Elsewhere Today 491
Aljazeera:
Poll shows many still doubt 9/11
By Alex Sehmer
Thursday, September 11, 2008
10:27 Mecca time, 07:27 GMT
More than 50 per cent of people reject the official belief that the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, were carried out by al-Qaeda, a new survey has revealed.
The findings, released late on Wednesday, suggest that the official version of events - that the attacks, which killed more than 2,900 people and sparked the US so-called "war on terror", were carried out by al-Qaeda - is still a long way from being generally accepted.
Only 46 per cent of respondents named al-Qaeda, while 25 per cent said they did not know and 15 per cent said the US government was behind the attacks.
Steven Kull, the director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, which carried out the survey, told Al Jazeera: "Broadly what this says is that there is a lack of confidence with the United States and so people mistrust the narrative the US puts forward."
Officially, hijackers took control of four passenger aircraft in the September 11 attacks. Two of the aeroplanes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the “Twin Towers” subsequently collapsed, bringing down two other buildings nearby. The third aircraft hit the Pentagon while the fourth is said to have crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
Kull's organisation asked more than 16,000 people world wide "Who do you think was behind the 9/11 attacks?", leaving the question open-ended.
Blaming Israel
While a substantial number of those polled believed the US government was in some way behind the attacks, seven per cent point the finger at Israel.
The 2001 attacks prompted the so-called US 'war on terror' [EPA]
Of the countries surveyed, Egypt and Jordan had the highest percentages of people who believed Israel was behind the attack, polling 43 and 31 per cent respectively. Nineteen per cent of those polled in the Palestinian territories claimed Israel was in some way responsible.
"In Muslim countries - where we've carried out a number of focus groups - it's clear there is a feeling that the US had some kind of motivation, such as invading Iraq," Kull said.
"There are also some difficulties with the idea that Muslims carried out attacks on civilians - which is widely seen as wrong and contrary to Islam... And there are plenty of people in Muslim countries who say it would have been too technically difficult [for al-Qaeda] to pull off."
In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, a majority 57 per cent said they did not know who was behind the attacks. Only five per cent said that Israel had been involved.
'Conspiracy theorists'
In 2002, the US government set up the 9/11 commission, chaired by Thomas Kean, a former governor of New Jersey, to investigate the event. It published its report in 2004, concluding that the 19 hijackers were all members of al-Qaeda. It also concluded that there had been intelligence failures on the part of the CIA and the FBI, the US's spy agencies.
But the World Trade Centre attacks quickly proved fertile ground for "conspiracy theorists" and sceptics have a wide range of alternative theories to choose from - including that US military personnel were involved in the attack or that the towers were brought down with the help of a controlled explosion.
"There are people who are saying that US soldiers were flying the planes ... or people who say simply that the US government turned a blind eye to the threat or that they somehow got them to do it through some means," said Kull.
One of the proponents of an alternative version of the events has been Willis Carto, editor of the American Free Press newspaper, which frequently points the finger of blame at Israel.
He told Al Jazeera the attacks were "perpetrated by the Israeli Mossad [secret service] in conjunction with the American government".
"There's no real evidence whatsoever that the official story of the planes smashing into the building was true. It's impossible to believe that a few furtive little characters armed with box cutters who had no idea how to fly ... could have manouvred the planes like this," Carto said.
"There are so many holes in the story that no one in his right mind can believe it."
Classroom politics
Those who expound alternative versions of the events have themselves become the targets for debunking. Loose Change, a popular series of internet videos that counters the official version of events, has itself inspired a blog called Screw Loose Change.
Reports in engineering publications have sought to counter alternative theories that say the towers could not have collapsed as they did simply by being hit by an aircraft.
In 2007, research by Keith Seffen, a senior lecturer in Cambridge University's engineering department, used analysis of an engineering model to show the tower collapse had been "quite ordinary and natural".
The US has also seen the debate enter the university classroom. Both Ward Churchill, of the University of Colorado, and Kevin Barrett, of the University of Wisconsin, provoked a public outcry over the fact they professed to believe alternative versions of the events.
Their critics feared the academics might be tempted to bring there beliefs into the classroom. Their supporters said that even if they did, a university classroom was the place for alternative theories.
'Structural failure'
Michael Newman, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist), which worked for several years on reports about how and why the World Trade Centre towers collapsed, told Al Jazeera the debate was unlikely to ever go away.
"Whenever we put out one of our reports, we get phone calls and emails from those with alternative views," he said.
"And you always get a lot of interest around the time of the anniversary - it's a part of history now.
The Nist reports say the towers' collapse was due to "structural failure" after the aeroplanes hit them. The reports have been welcomed by building code regulators and many of Nist's recommendations from its investigations have been adopted, but those with alternative viewpoints have continued to dispute the organisation's findings.
"We've heard opinions from all sides," Newman told Al Jazeera.
"At the end of the day, people are entitled to their own opinions and we probably won't be able to convince them otherwise."
Source: Al Jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/09/200891133339749344.html
AllAfrica: LRA Accused of Abuses
in Northeast As Army Moves in
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
10 September 2008
Kinshasa
As the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) mounted a military operation against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northeastern DRC, human rights activists released a list of abuses allegedly committed by the Ugandan rebels there over the last year.
"Our investigations, which are continuing, show that there were eight killings, 52 abductions, of which 11 cases involved girls under the age of 18, and nine rapes," said Benoit Kinalebu, a Catholic priest and head of the Dungu branch of the Justice and Peace Commission.
