OMNI NEWSLETTER NUMBER 10
ON THE US EMPIRE, THE US NATIONAL
SECURITY STATE ,
NATIONALISM, MILITARISM, April 5, 2013, Compiled by Dick Bennett Building
“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the
most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every
other. War is the parent of armies; from
these proceed debts and taxes. . . .”
James Madison, “Political Observations,”
April 20, 1795.
An underlying theme of this newsletter and of all of the
newsletters pertaining to war is the necessity of the US peace
movement in all its local organizations to be informed, to try to see through
lies and secrecy, to think, and to act both locally and globally. Often the argument is made that peacemaking
must begin with individual search for inner equanimity, steadiness, and
strength, and nobody can deny that foundation for peace, but our leaders’
reckless lawlessness, making the world hostile and unstable and killing
millions of people, destabilizes each and every one of us locally and
individually, and must be stopped. In
order to act, we are not compelled to wait until we have fully matured, and
anyway a lifetime is seldom enough time to enable that ideal condition. –Dick
CHRIS HEDGES ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BRADLEY MANNING
Manning provided to the public the most important window into the
inner workings of imperial power since the release of the Pentagon Papers. The routine use of torture, the
detention of Iraqis who were innocent, the inhuman conditions within our secret
detention facilities, the use of State Department officials as spies in the
United Nations, the collusion with corporations to keep wages low in developing
countries such as Haiti, and specific war crimes such as the missile strike on
a house that killed seven children in Afghanistan would have remained hidden without
Manning. READ MORE http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/369-wikileaks/16315-we-are-bradley-manning
#1 July 3, 2007
#2 Sept. 20, 2007
#3 April 7, 2008
#4 Nov. 30, 2008
#5 September 13,
2011
#6 October 16, 2011
#7 January 16, 2012
#8 June 3, 2012
#9 Oct. 20, 2012
My blog: It's the War
Department
Newsletters:
Index:
See: Afghan/US War, Costs of War,
Consequences of War, US Imperialism, US Imperialism Continental Westward
Expansion, US Imperial Pacific E. Asia Expansion, US Leaders Imperial
Lawlessness, Iraq/US War, McCarthyism, Ongoing, US Military Industrial Complex,
Militarism, Pentagon, Pentagon: Suicides, Pentagon: Whistleblowing, Torture, War
Crimes, and more.
Instead of Defense
Department: War Department
Instead of War on
Terror: War to Control Resources
Instead of Taliban:
Afghan/Pakistan Pashtun Resistance to Occupation
A wide-ranging source of information is the Defense News
Early Bird Brief: : http://omsswar.blogspot.com/2012/03/defense-news-early-bird-brief_14.html
Nos. 7 & 8 below.
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ Laying the foundation for peace, justice,
and ecology in knowledge.
Many books have been written prophesying the end of
US Empire with titles like: Suicide of a Superpower; The Empire Has No
Clothes; Taming American Power; Nemesis: the Last Days of the
American Republic; Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire;
and Selling Out A Superpower.
"To
initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it
is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that
it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." -- Robert H.
Jackson, Chief U.S. Prosecutor, Nuremberg
Verse for those who see no
evil:
If we see right, we see our Woes,
If we see right, we see our Woes,
Then what avails it to have
Eyes?
From Ignorance our Comfort
flows;
The only wretched are the
wise. Matthew Prior
Nos. 7 & 8
below.
Contents #9
PNAC Continues
US Militarism Abroad
New Book: Taming American Power
TomDispatch, Vine: Empire of Bases,
Lily Pad Strategy
Intervention Law and Libya
Zibechi, Urban Poor
Empire and Medical Care
New Weapon for Large Cargo and Constant Surveillance
US Militarism at Home
The Poor and Military Recruiting
Scales: Army Good, Too Many Wars
Bad
Moyers, Look Back to 1980s
Contents #10
Herman: the Troops, the Criminals,
Lawlessness, Propaganda System, Bush and Obama
Kutler: McGovern’ Critique of US
Foreign Policy
MISC: CHECK, ANNOTATE, PLACE
2 on Romney and Obama
US Intervention in Mali 2012
Militarizing Arctic North: Sweden
and Finland
Empire and Social Sciences
Early Years, 2 Books
McCoy and Scarano, Colonial
LaFebre, Late 19th
Century
Alternative History: Zinn and
Stone/Kuznick
Dick: The Story of the US
at Chrystal Bridges
·
Donate
Support Our
Troops, Our War, and Our War Criminals by Edward S. Herman / April 1st, 2013
The call to “support our troops,” or “our boys,” is really an
appeal to support the war in which the troops are engaged. Critics of the war would say
that if the war is unjustified, possibly even a criminal enterprise in
violation of international law at several levels, as was so clearly true of the
Iraq
Naturally, this critical view of supporting our troops gets little
play in the propaganda system, and the propaganda design of the formula “support
our troops” is probably effective in the environment of patriotic fervor
that wars engender. But the hypocrisy here runs deep. Many of the threads
of hypocrisy woven into this propaganda fabric stem from the fact that the
political and military establishments care very little about the welfare of our
boys. The really bad thing about their deaths, injuries and suffering is the
resultant negative publicity and possible increased financial costs of
greater attention to their needs that might limit military budget size and
flexibility. There has been a notorious struggle over the damage our boys have
suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan from economies in the protective equipment
provided to them; from the damaging psychological effects of multiple tours of
duty; from the reluctance to recognize the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) and the seriousness of traumatic brain injury (TBI); and the scandals
reflecting lagged and poor care of personnel back home and in need of medical
care.
In earlier years, also, it was a long struggle to get recognition
of the damage suffered by U.S. troops in Vietnam from the massive
chemical warfare used there, where, of course, the damage to U.S. personnel was
only a small fraction of that suffered by the Vietnamese people, still
unacknowledged and unrectified by the responsible criminal state. The
ironical usage of “MIA” to mean “missing in America,” referring to war veterans
in a sad state of indigence and homelessness at home, also goes back at least
to the Vietnam and post-Vietnam war days. There are many MIAs in the United
States today, and a dramatic figure that did get some publicity was
that more military personnel committed suicide than were killed in combat
in Afghanistan in 2012 (349 versus 295).
It is enlightening also that there is an inverse correlation
between aggressively supporting U.S.
Of course, along with “support our troops” there is an implicit
“support our torturers and higher level war criminals.” This flows from the
overwhelming and increasingly centralized power in the hands of the dominant
elite, including the military-industrial complex (MIC) and leading politicians,
and an associated remarkable level of self-righteousness. Anything we do is
tolerable because we are not only strong and the global policeman, but also
good and always well-intentioned, and are therefore not to be questioned when
we do abroad precisely what we condemn in target states. We can support Saddam
Hussein and even provide him with “weapons of mass destruction”, when he is
doing us a service in attacking Iran, even when he is using chemical
weapons there; and with no seeming sense of shame or guilt we can quickly turn
him into “another Hitler” when he disobeys orders. We can help the Shah of Iran
The really high level war criminals like Bush, Blair, and Obama
can get away with anything, not only because they are at the pinnacle of
power and can set their own rules, but also because they dominate the
external institutions that supposedly make the rule of law international, but
fail to do so. One of the prettiest cases is, of course, the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, an act matching Hitler’s
1939 invasion of Poland
But the sick comedy of “international law” rode on, with the UN,
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and International Criminal Court
(ICC) playing their assigned role by applying it whenever the Big Aggressor
or one of his leading allies felt the application of legal principles to
be useful. The Big A and his Little Aggressor client Israel wanted a
legal input for Darfur, but not for the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
invaded by Rwanda and Uganda, whose leaders were Big Aggressor clients, and so
it was—Sudan’s al-Bashir was indicted by the ICC, Rwandan and Ugandan leaders
were exempt. Big A and allies wanted legal authority for attacking Libya , but not Bahrain ,
so the ICC and United Nations Security Council (UNSC) obliged with indictments
for Gaddafi and sons, silence on Bahrain Libya ,
in collaboration with the ICC, greasing the skids for a NATO military attack on
Libya
The role of the “international community” (in the sense of
the leadership of the Western great powers and their clients, not
the underlying populations) was dramatically exhibited in giving the newly
elected U.S. President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace prize in 2009. He hadn’t
done anything whatsoever for peace at that time, but gave the appearance
of a leader more moderate than Bush and Cheney. A silly award, but once
again a giveaway on the supportive-groveling qualities of Western
political/cultural institutions. (Can you imagine the Nobel Committee giving
the award to Amira Hass, Malalai Joya, Kathy Kelly, or Richard Falk, people
actually making genuine personal sacrifices in the interest of peace?) Honest
analysis and morality would have recognized that Obama was going to be a major
war criminal by structural necessity, embedded as he was in a permanent war
political economy where political survival, let alone success, required the
commission of war crimes. Obama soon found that political success demanded
killing foreigners; that budget enlargement for killing was easy, but spending
for progressive civilian needs was difficult and would anger powerful people.
