more than show a never ending strip show with gospel on Sunday. It's an insult.
Oh, BET can show all the videos they want. I just want an alternative in my home. I choose not to have that in my home. I choose to avoid their programing. I wouldn't let my niece and nephew watch it. That's just a judgement I choose to make. They sell yogurt at the supermarket, I choose not to eat it.
I don't have much time right now but I want to bring attention to this "news" story Declaration of Independence Banned at Calif School:
A California teacher has been barred by his school from giving students documents from American history that refer to God -- including the Declaration of Independence.
Steven Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San Francisco Bay area suburb of Cupertino, sued for discrimination on Monday, claiming he had been singled out for censorship by principal Patricia Vidmar because he is a Christian.
Summary - the teacher was forcing his students to listen to and read "Christian Nation" propaganda. The school asked him to stop. The teacher is suing the school with the help of a right-wing "Christian Law" organization, the Alliance Defense Fund. (Also see this.)
The school did not "ban the Declaration of Independence" -- that is just a lie. This story is like when you hear that a man was "arrested for praying" and you find out he was kneeling in the middle of a busy intersection at rush hour and refused to move.
This is the BIG STORY today, on Rush, and Drudge, and the rest of the Usual Suspects. And it is a carefully planned and carefully timed lie.
The story is timed for this afternoon so that it cannot be refuted until Monday.
It is timed to cause fights and hatred at family Thanksgiving dinners across the country.
It is part of a strategy to reinforce a "conventional wisdom" notion that "liberals" are "going too far" with their demands of separation of church and state.
People For the American Way has a web page about the Alliance Defense Fund. From PFAW:
ADF's Founders:
Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ
Larry Burkett, founder of Christian Financial Concepts
Rev. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family
Rev. D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries
Marlin Maddoux, President of International Christian Media
Don Wildmon, founder of American Family Association
(And 25+ other ministries)
President and General Counsel: Alan Sears
Date of founding: 1994
Finances: $15,411,093 (2001 budget)
And note this:
ADF defines itself by its ability to strategize and coordinate with lawyers all over the United States.
[. . .]
ADF also defends the right of Christians to 'share the gospel' in workplaces and public schools, claiming that any efforts to curb proselytizing at work and school are anti-Christian.
"Strategize and coodrinate." Sounds like what's happening with this story, planted on Rush and Drudge, in time for the holiday. I hope that other bloggers can pick up on this. I suspect many of us are going to miss how important this is -- how big of an effect this is going to have on things we care about. This story is designed as ammunition for family conversations tomorrow.
As I write this, O'Reilly is on the air on FOX saying "Another ruling by an activist judge that puts us all in danger." That's an exact quote. It isn't about this story, but it reinforces it: Yet more "liberals' who are "going too far."
If someone brings this up, just ignore them.
Tell them that "lawyers say all kinds of things, that's why they have court cases."
Kos is off somewhere with the family, Atrios is in Barcelona and Jen is shopping on Unter Der Linden for the next week. However, I don't believe in fall vacations myself. I need winter vacations. You know, when NY is icy cold and grim? That's when I need to get the hell away. My current plans are to disappear for America's great national holiday, the Super Bowl.
But since this is a slow time, I'll continue my trend of posting a lot of non-political stuff. One of the issues I want to explore is the role of blogs in the national dialogue. I know we concentrate on politics here, but there's a blogging world beyond Kos and Instacracker, and I think something is changing there as well. It's hard to spot, because politics is the gift that keeps on giving and a lot of us are going to have to thank George Bush for keeping us relevant. The sad fact is that opposition politics works wonders. In the years the conservatives were in the wilderness, they developed support networks. And now it's our turn. Because we have to oppose Bush, we have to actually develop our arguments and refine them. But there are a bunch of people doing things we don't see and may be just as effective in other fields.
However, there is something I wanted to raise now, since I have your attention:
Clearly, blogs have changed the way people have seen the news, and a lot of success has resulted from that. Kos was qouted, according BlogPulse, almost 8,000 times during the election. Atrios, nearly 5,500 times. Only Drudge was quoted more, and Drudge has years of headstart and rarely runs original content.
Now, I'll get into that later, but right now, I want to ask a different question:
When does success mean selling out?
Now, I raise this question because some of Jen's idiot friends have chastised her about her new job. Because it's a nice corporate job with benefits and vacation time and allows for European vacations and the like. Now, these are the same people who worked at labor-law breaking dotcoms and screwed investors like Dutch whores. Yet, because Jen actually has a professional job, she's somehow "sold out".
Now, if I remember correctly, the whole goal of many of these people was to get bought by a bigger company and to live like rock stars. Or marry well. I don't remember any of them planning to give their riches away to the poor or anything like that. They wanted capitalist success, but on their terms. Not that any of them lifted a finger to actually help Jen when she needed a stable job. Oh no, they were happy to have her as an audience, but not as one of the chosen few.
Which is why I have a deep and abiding hate for many of those people. Me, I wasn't part of their circle, didn't want to be part of their circle and had my own friends. I knew they were untrustworthy scum in the first place. That doesn't make me smarter, it just means I'm a paranoid fuck to begin with.
I was about to say I thought of them like Hollywood people, but dotcom folks were not nearly as honorable. I called them Grateful Dead capitalists. In LA, they lie to you, you know they're lying, and you can work from that. You also have a mafia of people you can trust. Hollywood works much like the mob. If you're in a family, they look out for you. If you have the right friends, you will never go hungry.
But in Silicon Valley, trust no one. People were stabbing their best friends in the back for money. I mean, lifetime friends fell out over cash, people sold their friends out for VC money. Why do I call it Grateful Dead capitalism? Because beneath the veneer of brotherhood and fraternity, everyone was friends until the money got on the table, and it was like dinner time at the Borgias. The Dead were aggressive capitalists, it even got to the point where Jerry Garcia was selling ties. Well, that was the dotcom world. Cash ruled over all.
I don't think success means selling out. We're not bands. I think we should want success for people who work hard.
But I also think some people have some unrealistic expectations about what blogs can do.
One poster ranted about how all blogs do is rely upon the mainstream media and don't do any investigating.
Let me explain something: investigations are expensive. The Christian Science Monitor was looking for contributions for their investigative projects.
A single investigation can cost hundred of thousands of dollars. And I don't mean into voting irregularities. I mean into something as obvious as why US soldiers don't have enough bullets. Something like voting can go into the seven figures. Many are funded by grants from foundations.
Why?
Because news is expensive. Start with hotel fees and car rental. Then each FOIA request can lead to thousands of dollars of photocopy fees. Then the cost of hiring a researcher to dig into the information you get. You can easily have five people, getting paid $35 an hour just to work on this, not including the reporter. Tnen there are phone bills and phone tag. Internet costs. Lexis-Nexis is incredibly expensive.
The costs mount up on a daily basis and major news organizations have entire non-reporting or off-air staffs who work on these stories on a daily basis. It may take up to six months to get ONE 60 Minutes story.
It's easy for people to say "you didn't do this, you didn't do that."
Well, no one has $5K for FOIA photocopy fees. At least no blogger. We rely on the media because the cost of not doing so is prohibitive. Which is why I have such high praise for Blogads.
News takes money. People who block Blogads are working against the blogs they support. Because that is the money which pays for the news. Just keeping up this site requires both contributions and ads. I'm not raising money until after the holidays. Sure, that's a bit longer than the quarterly cycle I'd like to keep, but I rather any money now go to things like phone cards for Walter Reed. I can wait, I'm not going to starve, my computers work, and I can buy Christmas gifts. I also know people may well be broke after the holidays. But I can take that risk.
But that cushion only exists because of blogads. That's what paid for Thanksgiving dinner and the silly PDA version of Madden 2005 I impulse bought.
I'll talk about transition issues later, but for now, I think what makes blogs viable is that people do support them, not only emotionally, but financially. Instead of selling out, we're supporting what we believe in. And yes, I support blogs with cash as well. Why? Because things are not free. For too long, people have accepted volunteer work and amateurism as "grassroots" work. Well, we need to build an infratructure of sites which represents our beliefs. Does anyone think the Nation or New Republic is the best that we can produce? Or there is no need for new voices? Well, nothing is free.
There was some backbiting about 527's and Kerry not doing enough grassroots work. Well, we do not need 527's just for an election, but in the years between elections. We need them on the local level as well. We need a structure which isn't invented every election cycle.
And for people who are concerned about issues of purity, your financial support makes it much harder for people to just change their mind. Once you accept money, you are accountable for what you say and do.
Take the draft. Well, I didn't believe a draft was possible for the longest time. I changed my mind on that, not because people give me cash, but because I saw the casuality figures on Iraq. What your contributions did was make me understand that I had to explain my change of heart on the issue. Once you invested in me, I couldn't just change my mind in a flash.
Now, I have some contrarian opinions, but they're geniune, not stage managed for effect. I really do hate the Yankees.
But my question, which is an open one, is why do you trust blogs and bloggers and what would make you not trust them or question their motives?
Columbia) Nov. 18, 2004 - Church and state is the age old debate over how much each should be connected to the other.
One man says he has the answer and his name is Cory Burnell, "The particular reason we've looked at this strategy is that we've come to the conclusion that across the nation, Christian conservatives really are having trouble getting any voice at the national level."
Burnell is the leader of "Christian Exodus ." It's a group of Christian activists who say the nation is so far off the proper path, they will move to a place where many already share their views, set up a Christian government and possibly, split from the other states.
Burnell says that place is South Carolina, "We looked at Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina because they're all Bible Belt states with Christian conservative electorates. They're relatively small as far as population goes. And then South Carolina has some additional attractions."
He says once here, the group would try to elect members of the legislature, "Some of the issues important to us obviously are prayer at the local level in schools. The Ten Commandments in public display in government buildings. Additionally, the right to life for the unborn. And now certainly the protection of marriage."
Who is Cory Burnell? He is a 28-year-old math teacher and cell-phone salesman. Originally based in Texas, Burnell has temporarily moved to northern California where News 10 spoke to him by satellite. Burnell says he and his family will live there another year or so, then begin moving as many as 12,000 Christian Exodus members to South Carolina, with more to follow.
As you might expect, Burnell's concept has drawn considerable criticism.
State Senator and church Pastor Darrell Jackson isn't reticent with his opinion, "It's like a modern day Jim Jones." One of his concerns is about the Palmetto State's image, "That concerns me as a political leader here in the state. It tells me that we have a whole lot of work to do as it relates to our public image outside of the borders of South Carolina."
The Reverend Brenda Kneece heads the South Carolina Christian Action Council, "It's sort of bizarre, it's sort of counter to what those of us who are in leadership in areas of faith and belief would believe needs to be happening."
South Carolina became identified with the issue of secession with the first shots fired at Fort Sumter. More recently, supporters of something called the "Southern Independence" movement have suggested South Carolina could again lead the way in trying to break from the US.
In fact, Burnell promoted a similar plan as a leader of the neo-Confederate League of the South.
Neo-Confederate? No fucking kidding. Why am I not surprised? Jim Jones? Nah, more like a new P.T. Beauregard.I expect them to fire on Parris Island any day now.
Some idiots on the West Coast want to do the same thing
Nearly three decades before the 2004 elections, author Ernest Callenbach asked a prescient question: If we Oregonians, Washingtonians and Northern Californians were in charge, what would we do?
His answer: We'd leave the United States to its own self-created woes and build Ecotopia, our independent utopian society.
The idea was a fringe notion in 1975, when Callenbach's classic novel "Ecotopia" first captured a young generation's imagination.
But in the wake of recent national elections, a sovereign Ecotopia -- or Cascadia, as it is now widely referred to -- is re-emerging as a subject of interest for some. Long bandied about as little more than an engaging thought experiment, the secession of Oregon, Washington, northern California and possibly British Columbia from the United States and Canada suddenly is intriguing everyone from whimsical Web masters to earnest political activists.
That's right: Cascadia, our Cascadia, a new peaceful, sustainable, neighborly, environmentally friendly strip of fir green and fog gray that stretches anywhere from southern Alaska to northern California.
That is, except for the proposed state of Jefferson, an island of conservative red in a liberal blue sea at the Oregon-California border. But more about that later.
"Ecotopia," set 20 years after the secession of Oregon, Washington and Northern California, describes a land of electric mass transit, outdoor recreation, video-conferencing and a 20-hour workweek. Freed from the political controls and traditions of the United States, Ecotopia develops an ecosystem that is a perfect balance between humans and the environment.
"It focuses the mind to think about separatist sentiment," Callenbach says now, "regardless of whether it ever gets serious."
As he prepares a 30th anniversary edition of "Ecotopia," Callenbach says the book has become popular again among young people, who don't see its original environmental messages as impractical fringe theories.
Callenbach also sees a long-term trend toward smaller, localized governments.
"The U.S. is too damn big," he says. "Small countries are best. They don't have armies careening around on the other side of world."
Callenbach points to collaborative governments, such as Oregon's watershed councils, which bring ranchers, environmentalists, recreationists and Native Americans together to attempt consensus on contentious issues.
"That kind of thing will grow a lot, no matter who is in office," he says.
They forget that such a state could turn into a white supremcist, anti-immigrant nightmare. Hey, I'd bet Portland can burn as well. We know LA goes up like a forest fire.
What both groups of loons forget is what the Cree and Crow reminded the Quebec secessionists: you are not the only voice. The Canadian native peoples said bluntly that they didn't trust the Quebecois to protect their treaty and civil rights.
One of the reasons for a federal government is simple: to protect minority rights. Neither one of these lunatic plans would do that. They say they would, but how many state iniatives to restrict the rights of immigrants has California lived through? It is a federal government which prevents local abuse.
I know these ideas are nutty. I know they're just ideas. But I wish people would think about the relation of federal law in protecting people's rights before they want to seperate from the US because of narrow political goals.
Of course, Native treaties are just one complication. People tend to forget that treaties are still in force in the US and you cannot just ignore them. As casinos across the country serve as testimony to.
What do stars like Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg and Will Smith have in common? They're all part of a new "blacklist" in Hollywood.
A conservative African-American civil rights group says it would like to expose what it calls "the most anti-American black entertainers in the industry." To do so, it has created a new self-titled "blacklist" for African-Americans in Hollywood.
Danny Glover made the list. So did Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg and Will Smith, according to the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, of the Brotherhood Organization for a New Destiny, who is responsible for the list's inception. Why did he create it?
"I'm sickened by these black entertainers who drive $350,000 Bentleys crying racism," said Peterson, who acknowledged he's looking for a more positive message for the black community — especially for young people.
"Why not teach them how to overcome, rather then encouraging anger and doubt and fear in the hearts and minds of many young black Americans?" Peterson asked.
David Almasi, who is spokesman for Project 21, a group for conservative African-American leaders, said Peterson deliberately chose the term, "blacklist."
"Some people might be scared by the term 'blacklist' because they'll think it's something like back in the McCarthy era," said Almasi, who believes Peterson is taking a page from his liberal counterparts.
