Elsewhere Today 473
Aljazeera:
Israeli strike kills Gaza civilians
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 2008
17:03 MECCA TIME, 14:03 GMT
At least three civilians have been killed in Israeli air raids on Gaza City while Israeli forces shot dead a leader from the Islamic Jihad group in the West Bank.
The killings on Wednesday came as George Bush, the US president, wrapped up his regional tour to promote a US-backed peace deal between the Palestinians and Israel.
The three Palestinian civilians, a 14-year-old boy, his father and his uncle, were killed by Israeli aircraft in a missile attack.
Medics said the bodies were so mutilated that it was hard to identify them. according to Palestinian medical sources.
A later, second Israeli air strike on a car killed two Palestinians in the central Gaza Strip, the ruling Islamist Hamas faction said.
An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed there had been an air strike, saying it targeted a vehicle transporting munitions.
Living in fear
Major Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said the civilian's car destroyed in the earlier incident had been "unintentionally hit".
Jacky Rowland, reporting for Al Jazeera from Gaza, said residents were fearful of another attack.
She said: "Just standing out in the street in Gaza City, people are looking up to the sky ... People are expecting more [attacks].
"The Isrealis say they are targetting fighters, but as we've seen today, ordinary people can often be those who end up paying with their lives for this violence."
Israeli officials said another vehicle had been the intended target of the attack.
Islamic Jihad said that one of its cars was hit in the attack, but that its fighters had escaped.
West Bank violence
Israeli forces shot dead Walid al-Ubaidi, the leader of Palestinian group Islamic Jihad's al-Quds Brigades, in the West Bank on Wednesday.
Israeli troops operating in the northern West Bank town of Qabatiya, near the city of Jenin, killed al-Obeidi in a gunfight and wounded and arrested two other fighters, witnesses said.
An Israeli army spokesman said al-Obeidi was killed during an exchange of fire with troops who came to arrest him.
The al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad group, confirmed his death.
Palestinian fighters fired at least 21 rockets toward Israel on Wednesday but no injuries or serious damage were reported, the Israeli military said.
In mourning
Gaza was at a standstill on Wednesday as Palestinians held a general strike in mourning for 18 people killed in an Israeli raid the day before, the Strip's bloodiest day since Hamas seized control of the territory in June last year.
To mark three days of mourning, flags flew at half mast, Gaza streets were empty and parents kept their children home from school.
In solidarity with Gaza, the West Bank also held a general strike, with many shops shut in the city of Ramallah, home to the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president.
"The strike shows that we and Gaza are one people in the face of Israeli massacres," said Majdi Maraqa, a shop owner in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Abbas on Tuesday described the killings as "a massacre" and "a slaughter against the Palestinian people".
"Our people cannot keep silent over these massacres. These massacres cannot bring peace," he said.
Israel's incursion came a week after George Bush, the US president, said during a visit to the region he wanted a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians by the end of his presidential term at the end of 2008.
Hamas officials blamed Bush's presence in the region for the violence.
Abbas said the Gaza operation, in which Hussam al-Zahar - the son of Mahmoud al-Zahar, a former Hamas foreign minister - was also killed, had severely damaged the peace efforts relaunched by Bush in the US city of Annapolis less than two months ago.
Bush blamed
Israel said they were engaging in an operation "against terror threats".
Khaled Meshaal, the exiled political chief of Hamas, said he held Bush and Israel accountable for the deaths of the Palestinians killed during Israel's raids on the Gaza Strip.
As a press conference in the Syrian capital, Damascus, Meshaal said: "We would like to tell George Bush that this is the real terrorism. Arabs and Muslims are not the terrorists.
"An Israeli official said that Bush gave Olmert the green light to launch a full scale military incursion on Gaza," Meshaal said.
"Therefore I hold the American administration responsible for what happened yesterday in Gaza. Bush is a man of war and crime not peace and security."
At least 115 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in Gaza, according to a tally by the AFP news agency, since the Annapolis Conference on finding a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was held in November.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/
6C489EB1-6BBF-4A78-9A15-F996C9E9D51E.htm
AllAfrica:
Rebel Positions Bombed in West Darfur
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
16 January 2008
Nairobi
Fresh violence in the Sudanese state of West Darfur has restricted humanitarian work around El Geneina, with aid workers describing the region as "a no-go area".
According to aid workers, who did not want to be named, two villages in Geneina were bombed on 12 and 13 January by Sudanese government Antonov planes. Another attack hit Jebel Moon. Before these incidents, Chadian rebels carried out raids in the areas, aggravating the security situation.
The bombardment, sources said, targeted strongholds of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), led by Khalil Ibrahim, which had recently attacked "soft" government targets.
The attacks come two weeks after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed deep concern over the resumption of hostilities between JEM and Sudanese government forces in West Darfur. He cited an attack on 29 December by JEM on government positions in Silea, north of Geneina.
"The Secretary-General strongly urges all parties to show restraint and cease all military action in order to create a positive atmosphere for political negotiations leading to a definitive and inclusive peace agreement," Ban said in a statement on 31 December.
JEM leaders told international news agencies on 15 January that the raids had resulted in several civilian casualties as people fled the villages.
"They killed three citizens - two women and one man," JEM commander Abdel Aziz el-Nur Ashr told Reuters. Ibrahim told AFP news agency that bombing raids had taken place on 12, 13 and 14 January and that residents were seeking cover from the air strikes under trees and in dry river beds.
The army, however, instead accused JEM of attacking Sheria town in South Darfur and fabricating stories about bombardments.
The latest attacks occurred as UN and African Union mediators, Jan Eliasson and Salim Ahmed Salim, arrived in Darfur to encourage the rebels and government to find peaceful ways of resolving the crisis in the war-torn region.
The Darfur conflict erupted in 2003 when rebels took up arms against the Sudanese government, accusing it of marginalising the African communities in the area. Since then, aid workers estimate that more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.2 million forced from their homes. In total, about 4.2 million people depend on humanitarian assistance for day-to-day survival.
A hybrid UN-AU peacekeeping mission, known as UNAMID, has started deploying in the volatile region - although with only 9,000 of its mandated strength of 26,000 men and without essential logistics and equipment, including helicopters.
In an early blow, however, a UNAMID supply convoy was attacked on 7 January by elements of the Sudanese Armed Forces, drawing strong condemnation from the UN Security Council along with a demand that "there will be no further recurrence of the attacks on UNAMID".
On 14 January, Rodolphe Adada, Joint AU-UN Special Representative for Darfur, met Eliasson and Ahmed Salim. "They all agreed that the current tension could negatively affect the deployment of UNAMID and the distribution of humanitarian assistance in Darfur," UN spokeswoman Michele Montas told a news conference in New York.
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
Copyright © 2008 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200801160666.html
AllAfrica:
ODM Vows to Go On With Protests
By Odhiambo Orlale
The Nation (Nairobi) NEWS
16 January 2008
ODM leader Raila Odinga has today said that they will continue peaceful demonstrations across the country until they get "justice" over the disputed presidential election.
The protests took off in several towns with most exploding into riots after police broke the demonstrations. There have been reports of a man shot dead in Kisumu, while in Nairobi's Kibera slums three people were rushed to hospital with gunshot wounds.
Nairobi's city centre was peaceful until shortly after 2pm when riot police lobbed tear gas and shot in the air to eject some ODM leaders.
Mr Odinga said they would not be cowed by the heavy presence of armed security personnel at Nairobi's historic Uhuru Park, where they had planned to hold a rally, and the other 40 venues in major towns.
The controversial rallies that has been banned by the Government citing security concerns.
The venue has been cordoned for the past two weeks since President Kibaki was declared the winner of the contested presidential elections by the chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya, Mr Samuel Kivuitu.
The Park been guarded round the clock by a combined team of armed riot squad, Administration Policemen and the para-military General Service Unit officers, using horses and guard dogs.
The ODM leader told journalists that he had received information from party officials and supporters across the country that mass action had taken off in all venues.
In Bungoma, a former university student leader, Mr Wafula Buke, was among scores of ODM supporters who had been arrested for leading demonstrators, Mr Odinga said.
Said Mr Odinga: "Yesterday's victory by ODM in Parliament in the election of Speaker Kenneth Marende and his deputy, Mr Farah Maalim, shows that it will not be business as usual in Parliament."
The ODM leader addressed a Press conference together with the party's leading lights William Ruto, Najib Balala, Charity Ngilu and Joseph Nyaga shortly before they joined over 30 MPs in yet another attempt to gain entry into Uhuru Park.
Mr Odinga blamed the current political crisis in the country to the disputed presidential elections and accused President Kibaki, who had stood on a Party of National Unity ticket, of being in office illegally.
"This government has no international credibility, that is why it has deployed a big number of armed policemen throughout the country to stop our peaceful rallies," the ODM leader said.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200801160662.html
AlterNet: What Religion's Blind Stranglehold
on America Is Doing to Our Democracy
By Ira Chernus, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on January 16, 2008
It's a presidential campaign like no other. The candidates have been falling all over each other in their rush to declare the depth and sincerity of their religious faith. The pundits have been just as eager to raise questions that seem obvious and important: Should we let religious beliefs influence the making of law and public policy? If so, in what way and to what extent? Those questions, however, assume that candidates bring the subject of faith into the political arena largely to justify - or turn up the heat under - their policy positions. In fact, faith talk often has little to do with candidates' stands on the issues. There's something else going on here.
Look at the TV ad that brought Mike Huckabee out of obscurity in Iowa, the one that identified him as a "Christian Leader" who proclaims: "Faith doesn't just influence me. It really defines me." That ad did indeed mention a couple of actual political issues - the usual suspects, abortion and gay marriage - but only in passing. Then Huckabee followed up with a red sweater-themed Christmas ad that actively encouraged voters to ignore the issues. We're all tired of politics, the kindly pastor indicated. Let's just drop all the policy stuff and talk about Christmas - and Christ.
Ads like his aren't meant to argue policy. They aim to create an image - in this case, of a good Christian with a steady moral compass who sticks to his principles. At a deeper level, faith-talk ads work hard to turn the candidate - whatever candidate - into a bulwark of solidity, a symbol of certainty; their goal is to offer assurance that the basic rules for living remain fixed, objective truths, as true as religion.
In a time when the world seems like a shaky place - whether you have a child in Iraq, a mortgage you may not be able to meet, a pension threatening to head south, a job evaporating under you, a loved one battling drug or alcohol addiction, an ex who just came out as gay or born-again, or a president you just can't trust - you may begin to wonder whether there is any moral order in the universe. Are the very foundations of society so shaky that they might not hold up for long? Words about faith - nearly any words - speak reassuringly to such fears, which haunt millions of Americans.
These fears and the religious responses to them have been a key to the political success of the religious right in recent decades. Randall Balmer, a leading scholar of evangelical Christianity, points out that it's offered not so much "issues" to mobilize around as "an unambiguous morality in an age of moral and ethical uncertainty."