He quickly adapted to being a warrior president, his seemingly most proud
accomplishment being the killing of bin-Laden.
Obama has played all the war cards. He has lauded the Vietnam War
as a noble enterprise and is pleased to participate in and laud a memorial that
celebrates it. Like Bush he loves to speak to military cadres where he can draw
resounding applause with patriotic and war rhetoric, although increasing
numbers of liberal Democrats have gotten on board his war-oriented ship of
state and also find his warrior image and actions agreeable. He has gone
somewhat beyond Bush in institutionalizing government rights to invade privacy,
closing down information access, and criminalizing whistle-blowing. His drone
war policy and claimed right to assassinate even U.S. U.S.
• Article first appeared in Z Magazine April 2013
5 10 3 67
Ignore McGovern’s message at your peril
MONDAY, OCT 22, 2012 09:54 AM
CDT
The New York Times
downplays his impact, but we're desperate for McGovern-like critics of reckless
foreign policy
·
George
McGovern lived his public life with an integrity that in these rancid political
times, all of us might envy. He unfortunately is remembered most for his
overwhelming defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon in the presidential election
of 1972, but it is worth noting that Nixon resigned in disgrace, the only
president to ever abandon his office. McGovern was a historian, undoubtedly
with profound respect for the presidency; it is difficult to imagine his
obstructing justice or abusing his power in the Nixon manner.
As we
count the dwindling numbers of World War II veterans, we recall McGovern’s
heroic service in that conflict. He piloted the lumbering B-24, the slowest of
our combat bombers, through 35 hazardous missions over numerous targets in
Nazi-occupied southern Europe . He received the
Distinguished Flying Cross for one mission in which his navigator was killed,
yet he safely landed his crippled plane on a small Adriatic island.
After
World War II, a combination of his religious background, his studies for a
Ph.D. in history, and a rising call for American leadership in the world
profoundly touched McGovern. He turned away from his parents’ Republican roots
and embraced the idealism of Woodrow Wilson’s worldview.
The American failure to assert a leadership role in world affairs after 1918 convinced him and so many of his generation that theUnited States had an obligation to
lead a mission of collective security to ensure world peace. That notion served
him well throughout the 1950s and 1960s as he rose to political prominence. He
probably embraced John F. Kennedy’s clarion call in his 1960 inaugural address
to ”let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay
any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any
foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
The American failure to assert a leadership role in world affairs after 1918 convinced him and so many of his generation that the
In
the late 1950s, South Dakotans elected
McGovern to two terms in the House of Representatives, a somewhat remarkable
feat for a Democrat. In 1960, however, the state stayed true to its form and
McGovern lost his first bid for a Senate seat. The newly elected John F.
Kennedy chose McGovern to direct the Food for Peace Program. He actively
promoted the creation of the U.N.’s World Food Programme in late 1961, which
distributed food throughout the world and became the largest agency fighting
worldwide hunger. Near the end of his life, he suggested his own epitaph: “He
did the best he could to end hunger in this country and the world.”
McGovern
did not stay long in administrative work, and in 1962 he was elected to the
Senate. He served three terms and from there, he catapulted into national
prominence as a leading opponent to the Vietnam War. Throughout his subsequent
political career, McGovern identified himself as an heir to the Kennedy legacy,
but there is a certain irony for his Vietnam stance clearly put him at
odds with Kennedy’s expansive posture. It is too late in the day to disentangle
Kennedy’s role and responsibility in the Vietnam War from his successors’
policies.
In
its obituary, the New York Times apparently did not believe that it was “fit
news” to dwell on McGovern’s significant role in a bipartisan group of senators
who sought an end to our intervention in Vietnam — “Mr. McGovern left no
special mark in his three terms …” the newspaper said. Is it too embarrassing –
too painful – to remember McGovern’s role and that of other opponents who
helped force an end to our military role in Vietnam ?
Alas!
We forget and we foolishly repeat our mistakes — and at a cost. McGovern
deserves our warm memory as among the precious few public figures to
consistently and sensibly dissent from the reckless course of American foreign
policy in the later Cold War years, and even afterward. He disavowed his vote
supporting the Tonkin
Gulf
Presidents
Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (with an important assist from Dwight D.
Eisenhower) justified the Vietnam adventure with the “domino” theory, insisting
if Vietnam fell to the Communists, then nations throughout Southeast Asia would
topple like dominoes – presumably then the “Reds” would be in Hawaii, if not on
the beaches of La Jolla, Calif. Richard Nixon burnished his Cold War
credentials and eagerly embraced the “domino theory” and insisted he, too,
would prevent Communism from engulfing Southeast Asia.
For
the past four decades, opposition to the Vietnam War has become a blurred,
faded memory, exploited and belittled for self-serving partisan and policy
reasons. The unspoken suggestion is that critics of the war had undermined
desirable American interests, and advocated a diminished international role for
the United States .
What we seem to learn from history is to forget it. George McGovern’s
opposition to America ’s
unrelenting imperial course consistently remained his message, but all too
often he delivered it to an unsympathetic, even deaf, nation. McGovern’s
efforts rested on the assumption that American foreign policy must recognize
limitations of our power – a rejection of Kennedy’s determination to exercise
American power anywhere. And no dominoes fell when we left Vietnam .
McGovern’s
wartime experience provided a certain authority as he became increasingly
critical of American foreign policy during his years in Congress and beyond.
When he assailed George W. Bush’s decision to attack and invade Iraq , McGovern bravely rejected the ludicrous
proposition that Iraq
had “weapons of mass destruction,” with mushroom clouds looming on our horizon.
There was no national interest to be served, McGovern said. Vice President Dick
Cheney – the Bush administration’s leading dissembler – mocked McGovern’s
softness in foreign policy, and for his “defeatist” opposition to the Vietnam
War. McGovern, always with a disdainful eye for chicken hawks, retorted by
reminding us that Cheney “had other things to do” than serve in Vietnam . He
noted that Cheney had five deferments and never served a day in the military.
History
is memory, and what we remember and what we choose to forget tells us much
about ourselves. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger – he of the Nobel Peace
Prize – connived and purposefully avoided a peace settlement in Vietnam before
the 1972 election. Nixon in one voice used his Quaker upbringing to declare
“blessed are the peacemakers,” while in another voice he resolutely declared he
would not be the first president “to lose a war,” however unwinnable the war
had become, as he well knew. We celebrate McGovern for he actively sought to
force the president’s hand to end that costly war in lives and treasure, and
which, above all, had diminished American power and influence.