"What Rev. Peterson is actually asking people to do is exactly what the NAACP and other civil rights groups have done for years, and simply boycott an item, boycott a person, boycott a film," he said.
Peterson is pledging to keep the list up to date as other black stars speak out.
This blacklist is a joke. Only white conservatives would take it as more than that.
Because the people making the list are reviled by the black community. They have no influence, no voice, nothing to say of note. All they can do is tap dance for their white patrons. Why not add people who matter, like Warren Sapp and Donovan McNabb so people could really laugh at them.
While Kos is on vacation, there is an open Thanksgiving thread you need to check out. The recipies are just awesome.
Black Turkey
This recipe was first contained in the manuscript of a book called "The Naked Countess" which was given to the late Robert Benchley, who had eaten the turkey and was so moved as to write an introduction to the book. Benchley then lost the manuscript. He kept hoping it would turn up-- although not as much, perhaps, as Thompson did, but somehow it vanished, irretrievably. Thompson did not have the heart to write it over. He did, however, later put his turkey rule in another book. Not a cookbook, but a collection of very funny pieces called "Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player".
THE ONLY WAY TO COOK A TURKEY!!!!!!!
This turkey is work... it requires more attention than an average six-month-old baby. There are no shortcuts, as you will see.
Get a HUGE turkey-- I don't mean just a big, big bird, but one that looks as though it gave the farmer a hard time when he did it in. It ought to weigh between 16 and 30 pounds. Have the poultryman, or butcher, cut its head off at the end of the neck, peel back the skin, and remove the neck close to the body, leaving the tube. You will want this for stuffing. Also , he should leave all the fat on the bird.
When you are ready to cook your bird, rub it inside and out with salt and pepper. Give it a friendly pat and set it aside. Chop the heart, gizzard, and liver and put them, with the neck, into a stewpan with a clove of garlic, a large bay leaf, 1/2 tsp coriander, and some salt. I don't know how much salt-- whatever you think. Cover this with about 5 cups of water and put on the stove to simmer. This will be the basting fluid a little later.
About this time I generally have my first drink of the day, usually a RAMOS FIZZ. I concoct it by taking the whites of four eggs, an equal amount of whipping cream, juice of half a lemon (less 1 tsp.), 1/2 tsp. confectioner's sugar, an appropriate amount of gin, and blending with a few ice cubes. Pour about two tablespoons of club soda in a chimney glass, add the mix, with ice cubes if you prefer. Save your egg yolks, plus 1 tsp. of lemon -- you'll need them later. Have a good sip! (Add 1 dash of Orange Flower Water to the drink, not the egg yolks)
Get a huge bowl. Throw into it one diced apple, one diced orange, a large can of crushed pineapple, the grated rind of a lemon, and three tablespoons of chopped preserved ginger (If you like ginger, double this -REB). Add 2 cans of drained Chinese water chestnuts.
Mix this altogether, and have another sip of your drink. Get a second, somewhat smaller, bowl. Into this, measuring by teaspoons, put:
2 hot dry mustard
2 caraway seed
2 celery seed
2 poppy seed
1 black pepper
2 1/2 oregano
1/2 mace
1/2 turmeric
1/2 marjoram
1/2 savory
3/4 sage
3/4 thyme 1/4 basil
1/2 chili powder
In the same bowl, add:
1 Tbsp. poultry seasoning
4 Tbsp parsley 1 Tbsp salt
4 headless crushed cloves
1 well crushed bay leaf
4 large chopped onions
6 good dashes Tabasco
5 crushed garlic cloves
6 large chopped celery
Wipe your brow, refocus your eyes, get yet another drink--and a third bowl. Put in three packages of unseasoned bread crumbs (or two loaves of toast or bread crumbs), 3/4 lb. ground veal, 1/2 lb. ground fresh pork, 1/4 lb. butter, and all the fat you have been able to pull out of the bird.
About now it seems advisable to switch drinks. Martinis or stingers are recommended (Do this at your own risk - we always did! -REB). Get a fourth bowl, an enormous one. Take a sip for a few minutes, wash your hands, and mix the contents of all the other bowls. Mix it well. Stuff the bird and skewer it. Put the leftover stuffing into the neck tube.
Turn your oven to 500 degrees F and get out a fifth small bowl. Make a paste consisting of those four egg yolks and lemon juice left from the Ramos Fizz. Add 1 tsp hot dry mustard, a crushed clove of garlic, 1 Tbsp onion juice, and enough flour to make a stiff paste. When the oven is red hot, put the bird in, breast down on the rack. Sip on your drink until the bird has begin to brown all over, then take it out and paint the bird all over with paste. Put it back in and turn the oven down to 350 degrees F. Let the paste set, then pull the bird out and paint again. Keep doing this until the paste is used up.
Add a quart of cider or white wine to the stuff that's been simmering on the stove, This is your basting fluid. The turkey must be basted every 15 minutes. Don't argue. Set your timer and keep it up. (When confronted with the choice "do I baste from the juice under the bird or do I baste with the juice from the pot on the stove?" make certain that the juice under the bird neither dries out and burns, nor becomes so thin that gravy is weak. When you run out of baste, use cheap red wine. This critter makes incredible gravy! -REB)The bird should cook about 12 minutes per pound, basting every 15 minutes. Enlist the aid of your friends and family.
As the bird cooks, it will first get a light brown, then a dark brown, then darker and darker. After about 2 hours you will think I'm crazy. The bird will be turning black. (Newcomers to black turkey will think you are demented and drunk on your butt, which, if you've followed instructions, you are -REB) In fact, by the time it is finished, it will look as though we have ruined it. Take a fork and poke at the black cindery crust.
Beneath, the bird will be a gorgeous mahogany, reminding one of those golden-browns found in precious Rembrandts. Stick the fork too deep, and the juice will gush to the ceiling. When you take it out, ready to carve it, you will find that you do not need a knife. A load sound will cause the bird to fall apart like the walls of that famed biblical city. The moist flesh will drive you crazy, and the stuffing--well, there is nothing like it on this earth. You will make the gravy just like it as always done, adding the giblets and what is left of the basting fluid.
Sometime during the meal, use a moment to give thanks to Morton Thompson. There is seldom, if ever, leftover turkey when this recipe is used. If there is, you'll find that the fowl retains its moisture for a few days. That's all there is to it. It's work, hard work--- but it's worth it.
(What follows is not part of the recipe, but is an ingredients list to aid in shopping for this monster, or for checking your spice cabinet -REB)
Ingredients List:
1 turkey
salt
garlic
4 eggs
1 apple
1 orange
1 large can crushed pineapple
1 lemon
4 large onions
6 celery stalks
buncha preserved ginger
2 cans water chestnuts
3 packages unseasoned bread crumbs
3/4 pounds ground veal
1/2 pounds ground pork
1/4 pounds
butter
onion juice
1 quart apple cider
Spice List:
basil
bay leaf
caraway seed
celery seed
chili powder
cloves
ground coriander
mace
marjoram
dry mustard
oregano
parsley
pepper, black
poultry seasoning
poppy seed
sage
savory
Tabasco
thyme
turmeric
From: Morton Thompson
And the previously noted Alton Brown turkey:
The BEST turkey you will ever have (4.00 / 3)
Courtesy of the master himself, your food god and mine...Alton Brown.
1 (14 to 16 pound) frozen young turkey
For the brine:
1 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 gallon vegetable stock
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
1/2 tablespoon allspice berries
1/2 tablespoon candied ginger
1 gallon iced water
For the aromatics:
1 red apple, sliced
1/2 onion, sliced
1 cinnamon stick
1 cup water
4 sprigs rosemary
6 leaves sage
Canola oil
Combine all brine ingredients, except ice water, in a stockpot, and bring to a boil. Stir to dissolve solids, then remove from heat, cool to room temperature, and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled.
Early on the day of cooking, (or late the night before) combine the brine and ice water in a clean 5-gallon bucket. Place thawed turkey breast side down in brine, cover, and refrigerate or set in cool area (like a basement) for 6 hours. Turn turkey over once, half way through brining.
A few minutes before roasting, heat oven to 500 degrees. Combine the apple, onion, cinnamon stick, and cup of water in a microwave safe dish and microwave on high for 5 minutes.
Remove bird from brine and rinse inside and out with cold water. Discard brine.
Place bird on roasting rack inside wide, low pan and pat dry with paper towels. Add steeped aromatics to cavity along with rosemary and sage. Tuck back wings and coat whole bird liberally with canola (or other neutral) oil.
Roast on lowest level of the oven at 500 degrees F. for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and cover breast with double layer of aluminum foil, insert probe thermometer into thickest part of the breast and return to oven, reducing temperature to 350 degrees F. Set thermometer alarm (if available) to 161 degrees. A 14 to 16 pound bird should require a total of 2 to 2 1/2 hours of roasting. Let turkey rest, loosely covered for 15 minutes before carving
It's Sunday, so you have enough time for cooking. Why not trying a Mexican spicy dinner using some super hot jalapeño or habanero peppers? Too strong for you? No problem. Two years after creating mild jalapeño peppers, Texas pepper breeders have created a mild habanero pepper after 5 years of research. The New York Times reports that this mild habanero is available to growers and you'll soon find it in grocery stores (free registration, but permanent link). As says Dr. Crosby, the plant geneticist who bred this habanero pepper, "It's a pretty fruit. It's got the flavor but it doesn't kill you." Read more before enjoying your meal...
Before going further, why this need for a mild habanero pepper?
With worldwide pepper consumption on the rise, according to industry experts, the new variety -- a heart-shaped nugget bred in benign golden yellow to distinguish it from the alarming orange original, the common Yucatan habanero -- is beginning to reach store shelves, to the delight of processors and the research station, which stands to earn unspecified royalties if the new pepper catches on.
"I love it," said Josh Ruiz, a local farmer whose pickers this week filled some 200 boxes of the peppers to be sold to grocers for about $35 a box. "It yields good and I'm able to eat it." As for the Yucatan habanero, he said, "My stomach just can't take it."
By comparison, if a regular jalapeño scores between 5,000 and 10,000 units on the Scoville scale of pepper hotness based on the amount of the chemical capsaicin (cap-SAY-sin), and a regular habanero averages around 300,000 to 400,000 units, A&M's mild version registers a tepid 2,300, or barely one-hundredth of its coolest formidable namesake. A bell pepper, by the way, scores zero.
For more information about the Scoville scale, which was devised in 1912, you can read this page from Wikipedia, which tells us more about habanero peppers in this other page.
Now let's look at how this mild habanero is grown at the Texas A&M Agricultural Experiment Station (TAM).
The process to produce a more palatable habanero, Dr. Crosby said, began with cross-breeding a regular hot variety with germ plasm from a wild heatless pepper from Bolivia. "We took pollen from the hot to pollinate the heatless to create a hybrid," he said. The hybrid was then self-pollinated, fertilized with its own pollen, to inbreed desired qualities and then, Dr. Crosby said, "backcrossed to the hot to recover more of its genes for flavor." That was repeated for eight generations, or four years at two growing seasons a year, to produce the TAM Mild Habanero
.
And did you know there was an International Pepper Conference? The 17th conference was held last week in Naples, Florida, on November 14-16. And Dr. Crosby animated a discussion about "Breeding Peppers for Enhanced Beneficial Phytochemical Compounds."
If you want to know more about his work, you can read "Texas plant breeder develops mild habanero pepper" (PDF format, 2 pages, August 2004).
Finally, I cannot conclude this column before giving you a recipe. What about some Habanero Pepper Sauce from Diana's Kitchen?
Here is what you'll need.
* 12 habanero peppers, stems removed, finley chopped
* 1/2 cup chopped onion
* 2 cloves garlic, minced
* 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
* 1/2 cup chopped carrots
* 1/2 cup distilled vinegar
* 1/4 cup lime juice
And here is your cooking assignment.
Saute the onion and garlic in oil until soft; add the carrots with a small amount of water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until carrots are soft. Place the mixture and raw chiles into a blender and puree until smooth. Don't cook the peppers, since cooking reduces flavor of the Habaneros. Combine the puree with vinegar and lime juice, then simmer for 5 minutes and seal in sterilized bottles.
But be warned if you're using hot habanero peppers. This recipe is rated 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 by the author, B. Emert.
Intimidation by Israeli-Linked Organization Aimed at US Academic
MEMRI tries a SLAPP
I just checked my campus mail and found a letter in it from Colonel Yigal Carmon, late of Israeli military intelligency, now an official at the Middle East Media Research Organization, or MEMRI. He threatened me with a lawsuit over blog comments I made here at Informed Comment. This technique of the SLAPP or Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation had already been pioneered by polluting industries against environmental activists, and now the pro-Likud lobby in the US has apparently decided to try it out against people like me.
I urge all readers to send messages of protest to memri@memri.org. Please be polite, and simply urge MEMRI, which has a major Web presence, to withdraw the lawsuit threat and to respect the spirit of the free sharing of ideas that makes the internet possible.
Here is the letter:
November 8, 2004
Professor Juan Cole
University of Michigan History Department
1029 Tisch Hall
435 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
Dear Professor Cole,
I write in response to your article "Osama Threatening Red States?" published on November 3, 2004 on antiwar.com. The article included several statements about MEMRI which go beyond what could be considered legitimate criticism, and which in fact qualify as slander and libel. While we respect your right to argue the veracity of our translations, you certainly may not fabricate information about our organization. You make several claims that are patently false:
Trying to paint MEMRI in a conspiratorial manner by portraying us as a rich, sinister group, you write that "MEMRI is funded to the tune of $60 million a year." This is completely false.
You also write that MEMRI is an "anti-Arab propaganda machine" that "cherry-picks the vast Arabic press." If you have any level of familiarity with MEMRI, you should be aware of our Reform Project, which is one of the most important of MEMRI's projects, and which receives much of our energy and resources. The Reform Project (www.memri.org/reform.html) is devoted solely to finding and amplifying the progressive voices in the Arab world. It is especially disappointing that these charges do not come from an overzealous journalist, but from a member of the academic community, from whom one should be able to expect at least the minimum amount of research and corroboration.
In addition, you write that "MEMRI is one of a number of public relations campaigns essentially on behalf of the far right-wing Likud Party in Israel." This, too, is completely false. MEMRI is totally unaffiliated with any government, and receives no government funding. While I was formerly an Israeli official (and retired more than a decade ago), I have never been affiliated with the Likud Party, or any other party.
As such, we demand that you retract the false statements you have made about MEMRI. If you will not do so, we will be forced to pursue legal action against you personally and against the University of Michigan, which the article identifies you as an employee of. We hope this will not be necessary.
Sincerely,
[signed]
Yigal Carmon
Colonel Carmon's letter makes three charges: 1) that I alleged that MEMRI receives $60 million a year for its operations. 2) That I alleged that MEMRI cherry-picks the vast Arab press for articles that make the Arabs look bad. 3) That I said that MEMRI was affiliated with the Likud Party.