He said the offences were committed between August 2007 and July 2008.
"The army doesn't want to go into the forests because that is where the LRA fighters live. It is from there that they lead their incursions, and they return there immediately afterwards," added Kinalebu.
According to MONUC, the UN mission in DRC, the national army has sent several hundred troops to Dungu, which lies close to the border with Sudan and on the edge of Garamba national park, to protect civilians from the LRA.
"MONUC is providing logistical support with transport, food and medical assistance," said the mission's military spokesman, Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich.
DRC Defence Minister Chikez Diemu confirmed the presence of troops in the Dungu area but declined to go into details, describing the operation as a "state secret."
After two years of negotiations, LRA leader Joseph Kony was meant to have signed a comprehensive peace agreement with the Ugandan government in April 2008, but he failed to show up for the ceremony. He said he needed clarification about an indictment issued against him by the International Criminal Court.
On September 9, LRA spokesman David Matsanga said the action by the DRC army in Dungu was ill-advised.
"The announcement has baffled all of us because it will work as a spoiler to the peace process we have engaged our times on for the past two years," Matsanga said adding, "it is a provocative act that will not help all of us including the DRC."
"We shall not fire the first shot but we shall defend ourselves in case of any attack," Matsanga said.
[ 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/200809100972.html
AlterNet:
Has American Society Gone Insane?
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on September 11, 2008
For many Americans who gain their information solely from television, all critics of psychiatry are Scientologists, exemplified by Tom Cruise spewing at Matt Lauer, "You don't know the history of psychiatry. ... Matt, you're so glib." The mass media has been highly successful in convincing Americans to associate criticism of psychiatry with anti-drug zealots from the Church of Scientology, the lucrative invention of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.
However, Americans who gain their information outside of television and beyond the mass media may be aware of a secular, progressive tradition that is critical of how psychiatry has diverted us from examining societal sources of our malaise. This secular, humanistic concern was articulated, perhaps most famously, by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980).
In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm wrote, "Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself."
Is American society a healthy one, and are those having difficulties adjusting to it mentally ill? Or is American society an unhealthy one, and are many Americans with emotional difficulties simply alienated rather than ill? For Fromm, "An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility (and) distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton." Fromm viewed American society as an increasingly unhealthy one, in which people routinely experience painful alienation that fuels emotional and behavioral difficulties.
Unlike Tom Cruise, Fromm would not have been terribly upset that actress Brooke Shields found happiness in antidepressants. No genuinely humanistic critic of psychiatry believes that adults who choose prescription psychotropic drugs should be mocked or shamed, or prohibited from using them. Rather, humanist critics of establishment psychiatry advocate for informed choice about all treatments.
The essential confrontation for Fromm is not about psychiatric drugs per se (though he would be sad that so many Americans nowadays, especially children, are prescribed psychotropic drugs in order to fit into inhospitable environments). His essential confrontation was directed at all mental health professionals - including non-prescribers such as psychologists, social workers and counselors - who merely assist their patients to adjust but neglect to validate their patients' alienation from society.
Those comfortably atop societal hierarchies have difficulty recognizing that many American institutions promote helplessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, alienation and dehumanization for those not at the top. One-size-fits-all schools, the corporate workplace, government bureaucracies and other giant, impersonal institutions routinely promote manipulative relationships rather than respectful ones, machine efficiency rather than human pride, authoritarian hierarchies rather than participatory democracy, disconnectedness rather than community, and helplessness rather than empowerment.
In The Sane Society, Fromm warned, "Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man. The specialists in this field tell you what the 'normal' person is, and, correspondingly, what is wrong with you; they devise the methods to help you adjust, be happy, be normal."
In the "adjust and be happy" sense, there is commonality between establishment mental health professionals and Scientologists. Neither Dr. Phil nor Tom Cruise are exactly rebels against the economic status quo; and their competing self-help programs, though different, are similar in that they instruct people on how to adjust, be happy and be normal within our economic system.
The source of the mutual hostility between psychiatry and the Church of Scientology, as depicted by the mass media, centers around psychotropic drug use; but my sense is that the root cause of their feud is a fierce competition between them. Both establishment psychiatry and Scientology are competing for the same people - those more comfortable with authority, dogma and insider jargon than with critical thinking.
Both the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard and psychiatry's DSM (the official diagnostic manual in which mental illnesses are voted in and out by elite psychiatrists) have much more to do with dogma than science. Both Scientology and psychiatry embrace science fiction technobabble that poses as scientific fact. In Scientology's "auditing," the claim is that the Hubbard Electropsychometer (E-Meter) can assess the reactive mind of the "preclear" by passing a small amount of voltage through a pair of tin-plated tubes that look like empty soup cans wired to the E-Meter and held by the preclear. But psychiatry is no more scientifically relevant, as its trendy chemical-imbalance theories of mental illness have shelf-lives of about a decade, with establishment psychiatry most recently having retreated from both its serotonin-deficiency theory of depression and the excessive-dopamine theory of schizophrenia.
While Scientology can claim auditing adherents, and psychiatry can claim even more antidepressant advocates, neither treatment has been shown to be consistently superior to a placebo. And rather than validating their treatments with legitimate science performed by independent, financially unbiased scientists, both Scientology and psychiatry rely on what amounts to a well-funded public relations apparatus.