Nearly
a half-century later, we pursue more monsters abroad, and we have political
candidates who favor more American expansionism. The lessons and meaning of the
tragedy of Vietnam
are all too apparent; yet we have learned no lessons or meaning. We ignore
George McGovern’s message at our peril.
FIVE
APPARENTLY RELEVANT ARTICLES TO WHICH I COULD NOT GAIN ACCESS--DICK
"'Our (New) Terrorists' the MEK: Have We Seen This Movie Before?"
By Coleen Rowley, Huffington Post, posted September 27
"Boykinism: Joe McCarthy Would Understand"
By Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch.com, posted September 25
The author teaches history and international relations at Boston University
"New Stanford/NYU Study Documents the Civilian Terror from Obama's Drones"
By Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian, posted September 24
"The Siren Song of American Imperialism"
By William Astore, History News Network, posted September 24
The author is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology
"How Hawkish Are Americans?"
By Lawrence S. Wittner, History News Network, posted September 24
The author is a professor of history emeritus at SUNY
OBAMA? ROMNEY? WHO WOULD
BEST PROTECT US
“Foreign Affairs rule Pre-Debate Discourse.” ADG
( Oct. 22, 2012). The debate over Party
foreign affairs policies functions on the shallowest of issues—for example,
Romney supporters assail O. over the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi .
The truth is that on the large policies—invasion and occupation,
torture, and so on- the two candidates are indistinguishable. --Dick
Obama-Romney foreign
policy debate
World Socialist Website
to be held Monday night in Boca Raton, Florida, President Barack Obama
and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney can be expected to tout their
contrasting "visions" on US foreign policy. However, on the
fundamental issues of concern to the American corporate and financial
elite, the two candidates are entirely united.
They will both declare themselves defenders of "democracy" and
"freedom," even as American money and weapons prop up
dictatorships like the Saudi monarchy, the kleptocratic rulers of Congo
and other resource-rich African states, and military-backed regimes from
Honduras to Egypt. They accept unquestioningly the necessity to use
military force and political subversion to safeguard the economic and
strategic interests of the American financial aristocracy anywhere in
world.
Full story...
<http://evergreenedigest.org/two-defenders-american-imperialism>
World Socialist Website
to be held Monday night in Boca Raton, Florida, President Barack Obama
and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney can be expected to tout their
contrasting "visions" on US foreign policy. However, on the
fundamental issues of concern to the American corporate and financial
elite, the two candidates are entirely united.
They will both declare themselves defenders of "democracy" and
"freedom," even as American money and weapons prop up
dictatorships like the Saudi monarchy, the kleptocratic rulers of Congo
and other resource-rich African states, and military-backed regimes from
Honduras to Egypt. They accept unquestioningly the necessity to use
military force and political subversion to safeguard the economic and
strategic interests of the American financial aristocracy anywhere in
world.
Full story...
<http://evergreenedigest.org/two-defenders-american-imperialism>
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika (L)
shakes hands with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she arrives for
meetings at the Mouradia Palace in Algiers
Credit: Reuters/Saul Loeb/Pool
By
Andrew Quinn
(Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed
regional power Algeria on
Monday to support an Africa-led military intervention in northern Mali , a senior U.S.
Clinton's one-day visit comes amid mounting
international pressure on Algeria over the crisis in Mali, where a March
military coup was followed by a revolt that has seen Tuareg rebels and Islamist
militants, some linked to al Qaeda, seize control of the northern two-thirds of
the country.
The senior U.S.
official said after the talks that Clinton
argued strongly that counter-terror efforts in Mali
could not wait for a political resolution to Mali
"The secretary underscored ... that it is very
clear that a political process and our counter-terrorism efforts in Mali
"We have an awful lot at stake here, and an
awful lot of common interests, and there's a strong recognition that Algeria has to be a central part of the
solution," the senior U.S.
official told reporters traveling with Clinton
"They are going to be supportive of a major
effort in Mali Clinton
Africa's biggest country, and a top oil and gas
exporter, Algeria shares a
2,000-km (1,250-mile) border with Mali
It fears military action in Mali could push al Qaeda militants back into
southern Algeria as well as
triggering a refugee and political crisis, especially among displaced Malian
Tuaregs heading north to join tribes in Algeria
Although Algiers would
not be able to veto an intervention operation by other countries, it would be
diplomatically risky for African states backed by Western powers to intervene
in Mali
"TACIT" AGREEMENT
France, the region's former colonial
power, drafted a U.N. Security Council resolution urging Mali to engage in dialogue with Tuareg Islamist
rebels Ansar Dine if they cut links with radical groups, a move that satisfied Algiers
The resolution also asked African states and the United Nations
for a Mali
A second official said it appeared Algeria was
"beginning to warm to the idea" of an ECOWAS-led military
intervention, but this would be contingent on the West African block putting
forward a fully-developed plan which it has yet to do.
(Reporting By Lamine Chikhi; Editiing by Michael
Roddy)
The ADG (10-30-1012) published a condensed version of
this Reuters report, “Clinton Sees Algeria Having Mali Role.”
The US
N. Mali Tuaregs broke away.
Islamists ousted Tuaregs.
US-led UN Security Council approved African-led
military force to help S. Malian army oust N. Islamists. --Dick
E. SAN JUAN Philippines
|
Approaching
Imperial Neoliberalism
Imperial
neoliberalism, the rationale of actual political and economic globalization,
reveals itself most lucidly in the “Project
for New American Century,” the manifesto of advisers closest to President
George W. Bush. The designers of this new aggressive U.S.
foreign policy premised on an unprecedent military buildup were participants in
the invasions of Panama and Grenada , counter-insurgency wars in Central and South America(particularly Colombia ,
Peru ), the Cold War showdown
with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan , and the arming of Iraq to counter radical Islamists in Iran and elsewhere. Basically, the project
centers on a doctrine of unilateral pre-emptive war against any nation or
power seeking to rival the U.S. rather than containment and
multilateral internationalism of terrorist groups. The goal is total war,
endless war, premised on accelerated militarization of society and “moral
clarity.” What the last phrase means may be grasped by quoting portions of the
manifesto: “American foreign and defense policy is adrift…As the 20th century draws to a close, the United
States stands as the world’s pre-eminent power….Does the United States have the
resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?”
This domination of the planet is based on ”unquestioned U.S. military
preeminence” beefed up with new generation of nuclear weapons and sufficient
combat forces deployed to a wider network of foreward operating bases to fight
and win multiple wars, including forces for “constabulary duties” with American
rather than UN leadership. Are we facing here an aberrant act committed in a
moment of absent-mindedness?
In a
blueprint entitled “Rebuilding America’s
Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century” released last
September 2000, this neconservative group outlined its grand plan for world
hegemony: “The United States is the world’s only superpower, combining
preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’s
largest economy. America ’s grand
strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far
into the future as possible. Yet no moment in international politics can be
frozen in time; even a global pax Americana will not preserve itself….The presence
of American forces in critical regions around the world is the visible
expression of the extent of America’s status as a superpower…” The report
urges the control of the Persian
Gulf region by the U.S. , proceeding through the conquest of Iraq ,
followed by Syria and
eventually Iran .
For this plan to be “saleable” to the public, a catastrophic and catalyzing
event “like a new Pearl Harbor ” was needed;
this was promptly supplied by September 11, 2001. While the ostensible excuse
for the invasion of Iraq included Hussein’s tyranny, putative weapons of mass
destruction, and terrorism, it was in effect the desire of the US ruling elite
for a permanent role and base in this strategically important region of the
world, rich in resources but also geographically situated in a way that would
provided springboards for intervention into Europe, Russia, China and the
Indian subcontinent.