This is how I would reply:
1) I am glad to publish the annual funding of MEMRI, and its sources, as provided by Colonel Carmon, if he will tell us what the figure is, which he has not. As a historian, I have no desire to have anything but the facts in evidence. MEMRI obviously a well-funded operation, as any familiarity with its scope and activities would make clear. In the meantime, I am glad to acknowledge that the figure I gave has been disputed by Colonel Carmon. I think he would find that in democratic countries, in any case, a dispute over an organization's level of funding would be laughed out of court as a basis for a libel action. In fact, I am giggling as I write this.
2) I continue to maintain that MEMRI is selective and biased against the Arab press, and that it highlights pieces that cast Arabs, especially committed Muslims, in a negative light. That it also rewards secular Arabs for being secularists is entirely beside the point (and this is the function of the "reform" site). On more than one occasion I have seen, say, a bigotted Arabic article translated by MEMRI and when I went to the source on the Web, found that it was on the same op-ed page with other, moderate articles arguing for tolerance. These latter were not translated.
3) I did not allege that MEMRI or Colonel Carmon are "affiliated" with the Likud Party. What I said was that MEMRI functions as a PR campaign for Likud Party goals. Colonel Carmon and Meyrav Wurmser, who run MEMRI, were both die-hard opponents of the Oslo peace process, and so ipso facto were identified with the Likud rejectionists on that central issue.
Colonel Carmon was not a formal member of the Likud party while serving in Israeli military intelligence because active-duty military are not usually involved in civilian political parties! Since he retired to the US, he did not have the occasion to join the Likud, but there seems little question that if he were living in Israel he would vote for Likud rather than Labor, given his public stances.
So, the charge, that I claimed an "affiliation" of MEMRI with Likud, isn't true in the first place, and there is nothing to retract. That issue almost certainly generated the entire letter. MEMRI is a 501 (c) 3 organization, which is tax exempt in US law, and therefore cannot engage in (much) directly political activity without endangering its exemption. I don't think MEMRI does so directly intervene in politics as to make its 501 (c) 3 status questionable. But it is obvious that 501 (c) 3 is widely abused by rightwing think tanks.
More discussion on MEMRI on the Web can be found here.
I've said all I am going to say to Colonel Carmon just now. Israeli military intelligence is used to being able to censor the Israeli press and to intimidate journalists, and it is a bit shocking that Carmon should imagine that such intimidation would work in a free society.
I will add another criticism of MEMRI, which is that it systematically violates the intellectual property of Arab writers by appropriating their content without paying for it and storing them on its servers, and then claiming copyright in their work as translated! This is a shameful way of proceeding. Where the source articles are published in a country that is signatory to the major international copyright agreements, it may be illegal. All sites dealing in other languages do quote or translate from time to time, which falls under fair use. But MEMRI has a much more systematic set of appropriations going.
MEMRI has begun taking out blog ads. Since it can hardly go about threatening bloggers with lawsuits without violating the essential spirit of open discourse on the Web, it has forfeited any claim on our eyeballs. I urge all bloggers to decline advertisements from MEMRI until such time as Colonel Carmon withdraws his outrageous threat.
Do they think he's going to run away?
The problem with libel suits is that they open the door to a ton of nasty questions about related matters. Cole is not going to back down, nor is the University of Michigan.
SLAPP suits only work against the ignorant and the timid. Hell, if I was Cole, I'd get me a lawyer friend to draw up some proposed deposition questions. I doubt Col. Camron would like to discuss his career in the Mossad. However, it would be fair game in open court.
Would they like to debate their funding and their translation methods? Or their hiring practices?
Oh, and I bet those Arab writers would love to bring a cause of action against MEMRI as well. After all, Cole would have to contact the writers and have them tesitify to the content of their works in dispute. After all, you couldn't trust their translations, could you. Maybe he calls MEMRI Likud supporters because they....uh are?
It's no different than if the Saudis sued Michael Moore. Both sides play dirty, both sides want to be loved by the American media. The Saudis spend their money in a low-key way, the Israelis openly. It's about playing for the high ground with the American press. As more Arabs move to the US, Israelis want to neutralize any potential influence. A fluent Arabic speaker, Cole, who doesn't have an axe to grind and is married to an Iranian, is a perfect target for such a move. But what MEMRI doesn't get is that the Arabs can and will play the same game. And they have more money to do it.
Once you start in on this, don't think only one side can play.
The price of failure in Iraq. another funeral for another American soldier
Atrios posted a cheery graph on progress in Iraq. The words behind it are frightening:
Iraq remains far from the tipping point in terms of security. Insurgent attacks range across the entire country, Iraqi civilian casualties are high, attacks against coalition forces have increased, and coalition forces continue to be unable to control the violence. Major areas in al-Anbar province remain “no-go zones” for coalition and Iraqi forces, with fighting underway in Falluja to take back that city. Iraqi security force capacity appears to be improving, with large injections of coalition funds for training and equipment in recent months. But Iraqi security forces do not yet have the capacity needed to handle Iraq’s security challenges, and recent reports that insurgents have infiltrated the security forces add to the uncertainty about their capacity.2 Insurgents are also keeping pace with training efforts by targeting the security forces directly. The late October ambush and execution-style murder of 50 freshly trained Iraqi national guardsmen is only the latest attempt to undermine U.S. efforts and Iraqis’ faith in their own security institutions. Security remains the predominant concern for Iraqis: 100 percent of respondents in a recent poll conducted by the International Republican Institute identified security as a priority concern.3
Media reporting about security over the past few months has been largely negative, reflecting the increase in attacks and violence across the country. In data collected over a 30-day period in September, one media source reported more than 2,300 attacks by insurgents directed against civilians and military targets in Iraq, in a pattern that sprawled over nearly every major population center outside the Kurdish north.4 Some public source data has been similarly negative. Over a span of two days in mid-October, one source reported three serious car bomb attacks in Mosul alone, with 12 killed and 45 injured.5 Insurgents are focused on both foreign and Iraqi civilian and military targets, using various methods of attack including car bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, land mines, hostage-takings, and assassinations. Reconstruction efforts have also been specifically targeted. In one particularly violent attack in late September, at least 41 people were killed, most of them children, when two bombs went off close to the site of a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new water pumping station in Baghdad.6
U.S. Government sources have painted a more positive picture of the overall security situation, largely because they tend to focus on the increase in funding and training of Iraqi forces. Data put out over recent months includes the Iraqi Coastal Defense Force taking official responsibility for protecting its coastline7 and the establishment of the Iraqi Air Force’s Air Reconnaissance Squadron, which has flown sorties along the oil pipelines in the southeast of the country.8 Although more money is flowing into training and equipping Iraqi forces, this is not having an immediate impact on Iraqis’ daily lives. Crime is on the rise; polling data indicates that 53 percent of Iraqis see crime as one of the three most important issues in their lives, with close to 40 percent seeing it as the number one issue.9 With so much of the coalition effort geared toward rooting out insurgents and increasing the overall Iraqi capacity to take over the struggle, less focus is directed toward the everyday violence and crime that affectolds have been directly affected by violence, in terms of death, handicap, or significant monetary loss, since Saddam’s ouster.10 Some estimates place the figure for Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from war or crime between May 2003 and September 30, 2004 as high as 31,400; lower estimates put the numbers since the war began in the 10,000 – 15,000 range.11 Although training and equipping Iraqi forces is the key to Iraq’s longer term stability, Iraqis are desperate for improved public safety in the immediate ters Iraq’s citizens. Recent polling data shows that up to 22 percent of Iraqi househm.
Coalition and Iraqi forces have achieved some successes in recent months. The improved program to train and equip Iraqi forces has resulted in an estimated 100,000 Iraqi law enforcement officers and 62,000 Iraqi armed forces serving or training.12 In comparison to figures in late June 2004, this is an increase from approximately 88,000 and 49,000 respectively.13 Hundreds of weapons were turned over to coalition forces during the recent Iraqi government weapons-for-cash handover initiative in Sadr City,14 and Moktadah al Sadr’s Mahdi Army appears for now to be sticking to ceasefire terms. Center For Strategic and International Studies Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project
But the US is responsible for their own failures in Iraq. This report from July, 2004 lists a host of mistakes the US made in Iraq, largely due to slow funding and bad decisions.
The HUMINT Problem
Furthermore, the US has tried to carry out the impossible mission of developing effective human intelligence (HUMINT) on its own, rather than it full partnership with the Iraqis. One of the critical lessons of Vietnam was ignored. Rather than see the need for effective Iraqi intelligence collection and analysis -- and to rely on Iraqis for the lack of area and language skills and understanding of local political and tactical conditions – the US tried to create a network of informers and local contacts and carry out analysis on its own. The US simply does not have the capability in terms of expertise and access to suddenly improvise a largely autonomous HUMINT effort as a substitute for partnership with an intelligence organization run by local allies.
Progress Could Be Real if Adequate Aid Were (Had Been) Provided
Serious training in urban warfare, and efforts to provide proper equipment— including reconnaissance assets and other special equipment— seems to be currently underway. For example, the CPA reported as it went out of business that it had decided to give the new Iraqi air force two Seeker reconnaissance aircraft to conduct surveillance of the borders and oil facilities and was rushing procurement of 14 more.
There also is enough progress to show how productive the aid effort could still be if it was rushed forward, and the US treated the Iraqis as partners in reality and not simply in name:
• Iraqi government announced a new law allowing it to impose emergency security measures to combat terrorism
• The initial battalion of the Iraq Intervention Force (IIF) deployed into Baghdad at the end of June
– The IIF is being established, trained and equipped for urban counterinsurgency
operations
– All three battalions of the first IIF brigade will be ready by end of July.
• At the end of June, 41 of 45 battalions of the Iraqi National Guard (formerly the Iraqi Civil Defense Corp) were manned above 75 percent strength
– Currently conducting joint patrols throughout Iraq with Coalition and Iraqi Police forces
– Focus on equipping, training, and reconstituting the force
• Efforts are underway to recruit six additional 400-man public order battalions as part of the Iraqi Police Service civil intervention force
• With these additions, the Iraqi Police Service civil intervention force will total nine public order battalions and two counterinsurgency battalions
• A total of 5,502 new IPS recruits have completed the eight week training course
– Five classes, or over 3,411 students, have graduated from the Jordan Academy
– Four classes, or 2,091 students, have graduated from the Baghdad Public Safety Academy
• Approximately 25,000 IPS personnel who served as police under the former regime have completed a three-week Transitional and Integration Program taught by Coalition
• IPS officers are also being taught basic criminal investigation, criminal intelligence, and dignitary protection by Coalition advisors
Unfortunately, the reporting issued by the Depart pf Defense confirms the fact that the actual flow of US aid to the Iraqi security effort remains slow and inadequate. As of July 13, the US had only actually spent $220 million out of the $2,976 million apportioned under the FY2004 aid program of $18.4 billion.
Manpower and Training Status
The CPA never standardized its public reporting on the status of Iraqi training, although the data always implied a much higher level of training than actually took place. The training data on the Iraqi security forces were also altered in ways that disguises the level of training in most services in the in CPA reporting issued from April 2004 onwards, by implying that training under the Ba’ath regime, or limited on the job training under the Transition Integration Program (TIP) was adequate.
Training Status Under the CPA
The penultimate status report the CPA issued before its disbandment shows, however, that only 5,857 out of 88,039 Iraqi police had serious academy training, as of 25 June 2004, although another 2,387 were in the training pipeline. The final CPA report issued on 6 July 2004 did not provide the summary training data in previously reports, but did indicate that a total of 3,411 students had graduated from the Jordanian Academy and 1,674 students had graduated from the Baghdad Public Safety Academy. Even these students had courses lasting less than a fifth as long as similar training in the US and Europe. The figures for the Department of Border enforcement showed that 255 had postwar academy training out of a total of 18,248, plus 25 in training. The CPA went out of business before it provided figures for trained manpower in the new National Guard, but its final reports stated that 2,362 out of 39,128 men were “in training.” The same was true of its final report on the status of the Iraqi Army. A total of 10,222 men were said to be in service, of which 2,316 were “in training.” The data for the Facilities Protection Service showed an active strength of 74,069. Once again, no data were provided on what portions were regarded as trained and only 77 were reported to be “in training.”
Most of the training was little more than at the token level, and a GAO investigation
describes the end result as follows:
"State/INL provided the commanders with a temporary curriculum, the Transition Integration Program. The full curriculum is 108 hours long and provides basic police training in such subjects as basic human rights, firearms familiarization, patrol procedures, and search methods. According to a State Department official, the various major subordinate commanders had wide latitude in terms of training police and did not uniformly adopt the Transition Integration Program. They were free to establish their own curriculum and requirements for police, which varied in depth and scope. Training could last between 3 days and 3 weeks. According to a State/INL official, some commanders required trainees to undergo class and field training, while other commanders only required officers to wear a uniform. According to a multinational force interim assessment from May 2004, the Iraq Civil Defense Corps also lacked proper training. It stated that investment into training the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps units varied among the multinational divisions and that the units in the western and center south major subordinate commands in particular were the least prepared for combat. Furthermore, the training was not sufficient for high-intensity tasks. One CPA official agreed with this, stating that the training for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps did not prepare it to fight against well-armed insurgents with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, for example. The assessment also noted that the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps units contained too many inexperienced officers and soldiers."
Please note that the new figures for “trained” manpower in the table shown below differ sharply from those issued under the CPA. They now count both manpower fully trained in academies or with full military training, and manpower in the rushed programs that can be a matter of days or a few weeks as being the same. The end result is a far less honest reporting system that grossly exaggerates the actual level of training.
Previous reporting by the CPA shows that the totals for trained manpower are particularly absurd for the Iraqi National Guard, where most men shown as “trained” are actually figures for the token training program conducted for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps – when the force had a different name, role and mission. Today, the total training program for most new recruits to the National Guard lasts all of two weeks, and the first week is largely orientation.
The New Post- CPA Training Data
The new figures for trained manpower also overstate the training levels for the police and
for the border service (DBE), and ignore the fact that the facilities protection servicetraining
program is virtually no training at all.
There is nothing unique about this tendency to issue exaggerated statistics by omitting meaningful categories and definitions, and using meaningless measures of success. From the start, the CPA was a model of obfuscation, omission, and false imagery in very aspect of its public status reports. For example, the more comprehensive training data on the Iraqi security forces issued by the CPA were deliberately confused by implying that training under the Ba’ath regime, or limited on the job training was adequate.
• In reality, as of 25 June 2004, only 5,857 out of 88,039 Iraqi police had serious academy training, although another 2,387 were in the training pipeline. No figures were made available for how many could be said to have the necessary equipment, transportation, communications, and facilities. The figures for the Department of Border enforcement showed that 255 had postwar academy training out of a total of 18,248, plus 25 in training.
• No figures were provided for trained manpower in the new National Guard, although 2,362 out of 39,128 were said to be “in training”. The same was true for the Iraqi Army. A total of 10,222 men were said to be in service, of which 2,316 were “in training.” The data for the Facilities Protection Service showed an active strength of 74,069. Once again, no data were provided on what portion was regarded as trained and only 77 were reported to be “in training.”