Scientology and establishment psychiatry have something else in common. They are both orthodoxies that deal harshly with their ex-insiders who have come to reject them. Currently, psychiatry is the more prevailing orthodoxy, and, as George Orwell explained, the mainstream press does not challenge a prevailing orthodoxy. Orwell wrote, "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
It is my experience that psychiatry, Scientology and fundamentalist religions are turnoffs for genuinely critical thinkers. Critical thinkers are not so desperate to adjust and be happy that they ignore adverse affects - be they physical, psychological, spiritual or societal. Critical thinkers listen to what others have to say while considering their motives, especially financial ones; and they discern how one's motivation may distort one's assumptions.
A critical thinker would certainly not merely accept without analysis Fromm's and my conclusion that American society is insane in terms of healthy human development. Perhaps a society should not be labeled insane just because it is replete with schools that turn kids off to reading, for-profit prisons that need increasingly more inmates for economic growth, a mass media that is dishonest about threats to national security, trumped-up wars that so indebt a society that it cannot provide basic health care, a for-profit health care system that exploits illness rather than promoting health, et cetera.
A critical thinker would most certainly point out that there have been societies far less sane than the United States - and Erich Fromm made himself absolutely clear on this point. In the barbaric German society that Fromm fled, disruptive children who couldn't fit into one-size-fits-all schools were not forced to take Adderall and other amphetamines, but instead their parents handed them over to psychiatrists to be euthanized. Fromm, however, knew that just because one could point to societies less sane than the United States, this did not make the United States a sane, humanistic society.
Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green, 2007).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/97934/
Asia Times:
Seven years on, three big 9/11 lies
By Muhammad Cohen
Sep 11, 2008
HONG KONG - Dear, sweet Laura Bush told the biggest, baldest lie at last week's Republican National Convention. "Let's not forget," the first lady said, "President [George W] Bush has kept the American people safe."
Mrs Bush, your husband and his administration did not keep the American people safe. On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people died, and more than 6,000 were injured as al-Qaeda hijackers crashed commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. The Bush people act as if someone else was in charge when it happened.
It's the greatest political mystery of the 21st century, perhaps in American history: how have the Republicans avoided responsibility for 9/11? How can they keep claiming the deadliest attacks on the American mainland as a badge of honor, rather than a stain on their record?
Mrs Bush's whopper is one of three big lies that the Republicans keep telling on national security related to 9/11. The assault on the truth has gone on for seven years, and last week's convention video of the disaster suggests it will continue. Meanwhile, Democrats remain afraid to say the Bush administration has no clothes on when it comes to national security lest they be accused of politicizing 9/11, while Republicans keep flaunting the tragedy for partisan gain.
The Bush administration's steadfast refusal to take any responsibility for the attacks is absolutely mind-blowing. No appointee was fired for the most glaring national security cock-up since Pearl Harbor, if not the British torching of the White House in 1814. Then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice contends no one anticipated terrorists using airplanes to hit skyscrapers, even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation analyzed the possibility in 1991. For her incompetence and lack of candor, she was promoted to secretary of state.
As with other massive failures to anticipate, Hurricane Katrina and administering Iraq, the Bush administration believes its appointees are always "doin' a great job". In truth, failures at the highest levels of the national security and intelligence communities set the stage of 9/11, but the Bush administration won't admit it, and no one has ever been held accountable.
After bragging that it has kept America safe, Republicans then boast that America hasn't been hit again. At the convention, Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain talked about a second attack "that many thought was inevitable", even though no credible plot for further attacks has been found. While it's true there's hasn't been a strike on the American homeland since 9/11, taking bows for that is based on faulty logic. As Bill Clinton might say, it depends on how you define "again".
The same folks who say the US hasn't been hit again frequently contend the Iraq occupation lets the US fight the terrorists over there instead of fighting them in America. Never mind that were no international terrorists in Iraq before the US invasion, or the implicit suggestion of using American soldiers as sacrificial lambs to keep the bad guys away from the main flock. By the over-there logic, the US has been hit 4,152 times and counting since 9/11 in Iraq alone.
Some may argue that the US has been hit in other senses, such as the erosion of constitutional rights at home and standing in the world (see lie number 3). Anyone who goes through US airport security, tries sending money overseas, or applies for a student visa with a name like Muhammad will see that the hits just keep coming.
But the biggest lie in contending that the US hasn't been hit again since 9/11 is that the US did, in fact, get hit again on 9/11. Those attacks weren't a first strike by an unknown foe but the highlight of a series of attacks by a dedicated enemy. Al-Qaeda's war on the US began at the World Trade Center in 1993 with an attempt to blow up the Twin Towers with a truck bomb in the garage. Al-Qaeda went on to bomb the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000.
But when they entered office, the Bush people downgraded the Clinton administration's fight against al-Qaeda that included cruise missile attacks on targets in Somalia and Afghanistan. The Bush people demoted the chief counter-terrorism adviser to the National Security Council. Condoleezza Rice, and reportedly George W Bush, saw the August 2001 national security briefing memorandum entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States" and dismissed it. "It wasn't something that we felt we needed to do anything about," Rice told the 9/11 Commission. So America got hit again, in the very same spot where al-Qaeda first struck. Remember that old expression: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
The final national security lie linked to 9/11 is the one that matters most now. The Republicans claim that America is safer now because of the invasion of Iraq. That's wrong by several measures.
Bush's two top reasons for the invasion were to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and end its support for international terrorism. Both premises turned out to be false. Since Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no threat to the US, overthrowing his government had negligible direct impact on American national security. But invasion under the doctrine of preventive war in defiance of international institutions and under false pretences, plus the deployment of more than 150,000 troops for more than five years has wrought far-reaching national security harm.