In
President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, the doctrine of
“preemptive war” as the lynchpin in the endless war against terrorism, against
rogue states that form the axis of evil (Iraq, Iran and North Korea), was
announced. The right to act preemptively, using nuclear strikes and other
“operational capabilities,” was no longer being exercised to punish the
perpetrators of the crime of September 11 by the savage onslaught on
Afghanistan where Al-Qaeda and Osama bin laden had strongholds, but it was a
measure necessary” to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” The
fantasmatic danger of terrorism scattered around the world now justifies this
militarization of foreign policy and the willingness to intervene and engage
even in “lots of small, dirty fights in remote and dangerous places” in the
process of “draining the swamp” of civil society (to quote Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld; Mahajan 2002, 97; Shank 2003). In addition to the “shock and awe” war
against Iraq, endless and borderless war against anyone perceived or
declared as “terrorist,” that is, anti-American, seems overreaching and out of
proportion to the catastrophe of September 11 (Ullman and Wade 1996). The aim
of fighting and winning multiple, simultaneous major theater wars seems a
postmodernist avant-garde invention. But the reality of events appear to
confirm the intent: Afghanistan was subjugated at the expense of
some 20,000 lives, Iraq
at more than triple the number and still counting.
What
strikes most people as sinister is the plan of a secret army or
“super-intelligence support activity” labelled as the “Proactive Pre-emptive
Operations Group, or P2OG. It will combine the CIA and military covert action,
information warfare, and deception to provoke terrorist attacks that would then
requireU.S.“counterattack” against countries harboring the terrorists. But this
is humdrum routine for the “civilizing mission” since the conquistadors landed
in the “New World ” and the European
traders-missionaries began the merchandising of the bodies of African slaves.
In
retrospect, one can discern an uncanny similarity with the events before the
war against Iraq in 1991,
which inaugurated the era of “total war.” The depressed economic situation and
the scandals of corporate criminality cannot be remedied by further dismantling
of the welfare state, so the public must be diverted. Noam Chomsky’s analysis
of that situation sounds prescient and historically grounded in a well-defined
pattern of political sequences that condense half-a-century of postcolonial
interventions:
Two classic devices are to inspire fear of terrible enemies
and worship of our grand leaders, who rescue us just in the nick of time. The
enemies may be domestic (criminal Blacks, uppity women, subversives undermining
the tradition, etc.), but foreign demons have natural advantages.... As the
standard pretext [Communists] vanished, the domestic population has been
frightened—with some success—by images of Qaddafi’s hordes of international
terrorists, Sandinistas marching on Texas, Grenada interdicting sea lanes and
threatening the homeland itself, Hispanic narco-traffickers directed by the
arch-maniac Noriega, after he underwent the usual conversion from favored
friend to Attila the Hun after committing the one unforgivable crime, the crime
of disobedience…. The scenario requires Awe as well as Fear...(1992, 408)
The
terrorizing sublime
Awe as
well as fear—this “structure of feeling,” which postcolonial critics have so
far ignored, frames the situation of the war against terrorism carried to the
imperial margins, this time in the Philippines. I would now like to call the
attention of the reader to the Philippines, a former colony of the United
States (now arguably a genuine U.S. neocolony) and the continuing l’affaire Abu Sayyaf and its use as a pretext for the
invasion by over a thousand U.S. troops of this second front of the war against
terrorism, after Afghanistan.
Since
the seventies at the time of the Marcos dictatorship, the severely impoverished
Muslims in the southern Philippines
called “Moros” (who were never actually subjugated by the Spaniards, Americans
or Japanese throughout their history) have mounted a fierce struggle for
autonomy and dignity, for some measure of self-determination. While the Moro
National Liberation Front has compromised with the government, another more
formidable group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, has continued its struggle.
But its fighters are now branded “terrorists” and their legitimate cause
criminalized. It is expected that the MILF will be classified as a “foreign
terrorist organization”—foreign, of course, to Americans, but not to Filipinos.
When President Arroyo allowed the U.S. Special Forces to participate in the
pursuit of the Abu Sayyaf, a bandit-group that is really a creation of both the
CIA and the Philippine Armed Forces, did she not violate the Philippine
Constitution? Indifference to this question is a symptom of the larger problem
of either ignorance of the plight of the Moro people, or complicity with the
ruling class in the oppression and exploitation of at least 7.5 million
citizens who happen to subscribe to another faith.
Thousands,
perhaps over a hundred thousand now, have died since the flare-up of
Christian-Muslim hostilities in the sixties, climaxing in the years after 1972
with the battle of Jolo, Sulu. The city was actually burned by government
forces, producing 2,000 corpses and 60,000 refugees in one night. A ceasefire
was reached after the Tripoli Agreement of 1976, but it was often honored
in the breach. The split of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front led Hashim
Salamat from Misuari’s more secular Moro National Liberation Front introduced
a sectarian but also conciliatory element in the scene, precipitating the
formation of the Abu Sayyaf along the lines of the government-sponsored and
CIA-funded Bangsa Moro Liberation Organization (BMLO) in 1976.
The Abu
Sayyaf has been represented in the U.S. mass media as an awesome and
fearful force, mysterious yet intelligible. It is now public knowledge that the
Abu Sayyaf, like the MILF, was set up by the Philippine government to split the
Moro struggle for self-determination and pressure the MNLF into capitulation.
But since 1995 the Abu Sayyaf has turned into a Frankenstein’s monster devoted
to hostage-taking for ransom and terrorizing civilian communities. In the midst
of U.S.
intervention last year, an International Peace Commission went to Basilan on
March 23-27, 2002, and produced what I think is the most comprehensive and
detailed report on conditions in the region. The conclusion of their report,
entitled Basilan: The Next
Afghanistan?, is unequivocal:
the Abu Sayyaf is a symptom of the disastrous failure of the state in ensuring
not only peace and security but honest and effficient government—both
provincial governance and military-police agencies—in a milieu where the
proverbial forces of civil society (business, church, media) have been complicit.
Enmeshed in corruption that involves local officials, military officers, and
central government, the region where the Abu Sayyaf thrives has witnessed the
reign of absolute terror over civilians. Nowhere in the entire Philippines
is the violation of human rights and the brutalization of civilian suspects so
flagrant and ubiquitous as in Basilan where this group operates. In this
context, the deployment of U.S. troops in Mindanao, compliments of the Arroyo
administration, has only worsened the situation, demonized and mystified the
Abu Sayyaf as an Al Qaeda accomplice, and promoted hostility among various
ethnic groups.
Engaging
the neocolonial return
Given
this context, let us examine how metropolitan wisdom has employed
“postcolonial” resources to represent this whole conjuncture to the academic
public. One example is Charles O. Frake’s article “Abu Sayyaf:
Displays of Violence and the Proliferation of Contested Identities among
Philippine Muslims” in a 1998 issue of American
Anthropologist. While
Frake is quite erudite in referencing the history of the Muslims from the
Spanish times to the present, he never examines seriously, except in a
tokenizing gestural mode, the political and economic context of land
dispossession and economic marginalization of the Muslim majority. Instead,
typical of postcolonial discourse, he focuses on the Abu Sayyaf as an attempt
to solve “the logical gap in the identity matrix of Philippine Muslim
insurgency.” Since the Moro movement has been fragmented by ethnic antagonisms
among Tausugs, Maguindanaos, Maranaos, Yakans, and so on, the Abu Sayyaf,
according to Frake, is “militantly Islamicist.” And because its leadership
draws from the displaced and unaffiliated youth, as well as the traditional
outlaw areas, the group represents “a new layer in the strata of kinds of
identity laid down in the long history of conflict in the Muslim Philippines”
(1998, 48). In short, the Abu Sayyaf (according to Frake’s postmodernist optic)
is a symptom of the problem of “identity proliferation,” since the fault-lines
of identity construction are often revealed in explosions of political
violence. Empire, class and nation have all been expunged from the
functionalist, cooptative frame of analysis.