• Training in urban warfare, providing reconnaissance assets and other special equipment, is only beginning, and the few meaningful details have been made public are not reassuring. For example, the CPA reported as it went out of business that it had decided to give the new Iraqi air force two Seeker reconnaissance aircraft to conduct surveillance of the borders and oil facilities and was rushing procurement of 14 more.
The fact the status reports do even more to disguise the level of true progress is simply unacceptable. No single mission is more important than security, and no Iraqi popular desire is clearer than that this mission be done by Iraqis. The US has been guilty of a gross military, administrative, and moral failure. It seems to be finally taking steps to correct these mistakes, but its past history shows that detailed progress reporting is essential, and that the US military has been reluctant at best to come to grips with the need for an effective effort.
I don't worry about George Bush sending the cops for me.
I don't worry about a bust of him going up on the Mall.
I worry about people being driven out of business for making Grand Theft Auto.
The real threat isn't the FBI, but people making war on free expression of ideas. George Bush is less a threat to my rights than the neighbor who wants to "protect" her kids.
They don't have banned books week because of Washington. Nope. It's concerned parents who are shocked that Huck Finn has the word nigger in it. People want to worry about fascism, yet how many people have sued to get comprehensive sexual education in their kid's school? How many tolerate abstinance education as a substitute?
It is easy to worry about a few thousand Muslims being fingerprinted, but how many people defend their local library's right to privacy?
It's not a fascist state I worry about, but a nanny state, where my basic rights to listen to music, read, watch what I want on TV, which I feel is at threat. And not because of the Patriot Act. Were it only so simple.
What is happening is that people are taking their personal beliefs into the public arena.
When you have a book at the Grand Canyon book store which says the great flood created it, and only a few scientists object, something is deeply wrong. Because that's faith, not fact.
Yet, I got the following e-mail today and it wasn't from Lou Shelton:
GROUPS: 10 MOST VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES SHOULD NOT BE ON HOLIDAY SHOPPING LISTS FOR CHILDREN, RETAILERS & INDUSTRY URGED TO CLEAN UP SALES, RATINGS
“Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” and “Halo 2” Highlighted As Off Limits for Young Children; Unwary Adult Shoppers Not Aided by Weak, Poorly Promoted Rating System and Confusing Ads.
NEW YORK CITY//November 23, 2004//Five leading parent, church and women’s groups along with New York City Council Member Eric Gioia today issued a “10 worst violent video game” list in the hopes of alerting unwary parents and grandparents to the blood-soaked and anti-social content of the games that might otherwise be purchased as holiday gifts for children. In a joint statement, the groups also urged retailers to stop selling the inappropriate games directly to children and called on the industry to come up with an improved and more widely promoted game rating system that parents can understand.
The five groups -- the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), the National Committee on Women's Organizations, Mothers Against Violence in America, Center for Advancement of Public Policy, Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ and NYC Council Member Eric Gioia -– highlighted 10 video games as the worst in terms of violence (in alphabetical order): (1) Doom 3; (2) Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; (3) Gunslinger Girls 2; (4) Half Life 2; (5) Halo 2; (6) Hitman: Blood Money (releases in 2005); (7) Manhunt; (8) Mortal Combat: Deception; (9) Postal 2; and (10) Shadow Heart. The list of problem games also extends to all earlier versions of the problem games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series and Hit Man series. The groups also voiced their concerns about a free, Web-based game “America’s Army,” which is used to promote enlistment in the U.S. Army, but is accessible to the youngest of children.
Sister Pat Wolf, executive director, ICCR, said: “To parents and grandparents faced with confusing advertising and a vague and poorly promoted rating system for videogames, I say this: Take the time to learn about the worst games and steer clear of them. While I doubt that many parents or grandparents would deliberately put a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in the hands of a pre-teen, it is all too easy to see how that could happen today. Many adults who have not played video games may not realize that these ‘games’ will typically force an impressionable child to kill in order to ‘win.’ Adults buying video games for children need to understand that the game makers and retailers are not on their side when it comes to these violent video games. This fast-buck-at-any-cost mentality is something that is a real danger to kids.”
Pamela Eakes, president and founder, Mothers Against Violence in America, said: “No parent or grandparent should succumb to the pressure from a young child who requests one of these violent video games, which put the player in the positions of a mass murderer, a gun-wielding street thug, an abuser of women, an indiscriminate sniper, a cop killer and so on. There is no seven- or eight-year-old child in America who will be well served in any way by gaining access to these cesspools of bloodlust, degradation of women and racial stereotyping. I wonder what it will say to a child if they receive such a game from a parent or grandparent, no matter how unwitting the gift giver might be.”
NYC Council Member Eric Gioia, chair of the Committee on Oversight and Investigations in the New York City Council, said: “Some retailers are allowing children and teenagers to purchase the most violent, the most graphic, and the most sexually explicit video games ever created, notwithstanding ratings and warnings on the packaging. An investigation I conducted last year showed a minor could walk into almost any store selling video games in New York City and purchase them without difficulty. But killing cops, beating women, and committing hate crimes, are not something I want my children practicing, in living, vivid, color. The video game industry asked for a chance to let self-regulation work, and we’ve given it to them. In a few weeks, we will see the results when I release my follow-up investigation. In the meantime, I renew my request to all retailers to act responsibly; keep adult content away from our kids. And to parents, I remind them that a well-informed parent is our best weapon against the distribution of inappropriate, potentially harmful video games to children.”
Dr. Martha Burk, president, Center for Advancement of Public Policy and chair, National Council of Women's Organizations, said: “Video game retailers must commit to keeping video games with graphic violence or strong sexual themes out of the hands of children. The best way to do this is to not sell the games. Corporate responsibility must mean more than meeting minimal rating standards, which presently serve the industry far more than they serve the consumer. Retailers must develop their own standards in regards to the marketing of these types of games, and disclose how they are implementing and complying with these standards. Too many newspaper ads today mix in the videogames for toddlers with videogames no child should see. And on Amazon.com, when you pull up Half Life 2, you find that a purchase will be rewarded with a stuffed Shrek 2 doll. That makes the violent video game seem like something designed for kids.”
Dr. Bernice Powell Jackson, executive minister and officer, Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ, and president, North American Region of the World Council of Churches, said: “Our concern about these violent video games is not guesswork. For example, there is ample evidence today that playing violent video games leads to increased aggressive thought, feelings and actions. We also have considerable anecdotal evidence of the fact that parents don’t understand the industry rating system. And retailers must stop turning a blind eye when it comes to sales to children. This is a huge problem: A New York City Council study found that such purchases by children of inappropriate games happened in 34 out of 35 stores. These games are bad for kids. The rating system does not work. Retailers are making a mockery of the supposed limits on sales. All of this paints a very unattractive picture of a violent video game ‘system’ in America that just does not work at all.”
You're worried about George Bush? I'm worried about Sister Pat Wolf.
Why? Because I can write my Congressman, I can oppose the President and his policies. Sister Pat wants to march into my home and tell me what to think. She wants to tell me what to buy for my kids and make that a moral decision. What do I do to stop her? Who's going to march against her? No one is going to call her anti-democratic acts fascism. No, they'll blame the game companies for making "violent games".
Because she's not talking about keeping games away from kids. That's a nice. clever cover for what this really is. She doesn't want anyone to play these games, kids or adults. Rating games should outrage people. We don't rate books and newspapers, and they often have ideas which we object to.
I'm NOT saying kids should play GTA:AS for fun. But that game isn't for kids. Rockstar Games doesn't make it for kids, they don't market it to kids, and it's not supposed to be sold to kids.
When I read liberals screaming about "potentially harmful video games to children" I hear the jackboots a lot closer than from John Ashcroft's DOJ. And it is liberals, not just the fundies, who scream about this. Despite there being NO as in ZERO evidence of a correlation between real world violence and a video game, people still posit this myth as a fact. Doesn't Councilman Gioia have real issues to deal with? Don't his constitutents have real problems not sponsored by SONY?
These people want the government to regulate thought they don't like. Pure and simple.
Personally, I think these are parental decisions. I don't want Councilman Gioia and Dr. Burk limiting my choices as a consumer or an American. What other ideas do these people want to limit?
I know what Lou Shelton wants, a theocracy. I know what George Bush wants, cheap-labor capitalism. But I don't know what Sister Wolf and Dr. Burk want. I don't know where they would stop. Is it GTA:AS or America's Army or any other game which disagrees with their ideology. Yet, if you ask these people how these games are a danger to kids, they don't have an answer. They have some hoked up studies from Dave Grossman, but not one legal decision from a court backing up their claims. In fact Grossman's studies were tossed in cases when they were used.
These people are not about information, but judgment. They want to drive these ideas from the marketplace, using law and fear. Not facts and reason.
Given a choice, I'd dump the useless ratings and let people make their own judgments on what they should come in contact with.
In our democracy, some ideas are vulgar, angry and unpleasant. Some are sold to people too young, and some for people too old. But that is not something I need a bunch of nanny state busybodies to prevent.
Now, I'm not for giving ten year olds games where you rape and murder people. I wouldn't buy my nephew GTA:AS. It's not appropriate. But I am confused. What is wrong in marketing to teenagers to join the US Army? What is wrong in using a computer game to recruit them? How is that the same as GTA:AS? How are the two related? Is serving in the Army the same as being a gang banger? I am confused as to the relationship between the two. Kids can't enlist in the Army. The real Army is a very different place than a computer game and anyone who thinks differently will get the shock of their life at Ft. Jackson.
We can oppose the worse in our opponents. We can protect ourselves from those who are obvious. A national ID card, the Patriot Act, those are obvious assaults on our freedoms.
Lou Shelton makes his plans as clear as day. He wants a Christian America. No secret, no obfuscation.
But we will not lose our freedom from the obvious.
If we lose our freedom, it will be step by step, with seemingly modest proposals against things we don't like. It is no coincidence that the FCC went after Howard Stern. Because it is easy to go after the unpopular. It was easy to punish him because many people didn't like the tits and ass aspect of his show. The fact that his freedom of expression was inhibited by shifting, nonsensical rules, seemed to bother few people until he criticized President Bush. Then, people leaped to his defense. The fact that he should have been able to say what he wanted didn't occur to a lot of people until he said what they wanted to hear.
Sure, these "liberal" dogooders think they are protecting children with their campaign against free expression, but they don't make any connection between their anti-democratic campaign against something they see as trivial and the rights of people to express themselves any way they choose. These games aren't marketed to kids for the most part. And even if they were, isn't their sale a private decision between parents and children? No one wouldn't sell a kid a copy of Mein Kampf. Even in my liberal elementary school, they hid the sex books from the kids. I still asked for them, and got them, but it was silly.
Just because this isn't socially positive, it doesn't mean I need nannies to tell me so. Parents shouldn't buy ANYTHING for their kids without checking it out.
Now, there are changes I'd like to make, like the ability to return games for credit when it isn't acceptable. And for people to find out what games are about in a neutral forum. But I don't trust ratings for anything and I think people should make their own decisions on what is acceptable in their homes. I certainly don't need nannies, liberal or conservative making my choices for me.
Today, they want to protect children, tomorrow, they'll want to protect us. It isn't the jackboot which I am afraid of, but the "helping hand".
The American holiday of Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching, and the traditional Thanksgiving dinner centering around a roast turkey looms over us. If you're planning on roasting a turkey, it's probably time to start thinking about buying one. (Thawing a large frozen turkey could take a whole week.) "Designer" turkeys can cost as much as $10 a pound while some supermarkets will sell you a turkey for less than $1 per pound. But what do you look for when buying a turkey?
Fresh or Frozen
Fresh turkeys are turkeys that are quick-chilled to 40°F (4°C) or lower and have been stored at a temperature greater than 26°F (-3°C). This means, it is possible that the turkey could be partially frozen (if stored for a while). They should kept in the refrigerator after purchase and cooked within two days.
Frozen turkeys are turkeys that have been frozen in a blast freezer and are kept at 0°F (-18°C) or lower. The turkey is frozen quickly enough that ice crystals don't form (so no damage occurs during thawing). Frozen turkeys are packaged tightly in plastic to prevent freezer burn and can be stored in the freezer for long periods of times (over a year if necessary). To thaw a turkey, move it from the freezer to the refrigerator and allow about 5 hours for each pound of turkey. A 12 pound turkey will take a little over two days to thaw while a large 20 pounder will take about four days. Once the turkey has thawed, you can keep it in the fridge for up to two days before cooking. Refreezing a turkey reduces the quality because ice crystals will form during the slow freezing process (tearing the tissue of the turkey apart).
Both fresh and frozen turkeys produce excellent results when roasted properly. In general, fresh turkeys cost more than frozen, so I use frozen turkeys.
Basted or Unbasted
Basted turkeys have been injected with a sodium-based solution to increase the juiciness of the bird. Flavor enhancers, fat, broth, or stock can also be injected into the turkey. In the United State, it is required by law that labels must include a statement identifying the total quantity and common name of all ingredients in the solution. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) website provides this example: "Injected with approximately 3% of a solution of _____________ (list of ingredients)."
In general, basted turkeys are more juicy (when roasted directly), but have an off taste. For the best turkey, buy an unbasted one and brine it for a few hours before cooking. Don't brine a basted turkey since they already have a heightened salt content.
Age
Fryer/roaster turkeys are young turkeys usually less than four months old. These are generally between 4 and 8 pounds (1.8 and 3.6 kg) and are very tender.
Young turkeys are between 4 and 7 months of age. They are sometimes referred to as young roaster turkeys and are also very tender. I recommend using either fryer/roaster or young turkeys for roasting.
Yearling turkeys are around 12 months old. The skin and meat are moderately tender and can still be roasted well.
Mature turkeys are over fifteen months old and should not be used for roasting since they will produce fairly tough meat.
Size
To figure out how much turkey you need to roast, use the 3/4 pound (1/3 kg) per person rule of thumb. A ten pound turkey can be expected to feed 12 to 14 guests.
Other labels
Free range or free roaming turkeys must be allowed access to the outside while being raised. This does not affect the taste of the turkey.
Hen turkeys are female turkeys and generally are 15 pounds (7 kg) or less. Tom turkeys are male and are typically more than fifteen pounds. The sex of the turkey has no bearing on flavor, texture, or tenderness.
Kosher turkeys are turkeys that have been prepared under Rabbinical supervision. Often, they are sold with a layer of salt coating the turkey increasing juiciness and saltiness. These turkeys do not need to be brined, but soaking them in water may increase their tenderness by increasing water content prior to cooking.
Minimally processed turkeys are supposedly minimally processed. However, processing can include traditional processes for preparing meat such as smoking, roasting, freezing, drying, and fermenting. Generally, this isn't an issue when buying a turkey for roasting because they all be minimally processed.