The Iraq invasion distracted the US military and the world from the real fight against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. It also pre-empted providing Afghanistan with the political and infrastructure foundations needed to create a modern nation. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden remains at large, and al-Qaeda has orchestrated attacks on London, Madrid and beyond that have taken hundreds of lives.
The Iraq invasion - a unilateral attack on a Muslim majority country - has served as al-Qaeda's best recruiting tool. It's given terrorists of all stripes a training ground, just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did for Osama bin Laden's generation. But you don't have to be a jihadi or even a Muslim to have lost respect for America over the Iraq debacle. After enjoying virtually the entire world's goodwill after 9/11, polls showed America's standing in the world plummeted after the Iraq invasion. Favorable ratings are only recovering now because the Bush administration is approaching its end. It's impossible to calculate the impact of that tide of anti-Americanism in areas from the value of the US dollar to the potential Einsteins and their parents who have decided against moving to Bush's America.
It hasn't just been ordinary people who've noticed America is different since 9/11. Nations and their leaders have tacked in the wake of Iraq. Bush's "axis of evil" designee North Korea has become a nuclear-armed international outlaw, with the capacity to strike America's closest Asia allies, and perhaps even US territory. Iran, the third member of the "Axis", has realized that when a superpower says it will wage pre-emptive war, nuclear arms are the only meaningful defense.
With America overstretched and distracted by Iraq and bogged down in Afghanistan, Russia is reasserting its ambitions. It's using its energy resources and armed forces against its neighbors, echoing the bygone days of the Soviet Union. Other local bullies are watching with interest, realizing that the US lacks the resources to counter military adventurism.
Facing a nuclear North Korea and an aggressive Russia, in debt to China, reviled in much of the world, and still fighting two wars half a world away from home, there's no way America is safer now than it was in March 2003 - when the US invaded Iraq.
Unless, that is, you accept September 11, 2001, as an example of keeping America safe.
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com), a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance and cheap lingerie.
Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JI11Ak01.html
Clarín: A siete años de los atentados,
el 11 S ya es un género literario
El día después de los ataques terroristas a las Torres Gemelas de Nueva York, el 11 de setiembre de 2001, los diarios de todo el mundo declamaban que no existían palabras para describir el horror. Pero con el paso del tiempo grandes novelistas como John Updike y Ian McEwan, entre otros, tomaron esos hechos como tema central de sus ficciones.
10.09.2008 | Literatura
Todas las ediciones de todos los periódicos del mundo del 12 de septiembre del 2001 compartieron las mismas imágenes y el mismo asombro. Tipografías gigantescas y fotos de las torres del World Trade Center siendo penetradas por los aviones comerciales. Caras parecidas al grito de Munch huyendo de nubes apocalípticas de polvo. Escombros, operativos de auxilio, caras serias de los líderes internacionales. Fue un momento histórico, aunque no fue el primer 11 de septiembre trágico de la historia, bien lo sabemos los latinoamericanos.
Otro denominador en común en la cobertura de la prensa internacional inmediatamente después del 11 S fue la afirmación de que lo que pasó no se podía expresar en palabras.
Por ejemplo, el 13 de septiembre del 2001, a menos de 48 horas de los ataques terroristas a las Torres Gemelas en Manhattan, la periodista Michiko Kakutani (Premio Pulitzer 1998) publicó en The New York Times un largo editorial describiendo las dificultades que estaba sufriendo el periodismo para cubrir los horribles eventos del martes previo. Comienza con las siguientes observaciones:
"El lenguaje nos falló esta semana"."Incomprensible", "Más allá de lo peor que podríamos haber imaginado", "Increíble"... esas fueron las frases que se escucharon una y otra vez en estos últimos dos días. Mientras la gente se esforzó por describir los eventos del martes por la mañana, buscando metáforas y analogías que pudieran capturar el horror de lo que habían visto".
A siete años de la tragedia, la literatura ha dejado atrás la incomprensión y el asombro mudo y ha empezado a generar narrativas que describen el impacto social de los ataques terroristas y cuestionan sus múltiples significados psicológicos.
Entre los autores de primera fila estadounidenses que han atacado el problema "nine eleven", como quedó apodada la fecha en los Estados Unidos, están John Updike (Terrorista), Don DeLillo (El hombre del salto), Jay Mcinerney (The good life) y Jonathan Safran Foer (Tan fuerte, tan cerca). El inglés Ian McEwan (Sábado) también ha escrito una novela con el 11 de septiembre como tema central.
La aparición de estas novelas comenzó en el 2005, cuatro años después de la catástrofe y ahora ya esta identificado como un género. En ese mismo momento surgieron editoriales preguntándose: ¿No será demasiado temprano para escribir sobre el 11 S?
Como sea, desde hace años uno de los anhelos máximos de los escritores estadounidenses es escribir la Gran Novela Americana; ahora una sub-meta de este estilo es escribir la gran novela del 11 de septiembre.
Jay Mcinerney, uno de los jóvenes novelistas estrellas de los años 80, dijo en una entrevista con el USA Today: "Eventualmente habrá una novela –o una serie de novelas– que darán forma a nuestro conocimiento sobre estos eventos, de la misma manera –por ejemplo– que El gran Gatsby nos informa sobre el espíritu de los años 20".