Frake is
an example of a knowledge-producer intent on unwitting mystification. The
result of applying Geertz’ “thick description,” that is, the focus on how
participants interpret everyday happenings, instead of clarifying the nexus of
causality and accountability, muddles it. Frake wants to answer the question:
“How can such nice people [meaning the anonymous members of the Abu Sayyaf], at
times, do such horrible things?” But his premise—that the central motivation of
individuals in society is to be recognized as somebody, to establish an
identity—is completely detached from historical specificities, even from the
basic determinants of any cultural complex or location. Despite the empirical
citations and putative data, Frake’s attempt to deploy postmodern ethonography
on the Abu Sayyaf phenomenon results only in a simplistic reduction: that in
situations of struggle, people fail to unite because they continually interpret
what’s going on around them, thus multiplying “contested identities.” I
am afraid such “thick descriptions” are really opaque ruses obscuring instead
of illuminating the plight of the Moro people. Vincent Crapanzano’s critique of
Geertz may be quoted here: the method of “thick description” “offers no
understanding of the native from the native’s point of view,...no specifiable
evidence for his attributions of intention, his assertion of subjectivity, his
declarations of experience” (quoted in San Juan 2002, 234).
Recalling
Said’s critique of Orientalist scholarship cited earlier, I cannot imagine any
intellectual who, endeavoring to grasp the roots of a long-enduring, complex
“Moro problem,” will preemptively assert or claim a detached or disinterested
stance. A few postmodernist scholars openly announce their point-of-view, their
subject-positions—if only to wash their hands, of course, of any complicity
with US
colonialism or imperialism. Professions of neutrality have been replaced with
gestures of liberal guilt manifest in philanthropic compassion. Unfortunately,
these gestures only prolong the orientalizing supremacy of Western knowledge-production
and its hegemonic influence. Of course it is now commonplace to note that all
disciplinary research performed in state institutions, all pedagogical agencies
(in Karl Mannheim’s phrase, the “everyday constituent assembly of the mind”),
are sites of ideological class struggle and none can be hermetically insulated
from the pressures of material local and global interests. There is no vacuum
or neutral space in the planetary conflict of classes and groups for hegemony.
Perseverance
in commitment
In my
recent work (San Juan 2002; 2004), I called attention to recent
developments in Cultural Studies as a disciplinary practice in North America
and Europe that have subverted the early promise of the field as a radical
transformative force. In every attempt to do any inquiry into cultural
practices and discourses, one is always carrying out a political and ethical
project, whether one is conscious of it or not. There are many reasons for
this, the main one being the inescapable political-economic constitution of any
discursive field of inquiry, as Pierre Bourdieu has convincingly demonstrated.
And in the famous theoretical couplet that Foucault has popularized,
knowledge/power, the production of knowledge is always already implicated in
the ongoing struggles across class, nation, gender, locality, ethnicity, and so
on, which envelopes and surrounds the intellectual, the would-be knower,
learner, investigator, scholar, and so on.
This is
the moment when I would like to close with some reflections, and questions, on
why problems of culture and knowledge are of decisive political importance for
the postcolonial critic. Although we always conceive of ourselves as
citizen-subjects with rights, it is also the case that we are all caught up in
a network of obligations whose entirety is not within our conscious
grasp. What is our relation to Others—the excluded, marginalized, and
prostituted who affirm our existence and identity--in our society? In a sense
we (Filipinos, Americans) are responsible for the plight of the Moros—yes,
including the existence of the Abu Sayyaf--insofar as we claim to live in a
community of singular persons who alternatively occupy the positions of
speakers and listeners, I’s and you’s, and who have obligations to one another,
and reciprocal accountabilities. We should also keep in mind the new historical
milieu characterized by what Alain Badiou calls “the disjunctive synthesis of
two nihilisms,” capitalist nihilism and the anonymous fascist nihilism
manifested in the 9/11 attack (Badiou 2003, 160). This ethical challenge sums
up, to my mind, the riposte that postcolonial agency must pose to neoliberal
imperialism (instanced by Frake’s discourse, among others) if it is to sustain
its tradition of critique, that uncompromising questioning of absolutisms and
sacralizing mystifications that Edward Said initiated at the beginning of his
exemplary intellectual adventure.
©
2006 Bulatlat ■ Alipato Publications
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/19/our-leningrad/
Weekend Edition October 19-21, 2012
Solitite of an Internationalist
Our Leningrad
“No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten”. That is what is engraved
in Gold on the granite stone, right behind the statue of the Motherland,
spreading her arms in grief.
The Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery
is in the city of St. Petersburg
–186 mass graves and about half a million people are buried there, including
most of my family from the maternal side.
During World War II, for 900 days (2 and a half years), the city of Leningrad stood firm,
defying the most horrific siege in modern history. It stopped the advance of
the Nazi troops, withstood constant aerial bombardments, bitter cold, hunger
and the lack of all basic necessities. Almost half the population vanished, was
burnt by bombs, frozen in trenches and in unheated flats, or was starved to
death.
This cultural capital of Russia
performed the ultimate sacrifice: rising in defiance and courage, playing an
important role in defeating Nazism, and thus in saving the world.
All of this while most of the West, either collaborated with Nazism or
tried to ‘appease’ it.
Naturally the USSR in
general and Leningrad
in particular, did not save the world that belonged to the white race; it saved
the world of “non-humans”, according to the German Fascists, of exterminable
beings: people from Indian sub-Continent, Africans, Jews, Roma (Gypsies),
Slavs, most of the Asians and Arabs.
And by smashing Fascism, colonialism also received a decisive blow (as
Fascism and colonialism are made of the similar stuff), allowing dozens of
nations in Asia and Africa to gain
independence, and freedom. At least for some time; at least until the Western
nations managed to regroup.
This was, naturally, never forgiven in the European and North American
capitals. The Soviet Union and all its ideals
and principles had been dragged through the dirt and vilified. Although it
saved the world from Nazism, it became common to compare it to Fascist Germany,
and many progressive Western intellectuals adopted this twisted and insulting
judgment.
As I sat on a bench near the Statue Of The Motherland, I was in the
company of Artem Kirpichenok, one of the leading Russian historians; a
Jew who lived in Israel for 15 years, but decided to return to his native St
Petersburg after becoming disillusioned with racism and the institutionalized
discrimination of the minorities living in the Jewish State.
“It is incredible that Western propaganda succeeded in making most people
all over the world believe that Nazism and Soviet Communism are
comparable”, I said. “Even some progressive intellectuals are pronouncing both
‘–isms’ in one single breath.”
“Nazi Germany, the same as England, USA and France, was based on
racist and colonialist mindset, widely accepted principles among the Western
bourgeoisie in the 1930s”, uttered Artem Kirpichenok. “Hitler was building his
empire in Eastern Europe on the British colonial design in India . Nazi
racial theories did not differ too much from the racism in the US South or from
the racial theories of French, Belgian, British or Dutch empires implemented in
the colonies. The collapse of the Third Reich hit hard on all those ideals of
colonialism and racism. And the Soviet Union
was mainly to ‘blame’ for that collapse. The ideological basis of the European
dominance over Asia, Africa and Latin America
had been damaged.”
That could of course never be forgiven.