Mitt Romney was courting the evangelical-swinging-toward-Huckabee vote when he, too, went out of his way to link religion with moral absolutes in his big Iowa speech on faith. Our "common creed of moral convictions? the firm ground on which Americans of different faiths meet" turned out, utterly unsurprisingly, to be none other than religious soil: "We believe that every single human being is a child of God? liberty is a gift of God." No doubts allowed here.
American politicians have regularly wielded religious language and symbolism in their moments of need, and such faith talk has always helped provide a sense of moral certainty in a shape-shifting world. But in the better years of the previous century, candidates used religion mostly as an adjunct to the real meat of the political process, a tool to whip up support for policies.
How times have changed. Think of it, perhaps, as a way to measure the powerful sense of unsettledness that has taken a firm hold on American society. Candidates increasingly keep their talk about religion separate from specific campaign issues. They promote faith as something important and valuable in and of itself in the election process. They invariably avow the deep roots of their religious faith and link it not with issues, but with certitude itself.
Sometimes it seems that Democrats do this with even more grim regularity than Republicans. John Edwards, for example, reassured the nation that "the hand of God today is in every step of what happens with me and every human being that exists on this planet." In the same forum, Hillary Clinton proclaimed that she "had a grounding in faith that gave me the courage and the strength to do what I thought was right, regardless of what the world thought. And that's all one can expect or hope for."
When religious language enters the political arena in this way, as an end in itself, it always sends the same symbolic message: Yes, Virginia (or Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina) there are absolute values, universal truths that can never change. You are not adrift in a sea of moral chaos. Elect me and you're sure to have a fixed mooring to hold you and your community fast forever.
That message does its work in cultural depths that arguments about the separation of church and state can never touch. Even if the candidates themselves don't always understand what their words are doing, this is the biggest, most overlooked piece in today's faith and politics puzzle - and once you start looking for it, you find it nearly everywhere on the political landscape.
The Threat to Democracy
So, when it comes to religion and politics, here's the most critical question: Should we turn the political arena into a stage to dramatize our quest for moral certainty? The simple answer is no - for lots of reasons.
For starters, it's a direct threat to democracy. The essence of our system is that we, the people, get to choose our values. We don't discover them inscribed in the cosmos. So everything must be open to question, to debate, and therefore to change. In a democracy, there should be no fixed truth except that everyone has the right to offer a new view - and to change his or her mind. It's a process whose outcome should never be predictable, a process without end. A claim to absolute truth - any absolute truth - stops that process.
For those of us who see the political arena as the place where the whole community gathers to work for a better world, it's even more important to insist that politics must be about large-scale change. The politics of moral absolutes sends just the opposite message: Don't worry, whatever small changes are necessary, it's only in order to resist the fundamental crumbling that frightens so many. Nothing really important can ever change.
Many liberals and progressives hear that profoundly conservative message even when it's hidden beneath all the reasonable arguments about church and state. That's one big reason they are often so quick to sound a shrill alarm at every sign of faith-based politics.
They also know how easy it is to go from "there is a fixed truth" to "I have that fixed truth." And they've seen that the fixed truth in question is all too often about personal behaviors that ought to be matters of free choice in a democracy.
Which brings us to the next danger: Words alone are rarely enough to reassure the uncertain. In fact, the more people rely on faith talk to pursue certainty, the more they may actually reinforce both anxiety and uncertainty. It's a small step indeed to move beyond the issue of individual self-control to controlling others through the passage of laws.
Campaigns to put the government's hands on our bodies are not usually missionary efforts meant to make us accept someone else's religion. They are much more often campaigns to stage symbolic dramas about self-control and moral reassurance.
Controlling the Passions
American culture has always put a spotlight on the question: Can you control your impulses and desires - especially sexual desires - enough to live up to the moral rules? As historian of religion John F. Wilson tells us, the quest for surety has typically focused on a "control of self" that "through discipline" finally becomes self-control. In the 2008 presidential campaign, this still remains true. Listen, for example, to Barack Obama: "My Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. So I think faith and guidance can help fortify? a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy."
Mitt Romney fit snugly into the same mold. He started his widely-heralded statement on religion by talking about a time when "our nation faced its greatest peril," a threat to "the survival of a free land." Was he talking about terrorism? No. He immediately went on to warn that the real danger comes from "human passions unbridled." Only morality and religion can do the necessary bridling, he argued, quoting John Adams to make his case: "Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people" - in other words, people who can control themselves. That's why "freedom requires religion."
All too often, though, the faith-talk view of freedom ends up taking away freedom. When Romney said he'd be "delighted" to sign "a federal ban on all abortions," only a minority of Americans approved of that position (if we can believe the polls), but it was a sizeable minority. For them, fear of unbridled passion is stronger than any commitment to personal freedom.
In the end, it may be mostly their own passions that they fear. But since the effort to control oneself is frustrating, it can easily turn into a quest for "control over other selves," to quote historian Wilson again, "with essentially bipolar frameworks for conceiving of the world: good versus bad, us versus them" - "them" being liberals, secular humanists, wild kids, or whatever label the moment calls for.
The upholders of virtue want to convince each other that their values are absolutely true. So they stick together and stand firm against those who walk in error. As Romney put it, "Any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty has a friend and ally in me."
That's the main dynamic driving the movements to ban abortion and gay marriage. But they're just the latest in a long line of such movements, including those aimed at prohibiting or restricting alcohol, drugs, gambling, birth control, crime, and other behaviors that are, in a given period, styled as immoral.
Since it's always about getting "them" to control their passions, the target is usually personal behavior. But it doesn't have to be. Just about any law or policy can become a symbol of eternal moral truth - even foreign policy, one area where liberals, embarked on their own faith-talk campaigns, are more likely to join conservatives.
The bipartisan war on terror has, for instance, been a symbolic drama of "us versus them," acting out a tale of moral truth. Rudolph Giuliani made the connection clear shortly after the 9/11 attack when he went to the United Nations to whip up support for that "war." "The era of moral relativism? must end," he demanded. "Moral relativism does not have a place in this discussion and debate."
Nor does it have a place in the current campaign debate about foreign policy. Candidate Huckabee, for example, has no hesitation about linking war abroad to the state of morality here at home. He wants to continue fighting in Iraq, he says, because "our way of life, our economic and moral strength, our civilization is at stake? I am determined to look this evil in the eye, confront it, defeat it." As his anti-gay marriage statement asks, "What's the point of keeping the terrorists at bay in the Middle East, if we can't keep decline and decadence at bay here at home?"
On the liberal side, the theme is more muted but still there. Barack Obama, for instance, has affirmed that the U.S. must "lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. I still believe that America is the last, best hope of Earth." Apparently that's why we need to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq indefinitely. Clinton calls for "a bipartisan consensus to ensure our interests, increase our security and advance our values," acting out "our deeply-held desire to remake the world as it ought to be." Apparently that's why, in her words, "we cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran."
When words and policies become symbols of moral absolutes, they are usually about preventing some "evil" deed or turning things back to the way they (supposedly) used to be. So they are likely to have a conservative impact, even when they come from liberals.
The Future of Faith Talk
In itself, faith in politics poses no great danger to democracy as long as the debates are really about policies - and religious values are translated into political values, articulated in ways that can be rationally debated by people who don't share them. The challenge is not to get religion out of politics. It's to get the quest for certitude out of politics.
The first step is to ask why that quest seems increasingly central to our politics today. It's not simply because a right-wing cabal wants to impose its religion on us. The cabal exists, but it's not powerful enough to shape the political scene on its own. That power lies with millions of voters across the political spectrum. Candidates talk about faith because they want to win votes.
Voters reward faith talk because they want candidates to offer them symbols of immutable moral order. The root of the problem lies in the underlying insecurities of voters, in a sense of powerlessness that makes change seem so frightening, and control - especially of others - so necessary.
The only way to alter that condition is to transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires. That would be genuine change. It's a political problem with a political solution. Until that solution begins to emerge, there is no way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/73764/
Arab News:
Rain Creates Chaos in UAE Cities
K.T. Abdurabb, Arab News
Wednesday 16 January 2008 (08 Muharram 1429)
DUBAI/SHARJAH, 16 January 2008 — Over 500 accidents have been reported in Dubai as heavy rain lashed the United Arab Emirates causing flooding and traffic jams across Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al-Khaimah and Ajman.
Dubai Police’s Control and Command Room confirmed more than 500 accidents across the city and the deaths of two people in separate accidents due to incessant rain.
Badr Al-Sairi, an official from the Roads & Transport Authority (RTA), urged motorists to exercise extreme caution while driving. He said that the UAE, according to meteorologists, would be facing an unstable climate.
Streets and roundabouts across Dubai have been flooded, and motorists were stuck in traffic for two to five hours. Police also diverted traffic away from the Emirates Road in both directions, as it was flooded. Corniche Road, Mina Road, Al-Nahda, the Al-Tawun Mall area, King Faisal Street, and almost all major roads in Sharjah were clogged.
In Ajman, Al-Nuaimai Road, Old Immigration Road, Al-Bustan, Al-Karama and the Industrial Area were flooded. Office goers and school children struggled to reach their destinations and several schools in Dubai and Sharjah canceled lessons, as school buses could not reach schools on time.
M. Ali, a resident in Dubai, said that it took two hours to travel 1.5 km in the Al-Qouz industrial area of Dubai.
Rajendran from Sharjah said that it took him five hours to reach his office in Jabel Ali. “I started from Sharjah around 5.45 a.m. and I reached my office in Jabel Ali at 10.55 a.m. It was a terrible experience,” he added.
Weather pundits predict more rains with thunderstorms expected today. Fishermen have been advised not to venture into the sea and residents have been warned against venturing into the valleys due to flash floods.
The RTA in Dubai is closely monitoring the condition of roads and traffic at various roads in Dubai round the clock.
Maitha Adai, CEO of RTA Traffic & Roads Agency, said that the intensive efforts and actions of the RTA Emergency Team have eased the gravity of potential accidents and damage that could have resulted from the continuous rainfall, which reached 36.4mm yesterday afternoon.
She added that in order to facilitate the work of the team, Dubai has been divided into three zones: Deira, Bur Dubai, and main roads. All necessary precautions are in place to minimize the extent of damage, including safety measures, communicating with all roads and services contractors to exercise caution and take necessary action particularly in view of the Met Office advice that rainfall may continue.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=105710&d=16&m=1&y=2008
Asia Times:
The 'war on terror' moves East
By Jason Motlag and Jim Lobe
Jan 17, 2008
The Pentagon's announcement on Tuesday that it is dispatching about 3,200 US Marine Corps to Afghanistan underlines both Washington's mounting concern about the strength of the Taliban insurgency and the growing sense that the central front in its nearly six-and-a-half-year-old "war on terror" has moved back to its South Asian roots.