Según Books in Print, una de las fuentes oficiales sobre libros editados en los Estados Unidos, entre el 2001 y el 2006 se publicaron 1.036 títulos de no-ficción sobre el 11 de septiembre. En ese mismo período se publicaron aproximadamente 30 novelas centradas en los ataques de ese día.
Una de las últimas, El hombre del salto, de Don DeLillo, fue calificada por Newsweek como "la primera novela 9-11 que es una obra de arte". Ese libro toma su titulo de la foto angustiante de un hombre cayendo desde las torres, cabeza abajo, a su muerte.
Como tal, ejemplifica el problema de cualquier escritor al tomar ese día como materia para una narrativa. Los políticos y los medios de comunicación nos han saturado con interpretaciones, imágenes e historias del cataclismo. El escritor, sumado a la dificultad inicial de cualquiera escritura, tiene que luchar contra todo este imaginario popular acumulado. Por eso, tal vez, será la labor de la próxima generación de novelistas transformar esos eventos en literatura. Tolstoi, después de todo, escribió sobre las guerras Napoleónicas más de cincuenta años después de sus grandes batallas.
Copyright 1996-2008 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/notas/2008/09/10/_-01757242.htm
Guardian: The world's verdict will be harsh
if the US rejects the man it yearns for
An America that disdains Obama for his global support risks turning current anti-Bush feeling into something far worse
Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian,
Wednesday September 10 2008
The feeling is familiar. I had it four years ago and four years before that: a sinking feeling in the stomach. It's a kind of physical pessimism which says: "It's happening again. The Democrats are about to lose an election they should win - and it could not matter more."
In my head, I'm not as anxious for Barack Obama's chances as I was for John Kerry's in 2004 or Al Gore's in 2000. He is a better candidate than both put together, and all the empirical evidence says this year favours Democrats more than any since 1976. But still, I can't shake off the gloom.
Look at yesterday's opinion polls, which have John McCain either in a dead heat with Obama or narrowly ahead. Given the well-documented tendency of African-American candidates to perform better in polls than in elections - thanks to people who say they will vote for a black man but don't - this suggests Obama is now trailing badly. More troubling was the ABC News-Washington Post survey which found McCain ahead among white women by 53% to 41%. Two weeks ago, Obama had a 15% lead among women. There is only one explanation for that turnaround, and it was not McCain's tranquilliser of a convention speech: Obama's lead has been crushed by the Palin bounce.
So you can understand my pessimism. But it's now combined with a rising frustration. I watch as the Democrats stumble, uncertain how to take on Sarah Palin. Fight too hard, and the Republican machine, echoed by the ditto-heads in the conservative commentariat on talk radio and cable TV, will brand Democrats sexist, elitist snobs, patronising a small-town woman. Do nothing, and Palin's rise will continue unchecked, her novelty making even Obama look stale, her star power energising and motivating the Republican base.
So somehow Palin slips out of reach, no revelation - no matter how jaw-dropping or career-ending were it applied to a normal candidate - doing sufficient damage to slow her apparent march to power, dragging the charisma-deprived McCain behind her.
We know one of Palin's first acts as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska was to ask the librarian the procedure for banning books. Oh, but that was a "rhetorical" question, says the McCain-Palin campaign. We know Palin is not telling the truth when she says she was against the notorious $400m "Bridge to Nowhere" project in Alaska - in fact, she campaigned for it - but she keeps repeating the claim anyway. She denounces the dipping of snouts in the Washington trough - but hired costly lobbyists to make sure Alaska got a bigger helping of federal dollars than any other state.
She claims to be a fiscal conservative, but left Wasilla saddled with debts it had never had before. She even seems to have claimed "per diem" allowances - taxpayers' money meant for out-of-town travel - when she was staying in her own house.
Yet somehow none of this is yet leaving a dent. The result is that a politician who conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan calls a "Christianist" - seeking to politicise Christianity the way Islamists politicise Islam - could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Remember, this is a woman who once addressed a church congregation, saying of her work as governor - transport, policing and education - "really all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God".
If Sarah Palin defies the conventional wisdom that says elections are determined by the top of the ticket, and somehow wins this for McCain, what will be the reaction? Yes, blue-state America will go into mourning once again, feeling estranged in its own country. A generation of young Americans - who back Obama in big numbers - will turn cynical, concluding that politics doesn't work after all. And, most depressing, many African-Americans will decide that if even Barack Obama - with all his conspicuous gifts - could not win, then no black man can ever be elected president.
But what of the rest of the world? This is the reaction I fear most. For Obama has stirred an excitement around the globe unmatched by any American politician in living memory. Polling in Germany, France, Britain and Russia shows that Obama would win by whopping majorities, with the pattern repeated in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. If November 4 were a global ballot, Obama would win it handsomely. If the free world could choose its leader, it would be Barack Obama.
The crowd of 200,000 that rallied to hear him in Berlin in July did so not only because of his charisma, but also because they know he, like the majority of the world's population, opposed the Iraq war. McCain supported it, peddling the lie that Saddam was linked to 9/11. Non-Americans sense that Obama will not ride roughshod over the international system but will treat alliances and global institutions seriously: McCain wants to bypass the United Nations in favour of a US-friendly League of Democracies. McCain might talk a good game on climate change, but a repeated floor chant at the Republican convention was "Drill, baby, drill!", as if the solution to global warming were not a radical rethink of the US's entire energy system but more offshore oil rigs.
If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.
Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.