* * *
During the siege, my maternal grandmother dug trenches on the outskirts
of the city. She fought the Germans, and was decorated for her courage on
several occasions. I have no idea how she did it, how she managed to fight and
to survive – she was so gentle, fragile and very shy. Many years after the war,
years after I was born, whilst she was reading me poems and fairy tales, I
would find it very difficult to imagine her holding a Kalashnikov, hand
grenades or even a shovel. But she did; she fought, and she was ready to die
for what she then thought, was the epic battle for the survival of humanity.
And she came very close to dying on several occasions.
She was an Orthodox Christian lady, but also a firm supporter of
Communism, a rare combination. She married my grandfather, a brilliant Muslim
man from the Chinese minority in Kazakhstan , Husain Ischakov, a
linguist and a Commissar of Health and later for Food Supply (basically a
ministerial post in the old days).
What followed was a fragment that appeared as if it had been cut directly
from official Western propaganda. My grandfather fell out of favor with Stalin,
was arrested and executed. In 1937, (the first earliest memory my mom had from
her ‘childhood’) this tall and elegant man was bent over the cradle, lifting my
mom in his arms, and pressing her against his chest, before being led away by
the agents of the State, to oblivion and eternity. He cried as he looked at her
face; he knew exactly what was ahead. He never came back.
My grandmother fought. She was decorated. But nonetheless, after the War
was over, she was arrested and thrown into jail for ‘marrying an enemy of the
State”. She spent years in prison, while my mother went through hell, virtually
an orphan. When my grandma was released from prison, she said to my mother: “It
was so terrible that I thought; two more weeks and I would hang myself there”.
But she never betrayed my grandfather: all she had to do was to sign that she
‘regretted’ marrying him. She never did. Obviously, her loyalty was more
important to her, than her own life.
She left that jail, still an Orthodox Christian, and still a Communist!
My grandfather’s name was eventually ‘cleared’; he was made a ’hero’
again posthumously. Books were written about him, and my mother was allowed to
study architecture.
* * *
What happened to my family was of course brutal and terrible. And to
claim that the USSR
was some paradise on Earth would be insane.
But we are talking about 1930s and 1940s. And in that context, the USSR was definitely more humane than Western
Europe or the United States .
To dispute that would be to deny the most basic statistics.
“Let us compare”, I was repeatedly told by the greatest Southeast Asian
novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was nominated countless times for the Nobel
Prize for literature but never received one because, unlike Solzhenitsyn, he
was imprisoned in the wrong – pro-Western – concentration camps. “Let us
remember that everything occurs in some historical context.”
Western propaganda managed to put to work some tremendously effective
lies, half-truths and outright fabrications, that could not be checked or
disputed (not that most of the people would even try): the number of victims in
the gulags were exaggerated, and were regularly combined with the numbers of
both political and common criminals (in the Stalin era, everybody convicted of
any crime was put to work, in some sort of labor camp with terrible conditions,
as the country was still poor. Many prisoners never returned).
Some members of the Soviet intellectual and military elites (including my
grandfather) were executed. But was it just because of ‘Stalinist terror’? Many
analysts (Russian, Chinese and others) now claim that the Nazi spy apparatus
thoroughly infiltrated Soviet intelligence. Germany wanted to get rid of the
most talented, loyal and tolerant Soviet leaders and Generals. They identified
them, and then began injecting and spreading the most damaging, but fabricated
information about their disloyalty. My grandfather was, for instance, executed
on the charge of ‘spying for Japan ’,
a ridiculous but somehow ‘logical’ charge as he was a linguist, and spoke
several Asian languages.
On top of that, Stalin and those around him, had plenty to be ‘paranoid’
about: the hostility of the West towards the young Communist state was
apparent. The USSR was
attacked by the US , UK , and ravaged
by brutal Czech Legions and other invading forces.
* * *
Anyone with a drop of objectivity would have to admit (unless he or she
would be set on denying the basic principle of humanism, which declares that
all people are equal, regardless of their race and or nationality) that the
Communist Soviet Union committed much lesser amounts of crime than the Western
countries under the banner of ‘constitutional monarchies’ or ‘multi-party
democracies’.
While the Soviets were busy pulling tens of millions out of poverty (and
we are talking, for instance, about the Muslims of the Middle East, the areas
where the standard of living eventually reached that of the European parts of
Russia, as well as the other countless minorities inhabiting this enormous
country), in approximately the same era the Belgians managed to kill around 10
million people in Congo, chopping off their hands and burning women and
children in their huts alive.
The Germans committed a monstrous genocide (or call it Holocaust) against
the Herero tribe in Namibia ,
for no other apparent reason than because they seemed to dislike their members.
The first concentration camps on earth were built by the British Empire in
Africa, and the French colonial onslaughts are well documented in Southeast
Asia, in West and North Africa and elsewhere.
The Dutch plundered, raped, killed and enriched themselves on a great
archipelago that is now called Indonesia .
The genocides, mass murder and terror that were spread by the West, in
the rest of the world, have been countless, but of course under-reported, as
‘foreign aid’ for education and the media, managed to train and discipline
collaborators in the poor world, securing that the truth about the past would
be generally omitted.
Even the end of World War II did not bring to an end, the bestial
treatment of ‘the natives’ at the hands of the European and North American
colonialists. One should recall the treatment of the people of the Middle East , by Winston Churchill and other glorified
British leaders. All this is of course well documented, including in the books
written by Churchill himself, but hardly mentioned by the disciplined and
reliable mainstream media and academia, in both the colonizing and colonized
nations.
There are countless statues of Winston Churchill or the Belgian King
Leopold II, all over capitals of Europe .
In the second half of the 20th Century, during the so called ‘Cold War’,
the Soviet Union stood firmly on the side of the oppressed, on the side of the
liberation struggles, for freedom in Africa, Asia and Latin
America . One has to wonder how mighty has been the propaganda that
has made it all to be forgotten?
While Europe and the United States (and their constitutional monarchies
and multi-party ‘democracies’) cultivated despots in Iran, Egypt, the Gulf, the
Middle East, South Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala,
Nicaragua, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, Kenya, South Africa,
Indonesia and so many other unfortunate places, the Soviet Union stood by the
Cuban, Nicaraguan, Tanzanian and North Vietnamese revolutions, it supported the
leaders, true heroes and liberators like Patrice Lumumba and President Salvador
Allende.
And both of us – Noam Chomsky and I – came to the conclusion during our
recent debate at MIT, that the standards of living in Riga, Prague or East
Berlin were allowed to be significantly higher than in Moscow, while those of
Tashkent or Samarkand were just marginally lower. The standard of living in the
colonies and the client states of the West were ten, twenty, even a hundred
times lower than those in Washington, Paris or London, often resulting in the
loss of millions of human lives.
I calculated that some 55 million lives have been lost since World War II
as a result of Western colonialism, neocolonialism, direct invasions, sponsored
coups and other acts of international terror. I am probably grossly
under-estimating the numbers, as there were lives lost to famines, terrible
mismanagement, and the outright misery triggered by Western imperialism.
Tens of millions of lives were further lost as a result of the terrible
seeds planted by imperialism and colonialism, the most obvious case being the
Partition of the Sub-Continent.
I would suggest that instead of comparing Fascism and Soviet Communism,
the Left and the entire thinking world would begin comparing what is truly
comparable: the Fascism, Western colonialism and market fundamentalism (the
most violent fundamentalist faith on earth today), served and represented by
“Western multi-party systems” and “Constitutional monarchies”.
* * *
When I meet a new person, which happens with a great frequency, to me
there is nothing more frightening than the most simple and natural question:
“Where are you from?”
I don’t know what to say, I cannot answer and even if I could, the reply
would be too blurry, too complex, and too philosophical. On top of that, unless
I would opt for some long and detailed answer, the information I would give
would be very inaccurate.