The deployment, which will take place over the next three months, will bring the total number of US troops in Afghanistan to a record level of about 30,000 - still significantly less than the 160,000 in Iraq but nonetheless an implicit admission that US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces have not been able to subdue the largely Pashtun rebels.
Indeed, on the eve of the Pentagon's announcement, a suicide bomber penetrated a luxury hotel in the capital Kabul, setting off a blast that killed more than half a dozen people, including a US citizen and a Norwegian reporter covering the visit of his country's foreign minister, in what the New York Times called "one of the most brazen assaults by the Taliban in the heavily protected heart of the Afghan capital ..."
Washington hopes that the additional troops will help both stabilize Afghanistan and shame its reluctant NATO allies into sending more troops to the same end. Of the 3,200 new troops, about 1,000 will be used for training the Afghan army, and the rest will be deployed to southern Afghanistan to fight the Taliban alongside British, Australian, Dutch and Canadian troops, who have taken record casualties during the past year.
Tainted record
Commandant General James Conway first pitched the plan last year after hostilities in Iraq's al-Anbar province in Iraq calmed down, saying marines on the ground there could either return home or "stay plugged into the fight" and head to Afghanistan.
Marines with a "more kinetic bent", Conway said, are needed to take the fight to the enemy.
But trend lines show that in an Afghan-style counter-insurgency, strength in numbers may not apply. In fact, successive troop buildups since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001 have been matched by a steady increase in insurgent-related violence.
Overall, attacks increased from nine in 2002 to 103 last year, according to the Rand Corporation, and some 300 foreign troops have died in the past two years.
While north and west of Afghanistan are today relatively safe, the Pashtun-dominated southern and eastern provinces are much worse. Six years on it's understood that the crucial window to inject development and win over disillusioned Pasthuns when the Taliban fled was diverted by the Iraq war. According to the Congressional Research Service, Washington has spent about US$3.4 billion a year on reconstruction, or less than half of what went to Iraq.
The aid that has trickled into Afghanistan has gone almost wholesale towards military expenditures. But the integrated "light footprint" strategy used so effectively to topple the Taliban, in which special forces on horseback and small ground units reinforced Northern Alliance irregulars, was replaced by blast-walled compounds and heavy armor vehicles.
Security efforts stood to receive a big shot in the arm from the US Congress' latest military spending package, which exceeded $10 billion - a massive upgrade from years past. Yet about 80% of the total was earmarked for military purposes versus just 20% for reconstruction. This makes little sense in an agrarian country where infrastructure has been shattered by 30 years of war.
Instead of punishing the Taliban, Western military technology has often backfired to strengthen their cause. Errant air strikes have killed hundreds of civilians and poisoned public faith in a weak central government. The Taliban, meanwhile, never miss a chance to capitalize on the mistakes of the foreign powers they frame as occupiers.
Take Helmand province, home to most of the country's booming opium industry that accounts for 92% of the global market. Taliban activity was minimal until the British deployed 4,000 troops there last year; now there are 7,000 troops and it has become a hotbed of the insurgency, made worse by increased drug production, street crime and corruption.
This failure is not lost on those who have spent time in the Afghan badlands. Former marine Captain Nathaniel Fick, a seasoned veteran of the Afghan and Iraq campaigns, highlighted in an August 12 Washington Post op-ed what he called "the paradoxical world of counterinsurgency warfare - the kind of war you win without shooting".
Those now backing on a "surge" of marine manpower to hunt Taliban appear to have forgotten what he reminds us: "The laws of these campaigns seem topsy-turvy by conventional military standards: money is more decisive than bullets; protecting our own forces undermines the US mission; heavy firepower is counterproductive; and winning battles guarantees nothing."
Today these four basic principals of counter-insurgency, based on army and marine doctrine, are taught to Afghan security forces at the Afghanistan Counter-insurgency Academy in Kabul. However, it is the marines themselves who have courted controversy in the country for being too heavy-handed.
Last March, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the former top US commander, expelled a marine special operations company after their convoy was ambushed and they went on a "rampage" in Nangarhar province that left 12 civilians dead, including an infant and three elderly men, according to a report by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. One man was said to be so riddled with bullets that he could not be identified.
"In failing to distinguish between civilians and legitimate military targets, the US Marine Corps special forces employed indiscriminate force," the report said. "Their actions thus constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian standards."
Faced with mounting public anger over the shootings and a series of botched air attacks, President Hamid Karzai is said to have pushed for the expulsion. The unit had been the first marine special operations company sent overseas before the incident, and US officials noted that an order for all 120 men to be redeployed was unprecedented, stressing the gravity of the incident. At present, only 300 marines are stationed in Afghanistan.
With a large marine force now being sent into the country, there is speculation it may be part of a broader effort by senior officers like Conway to raise the corps' status after hard knocks in Iraq. Afghanistan is in a sense still viewed by the American public as "The Good War" compared to Iraq, and a closer association could improve the image of the force in the long term.
Pakistan - that other problem
The still-shaky security situation in Afghanistan is not Washington's only concern in the region.
Continuing political uncertainties in the wake of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's assassination in neighboring Pakistan, where a number of disparate Islamist and Pashtun militias have recently united under the leadership of a Pakistani Taliban commander closely allied with al-Qaeda, have propelled that nuclear-armed nation to the top of Washington's national-security agenda.
Indeed, the assertion that "Pakistan is the world's most dangerous place" has become a new cliche of foreign policy discourse in Washington in recent weeks.
Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates highlighted that concern, noting, "Al-Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward Pakistan and attacks on the Pakistani government and Pakistani people," he asserted, just a week before Bhutto's assassination.
Her killing, as well as indications that Pakistan's deeply unpopular president and former army chief, Pervez Musharraf, was maneuvering to first delay and then to manipulate elections now scheduled for next month, renewed a growing policy debate over what conditions, if any, Washington should attach to its nearly $1.5 billion in mainly military aid to Pakistan this year.
Indeed, the Pentagon's quiet announcement late on December 31, just two days after Bhutto's assassination, that it had approved the transfer by defense giant Lockheed Martin of 18 F-16 warplanes to Pakistan fueled criticism that the George W Bush administration's priorities were badly skewed.
"The decision to go ahead with a half-billion sale of advanced fighter aircraft to Pakistan shows how dangerous misguided President Bush's policy is: How can the White House even think of green-lighting such a sale at such an incredibly sensitive time," said the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden.
"It sends exactly the wrong message to the Pakistani generals, and to the Pakistani people. This is the time we should be putting the pressure on the government and military to fully investigate the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and to hold free and fair elections - not let them off the hook," he said.
And while Biden and others argued that military aid should be conditioned on political reform, other critics have focused on recent reports that most of the $11 billion the US has provided Pakistan over the past five years has been used to buy conventional weapons systems more appropriate for war against India than the increasingly powerful Pakistani Taliban based in the Pashtun-dominated Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North-West Frontier Province.
"The F-16s really can't be used for counter-insurgency in FATA," according to Steve Coll, author of the prize-winning history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda from 1979 to 9/11, Ghost Wars and president of the New America Foundation (NAF). "The F-16s are a symbol of what has been wrong with US aid to Pakistan."
Increasingly worried about the advances made by the Pakistani Taliban under Baitullah Mehsud - whom Musharraf blamed for Bhutto's assassination - and the ineffectiveness of the Pakistani military in fighting it, top US officials have been discussing plans to authorize the Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations Forces to mount cross-border operations from Afghanistan against key Taliban and al-Qaeda targets.
Such actions, however, would trigger a severe backlash against both the US, whose popularity in Pakistan, like Musharraf's, is at an all-time low, and any Pakistani leader who is seen as condoning the raids, according to regional specialists. Musharraf himself has publicly denounced the idea, although he has occasionally permitted missile strikes against specific targets by US aircraft based in Afghanistan.
"It would be political suicide for a Pakistani leader to permit [such operations]," said Peter Berger, the co-director with Coll of the NAF's Terrorism and Counter-Insurgency Initiative and a well-regarded expert on al-Qaeda and the region.
"[Popular] approval for [Osama] bin Laden goes up to 70% in FATA and the Northwest Frontier," he added, noting that one recent survey showed that three out of four Pakistanis nationwide oppose US intervention.
The administration is also reportedly mulling plans to try to replicate what it considers a success in Pakistan - supporting Pashtun clan militias that are willing to take on Mehsud and his Taliban, although scores of clan leaders who might have taken up arms have been executed or replaced by various Taliban factions over the past several years.
A related option - which appears to be the operational strategy at the moment - is to ensure that at least some US military aid is tied to specific performance, step up counter-insurgency training for the army and the paramilitary Frontier Corps, and provide $750 million in development aid to FATA over five years as part of a long-term effort to weaken the insurgency.
But Christine Fair, a regional specialist at the Rand Corporation, has argued that such a plan is "four years too late", given the degree to which radical forces have taken control of the region. "I'm not sure who we would spend it on," she said at a recent briefing.
US officials are also hoping that next month's elections will produce a large moderate and secular majority in parliament, oust the radical coalition of Islamist parties that currently control regional governments in the Pashtun belt, North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan, and help restore confidence in the central government which has been badly battered by Musharraf's efforts over the past year to remain in power.
Jason Motlagh is a freelance journalist based in Delhi. Jim Lobe is a correspondent for Inter Press Service.
Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JA17Df02.html
Asia Times:
How the Pentagon planted a false story
By Gareth Porter
Jan 17, 2008
WASHINGTON - Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the January 6 US-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.
The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the navy itself.
Then the navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that US warships would "explode" in "a few seconds". Although it was ostensibly a navy production, Inter Press Service (IPS) has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defense Department.
The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three US warships occurred very early on Saturday January 6, Washington time. No information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.
The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are "just not a major threat to the US Navy by any stretch of the imagination".
Just two weeks earlier, on December 19, the USS Whidbey Island, an amphibious warship, had fired warning shots after a small Iranian boat allegedly approached it at high speed. That incident had gone without public notice.
With the reports from Fifth Fleet commander Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff in hand early that morning, top Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, January 6, to discuss what to do about the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz. The result was a decision to play it up as a major incident.
The decision came just as President George W Bush was about to leave on a Middle East trip aimed in part at rallying Arab states to join the United States in an anti-Iran coalition.
That decision in Washington was followed by a news release by the commander of the Fifth Fleet on the incident at about 4am Washington time on January 7. It was the first time the Fifth Fleet had issued a news release on an incident with small Iranian boats.
The release reported that the Iranian "small boats" had "maneuvered aggressively in close proximity of [sic] the Hopper [the lead ship of the three-ship convoy]." But it did not suggest that the Iranian boats had threatened the boats or that it had nearly resulted in firing on the Iranian boats.
On the contrary, the release made the US warships handling of the incident sound almost routine. "Following standard procedures," the release said, "Hopper issued warnings, attempted to establish communications with the small boats and conducted evasive maneuvering."