And the manner of that decision will matter, too. If it is deemed to have been about race - that Obama was rejected because of his colour - the world's verdict will be harsh. In that circumstance, Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote recently, international opinion would conclude that "the United States had its day, but in the end couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race".
Even if it's not ethnic prejudice, but some other aspect of the culture wars, that proves decisive, the point still holds. For America to make a decision as grave as this one - while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars - on the trivial basis that a hockey mom is likable and seems down to earth, would be to convey a lack of seriousness, a fleeing from reality, that does indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, "historical decline". Let's not forget, McCain's campaign manager boasts that this election is "not about the issues."
Of course I know that even to mention Obama's support around the world is to hurt him. Incredibly, that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the "candidate of Europe" and making him seem less of a patriotic American. But what does that say about today's America, that the world's esteem is now unwanted? If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest possible message to the rest of us - and, make no mistake, we shall hear it.
· freedland@guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/10/uselections2008.barackobama
Jeune Afrique: Selon la rebellion,
Deby "détourne l'argent" du pétrole
TCHAD - 10 septembre 2008 - par AFP
Mahamat Nouri, principal chef rebelle du Tchad, a affirmé mercredi que le président Idriss Deby "détourne l'argent du pétrole" tandis que "la population paie", réagissant à la décision de la Banque mondiale (BM) de supprimer son aide à l'infrastructure pétrolière tchadienne.
"Idriss Deby n'a respecté aucun engagement avec la Banque (mondiale). Détournement, pillage de l'argent du pétrole, utilisation à des fins militaires (...). Tout cela a contraint la Banque à se retirer", a déclaré à l'AFP le général Nouri, qui avait dirigé l'attaque rebelle sur N'Djamena en février, joint par téléphone satellitaire depuis Libreville.
"La population paie depuis longtemps les détournements du clan Deby et l'utilisation de l'argent à des fins militaires. Le clan a des comptes à l'étranger, ils ont acheté des villas en Afrique du Sud, en Europe", a ajouté le chef rebelle.
Mahamat Nouri estime par ailleurs que "la Banque mondiale a tenté de sauver son image".
Interrogé sur une responsabilité de la rébellion et de ses fréquentes attaques dans la hausse des dépenses militaires de l'Etat tchadien, le général Nouri a répondu: "Il y a une rébellion parce qu'il y a une mauvais gouvernance, et la révolte des Tchadiens, c'est celle-là".
De son côté, Abderraman Koulamallah, responsable rebelle de l'Union démocratique pour le changement (UDC), a affirmé: "Pour que cela (la guerre entre les rebelles et le gouvernement, ndlr) s'arrête, il suffit de mettre en route un bon processus de réconciliation. Nous y sommes prêts. L'Alliance nationale est toujours disposée à trouver un accord juste pour arrêter la guerre. C'est contraints et forcés que nous la faisons".
Le rebelle, qui avait également participé à l'attaque de février, estime que "la Banque mondiale ne pouvait continuer à tolérer une gestion calamiteuse par N'Djamena des fonds pétroliers, principale richesse naturelle du pays, à des fins militaires". "Ces fonds auraient dû être destinés à des opérations prioritaires comme la santé et l'éducation", rappelle-t-il.
La BM a mis fin mardi à son accord d'aide au développement des infrastructures pétrolières du Tchad, celui-ci ne respectant pas, selon, elle ses engagements en matière de réduction de la pauvreté.
Normalement, le Tchad, producteur depuis 2003 de pétrole qui lui a rapporté environ un milliard de dollars en 2007, devait consacrer 70% de ses revenus issus de l'or noir à des programmes de réduction de la pauvreté, à l'éducation et à la santé.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP91038selonelortp0
Mail & Guardian:
Da revolution is on da phone
BINYAVANGA WAINAINA
CONTINENTAL DRIFT - Sep 11 2008
Sigh.
I do not come from the YoYo generation. So I had no idea dat P-Squared, a very phat duo of identical twins from Nigeria, had landed in Nairobi to give a concert that turned da city upside down. I had no idea that these twins had won a competition in Nigeria called "Grab Da Mike". I do not know da guy called DJ Space of MOB DJs, who worries about being lynched if a P-Squared song is not played every 15 minutes.
I suspect our ministry of education does not know who DJ Space is either. Nor does the music department of Kenyatta University. I can just see the course curriculum: Dis Hip-Hop Course aims to be da Bomb.
We do produce a lot of people who can play da flute. We also can do praise-singing choirs. In our National Schools Music Festival, there is no Hip-Hop category, or anything that came after 1930. There are choirs singing things such as Waltzing Matilda and "Were you ever in Quebec, rowing timber on the deck".
When I was in school, we had a teacher of great enthusiasm for what they called the set piece. Unfortunately he had a Meru accent which mangled all the hard consonants. The song went something like this: "A pigeon flew over to Galilee, Fre cru". The choir had to find our inner bird and trill, over and over again, "Fre Cru, fre cru, fre cruuuuuu." Poor man was only able to say Mblee Clu …
There are categories for sopranos, and altos and choral groups. There is no rhumba or benga. With the exception of the traditional music categories, there is nothing that in any way ties the tastes of any Kenyans or Africans, or even Quebec Canadians I know. There is nothing that ties any known market that has ever existed in Kenya: in pre-colonial Kenya, in post-colonial Kenya, in post-election violence Kenya, in science fiction Kenya. The buyers of the products of the music festival can only be dictators needing praise choirs and retired schoolteachers from small-town America in the late 1930s and the officials of the Music Festival.