I am a dedicated Internationalist, but it is not taken as an identity by
the majority of those that I meet.
My interviewers and reviewers often choose Prague ,
the former Czechoslovakia or
the present day Czech
Republic as my identity, but it is
thoroughly false. Prague
was never my home. Czechoslovakia
was where I endured a hellish childhood, where during the winter, I had my
shoes filled with urine and then the other kids would let them freeze outside
the school or gym, one of countless punishments for my having an “Asian
mother”. It is where I had to fight after each class, from the age of six for
my life, simply because my mother was not just half Asian, but because she was
also half Russian.
My true identity is truly spread all around: it lies deep and high in the
Peruvian and Bolivian Andes where I faced death on several occasions while
covering the Peruvian “Dirty War”. It is in Chile ,
bouncing from the walls of the narrow, winding and often haunted streets of the
coastal city of Valparaiso
– it lies with Chilean poets and with the songs of fishermen at its coast. My
identity is spread throughout that enormous body of water of the South Pacific
Ocean dotted with tiny specks of land – now ‘island nations’ that were
colonized and utterly destroyed by the traditional colonial powers.
My identity is from the Swahili coast of Africa and around the Great Lakes of the continent, in all those places that
underwent the worst genocide in modern history, the genocide triggered by the
European and North American political and economic interests. My identity also
lies in the deserts of the Middle East , and if
I knew the Sub-Continent in just a bit more in detail, it would be there as
well. I am at home in Havana , Caracas ,
Buenos Aires , Onomichi, Beijing ,
Cape Town and Kuala Lumpur . And I also live in Japan , Indonesia
and Kenya .
It is a total mess, I know, it is very confusing and I cannot explain it,
but that’s how it is.
For years, even decades, my home was where there was a struggle for
justice and independence; I have been writing books and articles, making films
or getting directly involved in the struggle. I can hardly identify my race,
culture or national identity, anymore and I don’t even try to. I go where I am
needed. And at the end, also, as Garcia Marquez wrote: my home is where they
read my books.
* * *
I was born in Russia ,
in Leningrad (I am sorry, but I simply cannot
call it St. Petersburg , as it is called now, it
will always remain Leningrad
to me). I had never lived there, because my parents took me to Czechoslovakia
when I was just a few months old. But every year, my mother would put me on a
plane, one of those old Soviet Tupolev jets with mahogany tables, lampshades
and black caviar served on all the international flights, in just one single
class, to send me to Leningrad where my grandmother would be waiting for me,
armed with a set of keys to some humble rented room in the Bay Of Finland, a
room which, for me, was like a paradise. My grandmother was always armed with
endless tickets and passes to the opera houses, ballet performances and art
exhibitions. In the Communist days they cost nothing, but it was not easy to
get them.
And she had piles of books waiting for me. I let her read to me, even
though I was able to read myself. She read to me until it was late into the
night and when it rained outside, the moments were especially magic.
From the moment I left Leningrad ,
I began counting the days left till my return. I had my special secret book
where I marked each day that had passed. The cold deep water of the Neva River,
its bridges, the open spaces, the beauty of this former Russian capital so
often covered by fog, the pathos of Russian and then Soviet history, the pathos
of the history of my own family – all this captivated my mind, made me dream,
made me prematurely adult.
In Czechoslovakia , my
mother missed Russia
terribly. She cried almost every night. She read books to me, too, and a lot of
poetry.
Like this, I had no childhood naturally, but they managed to make a
writer out of me at an extremely early age. I inherited their struggle, their
900 days of Siege, their war, their Russia .
Both women passed everything on to me, but it was not just the suffering,
the prisons and the wars, but also great hope, the ability to dream,
enthusiasm, optimism, as well as great solidarity. They taught me that one
could always build from nothing or rebuild from the ashes. And that love, if it
is true love, is not something that does disappear, nor does it vanish in one
month or even in several years.
They also passed on to me the love for their city; their lost but never
forgotten love.
* * *
Now, after all those years I came back to Leningrad . By now I was much more Latin
American or Asian, than Russian. My native tongue was suddenly feeling so heavy
and rusty: it was still perfect in terms of pronunciation but archaic and
over-polite.
I returned exhausted, after launching my big book in London
– the book about Indonesia ,
and how the West had ruined it after the 1965 US-sponsored coup. I returned
after just finishing my 160 minutes documentary film on the genocide in DR
Congo, and after working at the Ugandan and then on Turkish-Syrian border.
I suddenly felt lonely and I was desperately longing to tell my story to
someone dear to me. But it so happened that no one joined me in Leningrad .
I wandered through the streets, so beloved and yet so foreign.
I went to the old beach at Zelenogorsk, but it had changed, the marina
was dotted with private boats and yachts instead of my old tugboats and patrol
vessels.
I went to visit the forest where the dead body of my grandfather was
thrown from the train. Now it was the memorial cemetery, in fact a haunted
forest with the names and photographs nailed to the trees. I did not want to
travel here from the city where I was born, from Leningrad . I wanted to come here from Helsinki , from a neutral
place, but it was not meant to be.
The forest was quiet. There were a few mourners, but otherwise total
silence. My Muslim, Communist, Chinese grandfather was here. My grandfather, a
linguist, the Minister of Health of Kazakhstan, a man who gave his entire life
to the revolution, but fell out of favor and was killed, thrown into this quiet
forest, without any respect or any rituals.
It was easy to draw conclusions, to condemn everything. But I had heard
enough about him to know that he would not betray his beliefs, just as my
grandmother had never done.
Before she died, I asked my grandmother: “You never re-married. You
remained beautiful for decades after my grandfather died. Why?”
She smiled her unpretentious smile: “Your grandfather”, she said, “Was a
very big man. It is extremely rare to meet a man like that. Others never even
came up to his shoulder”. And she did not mean my grandfather’s height.
He was a Communist, and what it meant to him, was simply the process of
building a much better world than the one he knew from his childhood.
In the forest, I sat on the grass. It was cold. After all those wars that
I had covered, after the 145 countries I had visited, the dozens of books and
films I had produced, after all that struggle, I suddenly felt the need to
cling to someone, just for this moment; I needed to speak, to be held, to tell
the story, from the beginning to the end. I was never the one into
autobiographies, but now I needed to be understood. But in the end I came
alone, with just my Leica and a tiny book of poetry written by Antonio Guerrero
Rodriguez, one of the Cuban 5 – patriots imprisoned brutally in Miami .
My entire maternal family was broken and scattered. But we were all
fighters. Like my grandmother and grandfather I had to go on: I had to struggle
and fight for what I believe in. Like them I knew how short life is, how little
time there is, how precious it is and how mighty the enemy is.
* * *
Later I travelled on the legendary Leningrad
metro, with all those underground palaces, and the old Soviet-era dilapidated
carriages.
I kept reading Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, the bi-lingual Spanish and
Russian, edition that was given to me in Kiev ,
by the translator of my writing.
El amor que expira no esamor
El verdadero amor pertenece
A todo el tiempo, a la tierra toda,
Sin temor enfrenta tempestades,
Resiste hasta el filo de la muerte
Y, como
la natura, eseterno.
In this stunning poem written in a Miami
prison, Rodriguez argues that love that can pass is not really love. That true
love could resist even death itself and is, like nature, eternal.
I noticed that a young lady was reading over my shoulder. After a while,
she asked me in passable Spanish: “Is it true what it says?” Also in Spanish I
replied: “Yes, they are in prison, all of them. It is terrible.”
“It is not what I mean”, she said with certain urgency. “Is it true what
it says? That love is eternal or it is not love?”