The release did not refer to a US ship being close to firing on the Iranian boats, or to a call threatening that US ships would "explode in a few minutes", as later stories would report, or to the dropping of objects into the path of a US ship as a potential danger.
That press release was ignored by the news media, however, because later that Monday morning, the Pentagon provided correspondents with a very different account of the episode.
At 9am, Barbara Starr of CNN reported that "military officials" had told her that the Iranian boats had not only carried out "threatening maneuvers", but had transmitted a message by radio that "I am coming at you" and "you will explode". She reported the dramatic news that the commander of one boat was "in the process of giving the order to shoot when they moved away".
CBS News broadcast a similar story, adding the detail that the Iranian boats "dropped boxes that could have been filled with explosives into the water". Other news outlets carried almost identical accounts of the incident.
The source of this spate of stories can now be identified as Bryan Whitman, the top Pentagon official in charge of media relations, who gave a press briefing for Pentagon correspondents that morning. Although Whitman did offer a few remarks on the record, most of the Whitman briefing was off the record, meaning that he could not be cited as the source.
In an apparent slip-up, however, an Associated Press story that morning cited Whitman as the source for the statement that US ships were about to fire when the Iranian boats turned and moved away - a part of the story that other correspondents had attributed to an unnamed Pentagon official.
On January 9, the US Navy released excerpts of a video of the incident in which a strange voice - one that was clearly very different from the voice of the Iranian officer who calls the US ship in the Iranian video - appears to threaten the US warships.
A separate audio recording of that voice, which came across the VHS channel open to anyone with access to it, was spliced into a video on which the voice apparently could not be heard. That was a political decision, and Lieutenant Colonel Mark Ballesteros of the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office told IPS the decision on what to include in the video was "a collaborative effort of leadership here, the Central Command and navy leadership in the field".
"Leadership here", of course, refers to the secretary of defense and other top policymakers at the department. An official in the US Navy Office of Information in Washington, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that decision was made in the office of the secretary of defense.
That decision involved a high risk of getting caught in an obvious attempt to mislead. As an official at Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain told IPS, it is common knowledge among officers there that hecklers - often referred to as "Filipino Monkey" - frequently intervene on the VHF ship-to-ship channel to make threats or rude comments.
One of the popular threats made by such hecklers, according to British journalist Lewis Page, who had transited the strait with the Royal Navy is, "Look out, I am going to hit [collide with] you."
By January 11, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was already disavowing the story that Whitman had been instrumental in creating only four days earlier. "No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats," said Morrell.
The other elements of the story given to Pentagon correspondents were also discredited. The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, Captain David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon's story that he had felt threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water. Meeting with reporters on Monday, Adler said, "I saw them float by. They didn't look threatening to me."
The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea that they had been close to firing on the Iranians. Cosgriff, the commander of the Fifth Fleet, denied the story in a press briefing on January 7. A week later, Commander Jeffery James, commander of the destroyer Hopper, told reporters that the Iranians had moved away "before we got to the point where we needed to open fire".
The decision to treat the January 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington and navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the navy's reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Lydia Robertson of Fifth Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, "There is a different perspective over there."
Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA17Ak03.html
Guardian:
Tamil Tigers kill 28 with bus bomb
Randeep Ramesh, South Asia correspondent
Wednesday January 16, 2008
More than 28 civilians were killed and dozens wounded when a roadside bomb blew up a crowded bus in southern Sri Lanka, as a six-year ceasefire between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels ran out.
After the blast, gunmen shot passengers as they tried to flee, according to witnesses. "Everyone that got out through the doors, they shot and killed," Sampath, a 25-year-old passenger, told Associated Press. "I jumped from the window and just escaped."
The attack, on a bus regularly used by schoolchildren, occurred in the remote town of Buttala about 150 miles south-east of Colombo.
The defence ministry said the bus was destroyed by a Claymore-style mine packed with explosives, nails and ball bearings - the signature bomb of the Tamil Tiger rebels.
"There are no other groups operating in the area," a military spokesman, Udaya Nanayakkara, said.
A second bomb hit an army personnel carrier 12 miles south of the first attack, wounding three soldiers, the military said.
Local hospitals told news agencies that no children had been killed by the bus bomb. Witnesses described the scene as a bloodbath.
"I was on my way to take my one and a half month old baby to the doctor. I heard a loud noise and I thought it was a bomb, so I went under the seat of the bus with my baby and we heard firing for about five minutes," housewife TM Lalani, 27, told Reuters from Buttala hospital.
"Everybody was screaming and I saw people on the ground in a bloodbath," she said. "My leg got injured from pieces of glass. Luckily my baby has not got any injuries."
The bomb signals a new phase of fighting between security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - separatists who are designated as a terrorist group by Britain, India and the US.
Although war has raged in the north and east for months, the Sri Lankan government's decision to end a formal truce has been criticised by international observers who say it will increase fighting and kill off peace prospects.
In the two weeks since the government said the truce was over, the military estimates more than 300 people have been killed in violence in the north, where the rebels are deeply entrenched. Independent verification is impossible in what has become a bitter battleground.
The Sri Lankan government has said the Tigers simply used the ceasefire to rearm. Diplomats in Colombo have warned that neither side will back down in the coming weeks.
"Despite major donors and other countries asking for restraint, I don't see this government backing down. Neither will the LTTE," said an official from a western embassy. "Instead civilians are being targeted in the south, which is the Sinhalese heartland. This is the Tigers' way of pressurising the government and pinning down troops away from the LTTE bases in the north."
Last week the American FBI highlighted the threat of the LTTE, which it said had inspired al-Qaida to adopt ever more ruthless tactics.
The FBI said the Tigers had perfected the use of suicide bombers, invented the suicide belt and pioneered the use of women in suicide attacks, as well as carrying out a campaign of assassinations. Some 4,000 people in the past two years alone had been murdered by the LTTE, said the FBI, and the rebels had also assassinated two world leaders - the only terrorist organisation to have done so.
"Needless to say, the Tamil Tigers are among the most dangerous and deadly extremists in the world," the FBI said on its website.
The Tigers are demanding an independent state in the island's north and east, claiming that its 3 million Tamils, who are mainly Hindu, have suffered from racist pogroms under the majority Buddhist Sinhalese population. This is denied by the government in Colombo.
The resulting civil war has taken the lives of 70,000 Sri Lankans on both sides of the conflict since 1983. The latest bombings came a few hours before the end of the 2002 ceasefire agreement, which in practice has been long dead.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2241480,00.html
Jeune Afrique: L'opposition conquiert le perchoir
et se prépare à manifester
KENYA - 15 janvier 2008 - par AFP
L'opposition kényane a remporté mardi le prestigieux poste de président du Parlement, obtenant ainsi une victoire hautement symbolique pour ses partisans qui étaient descendus en masse dans les rues pour dénoncer la réélection controversée du chef de l'Etat Mwai Kibaki.
L'ancien secrétaire général des Nations unies Kofi Annan, qui devait arriver mardi soir au Kenya, a été contraint de reporter "de quelques jours" sa mission de médiation en raison d'une "forte grippe", a annoncé l'ONU à Genève.
Kenneth Marende, le candidat du Mouvement démocratique orange (ODM) du chef de l'opposition Raila Odinga, a été élu président de l'Assemblée nationale kényane avec 105 voix contre 101 accordées au postulant du camp présidentiel, Francis Ole Kaparo.
Le vote a eu lieu lors de la séance d'ouverture de l'assemblée issue des élections contestées du 27 décembre.
L'annonce du résultat a été accueillie par des cris de joie des députés du parti de M. Odinga, candidat malheureux à la présidentielle.
Elle a aussi été saluée par les hourras de ses supporters à Eldoret (ouest), l'une des villes les plus touchées par les violences post-électorales qui ont fait au moins 700 morts et 255.000 déplacés dans le pays.
"Nous avons gagné! Longue vie à l'ODM", scandaient des partisans de Raila Odinga à Eldoret, un de ses bastions électoraux, à l'annonce en direct à la télévision de la victoire de leur camp, a constaté une journaliste de l'AFP.
"Nous avons le devoir de soutenir la démocratie", a déclaré le nouveau président du Parlement, dans un discours inaugural dépourvu de toute allusion directe à la réélection contestée de M. Kibaki à la tête de l'Etat.
Les Etats-Unis ont "applaudi" mardi à l'élection d'un responsable de l'opposition kényane au prestigieux poste de président du Parlement, estimant qu'elle "montre aux deux parties qu'elles peuvent et doivent se réunir".
Lors des élections législatives, qui coïncidaient avec le scrutin présidentiel, l'ODM était arrivé en tête avec 99 élus au parlement.
Kenneth Marende, 52 ans, a dit espérer que cette assemblée s'efforcerait "de doter les Kényans d'un nouvel ordre constitutionnel le plus rapidement possible".
Le président Kibaki avait été critiqué au terme de son premier mandat pour avoir échoué à changer la constitution et à pourvoir l'exécutif kényan d'un poste de Premier ministre, limitant ainsi les prérogatives du président.
La session a été marquée par la première apparition commune en public de MM. Kibaki et Odinga depuis les élections et la vague de violences meurtrières qui les ont suivies.
Mais à peine cette victoire remportée à l'Assemblée, l'opposition compte se livrer à une nouvelle épreuve de force avec le pouvoir, dans la rue cette fois. Elle a maintenu ses appels manifester durant trois jours, à partir de mercredi, malgré l'interdiction de ces rassemblements par la police.
Mardi, les habitants de Nairobi ont vaqué normalement à leurs occupations dans une ville sous haute surveillance policière.
La police paramilitaire avait pris position dès la matinée dans le grand parc du centre de la capitale proche du Parlement. D'autres forces de sécurité étaient positionnées non loin du bidonville de Kibera, fief de M. Odinga.
En province, aucun incident n'avait été signalé. A Eldoret, la majorité des commerces avaient ouvert normalement et de nombreux habitants étaient rivés dés 14H00 devant leurs écrans de télévision. Des habitants s'efforçaient toutefois de quitter la ville par peur de nouvelles violences.
Par ailleurs, la Commission européenne n'a pas exclu mardi de réexaminer son aide au Kenya. "Toutes les options sont ouvertes sur l'aide", a déclaré son porte-parole, Johannes Laitenberger, faisant écho à des déclarations similaires la veille du commissaire au Développement Louis Michel.
L'aide totale européenne au Kenya a atteint 290 millions d'euros entre 2002 et 20O7, et doit se monter à 383 millions d'euros entre 2008 et 2013.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP84208lopporetsef0
Mother Jones:
Revolution of the Snails
Encounters with the Zapatistas: Real change takes time.
Rebecca Solnit
January 15 , 2008
I grew up listening to vinyl records, dense spirals of information that we played at 33-1/3 revolutions per minute. The original use of the word revolution was in this sense—of something coming round or turning round, the revolution of the heavenly bodies, for example. It's interesting to think that just as the word radical comes from the Latin word for "roots" and meant going to the root of a problem, so revolution originally means to rotate, to return, or to cycle, something those who live according to the agricultural cycles of the year know well.