For Kenya to become a middle income country by 2030, our government decided to remove music and art from our syllabus. The idea there I guess, is that there is no money or future in it. South Africa and Senegal make millions of dollars from cultural products - in part because their education systems celebrate local languages and culture.
The reason why Kenyans are bad musicians is because we are out of touch with our own tastes and instincts. The most important thing we learn in school is to demean who we are and where we come from. The reason why Kenyans are so culturally unconfident is because we stand in music halls and pretend to be rowing timber on the deck in Quebec. To this day the lobbies of our five-star hotels play this sort of music.
So while we were trying to be a sort of impossible and imaginary Western person - serving no market or idea - another billion-dollar market quietly landed at the feet of African artists everywhere a few weeks ago.
When the Zain group announced the arrival of a mobile phone network that covers 500-million people, from the Middle East to Nigeria, it fulfilled a vision by the founders of Celtel International to build the first true pan-African mobile phone network - inspired by the Nkrumahs and Marcus Garveys of this world.
Soon, and I mean in a matter of months, we will have a cheap, borderless platform from which to share ideas, music, words and conversations with millions of people. I will be able to produce a song and somebody in minutes in Nigeria or Congo or Gabon will scroll down his phone and buy it.
I will be able to do the same with animation, comic strips, graphic novels, romance ebooks, how-to multimedia and soap operas.
Many businesses are aware of this, as are many policy people, ICT experts and money people in London. But the producers of this content have been caught flat-footed. There is no partnership between capital, policy and artists. It truly escaped the minds of our foggy old policy people that this 20-year-old season called the Information Age is the one of the content creator: Da musician, Da writer, Da artist.
The mobile phone has brought the distribution we have all been dreaming about for over a century.
Already big British and American money is sniffing around to develop this content and sell it back to us. Most of Nairobi's animators have been bought up.
Harvard now has a team documenting the rise of African hip-hop. Meanwhile, our students stand on stage and sing, "Fre Cru, Fre cru, Fre cru". That Harvard graduate will be the guy to make the millions of dollars from our own cultural products.
Source: Mail & Guardian Online
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-09-11-da-revolution-is-on-phone
Mother Jones:
Are Any 9/11 Conspiracy Films Plausible?
Arts: In search of intelligent life among the 9/11 tinfoil-hatters.
By Dave Gilson
September/October 2008 Issue
for the past few years, I've received a steady, unsolicited stream of books and dvds that purport to reveal What Really Happened on September 11. None of them have come close to convincing me that George W. Bush and his neocon cronies were either evil or, more important, smart enough to have orchestrated the terrorist attacks on the United States. Perhaps that's because I'm one of the media gatekeepers that the "9/11 truth movement" is fond of blaming for its lack of visibility and credibility. (According to Barrie Zwicker's Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, Mother Jones is part of the "phony 'left' media" co-opted by the "diaboligarchy.")
But I've held on to my growing library of 9/11 skepticism both as an artifact of an unpopular delusion and a guilty pleasure. In spite of my shadow-government puppet masters, I find the "Truthers'" mix of feverish delusions and all-American idealism oddly entertaining.
So when a couple of feature-length 9/11 conspiracy movies recently landed on my desk, I felt a twinge of anticipation. The Reflecting Pool and Able Danger are, as far as I can tell, the first thrillers inspired by Truther theories. Maybe, I thought, these films would have a dash of paranoid style. And just maybe they'd have what's missing in the online hall of mirrors that spawned the 9/11 truth movement—coherence.
These films are another sign of the endurance of the biggest conspiracy theory since—pick your favorite—the cia/the Mafia/Castro killed JFK. September 11 truthiness will be one of the many bad hangovers of the Bush years. A 2006 Scripps Howard poll found that 36 percent of Americans think the government was somehow behind the attacks. Significant numbers also subscribe to the Truthers' various hypotheses for how it all went down: 16 percent said that the World Trade Center was actually destroyed by hidden bombs; 12 percent said the Pentagon was not hit by an airplane, but a missile. (The survey did not tally the popularity of other nuggets of —Truther lore, such as the idea that 7 wtc was purposely demolished, that Flight 93 was shot down, that Mohammed Atta was a patsy, or that no planes hit the twin towers.) A handful of celebrities—Rosie O'Donnell, Charlie Sheen, Willie Nelson—have recited parts of the Truther catechism. There is 9/11 conspiracy folk music (Jesse Goplen's "Controlled Demolition") and hip-hop (Mos Def and Immortal Technique's "Bin Laden," which declares, "Bush knocked down the towers"). But the closest thing to a breakout work of pop culture is Steve Alten's The Shell Game, a Clancyesque thriller in which neocons try to best their 9/11 scheme by detonating a suitcase nuke in Los Angeles and pinning the blame on Iran.
What better way, then, to popularize an only-in-the-movies version of reality than with a movie? It's telling that the director of Loose Change, the best-known series of 9/11 conspiracy documentaries thus far, originally planned to write a screenplay for a fictional thriller. The Reflecting Pool and Able Danger aspire to be conventional movies; they adhere to the formula for conspiracy thrillers, from The Parallax View to The Da Vinci Code. Both follow a protagonist whose discovery of the awful truth is confirmed by the mobilization of powerful forces intent on silencing him. Yet while most conspiracy flicks rely on viewers to check their BS detectors at the door, the 9/11 movies don't want you to suspend your disbelief. Just the opposite: They want you to walk away a believer.