I was stunned, as this would not have happened even in Buenos
Aires , this exchange could only take place in Havana … and here. Then I realized that after
all, this was my city, the city where poets were read by the millions, and the
city that made me a writer. I looked at the girl, looked her straight in the
eyes and replied in Russian: “My grandparents thought so. I don’t know if it is
truth but I always lived as if it is.”
The girl nodded. She said nothing, but as she was leaving the car at the
next station, she gave me the most brilliant smile I have received in years.
Obviously the city had its way to give me strength.
Outside, on the bank of Neva
River
As Rodriguez and others realized, one has to fight when men, women and
children are being slaughtered, when entire nations and cultures are being
destroyed. When injustice is called justice and in the name of it, cruelty
reigns.
With the deep waters of the Neva in
front of me, I whispered as I had when I was a child addressing the city: “Now
I will go, but I will come back. Please wait for me.”
Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He
covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His book on Western
imperialism in the South Pacific – Oceania – is published by Lulu . His provocative book
about post-Suharto Indonesia
and market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of
Fear” (Pluto). After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania,
Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa .
He can be reached through his website.
EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY
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Monday December 3rd, 2012, 4:32 pm
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Dear
Reader,
We place these articles
at no charge on our website to serve all the people who cannot afford Monthly Review, or who cannot get
access to it where they live. Many of our most devoted readers are outside of
the United States
This article will be posted in full on December 31, 2012.
“The superb essays
in this volume admirably provide a broad approach to understanding the
centuries-long growth of American power.”—Walter LaFeber, author of The
New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898
At the end of the nineteenth
century the United States
swiftly occupied a string of small islands dotting the Caribbean and Western
Pacific, from Puerto Rico and Cuba
to Hawaii and the Philippines U.S. state to its limits, creating both the need
and the opportunity for bold social experiments not yet possible within the United States Washington U.S.
Moving well beyond theory, this volume takes the next step, adding a fine-grained, empirical texture to the study of
“Brilliantly illustrates the
myriad ways in which the costs of empire-building are borne, although neither
equally nor obviously, by both colonizers and the colonized.” —Franklin W.
Knight, Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History, Johns Hopkins
University
Alfred W. McCoy is the J. R. W. Smail Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of A Question of Torture and The Politics of Heroin. 
Francisco A. Scarano is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of
A
Review of Walter LeFeber’s “The New Empire” : An Interpretation
of American Expansion 1860-1898 (New York, Cornell
University Press, 1963).
Walter LaFeber’s “The New Empire” proposes that American
foreign policy
from 1860-1898 was framed by extra-continental expansion based upon an economic
need to find foreign markets in which to sell American surpluses. By
examining the early theorizing of this economic cause
of expansion, its formulation through intellectual, strategic,
and economic channels, and
the reaction of policymakers to changing economic situations through the use of expansion from
1893-1898, LaFeber claims that the “New Empire” established by 1899 was the culmination of
an American foreign policy whereby
policymakers such as Seward, Blaine, Mahan, and Cleveland used American expansion to establish an
economic chain of markets
beneficial
to the growth of the United States. LaFeber begins
with the origin of the idea and the policymakers, such as William Seward and James Blaine, who
he claims set the economic driven expansion in motion. He uses quotes from Seward such as, “The
Nation that draws most
materials and provisions from the earth, and fabricates the most, and sells the most of productions and
fabrics to foreign nations, must be, and will be, the greatest power of the earth,”
to showcase early calls for economic expansion. He presents
Blaine’s ability to take the idea to a broader level when he quotes him as
saying, “wherever a foothold is found for American enterprise, it is quickly occupied, and this
spirit of adventure,which seeks its outlet in the mines of South America and
the railroads of Mexico, would not be slow to avail itself of openings for
assured and profitable
enterprise.” He claims the formulation of the
idea of economic driven expansion occurred on an intellectual, a strategic, and an
economic level through the work of men such as Mahan, Blaine, and Patterson. LaFeber
uses Mahan to show the
intellectual realization that too much surplus lowered prices in the U.S. Tennessee
LaFeber quotes a State Department
official who claims that after theVenezuelan
Border Crisis of 1895 it was clear that “when our manufacturersmust help
to swell the volume of our export trade…It has been the task of Mr. Cleveland’s foreign policy to prepare the way
for them, to insure ahospitable reception for them.”
6
He then uses an excerpt from the
Banker’sMagazine to show the economic push toward war with Spain over Cuba,citing
that “so many of our citizens are so involved in the commerce
andproduction of the island, that to protect these interests…the U.S. will
haveeventually to force the establishment of fair and reasonable
government.”
The
problems with LaFeber’s thesis begin in his presentation of how economic driven expansion was developed
by men like Seward and Blaine in the 1850s and 60s. While Seward and Blaine were
expansionists, Sewardwas distracted by the Civil War and out of a position
of power by 1869 andBlaine would not become Secretary of State in a
full capacity until 1889 and
thus
both were incapable of putting into action any sort of concrete
foreign policy
initiative from 1860 leading up to 1889. There is also the question
of what else could be driving expansion such as religion, as men like
Josiah Strong
proclaimed that Anglo-Saxon America was the pure race of Christianity and
that “this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America…And can
anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the
“survival of the fittest.”
THE
AMERICAN SPIRIT? By Dick Bennett
That’s not easily defined. Is it unified? And more complex, who is to report that Spirit,
or must it be inevitably reports plural, diverse commentators reporting on a
diverse history?
“The Story of America through the Art at
Chrystal Bridges” (the magnificent museum building by Moshe Safdie and art
collection purchased by Alice Walton located at Bentonville , AR
For example, the collection contains many
drawings of Native Americans. What story
does this collection tell? Some 400 Indian
nations were destroyed and millions of Indians displace or killed by the
conquest of the continental USA
The
collection is arranged chronologically and begins with a portrait of a noble
General George Washington. Is the
story of America America ” that Howard Zinn rebelled against in
his book A People’s History of the United States United States : From Columbus United States America , since it arrogantly
dismisses the proper distinctions of North and South and Central
America .)
Two new books carry forward Zinn’s
historical perspectives of ordinary citizens who challenge mainstream abuses of
power: 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History, edited
by Michele Bollinger and Dao X. Tran, and The
Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.
101
Changemakers are about people who challenged established ideas and
practices, people who “shaped struggles for social justice,” the “unsung
heroines and heroes of US
From the opening page of The Untold History, the importance of
studying history with new lenses is crystal clear: “Historical understanding defines people’s
very sense of what is thinkable and achievable.
As a result, many have lost the ability to imagine a world that is
substantially different from and better than what exists today.” The book is based upon the authors’ documentary
film series by the same title. The two
depict the struggle for “a more just, humane, democratic, and equitable world”
particularly by tracing the development of US militarism and empire and
rationalizing myths, which is to say the “ways in which we believe the country
has betrayed its mission.”
Chrystal Bridges gives the “story of America United States
Contents of #7
Dick: Ark.
Book: Bacevich, et
al. Short American Century
Bacevich: American Century Ended
Hedges: Suing Barack Obama
Chomsky on Warrior Caste
Parenti book, The Face
of Imperialism
Nuclear Weapons Locations
Film, Amigo by
Sayles
Cut US
Military Spending
Cold War Continuing
From Iraq
to Australia
Engelhardt, The United States
Articles Forwarded by Historians Against War
Contents of #8
Myth of US
Innocence, Classified Reading List
Dick, LTE on
Supporting the Troops
Film
History of US
Anti-Imperialism
Orton: US
Aggression
Engelhardt, The United States
Golinger, The Empire’s Web
Chomsky, From
Vietnam War to Present
Cindy Sheehan
Rachel Maddow,
Presidential Power
Bacevich,
Special Operations
Schwartz, War Without End
END
IMPERIALISM NEWSLETTER #10
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