Only in 1450, says my old Oxford Etymological Dictionary, does it come to mean "an instance of a great change in affairs or in some particular thing." 1450: 42 years before Columbus sailed on his first voyage to the not-so-new world, not long after Gutenberg invented moveable type in Europe, where time itself was coming to seem less cyclical and more linear—as in the second definition of this new sense of revolution in my dictionary, "a complete overthrow of the established government in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it."
We live in revolutionary times, but the revolution we are living through is a slow turning around from one set of beliefs and practices toward another, a turn so slow that most people fail to observe our society revolving—or rebelling. The true revolutionary needs to be as patient as a snail.
The revolution is not some sudden change that has yet to come, but the very transformative and questioning atmosphere in which all of us have lived for the past half century, since perhaps the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, or the publication of Rachel Carson's attack on the corporate-industrial-chemical complex, Silent Spring, in 1962; certainly, since the amazing events of 1989, when the peoples of Eastern Europe nonviolently liberated themselves from their Soviet-totalitarian governments; the people of South Africa undermined the white apartheid regime of that country and cleared the way for Nelson Mandela to get out of jail; or, since 1992, when the Native peoples of the Americas upended the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in this hemisphere with a radical rewriting of history and an assertion that they are still here; or even 1994, when this radical rewriting wrote a new chapter in southern Mexico called Zapatismo.
Five years ago, the Zapatista revolution took as one of its principal symbols the snail and its spiral shell. Their revolution spirals outward and backward, away from some of the colossal mistakes of capitalism's savage alienation, industrialism's regimentation, and toward old ways and small things; it also spirals inward via new words and new thoughts. The astonishing force of the Zapatistas has come from their being deeply rooted in the ancient past—"we teach our children our language to keep alive our grandmothers" said one Zapatista woman—and prophetic of the half-born other world in which, as they say, many worlds are possible. They travel both ways on their spiral.
Revolutionary Landscapes
At the end of 2007, I arrived on their territory for a remarkable meeting between the Zapatista women and the world, the third of their encuentros since the 1994 launch of their revolution. Somehow, among the miracles of Zapatista words and ideas I read at a distance, I lost sight of what a revolution might look like, must look like, on the ground—until late last year when I arrived on that pale, dusty ground after a long ride in a van on winding, deeply rutted dirt roads through the forested highlands and agricultural clearings of Chiapas, Mexico. The five hours of travel from the big town of San Cristobal de las Casas through that intricate landscape took us past countless small cornfields on slopes, wooden houses, thatched pigsties and henhouses, gaunt horses, a town or two, more forest, and then more forest, even a waterfall.
Everything was green except the dry cornstalks, a lush green in which December flowers grew. There were tree-sized versions of what looked like the common, roadside, yellow black-eyed susans of the American west and a palm-sized, lavender-pink flower on equally tall, airily branching stalks whose breathtaking beauty seemed to come from equal parts vitality, vulnerability, and bravura—a little like the women I listened to for the next few days.
The van stopped at the junction that led to the center of the community of La Garrucha. There, we checked in with men with bandannas covering the lower halves of their faces, who sent us on to a field of tents further uphill. The big sign behind them read, "You are in Territory of Zapatistas in Rebellion. Here the People Govern and the Government Obeys." Next to it, another sign addressed the political prisoners from last year's remarkable uprising in Oaxaca in which, for four months, the inhabitants held the city and airwaves and kept the government out. It concluded, "You are not alone. You are with us. EZLN."
As many of you may know, EZLN stands for Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army for National Liberation), a name akin to those from many earlier Latin American uprisings. The Zapatistas—mostly Mayan indigenous rebels from remote, rural communities of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost and poorest state—had made careful preparations for a decade before their January 1, 1994 uprising.
They began like conventional rebels, arming themselves and seizing six towns. They chose that first day of January because it was the date that the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, which meant utter devastation for small farmers in Mexico; but they had also been inspired by the 500th anniversary, 14 months before, of Columbus's arrival in the Americas and the way native groups had reframed that half-millenium as one of endurance and injustice for the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere.
Their rebellion was also meant to take the world at least a step beyond the false dichotomy between capitalism and the official state socialism of the Soviet Union which had collapsed in 1991. It was to be the first realization of what needed to come next: a rebellion, above all, against capitalism and neoliberalism. Fourteen years later, it is a qualified success: many landless campesino families in Zapatista-controlled Chiapas now have land; many who were subjugated now govern themselves; many who were crushed now have a sense of agency and power. Five areas in Chiapas have existed outside the reach of the Mexican government, under their own radically different rules, since that revolution.
Beyond that, the Zapatistas have given the world a model—and, perhaps even more important, a language—with which to re-imagine revolution, community, hope, and possibility. Even if, in the near future, they were to be definitively defeated on their own territory, their dreams, powerful as they have been, are not likely to die. And there are clouds on the horizon: the government of President Felipe Calderón may turn what has, for the last 14 years, been a low-intensity conflict in Chiapas into a full-fledged war of extermination. A war on dreams, on hope, on rights, and on the old goals of the hero of the Mexican Revolution a century before, Emiliano Zapata: tierra y libertad, land and liberty.
The Zapatistas emerged from the jungle in 1994, armed with words as well as guns. Their initial proclamation, the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, rang with familiar, outmoded-sounding revolutionary rhetoric, but shortly after the uprising took the world by storm, the Zapatistas' tone shifted. They have been largely nonviolent ever since, except in self-defense, though they are ringed by the Mexican army and local paramilitaries (and maintain their own disciplined army, a long line of whose masked troops patrolled La Garrucha at night, armed with sticks). What shifted most was their language, which metamorphosed into something unprecedented—a revolutionary poetry full of brilliant analysis as well as of metaphor, imagery, and humor, the fruit of extraordinary imaginations.
Some of their current stickers and t-shirts—the Zapatistas generate more cool paraphernalia than any rock band—speak of "el fuego y la palabra," the fire and the word. Many of those words came from the inspired pen of their military commander, the nonindigenous Subcomandante Marcos, but that pen reflected the language of a people whose memory is long and environment is rich—if not in money and ease, then in animals, images, traditions, and ideas.
Take, for example, the word caracol, which literally means snail or spiral shell. In August 2003, the Zapatistas renamed their five autonomous communities caracoles. The snail then became an important image. I noticed everywhere embroideries, t-shirts, and murals showing that land snail with the spiraling shell. Often the snail wore a black ski mask. The term caracol has the vivid vitality, the groundedness, that often escapes metaphors as they become part of our disembodied language.
When they reorganized as caracoles, the Zapatistas reached back to Mayan myth to explain what the symbol meant to them. Or Subcomandante Marcos did, attributing the story as he does with many stories to "Old Antonio," who may be a fiction, a composite, or a real source of the indigenous lore of the region:
"The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a caracol, and that those who have good in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for them to check that the world remains right. They say that they say that they said that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this is what the very first ones called knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heart to walk the world…. The caracoles will be like doors to enter into the communities and for the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside and also for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send far and wide our word and also to hear the words from the one who is far away."
The caracoles are clusters of villages, but described as spirals they reach out to encompass the whole world and begin from within the heart. And so I arrived in the center of one caracol, a little further up the road from those defiant signs, in the broad, unpaved plaza around which the public buildings of the village of La Garrucha are clustered, including a substantial two-story, half-built clinic. Walking across that clearing were Zapatista women in embroidered blouses or broad collars and aprons stitched of rows of ribbon that looked like inverted rainbows—and those ever-present ski masks in which all Zapatistas have appeared publicly since their first moment out of the jungles in 1994. (Or almost all, a few wear bandannas instead.)
That first glimpse was breathtaking. Seeing and hearing those women for the three days that followed, living briefly on rebel territory, watching people brave enough to defy an army and the world's reigning ideology, imaginative enough to invent (or reclaim) a viable alternative was one of the great passages of my life. The Zapatistas had been to me a beautiful idea, an inspiration, a new language, a new kind of revolution. When they spoke at this Third Encounter of the Zapatista Peoples with the People of the World, they became a specific group of people grappling with practical problems. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr. when he said he had been to the mountaintop. I have been to the forest.
The Words of the Third Encounter
The encuentro was held in a big shed-like auditorium with a corrugated tin roof and crossbeams so long they could only have been hewn from local trees—they would never have made it around the bends in the local roads. The wooden walls were hung with banners and painted with murals. (One, of an armed Zapatista woman, said, "cellulite sí, anorexia, no.") An unfinished mural showed a monumental ear of corn whose top half merged into the Zapatista ski mask, the eyes peering out of the corn. Among the embroideries local artisans offered were depictions of cornstalks with Zapatista faces where the ears would be. All of this—snails and corn-become-Zapatistas alike—portrayed the rebels as natural, pervasive, and fruitful.
Three or four times a day, a man on a high, roofed-over stage outside the hall would play a jaunty snippet of a tune on an organ and perhaps 250 of the colorfully dressed Zapatista women in balaclavas or bandannas would walk single file into the auditorium and seat themselves onstage on rows of backless benches. The women who had come from around the world to listen would gather on the remaining benches, and men would cluster around the back of the hall. Then, one caracol at a time, they would deliver short statements and take written questions. Over the course of four days, all five caracoles delivered reflections on practical and ideological aspects of their situation. Pithy and direct, they dealt with difficult (sometimes obnoxious) questions with deftness. They spoke of the challenge of living a revolution that meant autonomy from the Mexican government, but also of learning how to govern themselves and determine for themselves what liberty and justice mean.
The Zapatista rebellion has been feminist from its inception: Many of the comandantes are women—this encuentro was dedicated to the memory of deceased Comandante Ramona, whose image was everywhere—and the liberation of the women of the Zapatista regions has been a core part of the struggle. The testimonies addressed what this meant—liberation from forced marriages, illiteracy, domestic violence, and other forms of subjugation. The women read aloud, some of them nervous, their voices strained—and this reading and writing was itself testimony to the spread both of literacy and of Spanish as part of the revolution. The first language of many Zapatistas is an indigenous one, and so they spoke their Spanish with formal, declarative clarity. They often began with a formal address to the audience that spiraled outward: "hermanos y hermanas, compañeras y compañeros de la selva, pueblos del Mexico, pueblos del mundo, sociedad civile"—"brothers and sisters, companions of the rainforest, people of Mexico, people of the world, civil society." And then they would speak of what revolution had meant for them.
"We had no rights," one of them said about the era before the rebellion. Another added, "The saddest part is that we couldn't understand our own difficulties, why we were being abused. No one had told us about our rights."
"The struggle is not just for ourselves, it's for everyone," said a third. Another spoke to us directly: "We invite you to organize as women of the world in order to get rid of neoliberalism, which has hurt all of us."