Although there does not yet exist a man-made turkey, there are Natural turkeys. Natural turkeys do not contain artificial flavors, food coloring, chemical preservatives, or any other artificial ingredient. In the U.S., the label must explain the use of the term "natural" (for example, no added colorings or artificial ingredients; minimally processed). Natural turkeys generally have the best flavors without the chance of the turkey tasting artificial. They also cost more.
The label "no antibiotics" can be used when the turkey producer proves to inspectors that the turkeys were raised without antibiotics.
Although the U.S. government prohibits the use of hormones when raising turkeys, the label "no hormones" can still be found on some turkeys. According to the USDA, the claim "no hormones added" cannot be used on the labels of poultry unless it is followed by a statement that says, "Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones."
House party! MoveOn.org regroups in a nationwide brainstorming session, and finds not everyone is quite ready to just move on from November's election.
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By Katharine Mieszkowski
Nov. 22, 2004 | BERKELEY, Calif. -- At political signer and satirist Laramie Crocker's place in Berkeley on Sunday night, the forest green Subaru Outback parked out front still bore a "Dean for America" bumper sticker and another said, "It's up to the women ... vote! Kerry/Edwards." A scrawled, taped-up sign on the door of Crocker's wooden front gate read: "Party On at Laramie's." The "party" was one of more than 1,600 house parties across the country designed to shape the future of what's arguably the country's largest progressive organization, MoveOn.org. Sunday's get-togethers linked thousands of MoveOn's more than 2 million activists by speakerphone and computer and had a simple goal: to identify issues the group should focus on and strategies it should deploy to "move on" from the defeat in November's election.
But not everyone at Crocker's house was convinced that Bush really won -- and they're not ready to move on. Fliers circulating through the party urged Crocker's 50 guests to call Sen. John Kerry's Senate office and demand that he "un-concede immediately" and "Demand a recount, and in suspicious counties a re-vote with a paper ballot." Another handout decried a "news media blackout" on the Nader-requested recount in New Hampshire and another recount effort in Ohio: "It's up to us to spread the word -- if nothing is done about this -- why have another election at all?" the flier exhorted. Whether because of outright fraud, voter intimidation or electronic voting machine irregularities, many of Crocker's guests believe the president may have stolen the office -- again. The mood among attendees as they munched a polyglot potluck of Red Vines licorice, hummus, carrot sticks, blue chips and pasta salad was both mournful and urgent.
"Things are so bleak now. I feel like it's prewar Nazi Germany here," says Arianna Siegel, who campaigned for Dennis Kucinich and teaches English as a foreign language. "There's a fascist government in control. There are a lot of angry people out there," she said, while waiting for the nationwide conference call to begin. An African-American woman from Emeryville, Calif., who refused to give her name for fear of government reprisals, said that since the election: "I don't even read the news anymore. I can't handle it. I don't want to listen to news about him every day." No one had to ask to whom she was referring.
When I read this, all I can say is I decry the lack of decent history education in America.
I know this was in Berkeley, I know people are upset about the election, but this is just silly dramatics.
Why?
Because, first of all, if we lived in a fascist state, that party wouldn't have had a reporter there, but informers and they all would have been arrested.
Look, democracy is and was fragile. You cannot take it for granted. But the US is not a fascist dictatorship and saying so profanes the memory of people who survived living under one.
Here's what to look for, if you must:
National identity cards with a central registry
A dictatorship needs a single set of documents to track the population. Local ID's as we have now, would not suffice. How could a policeman know if an ID was valid. Remember Allied POWs spent time and effort forging German documents from local resources. One of their favorite documents was an Ausweis, permission to be on Reich property. It was good nationwide. A social security number isn't used in every transaction. Nor is any financial document. You need a single national ID where if you don't possess it, you can be arrested for it on the spot.
A break down in political order
Congress doesn't just argue, it ceases to function. Disorder, even violence is common within it's halls. What laws it does pass are often ineffective. New groups outside the political mainstream not only grow, but seek election.
Violent political conflict
These outside groups not only seek political influence, they seek popular approval by launching street battles. These groups quickly become armed and use violence against political opponents. Political murders are commonplace, both within and without the movement
A national police force
You cannot run a dictatorship on a patchwork of local police forces. You need a single, uniformed, paramilitary police force which can cross local and even international boundaries and answer to one set of officials loyal to the head of state.
A charismatic demagougic leader
As much as George Bush annoys, he isn't a charsimatic leader. People like him in spite of his flaws. He isn't a gifted orator, he doesn't represent any ethnic faction, he doesn't appeal to people's darkest nativists fears. He doesn't represent a nationalist icon. There is no basis to believe that Bush or any American politician could lead the country into not only abrogating rights like in the McCarthy era, but handing the state a whole new set of powers. People have to be convinced that only by agrreeing to surrender these powers, which would include control of the economy and the right to strike and other social activities way beyond the Patriot Act, would this happen.
An allied or neutral military
The dictator either has to be part of the military, work with the military closely or have it swear personal loyalty to him. At best, the military will be neutral and serve the state, at worst, it is an instrument of terror. It's leaders have to be willing to be subordinate to the dictator and do his bidding.
Violent disappearance of political opponents
The state rounds up or murders its opponents extrajudicially. They don't use the law, they go outside of it and leave no record of their action, much less a court case. It would be as if Howard Dean was found decapititated on a roadside in Vermont, and Tom Harkin "committed suicide" while in police custody. John Kerry would be living in exile in Toronto, constantly dodging assassins. Government reprisal is at the lowest level, jail for even innocuous comments and at it's worst, a visit from the death squads. People aren't just jailed for political statements but any criticism of government, from trash delivery to the uniforms the police wear.
Dicatorships use terror at every level to cow the population.
Now it may suit your sense of the dramatic to call the US a fascist dictatorship, something I've heard since the 1980's on Pacifica, mostly said by people's who's ideas are unpopular. But if you read about real dictatorships, the comparison becomes embarassing rather quickly. Policy doesn't make dictatorships, actions do.
Now, Bush has some truly bad tendencies we have to fight, but he's not forming a new Gestapo and demanding identity passes for everyone. This isn't South Africa, 1989. If you conflate the threat, you miss the real menance, which is a steady erosion of our values, not a knock in the middle of the night.
although there are people in every society who will look for a man on a white horse
And don't tell me about how it will be too late when we notice it. The Nazis didn't rise to power overnight. The conditions of disorder created the Nazis. Hitler telegraphed every move, and no one listened. In Chile and Greece, it was clear in the years before the military took power, that they had support to do so. People just refused to act. The struture of a dictatorship lies in institutions which centralize state power and encourage people to trust the government. What American trusts the government?
The thing about the picture of Bush is not that some syncophant did it, but that people are laughing their asses off over it. Some people need to worship the President, any president.
Which is why we need to be vigilient. Democracy is fragile and it has to be protected from all threats. The good thing is that respect for the office is not the same as idolizing a man. Our forefathers warned against this and Washington prevented it. But there have always been people who wanted a king or to be king. And that will never change. Nor will our ability to stop them.
Nov. 22, 2004 | TOKYO (AP) -- Koreans have a harsh history in Japan. Their homeland was under Tokyo's colonist yoke for 35 years, and in Japan they still face discrimination and cruel stereotypes. But thanks to the mega-hit South Korean soap opera "Winter Sonata," Koreans these days also face something quite different in Japan: adulation.
On visits to Tokyo, the show's two main actors -- Bae Yong-joon, 32, and Choi Ji-woo, 29 -- are mobbed by swooning fans, and sales of chewing gum and chocolates they advertise have surged.
Japanese are filling Korean language classes, crooning Korean pop songs at karaoke clubs and buying out flights to Seoul to visit places featured in the drama.
Ayumi Udagawa, 30, has gone a step further. Like thousands of women in recent months, she has registered with a matchmaking agency for the ultimate hot-selling item: a Korean husband.
"When I watched the drama, Korean men were so attractive and different from Japanese men," she gushed. "I want to meet a masculine, passionate Korean man."
The phenomenon is quite a twist -- if a superficial one -- for the image of Koreans in Japan, which colonized the Korean Peninsula from 1910 until 1945.
Koreans in Japan have struggled for decades against stereotypes depicting them as irrational, untrustworthy and violent. Despite deep cultural similarities, the two countries -- and their people -- remain far apart.
"This is perhaps the first time Korea is admired so widely by ordinary Japanese," said Chung Dae-kyun, Tokyo Metropolitan University professor of Korean studies. "It's a very positive development for both countries."
"Winter Sonata," produced by the Korean Broadcasting System, was televised twice on satellite channels in Japan starting in April 2003.
But the Korea boom took off after the soap opera was shown on national broadcaster NHK's regular programming this summer, winning nearly a 24 percent viewership despite its late Saturday night time slot. NHK has scheduled another airing of the series in December due to the overwhelming popularity of it.
The soap opera has won over Japanese fans with heavy doses of schmaltz and an endless number of twists and turns.
Bae and Choi's teenage romance is cut short when Bae dies in a car accident. Years later, Choi spots a man who looks just Bae, falls in love again, and sure enough, it turns out Bae didn't die after all -- he survived, but with amnesia. Then he has another car accident that brings back his memories of Choi. But then he goes blind ...
The plot may require superhuman efforts at suspension of disbelief. But many Japanese say the unpolished production style and the characters' sincere passion and conservative values remind them of a more innocent Japan that vanished in the wealth and materialism of the 1980s.
"I was impressed by how young people in the drama respected their parents, just like we were taught as children," said 51-year-old housewife Hideko Ezaki. "Such traditional values have faded here, and they seemed fresh."
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For Japanese who for so long have looked to the United States and Europe for culture and travel, the discovery that South Korea shares so much in common with them has been a pleasant surprise.
"We're so close on the map, and there are similar words in Korean and Japanese," said Udagawa, the matchmaker customer. "If we get used to one another, I'm sure we can be friends."
So, does this mean that Koreans can now become Japanese citizens?
How to put it? It would be as if all things Algerian became an French fashion statement. That Algerian men were suddenly on the hot to marry list in Paris. Because of a soap opera.
Between 1939 and 1945, many Koreans were forcibly brought to Japan to work u nder even more severe conditions [Park 1965]. During this same period, the Japan ese military forcibly brought many young Korean women to serve them as "comfort women" [Yoshimi 1995]. When Japan was defeated by the Allied Forces in 1945, it is estimated that there were approximately 2,300,000 Koreans in Japan.
Enforcement of Japanese names: "Soshi-kaimei"
During its colonial time and especially after the Pacific War broke out, Japan, using its military power, forced Koreans to completely assimilate to Japanese. A s a part of its assimilation policy, Japan forced Koreans to do "soshi-kaimei" ( adopt Japanese names instead of using their Korean ones). "Soshi-kaimei" was int ended to radically transform the Korean family system into that of the Japanese [Miyata et al. 1992]. The effect of "soshi-kaimei" is evident even today in a se nse, as the vast majority of Koreans in Japan still use Japanese names instead o f their Korean ones in their daily lives.
However, many Koreans attempted to preserve their family roots by modifying their Japanese names. One of the findings from my interviews with Koreans in Jap an was that there are correlations between their Japanese names and their Korean surnames. For example, "Kim", a popular Korean surname, can be read "kane" in J apanese. Thus, those Koreans who were members of the "Kim" family tended to name themselves "Kaneda", "Kaneyama", and so on. Some Koreans made up Japanese surnames referring to their "bonkwan" (which means the place where their ancestors or iginated). Other Koreans created Japanese surnames with words which expressed their family history. Regrettably, the wishes of the Koreans at that time to prote ct their ethnicity and national pride seem to have not necessarily been passed o n to today's young, third generation.
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Negation of both rights as Japanese citizens and as foreigners
How did the Japanese government treat Koreans compelled to remain in Japan after WWII? They treated Korean residents in as absurd a way as with their previous c olonial policy [Mintohren 1989]. The post-war Japanese government negated both Korean rights as Japanese citizens and as foreigners.
For example, Korean schools were established in many places in Japan after t he end of WWII. They were built by Korean parents who wanted their children to l earn Korean language, history and culture in preparation for their future return to Korea. However, Japanese authorities suppressed these Korean schools, statin g that it was not appropriate that Korean children were educated as foreigners since they were Japanese citizens.2
On the other hand, the Japanese government stripped Koreans residing in Japa n of their right to vote in December 1945. In 1947, Koreans residing in Japan be came subject to the Alien Registration Ordinance. The grounds for this treatment were that Koreans who did not have their "koseki" (family registration) in Japan were not seen as "true" Japanese, even though they were Japanese nationals. Even after the San Francisco Peace Treaty was effectuated in 1952, the Japan ese government still treated unrepatriated Koreans outrageously. When the treaty came into effect on April 28, 1952, the Japanese government unilaterally stripp ed Korean residents of their Japanese nationality. They did not even give Korean residents a choice between a Japanese, or a Korean nationality.
Moreover, as it obtained independence from the Allied Nations' control, the Japanese government awarded compensation to war veterans and the families of tho se who died. However, it was not awarded to those Korean veterans who were force d to become Japanese soldiers during WWII, nor to their families. This was on th e grounds that they were not Japanese nationals when the laws were established, even though they had been Japanese nationals during wartime.
In addition, Koreans conscripted into the Japanese army were given orders to abuse captives of the Allied Forces by their superiors. These Koreans were pena lized and executed as war criminals even after they had their Japanese nationali ty stripped. The Japanese government and the Japanese Supreme Court rejected Kor ean protests relating to this unfair treatment, stating that despite the fact th at they were no longer Japanese nationals, those Koreans forced to commit war cr imes would be found guilty as "Japanese nationals", and there would be no exempt ion from punishment [Utsumi 1982].
Japanese policy: not assimilation but oppression
It is often said that the post-war Japanese government continued their assimilat ion policy toward Korean residents in Japan. However, there are some doubts conc erning this. There are four possible theories in regards to the nature of Japanese policy adopted after the end of WWII toward Korean residents:
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The Japanese government has never attempted to improve the treatment of Kore ans in Japan to respect their human rights. It did, however, grant permanent resident status to South Korean nationals in the agreement between Japan and South Korea in 1965. This was a mere "token" action on behalf of the Japanese governme nt, in an attempt to normalize relations between Japan and South Korea. In 1981, the Japanese government also granted permanent residency to North Korean nation als and accepted applications for social security and welfare from them and othe r foreign residents. But this was a measure which the Japanese government had to take in accordance with Japan's ratification of the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees.
In 1991, the Japanese government awarded special permanent residency to thos e who lost Japanese nationality in accordance with the Peace Treaty in 1952 and their descendants. In 1992, permanent residents were exempted from fingerprintin g which was associated with foreign registration. Most of those who benefited fr om these new measures were Koreans in Japan. Although the Japanese government's treatment of Koreans in Japan has improved, it was not done of the government's own accord. The treatment of Koreans in Japan improved rather as a result of the movement against fingerprinting in the mid 1980s. The increasing importance pla ced on the protection of human rights internationally and the Japanese governmen t's consideration of its diplomatic relationship with South Korea have been cont ributing factors.
The Japanese government still persists in the restriction of nationality in recruitment for all levels of government service, though it is not actually stip ulated in law. This policy is problematic for some local governments who support employing foreign residents. Even in the recruiting of teachers for public scho ols, the Japanese government discriminates against foreign residents even though they have come through the same school system as Japanese nationals.
Nov. 22, 2004 | GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) -- A British company said Sunday it was releasing a video game recreating the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.
A spokesman for the president's brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., called the game "despicable."
The Glasgow-based firm Traffic said "JFK Reloaded" was an educational "docu-game" that would help disprove conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death. The game is due to be released Monday, the 41st anniversary of the shooting in Dallas.
Traffic said the game challenged players to recreate the three shots fired at the president's car by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository.
Traffic's managing director, Kirk Ewing, said the game -- available as an Internet download for $9.99 -- would "stimulate a younger generation of players to take an interest in this fascinating episode of American history."
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Actually Kennedy's response was restrained.
Odious, vulgar, obscene are words that come to mind. Docu-game my ass. It's just cheap exploitation and making money off of the dead. Making a game showing how many trains you could send to Auschwitz while keeping the Eastern Front supplied may have some historical value, but the vulgarity of it would prevent it from being made commercially.
OK, people have been asking how to control the inevitable booze filled family gatherings.
Well, it depends on your family. My family doesn't drink, my friends own bars. So I think there is a way to find a happy medium. Especially when booze starts fights. It doesn't with my friends, but I've seen enough stupidity to know how to avoid it.
Here's my plan:
Serve a lot of hors d'ouerves, a lot of crudities, and chips and dip. Make sure that there is enough food to give all but your seriously alcoholic relatives a healthy cushion.
Have a liquor strategy.
Don't have empty time, have the TV going, set up a playstation, play a DVD, watch a movie on cable.
Don't be afraid to warn people beforehand about the behavior you expect from them.
Kick people out two hours after dinner. Feign illness or tiredness.
Let me go into detail
Food strategy
1) Serve a lot of food, heavy on the starches
We all know food is a good thing, but you're not having a cocktail party. You need to have a lot more food to booze ratio. I mean antipasto, stuffed mushrooms, crackers and cheese, a bunch of shit. Let them take home Thanksgiving dinner, you want food to be plentiful before dinner and after dinner. Not to make people fat, but to keep them from getting hammered. If you talk about the food, diving for the bottle is less likely. Get a couple of Dominos pizzas on Wed, heat them up Thursday and serve as hors d'ouerves. You can use local pizza and cut them into squares. Make sure they have at least one topping
Booze strategy
2)Control what you serve and how you serve it. If you serve beer, there are two strategies:
A) Serve microbrews and have one six pack of Coors or Bud. Why? Because people drink less microbrews and drink them slowly.
B) Serve mini-keg beer in 10oz cups. Now, that's sneaky, but it's a bar trick my friends use when they have their $1 beer specials. They serve smaller cups during that time. It's not a profit issue, beer is almost all profit. It controls how drunk customers get. Kegs and small cups make people less likely to pound. I know you got hammered in college with kegs, we all did, but if you're at your uncle's hosue, running back for 10 beers becomes a pain in the ass. Which is what it is supposed to be
3) Limit your alcoholic choices
A) Serve hard cider. Most Americans haven't had it, but it can serve as a base for punches and snakebites, mixed beer and cider.
B) Serve wine and cheese. People will think you sophisticated, even if it's Two Buck Chuck. They won't ask where the beer is, they may grumble, but they won't bitch.
C) Make a lightly alcoholic punch. People will like it and not feel the need to get hammered off of hard liquor.
D) Mix a pitcher of drinks like bloody marys or screwdrivers.
E) Have someone mix the drinks. Draft a college age kid for this. Make sure you have someone police up the half empties and dump them in the sink in front of an adult. Small children can become sick from alcohol poisoning from drinking from half-finished drinks. Girls are perfect bartenders, since male relatives will be on their best behavior around them, unless they're pigs.
My point here is that you can serve booze and not have an open bar leading to massive fights. Free flowing cups is a recipe for mayhem.
If people bring booze, have plenty of mixers on hand. In a house, store the brought beer in the garage cooler. Far away from the action. Make them work for the beer.
Simply put, make it subtle, but place obstacles in the way between booze and drunkeness. Don't just place the booze out there if you know it's an issue.
4) Focus the attention on something besides the dinner table, run sports, a movie, games, whatever.
What to do if a fight is brewing:
5) If uncle Bob wants to hector your little sister about her LUG gf she brought to shock everyone, step in and ask Uncle Bob a question only he can answer, about his business or whatever. The key to preventing drama is the same as magic, divert attention.
6) But if someone is determined to have their moment in the sun, walk away. Say, "I'm not interested in this discussion" and leave. That will have the effect of a baseball bat on someone's head. It will stun them into a temporary silence. They want an audience. Don't give them one and see what happens.
son, the governor will not commute your sentence. Your time is almost up
Bumping this up as the Thanksgiving Open Thread for the next couple of days
It's almost Thanksgiving, and that means it's time to eat turkey carcass. This year, I'm probably not going to buy a whole turkey, since it will be a small thanksgiving. And since no one is going to pop over, it's unlikely that we will need massive leftovers. My intention is to get turkey breasts and thighs and roast them. Forget the three hour cooking time, the bulk, the nonsense.
This year, Christmas will be the food holiday, partly because I'm staying home and probably because Jen and I are going to do something together. We've never done that before, but I just don't have the interest of spending a week up in Boston like I have the past few years. But more on that later. This year, she's taking a long overdue vacation.
Right now, let's discuss Thanksgiving menus.
Every year, we have stuffing, well, dressing actually, baked macaroni, turkey, some green veggie, gravy and rice, never potatoes. Cider as well. In the past, we would have ham as well, but those days are long gone.
For desert, I like bread pudding myself. I have to cut down on the raisins, but I'll just add apples and plums instead. Maybe blueberries. Bread pudding is a mix of bad, bread, sugar, milk and good, fresh fruit.
So, as I pose every year, what are your favorite recipes for Thanksgiving?
Of all the holidays, Thanksgiving is my favorite because it is the most American. Everyone, well almost everyone, has turkey, and the difference is in the sides. The sides are about our heritage and culture, and the turkey is the unifying figure in all that.
However, nothing suits family drama like a holiday gathering, so drunken Uncle Bob can bemoan the Browns and gay marriage, your mother can hector you about the grandkids she wants you to produce, and everyone can ignore your SO. Which is why God invented Playstation 2 and Madden football. Nothing shuts people up like football, real or console. Hell, if they don't have one, rent one. Not only will the kids love you, you can finally shut up your idiot brother in law. Crush his beloved Cowboys as you lead the Pack to victory on the PS2.
Also, some friendly advice, keep the booze to a minimum. The less booze, the less potential for fights. I say keep it to beer, wine and hard cider and let the drinkers bring the hard stuff. Tell what ever lie you want, but sobriety prevents the kind of family fights which make so many holidays an ordeal.
I think 70 percent of shitty holidays can be prevented by keeping people sober, distracted and fed. And if someone wants to prattle on about abortion, just say "you have a right to your opinion" and play Tetris. Why? Because never rise to the bait of a fight and ruin dinner. If you must shut them up, wait until the turkey takes effect. Then say what you want. Better, if you do that on your way out of the door.Because you want to enjoy your meal and last words are the best words.
The thing about family is that you can't trade them in. As much as you would like to. So neutralizing them is my preferred approach.
I think a buffet also prevents scenes of high drama. If people aren't sitting around a table, the less likely they are to ask Cousin Jennie about her special friend, the one with the wife and kids. While a family dinner is nice, if your family is going to go batshit, don't have one. Another thing is that if you want control, host the damn dinner yourself. If your family is crazy, then you can limit the booze and direct the action.
And keep one thought in mind as you restrain yourself from choking your cousin: juries don't like people who murder their family members.
But mostly, Thanksgiving, if you can control your family, is about food. Which is why it is my favorite holiday.
It began with Ron Artest, a player who has undergone anger-management counseling and who last season alone was suspended six times. He went into the stands looking for blood Friday night, looking for the fan who threw the cup of beer at his head.
It ended with belligerent, crazed fans, at least some of whom were inebriated, pelting players from the visiting team with anything they could find. Already miffed they're paying more to see Ben Wallace than Isiah Thomas, these men came to the Palace of Auburn Hills to denigrate Artest and the Indiana Pacers more than celebrate their NBA champion Detroit Pistons. There are more than 100 of them at every arena in every city for every game now, many seated next to children.
During the madness, Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal attempted to cold-cock fans, displaying the most warped sense of loyalty to a teammate imaginable. A former NBA player reached by telephone yesterday called it the "being-down-for-your-boy mentality." He fears it is even more prevalent in the NBA now, part of the culture for many young players who feel more insulated from fans who skewer them on the Internet and on talk radio. After their family, their teammates and agents, these young men have no idea whom to trust.
It all converged to create the perfect storm Friday night in Detroit: The league's reigning hothead, Artest. The marginalized, angry fan, able to purchase alcohol in the fourth quarter. And a bunker-down mentality, fostered by coaches who quote Winston Churchill and defend their players' foul behavior most nights of the week.
The aftermath was almost as unbelievable as the video. Artest was suspended the remainder of the season yesterday by Commissioner David Stern, a 73-game total punishment that, if served, will go down as the longest in league history for fighting. After sitting out Saturday, Jackson got hit with a total of 30 games, O'Neal with 25 and Wallace, who shoved Artest with both hands in the face after a hard foul and who kept looking for a scrap even after the two were separated, was docked six games.
Most who have seen the video respond with shock and disbelief. But this has been coming for a while. Players and fans have been on a collision course for some time. And, frankly, it's surprising an ugly event of this magnitude didn't happen sooner. If you want the sad truth, some players actually respect what Artest, Jackson, and O'Neal did to those fans. It made them feel empowered in a way that every player who has ever been harassed wants to feel.
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We are to blame, too. The only relationships some players have with their fans are on the drive to the game. They turn on the radio and hear the vitriolic people who call them names. They hear the national "host" who incites them. Knowing tension and anger sell, broadcast executives find someone to fit their suits, Crossfire-style. They hire people who will take sides on sports issues the way people take sides on Roe v. Wade.
Fans, in turn, become more passionate. They love their teams more and hate their enemies more. And on Friday night in Auburn Hills, their enemy was Ron Artest.
"They say this is about scarring the NBA, but part of it is where society is heading," said Greg Anthony, the former NBA guard and now an ESPN analyst. "This whole talk radio and killing guys all the time on the airwaves spurs some of this emotion. The next thing you know, you got something so ugly and despicable, it's almost like some footage from rioting soccer stadiums in Europe."
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What happened Friday night was not just about a frightening, new NBA world. It was about a changing American sports landscape, a collision course between people who have nothing in common, who come to an arena where people now root against the bad guys more than they cheer the good guys, where the word "enemy" means something more than just a player who can beat the home team.
In Europe, soccer teams are more than sports franchises, they represent political and social beliefs as well. The workers at Fiat root hard for Inter Milan, because the management owns AC Milian. Inter's main sponsor is Ferrari, the rival automaker. In Glasgow, secterian violence between Catholics and Protestants is played out by Rangers and Celtic. Politics in Spain is played out between Catalan Barcelona and forner Franco favorite Real Madrid.
The riot at Auburn Hills doesn't come frieghted with that kind of history.
What has happened is that asswipes like Jim Rome, who's never played a day of ball, talks to other no lives about how real athletes suck. He and his peers talk about players as if they're robots. They fuel the disrepect and rage out there and focus it on players who are trying to play every day.
There is a gap between who loves basketball and who actually watches it. While black America is devoted to the game, it's whites who see the games.
Artest is not a nice, stable man, but someone tossed a beer on him. His reaction was wrong, but all too predictable. If someone throws a beer in your face, you're probably going to hit them. And the fans were all too eager to fight the players.
A drunken loser gets tanked up and expresses his frustration in this young black millionaire living better than he ever will. When he doesn't perform or he beats his chosen team of negroes, tossing a beer at him is acceptable. Athletes aren't support to react to abuse.
As far as Artest goes, his talent doesn't match his mental age. He needs serious therapy, something the league has ignored for a long time. Admitting players need help is as popular in the NBA as mental health care is in the military. Something is clearly wrong with Artest and everyone has hushed it up and ignored it until it smacked them in the face, or he punched a fan in the face.
Drunk fans and immature players are a toxic combination.
I tripped across this site while checking my Alexa rankings, where I found out an interesting fact. Atrios gets one percent of all of Blogspot's hits. Now, that may not seem like a lot, but: There are some 2.8 million blogs. However, 80% (2.2m) have no incoming links; that is, nobody reads them. (Wired, Aug. 2004). Thus there are some 600,000 blogs that are read, but of this, only a few ten thousand have substantial readership.
Blogger has about a million or so users. Let's say that 10 percent have a substantial readership, 10K or more hits a month. By having one percent of the total number of users, Atrios is, by far, the largest single read site in the Blogspot system, and not by a small margin.
As it stands, Kos is in the 4200 percentile of all sites read online, and I think Atrios would fall behind that, slightly.
I came across this while checking my own hits, which came to around 222K for the month. We never had those kinds of numbers at NetSlaves, despite our hard work. Robin Miller, of Slashdot fame, once said to me if you got a million hits a month, you could make some money. Well, I think with blog ads and direct contributions, you could do better with about a quarter of that.
What amazes me is not that so many people read the site, but that readership has increased over that period, and not by one or two percent, either. All of the leftside blogs have had MORE traffic after the election than before.
Why has this site, which is much less complicated and far reaching more successful than NetSlaves, with two books, was? It isn't because I work harder, I don't. I don't get as much publicity. Or do media. I know I'm popular in some of America's newsrooms, but that's not it.
It's simple: you.
Unlike the Netslaves audience, who were techies, the readers here come from a much wider pool of people. And from all manner of backgrounds. And frankly, it's easier to tell people things they don't want to hear when they are willing to listen.
I've seen everything in that EA story repeated hundreds of times. But no one wanted to hear it. They lived in Pollyanna America. A place where hard work would ultimately be rewarded. Where owners could cash in and make money and no one cared. Where owning a BMW was the height of personal success.
What I find ironic is that all those people who wanted to be vulture capitalists ultimately failed. People with far more humane values, like Kos and Atrios, have done amazingly well for themselves. So much so they can live off their writing. A goal which has eluded many, many writers over the years. Blogs, are by far, the most profitable online medium short of porn. With minimal overhead and a lot of work, one can make a profit. Maybe not a living, but a profit. Which is what all these VC loaded companies could never do, with their dreams of empire and captialist success.
Once, only Slashdot had that kind of power online, but as Linux has faded as a techinical issue, partly because of functionality and partly because of the growth of the Internet's users, now that power is diffused. Kos, Atrios and Andrew Sullivan have power online far out of proportion to their staffs.