They spoke of how their lives had improved since 1994. On New Year's Eve, one of the masked women declared:
"Who we think is responsible [for the oppressions] is the capitalist system, but now we no longer fear. They humiliated us for too long, but as Zapatistas no one will mistreat us. Even if our husbands still mistreat us, we know we are human beings. Now, women aren't as mistreated by husbands and fathers. Now, some husbands support and help us and don't make all the decisions—not in all households, but poco a poco. We invite all women to defend our rights and combat machismo."
They spoke of the practical work of remaking the world and setting the future free, of implementing new possibilities for education, healthcare, and community organization, of the everyday workings of a new society. Some of them carried their babies—and their lives—onstage and, in one poignant moment, a little girl dashed across that stage to kiss and hug her masked mother. Sometimes the young daughters wore masks too.
A Zapatista named Maribel spoke of how the rebellion started, of the secrecy in which they met and organized before the uprising:
"We learned to advance while still hiding until January 1. This is when the seed grew, when we brought ourselves into the light. On January 1, 1994, we brought our dreams and hopes throughout Mexico and the world—and we will continue to care for this seed. This seed of ours we are giving for our children. We hope you all will struggle even though it is in a different form. The struggle [is] for everybody…"
The Zapatistas have not won an easy or secure future, but what they have achieved is dignity, a word that cropped up constantly during the encuentro, as in all their earlier statements. And they have created hope. Hope (esperanza) was another inescapable word in Zapatista territory. There was la tienda de esperanza, the unpainted wooden store of hope, that sold tangerines and avacados. A few mornings, I had café con leche and sweet rice cooked with milk and cinnamon at a comedor whose handlettered sign read: "Canteen of autonomous communities in rebellion…dreams of hope." The Zapatista minibus was crowned with the slogan "the collective [which also means bus in Spanish] makes hope."
After midnight, at the very dawn of the New Year, when men were invited to speak again, one mounted the platform from which the New Year's dance music was blasting to say that he and the other men had listened and learned a lot.
This revolution is neither perfect nor complete—mutterings about its various shortcomings weren't hard to hear from elsewhere in Mexico or the internationals at the encuentro (who asked many testing questions about these campesinas' positions on, say, transgendered identity and abortion) - but it is an astonishing and fruitful beginning.
The Speed of Snails and Dreams
Many of their hopes have been realized. The testimony of the women dealt with this in specific terms: gains in land, rights, dignity, liberty, autonomy, literacy, a good local government that obeys the people rather than a bad one that tramples them. Under siege, they have created community with each other and reached out to the world.
Emerging from the jungles and from impoverishment, they were one of the first clear voices against corporate globalization—the neoliberal agenda that looked, in the 1990s, as though it might succeed in taking over the world. That was, of course, before the surprise shutdown of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 and other innovative, successful global acts of resistance against that agenda and its impact. The Zapatistas articulated just how audacious indigenous rebellion against invisibility, powerlessness, and marginalization could be—and this was before other indigenous movements from Bolivia to northern Canada took a share of real power in the Americas. Their image of "a world in which many worlds are possible" came to describe the emergence of broad coalitions spanning great differences, of alliances between hunter-gatherers, small-scale farmers, factory workers, human rights activists, and environmentalists in France, India, Korea, Mexico, Bolivia, Kenya, and elsewhere.
Their vision represented the antithesis of the homogenous world envisioned both by the proponents of "globalism" and by the modernist revolutions of the twentieth century. They have gone a long way toward reinventing the language of politics. They have been a beacon for everyone who wants to make a world that is more inventive, more democratic, more decentralized, more grassroots, more playful. Now, they face a threat from the Mexican government that could savage the caracoles of resistance, crush the rights and dignity that the women of the encuentro embodied even as they spoke of them - and shed much blood.
During the 1980s, when our government was sponsoring the dirty wars in Central America, two U.S. groups in particular countered those politics of repression, torture, and death. One was the Pledge of Resistance, which gathered the signatures of hundreds of thousands who promised to respond with civil disobedience if the U.S. invaded Sandinista-run Nicaragua or otherwise deepened its involvement with the dictatorships and death squads of Central America. Another was Witness for Peace, which placed gringos as observers and unarmed protectors in communities throughout Central America.
While killing or disappearing campesinos could be carried out with ease in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, doing the same to U.S. citizens, or in front of them, was a riskier proposition. The Yankee witnesses used the privilege of their color and citizenship as a shield for others and then testified to what they saw. We have come to a moment when we need to strengthen the solidarity so many activists around the world have felt for the Zapatistas, strengthen it into something that can protect the sources of "the fire and the word"—the fire that has warmed so many who have a rebel heart, the word that has taught us to imagine the world anew.
The United States and Mexico both have eagles as their emblems, predators which attack from above. The Zapatistas have chosen a snail in a spiral shell, a small creature, easy to overlook. It speaks of modesty, humility, closeness to the earth, and of the recognition that a revolution may start like lightning but is realized slowly, patiently, steadily. The old idea of revolution was that we would trade one government for another and somehow this new government would set us free and change everything. More and more of us now understand that change is a discipline lived every day, as those women standing before us testified; that revolution only secures the territory in which life can change. Launching a revolution is not easy, as the decade of planning before the 1994 Zapatista uprising demonstrated, and living one is hard too, a faith and discipline that must not falter until the threats and old habits are gone—if then. True revolution is slow.
There's a wonderful passage in Robert Richardson's biography of Thoreau in which he speaks of the Europe-wide revolution of 1848 and says of the New England milieu and its proliferating cooperative communities at that time, "Most of the founders were more interested in building models, which would be emulated because they succeeded, than in the destruction of the existing order. Still American utopian socialism had much in common with the spirit of 1848."
This says very directly that you can reach out and change the state and its institutions, which we recognize as revolution, or you can make your own institutions beyond the reach of the state, which is also revolutionary. This creating—rather than simply rebelling—has been much of the nature of revolution in our time, as people reinvent family, gender, food systems, work, housing, education, economics, medicine and doctor-patient relations, the imagination of the environment, and the language to talk about it, not to speak of more and more of everyday life. The fantasy of a revolution is that it will make everything different, and regime revolutions generally make a difference, sometimes a significantly positive one, but the making of radical differences in everyday life is a more protracted, incremental process. It's where leaders are irrelevant and every life matters.
Give the Zapatistas time—the slow, unfolding time of the spiral and the journey of the snail—to keep making their world, the one that illuminates what else our lives and societies could be. Our revolution must be as different as our temperate-zone, post-industrial society is to their subtropical agrarianism, but also guided by the slow forces of dignity, imagination, and hope, as well as the playfulness they display in their imagery and language. The testimony in the auditorium ended late on December 31. At midnight, amid dancing, the revolution turned 14. May it long continue to spiral inward and outward.
The last time Rebecca Solnit camped out on rebel territory, she was an organizer for the Western Shoshone Defense Project that insists - with good legal grounds - that the Shoshone in Nevada had never ceded their land to the U.S. government. That story is told in her 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, but the subsequent inspiration of the Zapatistas is most evident in the book Tom Engelhardt helped her to bring into being, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. She is 11 chapters into her next book.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2008 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/tomdispatch/2008/01/revolution-of-the-snails.html
New Statesman:
Has global warming really stopped?
Mark Lynas responds to a controversial article on newstatesman.com which argued global warming has stopped
Mark Lynas
Published 14 January 2008
On 19 December the New Statesman website published an article which, judging by the 633 comments (and counting) received so far, must go down in history as possibly the most controversial ever. Not surprising really – it covered one of the most talked-about issues of our time: climate change. Penned by science writer David Whitehouse, it was guaranteed to get a big response: the article claimed that global warming has ‘stopped’.
As the New Statesman’s environmental correspondent, I have since been deluged with queries asking if this represents a change of heart by the magazine, which has to date published many editorials steadfastly supporting urgent action to reduce carbon emissions. Why bother doing that if global warming has ‘stopped’, and therefore might have little or nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions, which are clearly rising?
I’ll deal with this editorial question later. First let’s ask whether Whitehouse is wholly or partially correct in his analysis. To quote:
"The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly."
I’ll be blunt. Whitehouse got it wrong – completely wrong. The article is based on a very elementary error: a confusion between year-on-year variability and the long-term average. Although CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing each year, no-one ever argued that temperatures would do likewise. Why? Because the planet’s atmosphere is a chaotic system, which expresses a great deal of interannual variability due to the interplay of many complex and interconnected variables. Some years are warmer and cooler than others. 1998, for example, was a very warm year because an El Nino event in the Pacific released a lot of heat from the ocean. 2001, by contrast, was somewhat cooler, though still a long way above the long-term average. 1992 was particularly cool, because of the eruption of a large volcano in the Philippines called Mount Pinatubo.
‘Climate’ is defined by averaging out all this variability over a longer term period. So you won’t, by definition, see climate change from one year to the next - or even necessarily from one decade to the next. But look at the change in the average over the long term, and the trend is undeniable: the planet is getting hotter.
Look at the graph below, showing global temperatures over the last 25 years. These are NASA figures, using a global-mean temperature dataset known as GISSTEMP. (Other datasets are available, for example from the UK Met Office. These fluctuate slightly due to varying assumptions and methodology, but show nearly identical trends.) Now imagine you were setting out to write Whitehouse’s article at some point in the past. You could plausibly have written that global warming had ‘stopped’ between 1983 and 1985, between 1990 and 1995, and, if you take the anomalously warm 1998 as the base year, between 1998 and 2004. Note, however, the general direction of the red line over this quarter-century period. Average it out and the trend is clear: up.
Note also the blue lines, scattered like matchsticks across the graph. These, helpfully added by the scientists at RealClimate.org (from where this graph is copied), partly in response to the Whitehouse article, show 8-year trend lines – what the temperature trend is for every 8-year period covered in the graph.
You’ll notice that some of the lines, particularly in the earlier part of the period, point downwards. These are the periods when global warming ‘stopped’ for a whole 8 years (on average), in the flawed Whitehouse definition – although, as astute readers will have quickly spotted, the crucial thing is what year you start with. Start with a relatively warm year, and the average of the succeeding eight might trend downwards. In scientific parlance, this is called ‘cherry picking’, and explains how Whitehouse can assert that "since [1998] the global temperature has been flat" – although he is even wrong on this point of fact, because as the graph above shows, 2005 was warmer.
Note also how none of the 8-year trend lines point downwards in the last decade or so. This illustrates clearly how, far from having ‘stopped’, global warming has actually accelerated in more recent times. Hence the announcement by the World Meteorological Organisation on 13 December, as the Bali climate change meeting was underway, that the decade of 1998-2007 was the “warmest on record”. Whitehouse, and his fellow contrarians, are going to have to do a lot better than this if they want to disprove (or even dispute) the accepted theory of greenhouse warming.
The New Statesman’s position on climate change
Every qualified scientific body in the world, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the Royal Society, agrees unequivocally that global warming is both a reality, and caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. But this doesn’t make them right, of course. Science, in the best Popperian definition, is only tentatively correct, until someone comes along who can disprove the prevailing theory. This leads to a frequent source of confusion, one which is repeated in the Whitehouse article – that because we don’t know everything, therefore we know nothing, and therefore we should do nothing. Using that logic we would close down every hospital in the land. Yes, every scientific fact is falsifiable – but that doesn’t make it wrong. On the contrary, the fact that it can be challenged (and hasn’t been successfully) is what makes it right.
Bearing all this in mind, what should a magazine like the New Statesman do in its coverage of the climate change issue? Newspapers and magazines have a difficult job of trying, often with limited time and information, to sort out truth from fiction on a daily basis, and communicating this to the public – quite an awesome responsibility when you think about it. Sometimes even a viewpoint which is highly likely to be wrong gets published anyway, because it sparks a lively debate and is therefore interesting. A publication that kept to a monotonous party line on all of the day’s most controversial issues would be very boring indeed.
However, readers of my column will know that I give contrarians, or sceptics, or deniers (call them what you will) short shrift, and as a close follower of the scientific debate on this subject I can state without doubt that there is no dispute whatsoever within the expert community as to the reality or causes of manmade global warming. But even then, just because all the experts agree doesn’t make them right – it just makes them extremely unlikely to be wrong. That in turn means that if someone begs to disagree, they need to have some very strong grounds for doing so – not misreading a basic graph or advancing silly conspiracy theories about IPCC scientists receiving paycheques from the New World Order, as some of Whitehouse’s respondents do.
So, a mistaken article reached a flawed conclusion. Intentionally or not, readers were misled, and the good name of the New Statesman has been used all over the internet by climate contrarians seeking to support their entrenched positions. This is regrettable. Good journalism should never exclude legitimate voices from a debate of public interest, but it also needs to distinguish between carefully-checked fact and distorted misrepresentations in complex and divisive areas like this. The magazine’s editorial policy is unchanged: we want to see aggressive action to reduce carbon emissions, and support global calls for planetary temperatures to be stabilised at under two degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Yes, scientific uncertainties remain in every area of the debate. But consider how high the stakes are here. If the 99% of experts who support the mainstream position are right, then we have to take urgent action to reduce emissions or face some pretty catastrophic consequences. If the 99% are wrong, and the 1% right, we will be making some unnecessary efforts to shift away from fossil fuels, which in any case have lots of other drawbacks and will soon run out. I’d hate to offend anyone here, but that’s what I’d call a no-brainer.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200801140011
Página/12:
El año en que cambió el mundo
Por Vicente Verdú *
Miércoles, 16 de Enero de 2008
En 2008 se cumple el 40º aniversario de un momento clave del siglo XX. París, San Francisco, Praga, Vietnam. Muchas mechas prendieron a la vez y una generación de jóvenes se rebeló contra el modelo de sociedad burguesa. Su moral represiva se combatía con la liberación sexual, el placer inmediato de las drogas, el rock and roll. Aquellos chicos, lejos de avergonzarse de su inmadurez, sacaron pecho. Se gritaba “la imaginación al poder”. Pero, ¿qué imaginación?, ¿y qué poder? Aliados de la lucha obrera, los “sesentayochistas” pertenecían en su mayoría a las clases acomodadas. Negaron el consumo y acabaron siendo sus máximos aliados. Promovieron la revolución social desde el superindividualismo. Las contradicciones del ’68 son numerosas. Pero de cada una de ellas saltó una chispa. Y entre todas forman una luz que sigue iluminando el mundo cuarenta años después.
“Desear la realidad está bien, realizar los deseos está mejor.” La consigna no dejaba lugar a dudas, puesto que la revolución de 1968 dejaba olisquear desde lejos los tufos que caracterizan a la orgía. La misma significación medular se encerraba en el “ser realistas, pedir lo imposible”, o, lo que es lo mismo, que todo lo soñado se cumpliera y que cualquier bien llegara a las manos con el simple derecho de existir. No podía, pues, considerarse extraño que los detractores observaran el movimiento como una pataleta de hijos mimados. Y obscenos. El talante dionisíaco del ’68 se oponía al orden sexual que reinaba en la sociedad burguesa, y ello constituyó el núcleo basal de la revuelta. Una revuelta generada no por fuerzas masónicas ni porque hubiera subido el precio del trigo al modo de la revolución de 1789, sino por la potencia del orgón.
El capitalismo, sin embargo, se mantuvo airosamente en pie. Más aún: el odiado capitalismo mutó su antigua piel por un satén de irisados colores, y con ello obtuvo capacidad para respirar mejor y desarrollarse como una verbena de consumo agregada a la fiesta del orgasmo, el antiautoritarismo, la aventura y el amor a la revolución.
Daniel Bell presagiaba en Las contradicciones culturales del capitalismo el conflicto que podría crearse cuando la ética del trabajo, derivada del ascetismo protestante, fuera asaltada por un modo de vida basado en el goce inmediato y el placer consumista. Pero el conflicto no creó jamás parálisis, sino, por el contrario, un efecto acelerador. Así, el libro más citado y célebre de Bell ha ido convirtiéndose en su obra más acertada si se lee, aproximadamente, en sentido inverso. Contradicciones en el sistema, sí; pero en lugar de romper el mecanismo, como creían Bell y los del ’68, se registró un superaccidente de cuya energía el capitalismo salió tan rejuvenecido como por un exfoliante de Clarins.
Los años sesenta constituyen la década crucial en que el conspicuo capitalismo de producción, oscuro, austero y represor, empezó a girar hacia el cromatismo musical del capitalismo de consumo. Mayo del ’68 significó, para los analistas sociopolíticos, la cristalización conjunta del malestar obrero, el malestar estudiantil en la universidad y la explosión del reino juvenil que estaba cociéndose desde los años ’20.
En 1925, Ortega y Gasset repetía en La deshumanización del arte su constatación, entonces asombrosa, de que los muchachos, en lugar de avergonzarse por su inmadurez y esforzarse en adoptar hechuras de viejo para ganar reputación, empezaban a sentirse ufanos de su apariencia.
¿Qué significaba esta traslación al look? Tenía que ver con que el viejo había perdido liderazgo.
Mayo del ’68 fue el éxito de la cohorte juvenil que cabalgó sobre la cresta de los espasmos ideológicos, artísticos y económicos, mientras ganaba la relevancia que sus mayores dilapidaron con el fracaso humano de las dos guerras mundiales. El creciente valor de la materia joven significó un vuelco en la jerarquía de todos los valores. El prototipo burgués basaba su moral en tres virtudes capitales: el ahorro, la utilidad y la finalidad. Mayo del ’68 y su máximo motor emocional refutaba cada uno de esos principios. Frente al ahorro y la contención sexual, propugnaba el gasto orgasmático (la energía del orgón que teorizó Wilhelm Reich); frente a la renuncia, el placer sin espera.
El ahorro se reveló entonces equivalente a la represión (el ahorro de sexo femenino hasta la boda), y la utilidad o la finalidad se manifestaron como la marca desencantada del proyecto y de la acción. Mayo del ‘68, encarnado en la orgía, empujaba en la otra dirección. Frente al ahorro represivo, el gasto; contra la calculada utilidad, la inmediatez, y frente a la finalidad, la aventura. La reunión de estos tres elementos dibuja el triángulo de la cultura de consumo. Maldecir ahora la sociedad de consumo resulta tan pesado como rancio, pero entonces era una manera joven y anticapitalista de ser. Para José Luis Aranguren (Cuadernos para el Diálogo), el consumismo era “un reduccionismo economicista de la vida”, y para Jean Baudrillard, “constituía un sistema que se hallaba en trance de destruir las bases del ser humano” (La societé de consommation, Denoël, 1970). Esta era la doctrina central. Y la paradoja, por tanto, era ésta: los presupuestos de la revolución sesentayochista procedían de la sociedad de consumo que crecía bajo sus pies, pero sus líderes repudiaban con vehemencia el consumismo, siendo ellos, por excelencia, grandes consumistas: del tiempo, del sexo, de los derechos, de los mass media.
De hecho, tanto Mayo del ’68 como el sistema de consumo son inconcebibles sin la gigantesca explosión de los mass media. La comunicación de masas y el consumo de masas, la fiesta y el contagio sesentayochistas fueron cruzándose en una copulación reproductora. De ahí que la revuelta fuera, de una parte, muy amplia, a la manera de una endemia, y de otra, muy efímera. Los media difundieron la nueva visión de la sociedad, la universidad, la psiquiatría, la familia, la escuela, la relación intersexual, los derechos de la mujer, y recrearon, con su ejercicio, la composición de una estampa nueva. Cuarenta años después no vale la pena calificar de éxito o fracaso aquella subversión porque sus vindicaciones se han inscripto en el alma social como un bordado del mismo hilo.
Sin la mujer, en suma, no habría sido factible la fiesta del ’68, y gracias a su vigoroso movimiento de liberación se emanciparon dos o tres sexos a la vez. El suyo, que funcionaba como gran policía de las buenas costumbres, y el sexo masculino, que obtuvo la inesperada franquicia para intercambiar sus deseos con los de sus parejas. Aquella renuncia a llevar sujetador fue literalmente la pérdida del sujetador.
No hubo tiempo para culminar la gran idea sexualista, pero ¿quién duda de que se consumaron muchos cortejos? Buena parte de la guerra de generaciones de entonces procedía no tanto del choque maoísta con los progenitores como de la incompatiblidad entre sus dictámenes sobre el sexo y el matrimonio y la teorética del amor libre. Muchas o todas las comunas fracasaron, y prácticamente cualquier intento de tríos a la manera de Jules et Jim provocaron neurosis; pero tanto Truffaut como nosotros, sus coetáneos, no desperdiciamos la oportunidad para ensayar.
De ahí aquello tan conocido de “la imaginación al poder”. ¿Qué imaginación? ¿Qué poder? Todo aquello que procedía de inaugurar excitadamente una transgresora, soñada y revolucionaria realidad sexual. El LSD, la marihuana, el hachís, la droga en general aureolaba la juerga, y si fue, de un lado, una complacencia en el placer individual, fue, de otro, un signo de oro para señalar el nuevo momento del valor.
Con la droga se obtenía gozo inmediato, sin esperas. Al igual que sucedía con las adquisiciones a plazos o con las hipotecas después. Primeramente se accedía al bien, y más tarde llegaban los efectos secundarios. Todo lo contrario a la ecuación de las generaciones precedentes al ’68, que primero ponían la abnegación, el ahorro, la espera, y más tarde optaban a la debida compensación.
La inversión de este enunciado canónico, proyectado en casi todos los ámbitos de la realidad, decidió el rumbo de la cultura. Los sesentayochistas fueron los grandes promotores del consumo, negando, sin embargo, el consumo. Grandes promotores de la revolución social siendo superindividualistas. Formidables aliados de las protestas de la clase baja cuando, en su mayoría, procedían de la clase alta o media alta.