The next move will be to pay regular contributors for their work, as the profitability grows. Right now, more people read this site than the print edition of any opinion magazine, from the Nation to the The National Review. It is only a matter of time before advertisers realize that their demographics and ad dollars are better spent online on blogs than in print magazines. And my blog is dwarfed by Kos and Atrios.
The next thing which will happen is the demise of Drudge. His rise to prominance only came about because reporters are lazy. But as his competitors like Blue Lemur/Raw Story actually break news, people will find Drudge's agregeation outdated. While agregation has a value, his sensibility was fresh a few years back. Now it's outdated. His layout alone is reader unfriendly. I mean, someone is eventually going to call him on his personal contradictions: a gay conservative man. If he doesn't think the fundies are coming for him, well, he's gonna learn the hard way.
The underlying strength of blogs is not one which is widely discussed, but should be. Blogs are reader and information friendly. The visual language of blogs work for the reader. The main story is in the center, links to one side, each story is seperate and independent. Comments are part of the structure of most sites, increasing interactivity. Drudge creates a visual mess which works against the reader. Someone who follows the visual language which works, the site architecture which works, is going to displace him.
Blogs are successful because they are simple. Complexity works against making money. The more you have to do, the more that can go wrong. Blogger is simple, and it allows the writer to concentrate on writing, not coding and servers. Part of the reason so many sites failed is that they had no idea on how to create compelling content. They paid money, but their idea of content was ususally repetative and lame. Flake.com? Covering the world of breakfast cereal?
The reason so many dotcoms failed was simple. VC's invested in their clones. Most would have made more money by finding a young furniture store owner in East Palo Alto and giving him $100K to expand. They would have been repaid and had a stable investment. Giving those brats millions was dumber than going to Vegas. Because all they did was live large and play at business.
I doubt Kos and Atrios woke up one morning and said "shit, blogs will make me rich". See, they had something to say, the fact that it became a business was well, if not accidental, not the driving force in their plans. They have never said they wanted to dominate the market, or become a market leader. Atrios knows what that means, because he's an economist, but in no way was it part of some plan to get him a BMW and a trophy wife.
In the end, the dotcommers had a passion for money, for living like rock stars. People like Reynolds and Sullivan, and Kos and Atrios have actual beliefs they want to share. I find Reynold's beliefs odious, but that doesn't mean he's not a smarter, harder working person than 50 dotcom assholes. I don't much like what he stands for, but he never screwed workers out of a payday to stick the money in his pocket. Andy Sullivan never lied to investors while breaking labor law.
As much as I disagree with their politics, their ethics are about 100 times higher than the dotcom people who pissed away billions.
That should indicate how little I think of dotcom people.
But in the end, the reason blogs work and dotcoms failed was simple: Dotcoms played by the old rules and offered up bland, familiar content. Was Suck ever more than snide and snarky? Was E Village ever interesting. Did any of the content plays have one second of compelling, interesting content?
People who've read me for a long time know I was a longtime Salon critic. I now have a great deal more respect for their work. Why? Because for three years, they ran silly articles on sex and culture and treated their news reporting as an afterthought. The quality of their work improved when they cut the bullshit, stopped the pseudo-porn and wrote seriously and from the left. They dumped the righty columnists when they realized subscribers weren't going to pay for David Horowitz, Andy Sullivan and Camille Paglia. And that they had to actually have journalism standards which mattered.
Slate has never really made the leap to popularity, but their Washington-centric work does get noticed.
But the fact is that the blogs introduced, sharp, opinionated, factual writing to the internet. Something that Slate and Salon, with their editors didn't have. They had the facts, but they didn't have the passion.
The reason people read blogs is not that we're right all the time, but that we're human, that we're real people behind the words. We're not auditioning for high paying media jobs as pundits, but saying what we think. I find it odd that more people read me than the New Republic, but then, to be honest, I'm more interesting than they are. They don't have food articles.
Awakened by a loud bang and the ring of their doorbell, an interracial couple peered out the front window of their Long Island home at 3 a.m. yesterday and saw a cross burning on the front lawn.
They said they immediately called the Suffolk County police, but by the time officers arrived, rain had doused the fire. The police removed the cross, which was three feet tall and made from the slats of a picket fence. By yesterday afternoon, the only remaining trace was a charred circle of grass outside the building, a two-family house in the southwest corner of Lake Grove.
Detective Sgt. Robert Reecks said that the police and the F.B.I. were investigating the incident as a hate crime, but that there were no suspects.
It was the county's first cross-burning since 1998, when a black family in Amityville returned home from church and found a burning cross on their lawn.
The Lake Grove home is a modest green split-level occupied by the couple, who rent the first floor, and another family upstairs.
The couple, who were not identified by the police, said that they had known each other for 30 years, had been married for 22 years and had lived in the house for 8. But they said that yesterday was the first time they felt attacked because of their relationship. The wife is white, and the husband is black.
"My first gut reaction was, how could this happen in the 21st century?" said the wife, who spoke only on the condition that she not be identified because she feared another attack. "I don't understand prejudice."
Richard Eggert, who lives upstairs, said he was asleep when he heard a loud thud against the front door - a sound that he thinks was made to wake up the families.
"I ran into the bedroom, and with all the lights off, you could see the flickering on the front lawn," he said.
By the time he raced downstairs to investigate, the husband was outside and whoever left the cross had vanished.
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Residents recalled a 1994 arson that destroyed a house that a black family was moving into in Nesconset, a predominantly white hamlet just west of Lake Grove. They also spoke of how, in 1997, the Ku Klux Klan planned a recruitment rally at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, only to be met by community resistance.
How could this happen?
Easy, it's Long Island.
What people who don't understand New York miss is how completely racist Long Island is.
My favorite story about Long Island racism happened a few years back.
An Indian couple went on vacation to India for a month. When they returned, their home had been looted, their food destroyed, all in full view of their neighbors. Not one of whom thought to call the cops.
This kind of shit doesn't happen in the other counties around New York, but Long Island? Hating minorities, blacks, Mexicans, it's local policy. Long Island is the most segregated community in the United States. Blacks live in eight towns, two of which are the worst school districts in the state.
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 22, 2004; Page A01
BAGHDAD, Nov. 21 -- Senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq say it is increasingly likely they will need a further increase in combat forces to put down remaining areas of resistance in the country.
Convinced that the recent battle for Fallujah has significantly weakened insurgent ranks, commanders here have devised plans to press the offensive into neighborhoods where rebels have either taken refuge after fleeing Fallujah or were already deeply entrenched.
But the forces available for these intensified operations have become limited by the demands of securing Fallujah and overseeing the massive reconstruction effort there -- demands that senior U.S. military officers say are likely to tie up a substantial number of Marines and Army troops for weeks.
"What's important is to keep the pressure on these guys now that we've taken Fallujah from them," a high-ranking U.S. military commander said, speaking on condition he not be named because of the sensitivity of the deliberations on adding more troops. "We're in the pursuit phase. We have to stay after these guys so they don't get their feet set."
The possibility that additional troops would be required to battle the insurgency in this critical period preceding the Iraqi elections, scheduled for Jan. 30, has been signaled for weeks. The Pentagon took an initial step in this direction last month, ordering about 6,500 soldiers in Iraq to extend their tours by up to two months.
With some fresh U.S. forces already arriving in Iraq as part of a long-scheduled rotation, and two newly trained Iraqi brigades due to start operating next month, U.S. military leaders had hoped to avoid further increases.
But over the past week, a closer assessment of the forces needed for the Fallujah recovery effort and future offensive operations revealed a gap in desired troop strength, at least over the next two or three months, according to several officers familiar with the issue.
The officers said the exact number of extra troops needed is still being reviewed but estimated it at the equivalent of several battalions, or about 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers. The number of U.S. troops in Iraq fell to nearly 100,000 last spring before rising to 138,000, where it has stayed since the summer.
To boost the current level, military commanders have considered extending the stay of more troops due to rotate out shortly, or accelerating the deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division, which is scheduled to start in January. But a third option -- drawing all or part of a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division on emergency standby in the United States -- has emerged as increasingly likely.
Hinting at this possibility at a Pentagon news conference on Friday, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the deputy chief of U.S. Central Command, recalled that airborne forces were deployed to Afghanistan on a short-term basis to bolster military operations. Smith noted, however, that the Afghan case was "a little bit different" because "we had a very small number of forces to begin with" there.
If airborne units were rushed to Iraq, commanders here said, they likely would not be used in the offensive actions being planned, given their lack of heavy armor and their unfamiliarity with the targeted neighborhoods. Rather, their purpose would be to take over policing and other functions in Baghdad's International Zone, where American and top Iraqi government officials work. That would free locally seasoned units of the 1st Cavalry Division for such actions.
Much of the division's 2nd Brigade, which had been patrolling Baghdad, was shifted to Fallujah for the battle there earlier this month and remains unavailable for action elsewhere. This situation is the cause of much of the pressure for reinforcements.
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To further bolster U.S. forces in the short term, commanders also are considering extending the scheduled departure of the 2nd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division, which has been assigned to the Kirkuk area.
U.S. military intelligence assessments portray the Fallujah offensive as having destroyed the insurgency's largest haven, but the assessments also acknowledge that the violent resistance campaign is far from broken nationwide. Since the Fallujah operation, insurgent attacks have continued across a broad stretch of Iraq, from northern cities to a restive area in Babil province south of Baghdad.
Although U.S. military officials have reported 1,600 or more enemy fighters killed in Fallujah, no key leaders of the insurgency were either killed or captured, according to senior officers here. Many insurgents who fled the city either before or during the battle are now thought by U.S. commanders to be looking for opportunities to regroup and mount new attacks.
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In discussing battle plans, commanders here did not want to telegraph the areas U.S. forces might be focusing on for their next offensives. But some of the potential targets can easily be discerned by mapping the locations of attacks on U.S. forces, including areas in or around the restive cities of Mosul, Ramadi, Baqubah, Samarra and Baghdad.
At the same time, officers cautioned against expecting anything on the scale of Fallujah, which involved more than 10,000 U.S. troops and about 2,500 Iraqi forces.
"They're not going to be big operations like Fallujah, because there's no place else in Iraq where the situation is like what it was there," one commander said.
Sending the ready brigade of the 82nd to Iraq is simply desperate. The US is banking on the elections creating stability, which is why they would risk the ready brigade and hope a Marine MEU can cover the gap. Those are the floating Marine units attached to the fleet. The problem is that the 82nd helpd create the Fallujah mess with their shoot everything and question later tactics.
The ready brigade is the Quick Reaction Force of the US military. If the Dominican Republic invades Haiti, or if Zimbabwe starts excuting whites, the 82nd's ready brigade is the force designed to stop the madness and support allies. It is on 24 hour standby to be launched anywhere in the world. Use of the 82nd is always a sign of desperation.
How long can the bulk of the Army be invested in Iraq before another crisis shows up?
The fact is that election day in Iraq will be a nightmare,
As far as the rest of the twaddle of the Marine spokesman, well, if the resistance is being defeated, why do they seem to keep raising hell across the country. The Marines are gonna find Fallujah to be an icy place to occupy, complete with daily car bombs and snipers. The Iraqi forces they want to leave behind are going to change sides the minute they can. Or just go home. They're fighting for a paycheck, not Allawi, who could the man in the moon as far as they're concerned.
There's no place like Fallujah? Go send a brigade into Sadr City and see what happens. The Marines control Ramadi yet? Oh, he means there was no more embarassing place like Fallujah.
CHARLES DICKENS himself would shudder, I should think, were he to see the way young adults are put to work in one semimodern corner of our economy. Gas lamps are long gone, and the air is free of soot. But you can't look at a place like Electronic Arts, the world's largest developer of entertainment software, and not think back to the early industrial age when a youthful work force was kept fully occupied during all waking hours to enrich a few elders.
Games for video consoles and PC's have become a $7 billion-a-year business. Based in Redwood City, Calif., Electronic Arts is the home of the game franchises for N.F.L. football, James Bond and "Lord of the Rings," among many others. For avid players with professional ambitions to develop games, E.A. must appear to be the best place in the world. Writing cool games and getting paid to boot: what more could one ask?
Yet there is unhappiness among those who are living that dream. Based on what can be glimpsed through cracks in E.A.'s front facade, its high-tech work force is toiling like galley slaves chained to their benches.
The first crack opened last summer, when Jamie Kirschenbaum, a salaried E.A. employee, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, accusing it of failure to pay overtime compensation. He remains at the company, so I spoke with him by phone last week to get an update. He told me that since joining E.A. in June 2003 in the image production department, he has been working - at the company's insistence - around 65 hours a week, spread over six or seven days. Putting in long hours is what the industry calls "crunching." Once upon a time, the crunch came in the week or two before shipping a new release. Mr. Kirschenbaum's experience, however, has been a continuous string of crunches.
Crunches also once were followed by commensurate periods of time off. Mr. Kirschenbaum reports, however, that E.A. has scaled back informal comp time, never formally codified, to a token two weeks per project. He said his own promised comp time had disappeared altogether. At this point, he said he would be glad to enjoy a Labor Day without laboring, or eat a Fourth of July spread at some place other than his cubicle, pleasures he has not enjoyed for two years. The company said it had no comment on the lawsuit, but it is likely to argue that Mr. Kirschenbaum's image production position is exempt from the laws governing overtime compensation.
A few days ago, another crack opened - one large enough to fit a picture window. An anonymous writer who signed herself as "E.A. Spouse" posted on the Web a detailed account of hellish employer-mandated hours reaching beyond 80 hours a week for months. No less remarkable were the thousands of comments that swiftly followed in online discussion forums for gamers and other techies, providing volumes of similar stories at E.A. and at other game developers. (See previous post)
I learned the identity of the E.A. employee described in the anonymous account and spoke at length with him in person late one night, adding a third shift to the day's double that he'd already worked. He seemed credible in all respects, in his command of technical detail, in his unshakable enthusiasm for the games he works on - and in his pallor.
For around $60,000 a year in an area with a high cost of living, he had been set to work on a six-day-a-week schedule. On weekdays, his team worked from 9 to 10 (that is, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.), and on Saturdays, a half-day (that means 9 to 6). Then Sundays were added - noon to 8 or 10 p.m. The weekly total was 82 to 84 hours.
By tradition, Silicon Valley employers have always offered their bleary-eyed employees lottery tickets in the form of stock options. E.A.'s option grants, however, offer little chance of a Google-like bonanza. An employee who started today with an options package like that of the E.A. worker just described (and who stayed with the company the four years required to fully vest) would get $120,000, for example, if the share price quadrupled - and proportionally less for more modest increases. The odds of a skyrocketing stock grew much longer this month, when the company said competition had forced it to cut prices on core sports titles.
Still, the company is a generous warden: free laundry service, free meals, free ice cream and snacks. The first month, the E.A. employee recalled, he and his colleagues were delighted by the amenities. But he said they soon came to feel that seeing the sun occasionally would have had more of a tonic effect.