Las contradicciones de Mayo del ‘68 son tantas que hacen aún más brillante su memoria. De cada contradicción brota una chispa, y de todas ellas, una luminaria que, si fracasó en sus objetivos políticos explícitos, ha triunfado rotundamente en el deslizamiento de sus intuiciones y emociones sustanciales. Gran éxito de la feminidad, sin duda.
* De El País de Madrid. Especial para Página/12.
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-97539-2008-01-16.html
The Nation:
Those Ungrateful Saudis
truthdig by Robert Scheer
[posted online on January 16, 2008]
Why is it that George W. Bush gets only a 12 percent favorability rating in Saudi Arabia? Even Osama bin Laden and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad scored higher in a poll last month by the nonpartisan Terror Free Tomorrow group, which counts both Republican Sen. John McCain and Democrat former Rep. Lee Hamilton on its advisory board. What ingrates those Saudis are. Didn't the Bush family save them twice from Saddam Hussein?
What more can this President do to curry favor with the Saudis? He forgave them for nurturing the Wahhabism that spawned Al Qaeda, and he never embarrasses them with the fact that bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen hijackers who attacked America on 9/11 were born and raised in the kingdom. Nor did Bush let the inconvenient fact that the Saudi government had backed the Taliban until 9/11 intrude on his cozy relations with the royal family. That warmth, displayed at ranching cookouts in both countries, has now been reinforced by $20 billion in US arms sales to the Saudis and their Persian Gulf allies, officially announced by Bush on Monday.
At first, the Bush Administration feared that some pro-Israel members of Congress might be able to derail the arms sale deal, but they solved that one by offering Israel $30 billion in new weapons. That's a good deal for the Israelis and for US arms manufacturers, although not for US taxpayers stuck with the tab. No problem-neither the media nor Congress notices the cost to taxpayers of anything carrying the label of "national security." Heck, Iraq's defense minister was just in Washington with his shopping list for new weapons and didn't cause much of a stir when he said the United States will have to defend Iraq for at least a decade more. So much for the impact of the $1 trillion already wasted on the Iraq debacle.
At least the Saudis pay their own way and then some, when you look at how our main banks would now be kaput were it not for the almost daily bailouts from Gulf-based holding companies. It's a good deal all around: The Gulf sheiks get their money by raising oil prices that drive up inflation, thus raising the interest rates on home mortgages, and then, when the banks foreclose on those homes at a loss, the oil money comes pouring in to make the banks whole again. A good deal for everyone, that is, except for the folks who lose the equity in their homes, but they don't have a lobby that Congress or the President has to worry about.
With Bush's imperial fantasy fading into dismal reality, our nation saddled with record debt, an immense trade gap and an American public that has seen through his "What, me worry?" con, the President has bizarrely sought validation through visiting the scene of his foreign policy crimes. Just how bizarre a ploy was summarized in a Wall Street Journal news report predicting, "As President Bush tours the Middle East on his first official visit, he will encounter an Arab public deeply critical of his policies in the region and skeptical that the US means what it says." The WSJ article quotes the editor of a leading newspaper aligned with Lebanon's US-backed government as stating unequivocally: "Democracy in the Middle East is now part of history. Nobody believes Bush anymore. He has turned the Middle East into a big mess, and you can't bring democracy and change with instability."
A big mess! It turns out they hate us not for our success, as Bush once claimed, but for our incompetence, which he has done much to exhibit. The poll of Saudis found that while only 12 percent hold a favorable opinion of Bush, a much more comfortable 40 percent like the United States. That's a lower approval rating than for China-or for Iran, from which Bush now wants to protect them-but it's a start. The problem is that few believe that Bush is the least bit serious about addressing any of the region's problems. As an editorial in the Arab News, a Saudi English-language newspaper, put it on the occasion of Bush's visit: " ... no Palestinian, no Arab believes, he will, or can, deliver.... Everything he touches turns to dust and ashes. Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe now even Iran."
There they go again, worrying only about themselves. Didn't Bush also touch New Orleans? What about Enron? Things have gotten so tough here that even Halliburton's CEO moved his headquarters to Dubai. The bad news for the Saudis is that Bush broke the United States-but they own it.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/truthdig
ZNet:
20th Year Urgent Funding Appeal
Dear Z User,
Our upgraded website is ready for you to use. But before proceeding to a link to the new site at the very bottom of this page, please read the brief message below as well as the many endorsements included here.
Our situation is urgent.
We need to raise sustainer pledges by $10,000 a month. If we miss our goal, we will have to cut back, perhaps drastically. If we make our goal, innovations can continue and planned expansions into education, video, and audio can begin.
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Raised So Far: $40,000
As we are only now going fully public with the new site,
prospects are good for making our goal, but we need you to help!
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The best way to help is to become a Z Sustainer with a monthly or yearly pledge.
You can, of course, make a one-time donation at any time and/or subscribe to Z Magazine or purchase Z Videos. That income is invaluable. But that alone cannot sustain our operation in the long-term. With a Sustainer pledge (on a sliding scale), you can sustain a valuable left institution indefinitely.
Our best estimate is that we have 500,000 recurring users. If just 1 out of 20 of these users were to become Sustainers, even at only $1 a month, our financial worries would be over.
So what prevents frequent users from becoming Sustainers? And why do we think that only 1 in 10 of our users will even read this appeal?
For some, it is financial constraints. But for most of those who have not yet become Z Sustainers, we think the problem is not a matter of finances, but of habit. People often feel that donated funds don't really matter, so why take time, even just a few minutes, to sign up? Indeed, why even read an appeal? That's just not the kind of thing I do. Well, old habits are made to be broken. And we can assure you that every last pledge will matter, a lot.
If you think Noam Chomsky knows what he is talking about when he writes, “It is of inestimable importance, in my judgment, that Z and ZNet, survive...”
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We do not take money from advertisers. Our subscribers and sustainers alone have kept us operating for the last 20 years. Now, we urgently need your support for the next 20 years—and beyond.
To date - and we have just begun - we have raised $40,000 toward our goal!
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A Personal Message
From Noam Chomsky
We live in an era of media concentration, vast efforts on many fronts (political, economic, military, ideological) to insulate state and private power from critical discussion or even popular awareness, and to reduce citizens to isolated atomized creatures restricted to satisfying personal 'created wants.' This massive and coordinated campaign has been partially successful, but only in a limited way.
The range and scope and dedication of popular activism has also increased, all over the world, reaching a level of international solidarity and mutual support that has never been seen before. The basic conflicts are very old, but they have taken quite dramatic and significant new forms, and the stakes are far higher than ever before. It is, regrettably, no exaggeration to say that the survival of the species is at risk - and many others with it. We all know why.
The popular movements are the hope for a decent future. They of course have to have access to information and modes of interaction. In addition to alternative print and video, to a very large extent they have relied on the internet, which allows people to escape from the constraints of the doctrinal systems, to explore and investigate and discuss crucial issues with one another, to plan and organize.
Z Magazine and ZNet have played a crucial role in serving all of these functions. I see that every day. I travel and speak constantly, in the U.S. and abroad, and spend many hours a day just responding to inquiries and comments. I constantly discover that the people and organizations I come in contact with are relying very substantially on Z projects for information, discussion, and opportunities for interaction and organizing, to an extent that is quite remarkable. Z is also an invaluable resource for me personally, in all of these respects, and also in my case for providing a forum for intense and very constructive discussion, the only one I regularly participate in. And for posting articles, interviews, commentaries, etc., of mine. I know that many others have very much the same experience.
It is of inestimable importance, in my judgment, that Z and ZNet, now composing the new ZCom with their various other projects such as their growing video efforts and incomparable summer school, arguably the most exciting and instructive I have ever encountered.
Again, I do not think it is possible to exaggerate the stakes. I hope that all of us who are committed to resisting and reversing the powerful currents of reaction and oppression and violence, and showing that another world is indeed possible, will contribute as best we can to ensure that the remarkable achievements of Z and ZNet will be carried forward.
Noam Chomsky
U.S.
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ZNet:
MLK Was A True Working-Class Hero
By Dick Meister
January, 16 2008
"I AM A MAN," the signs proclaimed in large, bold letters. They were held high, proudly and defiantly, by African-American men marching through the streets of Memphis, Tennessee, 40 years ago. It was in the spring of 1968.
The marchers were striking union members, sanitation workers demanding that the city of Memphis formally recognize their union and thus grant them a voice in determining their wages, hours and working conditions.
Hundreds of supporters joined their daily marches, most notably Martin Luther King Jr. He had been with the 1,300 strikers from the very beginning of their bitter struggle. He had come to Memphis to support them despite threats that he might be killed if he did.
The struggles of workers for union rights often are considered to be of no great importance. Dr. King knew better. He knew that the right to unionization is one of the most important of civil rights. Virtually his last act was in support of that right, for he was killed by an assassin's bullet on April 4, 1968 as he was preparing to lead strikers in yet another demonstration.
There are, of course, many reasons for honoring him on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Jan. 21. But we shouldn't forget that one of the most important reasons, one that's often overlooked, is Dr. King's championing of the cause of the Memphis strikers and others who sought union recognition.
His assassination brought tremendous public pressure to bear in behalf of the strikers in Memphis. President Lyndon Johnson sent in a detachment of federal troops to protect them and assigned the Under Secretary of Labor to mediate the dispute. Within two weeks, an agreement was reached that granted strikers the union rights they had demanded.
For the first time, the workers' own representatives could sit across the table from their bosses and negotiate and air their grievances and demands for remedies. They got their first paid holidays and vacations, pensions and health care benefits. They got the right to overtime pay and raises of 38 percent in wages that had been so low - about $1.70 an hour - that 40 percent of the workers had qualified for welfare payments.
They got agreement that promotions would be made strictly on the basis of seniority, without regard to race, assuring the promotion of African Americans to supervisory positions for the first time. The strikers, in fact, got just about everything they had sought during the 65-day walkout.
William Lucy, secretary-treasurer of the strikers' union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, saw Dr. King "bring tears to the eyes of strikers and their families just by walking into a meeting... the surge of confidence he inspired in the movement in Memphis."
The strikers' victory in Memphis led quickly to union recognition victories by black and white public employees throughout the South and elsewhere. They had passed a major test of union endurance against very heavy odds, prompting a great upsurge of union organizing and militancy among government workers.
As Lucy said, it was "a movement for dignity, for equity, and for access to power and responsibility for all Americans."
Anyone doubting that the labor and civil rights movements were - and are - intertwined in that effort need only heed the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:
"Our needs are identical with labor's needs: Decent wages, fair working conditions, liveable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community....
"The coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the blacks and forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined."
Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based writer who has covered labor issues for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16226
posted by attilav at 20:03
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