Copyright 2004
Any company which will do your laundry wants you to stay at work. It's not generousity, it's a sweatshop with a smile. The best company is one which lets you go home at a reasonable hour.
EA isn't stupid. Kids would kill to work for them and they know it. Once someone leaves, they fill that job quickly. They never lack for candidates.
The only problem is that they are leaving themselves open to whopper legal suits. Seven day work weeks aren't legal, even for salaried workers. When people start to crack, lawyers will be droping suits all over the place. In the end, these working conditions are counter productive.
Yet, when we talked about unions, many of these people sneered and spouted libeterian theory. They didn't want other people to make money for not working. Did they understand unions? No. But they sneered at them all the same.
Hopefully, some of these folks will get a clue, either now, or in the hospital when they take ill from stress.
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse.
EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging much of anything to me; it sounds like a money farm. To any EA executive that happens to read this, I have a good challenge for you: how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?
I am retaining some anonymity here because I have no illusions about what the consequences would be for my family if I was explicit. However, I also feel no impetus to shy away from sharing our story, because I know that it is too common to stick out among those of the thousands of engineers, artists, and designers that EA employs.
Our adventures with Electronic Arts began less than a year ago. The small game studio that my partner worked for collapsed as a result of foul play on the part of a big publisher -- another common story. Electronic Arts offered a job, the salary was right and the benefits were good, so my SO took it. I remember that they asked him in one of the interviews: "how do you feel about working long hours?" It's just a part of the game industry -- few studios can avoid a crunch as deadlines loom, so we thought nothing of it. When asked for specifics about what "working long hours" meant, the interviewers coughed and glossed on to the next question; now we know why.
Within weeks production had accelerated into a 'mild' crunch: eight hours six days a week. Not bad. Months remained until any real crunch would start, and the team was told that this "pre-crunch" was to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule. I don't know how many of the developers bought EA's explanation for the extended hours; we were new and naive so we did. The producers even set a deadline; they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title's shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.
Weeks passed. Again the producers had given a termination date on this crunch that again they failed. Throughout this period the project remained on schedule. The long hours started to take its toll on the team; people grew irritable and some started to get ill. People dropped out in droves for a couple of days at a time, but then the team seemed to reach equilibrium again and they plowed ahead. The managers stopped even talking about a day when the hours would go back to normal.
Now, it seems, is the "real" crunch, the one that the producers of this title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week. Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the team's existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored.
The stress is taking its toll. After a certain number of hours spent working the eyes start to lose focus; after a certain number of weeks with only one day off fatigue starts to accrue and accumulate exponentially. There is a reason why there are two days in a weekend -- bad things happen to one's physical, emotional, and mental health if these days are cut short. The team is rapidly beginning to introduce as many flaws as they are removing.
And the kicker: for the honor of this treatment EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time! ('comp' time is the equalization of time off for overtime -- any hours spent during a crunch accrue into days off after the product has shipped); c) no additional sick or vacation leave. The time just goes away. Additionally, EA recently announced that, although in the past they have offered essentially a type of comp time in the form of a few weeks off at the end of a project, they no longer wish to do this, and employees shouldn't expect it. Further, since the production of various games is scattered, there was a concern on the part of the employees that developers would leave one crunch only to join another. EA's response was that they would attempt to minimize this, but would make no guarantees. This is unthinkable; they are pushing the team to individual physical health limits, and literally giving them nothing for it. Comp time is a staple in this industry, but EA as a corporation wishes to "minimize" this reprieve. One would think that the proper way to minimize comp time is to avoid crunch, but this brutal crunch has been on for months, and nary a whisper about any compensation leave, nor indeed of any end of this treatment.
This crunch also differs from crunch time in a smaller studio in that it was not an emergency effort to save a project from failure. Every step of the way, the project remained on schedule. Crunching neither accelerated this nor slowed it down; its effect on the actual product was not measurable. The extended hours were deliberate and planned; the management knew what they were doing as they did it. The love of my life comes home late at night complaining of a headache that will not go away and a chronically upset stomach, and my happy supportive smile is running out.
No one works in the game industry unless they love what they do. No one on that team is interested in producing an inferior product. My heart bleeds for this team precisely BECAUSE they are brilliant, talented individuals out to create something great. They are and were more than willing to work hard for the success of the title. But that good will has only been met with abuse. Amazingly, Electronic Arts was listed #91 on Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2003.
EA's attitude toward this -- which is actually a part of company policy, it now appears -- has been (in an anonymous quotation that I've heard repeated by multiple managers), "If they don't like it, they can work someplace else." Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of EA's Human Resources policy. The concept of ethics or compassion or even intelligence with regard to getting the most out of one's workforce never enters the equation: if they don't want to sacrifice their lives and their health and their talent so that a multibillion dollar corporation can continue its Godzilla-stomp through the game industry, they can work someplace else.
But can they?
The EA Mambo, paired with other giants such as Vivendi, Sony, and Microsoft, is rapidly either crushing or absorbing the vast majority of the business in game development. A few standalone studios that made their fortunes in previous eras -- Blizzard, Bioware, and Id come to mind -- manage to still survive, but 2004 saw the collapse of dozens of small game studios, no longer able to acquire contracts in the face of rapid and massive consolidation of game publishing companies. This is an epidemic hardly unfamiliar to anyone working in the industry. Though, of course, it is always the option of talent to go outside the industry, perhaps venturing into the booming commercial software development arena. (Read my tired attempt at sarcasm.)
To put some of this in perspective, I myself consider some figures. If EA truly believes that it needs to push its employees this hard -- I actually believe that they don't, and that it is a skewed operations perspective alone that results in the severity of their crunching, coupled with a certain expected amount of the inefficiency involved in running an enterprise as large as theirs -- the solution therefore should be to hire more engineers, or artists, or designers, as the case may be. Never should it be an option to punish one's workforce with ninety hour weeks; in any other industry the company in question would find itself sued out of business so fast its stock wouldn't even have time to tank. In its first weekend, Madden 2005 grossed $65 million. EA's annual revenue is approximately $2.5 billion. This company is not strapped for cash; their labor practices are inexcusable.
The interesting thing about this is an assumption that most of the employees seem to be operating under. Whenever the subject of hours come up, inevitably, it seems, someone mentions 'exemption'. They refer to a California law that supposedly exempts businesses from having to pay overtime to certain 'specialty' employees, including software programmers. This is Senate Bill 88. However, Senate Bill 88 specifically does not apply to the entertainment industry -- television, motion picture, and theater industries are specifically mentioned. Further, even in software, there is a pay minimum on the exemption: those exempt must be paid at least $90,000 annually. I can assure you that the majority of EA employees are in fact not in this pay bracket; ergo, these practices are not only unethical, they are illegal.
I look at our situation and I ask 'us': why do you stay? And the answer is that in all likelihood we won't; and in all likelihood if we had known that this would be the result of working for EA, we would have stayed far away in the first place. But all along the way there were deceptions, there were promises, there were assurances -- there was a big fancy office building with an expensive fish tank -- all of which in the end look like an elaborate scheme to keep a crop of employees on the project just long enough to get it shipped. And then if they need to, they hire in a new batch, fresh and ready to hear more promises that will not be kept; EA's turnover rate in engineering is approximately 50%. This is how EA works. So now we know, now we can move on, right? That seems to be what happens to everyone else. But it's not enough. Because in the end, regardless of what happens with our particular situation, this kind of "business" isn't right, and people need to know about it, which is why I write this today.
If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. "What's your salary?" would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you're doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it's not just them you're hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?
Many students say Columbia Prof. Hamid Dabashi, a department chairman, has bullied and threatened them for defending Israel.
It's a capital of "thuggery" - a "ghastly state of racism and apartheid" - and it "must be dismantled."
A voice from America's crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is a tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university.
Columbia is at risk of becoming a poison Ivy, some critics claim, and tensions are high.
In classrooms, teach-ins, interviews and published works, dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.
In three weeks of interviews, numerous students told the Daily News they face harassment, threats and ridicule merely for defending the right of Israel to survive.
And the university itself is holding investigations into the alleged intimidation.
Dabashi has achieved academic stardom: professor of Iranian studies; chairman of the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department; past head of a panel that administers Columbia's core curriculum.
The 53-year-old, Iranian-born scholar has said CNN should be held accountable for "war crimes" for one-sided coverage of Sept. 11, 2001. He doubts the existence of Al Qaeda and questions the role of Osama Bin Laden in the attacks.
Dabashi did not return calls.
In September in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, he wrote, "What they call Israel is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their soul."
After the showing of a student-made documentary about faculty bias and bullying that targets Jewish students, six or seven swastikas were found carved in a Butler Library bathroom last month.
Then after a screening of the film, "Columbia Unbecoming," produced by the David Project, a pro-Israel group in Boston, one student denounced another as a "Zionist fascist scum," witnesses said.
On Oct. 27, Columbia announced it would probe alleged intimidation and improve procedures for students to file grievances.
"Is the climate hostile to free expression?" asked Alan Brinkley, the university provost. "I don't believe it is, but we're investigating to find out."
But one student on College Walk described the campus as a "republic of fear." Another branded the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department the "department of dishonesty."
A third described how she was once "humiliated in front of an entire class."
Deena Shanker, a Mideast and Asian studies major, remains an admirer of the department. But she says she will never forget the day she asked Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics, if Israel gives warnings before bombing certain buildings so residents could flee.
"Instead of answering my question, Massad exploded," she said. "He told me if I was going to 'deny the atrocities' committed against the Palestinians, I could get out of his class."
"Professorial power is being abused," said Ariel Beery, a senior who is student president in the School of General Studies, but stresses he's speaking only for himself.
"Students are being bullied because of their identities, ideologies, religions and national origins," Beery said.
Added Noah Liben, another senior, "Debate is being stifled. Students are being silenced in their own classrooms."
Said Brinkley: If a professor taught the "Earth was flat or there was no Holocaust," Columbia might intervene in the classroom. "But we don't tell faculty they can't express strong, or even offensive opinions."
Yet even some faculty members say they fear social ostracism and career consequences if they're viewed as too pro-Israel, and that many have been cowed or shamed into silence.
One apparently unafraid is Dan Miron, a professor of Hebrew literature and holder of a prestigious endowed chair.
He said scores of Jewish students - about one a week - have trooped into his office to complain about bias in the classroom.
"Students tell me they've been browbeaten, humiliated and treated disrespectfully for daring to challenge the idea that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish nation," he said.
"They say they've been told Israeli soldiers routinely rape Palestinian women and commit other atrocities, and that Zionism is racism and the root of all evil."
One yardstick of the anti-Israel sentiment among professors, critics say, is the 106 faculty signatures on a petition last year that called for Columbia to sell its holdings in all firms that conduct business with Israel's military.
...................
Their views could be dismissed as academic fodder if they weren't so incendiary.
Columbia's firebrands
In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are "warmongers" and "Gestapo apparatchiks."
The Jewish homeland is "nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States."
# Nicholas De Genova, who teaches anthropology and Latino studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls him "the most hated professor in America."
At an anti-war teach-in last year, he said he wished for a "million Mogadishus," referring to the slaughter of U.S. troops in Somalia in 1993.
"U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy," he added.
De Genova has also said, "The heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. ... Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust."
De Genova didn't return calls.
# Bruce Robbins, a professor of English and comparative literature.
In a speech backing divestment, he said, "The Israeli government has no right to the sufferings of the Holocaust."
Elaborating, Robbins told The News he believes Israel has a right to exist, but he thinks the country has "betrayed the memory of the Holocaust."
# Joseph Massad, who is a tenure-track professor of Arab politics. Students and faculty interviewed by The News consistently claimed that the Jordanian-born Palestinian is the most controversial, and vitriolic, professor on campus.
"How many Palestinians have you killed?" he allegedly asked one student, Tomy Schoenfeld, an Israeli military veteran, and then refused to answer his questions.
To Massad, CNN star Wolf Blitzer is "Ze'ev Blitzer," which is the byline Blitzer used in the 1980s, when he wrote for Hebrew papers but hasn't used since.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can be likened to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, he once declared.
"The Jews are not a nation," he said in one speech. "The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist."
Massad didn't return several calls. On his Web site, he says he's a victim of a "witch hunt" by "pro-Israel groups" and their "propaganda machine."
I know the right loves to blow these things out of proportion.
But here are my points.
The Israelis didn't make Arabs poor and corrupt. The Likud didn't foist the Sauds on Saudi Arabia or the Mubarak regime in Egpyt. Were these educated Arabs and their followers as bitterly critical of Arab dictatorships as they are of Israel. The Americans are just idiots spouting for fashion. Genteel anti-semitism is and always has been fashionable among the Ivy set.
Yet, too many Americans are willing to overlook the clear crimes of the Israelis against the Palestinians. Israel clearly violates international law when they feel like it. But so do the Palestinians.
No side is innocent here.
And bullying kids, if that is what is happening, is cowardice. If you're so moved by the Palestinian struggle, go send money or fight. Don't fight from behind a desk against people who aren't living in Israel.
I blame Israel for moving towards apartheid and I blame the Arabs for using the Palestinians as a cudgel. They are poor because Arab states tolerate their poverty and despare because it distracts their population from their own corruption and miserable lives. Without Israel, Mubarak would be living in Switzerland because the Egyptians would have kicked his ass out.
When the Arab people figure out that Israel is not the cause of theit misery, Arab states will be in deep trouble. People who blindly attack or support one side or the other are either racists, fools or ignorant. Israelis don't send teenage bombers to Gaza and Palestinians don't tear down settlements as collective punishment. Both sides created this mess, both sides have to get out of it.
This weekend Congress was working on a massive $388 billion omnibus spending bill that will cover all manner of federal spending. But at the request of Rep. Ernest Istook of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Appropriations Transportation Subcommittee, a special provision was inserted into the bill which allows the Chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees or their "agents" to review any American's tax return with no restrictions whatsoever.
Specifically, none of the privacy law restrictions -- or the criminal and civil penalties tied to them -- would apply when the Chair or anybody he or she designates as his or her "agent" looked at your tax return.
The exact language of the provision is as follows ...
"Hereinafter, notwithstanding any other provision of law governing the disclosure of income tax returns or return information, upon written request of the Chairman of the House or Senate Committee on Appropriations, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service shall allow agents designated by such Chairman access to Internal Revenue Service facilities and any tax returns or return information contained therein."
The provision was slipped into the bill at the last moment. And, at least on the Democratic side, no one was told about it until some Dems caught it at the last moment.
Senate Republicans quickly backtracked, calling the provision a mistake or snafu and insisting they knew nothing about it. You can see some of the back-and-forth that took place on the Senate floor in this AP piece at CNN.
Sen. Stevens of Alaska, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, originally blamed the provision on a 'staffer'. But later, according to the AP, Sen. Frist and "congressional aides" said it was inserted at the behest