Fittingly, The Reflecting Pool begins with a journalist receiving a 9/11 conspiracy video. Lead character Alex Prokop, a reporter for a liberal California newsmagazine, is initially wary of questioning the official story. But in the first of many journalistic sins, he teams up with Paul Cooper, a 9/11 "researcher"—one of the exalted Googlemaniacs who form the truth movement's brain trust. Cooper's daughter died when Flight 11 supposedly hit the north tower, and he's pursuing a rico suit against half the government. Aside from that, he's a totally reliable source.
Prokop and Cooper interview a parade of composite characters who rehash the conspiracy movement's greatest hits. Prokop doesn't swallow every wacky hypothesis; he flips out after a Deep Throat-style meeting in a parking garage with a guy who rants about "holographic technology." Then he and Cooper go back to their hotel room and use wooden blocks and model airplanes to deduce that the Pentagon must have been hit by a missile.
While The Reflecting Pool is plodding and pedantic, Able Danger at least tries to make the preposterous fun. Shot in a neonoir style, its hero is Thomas Flynn, an affectless Brooklyn hipster who's written his own alternate history of 9/11. A mysterious Central European woman finds him, claiming to be in possession of a hard drive containing evidence of official foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot. After getting his hands on her MacGuffin, Flynn gets tangled in a web of deception and cartoonish characters, such as Luther, a cravat-wearing, Muhammad-praising baddie who sounds like a B-movie Nazi: "Vat shall ve talk about?"
Able Danger tips its tinfoil trucker's cap to The Maltese Falcon, but its other inspiration appears to be Enemy of the State, the 1998 thriller in which Will Smith is stalked by an all-seeing National Security Agency. The high-tech surveillance team that's tracking Flynn identifies him as a "high-value target: anti-regime propagandist." When the men in black drag Flynn into an suv, one reminds him, "Don't think because you operate in a little café in nowheresville Brooklyn that you're not being watched." Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the government isn't reading your blog.
Needless to say, the Truthers have yet to find their Chris Carter or Oliver Stone. These movies repackage 9/11 skepticism in an accessible format, but they're practically inscrutable without descending further into the rabbit hole. Able Danger can only be understood by reading The Big Wedding by Sander Hicks, an indie journalist whose version of 9/11 involves an alliance of Islamists, neo-Nazis, technofascists, and a Republican "pedophilia cult." And God help you if you turn on the droning filmmakers' commentary on The Reflecting Pool dvd.
But the most annoying thing about the movies—and the Truthers—is that the actual truth, in all its awful complexity, isn't enough for them. No matter that 3,000 Americans died because of bungling and blowback, or that the Bush administration twisted their deaths into pretexts for unnecessary war and executive power run amok. The Truthers want more. They've missed the real lesson of the Bush administration, which is not that a secretive cabal runs the White House, but that its diabolic intent has been trumped by its staggering incompetence. Seven years on, the neocon notion that imperial power can reshape reality has been fully exposed as a fantasy. Yet the Truthers cling to the myth of official omnipotence, making them some of the last Americans who still believe that this administration could successfully pull off anything bigger than T-ball on the South Lawn.
To be sure, the Bush administration has made it all too easy to succumb to conspiratorial thinking. Due to official stalling and stonewalling, the full story of September 11 remains a work in progress. The 9/11 Commission's official account glossed over uncomfortable questions but read like a page-turner. Fittingly, a nation hungry for answers gobbled it up; nearly 9 million copies of the report were sold or downloaded, and it enjoyed a second life in comic-book form. The 9/11 skeptics have tapped into this desire for answers—a common Truther refrain is that they're "just asking questions." But that's like proponents of intelligent design saying they don't know how the universe was created. The Truthers aren't filling in the gaps in our reality; they're already living in an alternate one.
As Don DeLillo, no stranger to the power of conspiracy theories, observed shortly after 9/11, the terrorist attacks were a profound break in our narrative about how the world works and America's place in it. "The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative," he wrote in Harper's. That was before the Bush administration stepped in and wrote a counternarrative in which the United States was locked in an endless existential battle with a fathomlessly evil foe.
The dubiousness of that hastily improvised scenario is now apparent. Yet the 9/11 truth movement's narrative is just as maddeningly inadequate—and unimaginative—as the neocons'. —A parallel universe inhabited only by patriots and pawns is an intriguing place to spend a couple of hours if you're watching 24 or a movie like Able Danger. But it's not the world we must face after the final credits roll.
Dave Gilson is a senior editor at Mother Jones.
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/arts/feature/2008/09/media-jones-the-truth-is-out-there.html
New Internationalist:
The privatization of Patagonia
Fences are marching across the Patagonian wilderness, displacing indigenous peoples and turning pure water into private property. Tomás Bril Mascarenhas reports on another conquest, this time by foreign investors.
Tomás Bril Mascarenhas
Issue 392
‘If we don’t stop this intrusion we will live in exile in our own land,’ says Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 for his struggle to defend human rights in Argentina. He is now worried about the impact on the country’s indigenous peoples of massive sales of land in Patagonia.
His fears are well founded. In the 1990s Argentina privatized almost every public asset and became the International Monetary Fund’s model student. Now investors have started to diversify, buying thousands of hectares of land that contain not only native peoples’ memory and ancient woodlands but also lakes and rivers with some of the purest water on the planet.
In the last 15 years, clothing magnate Luciano Benetton has bought 900,000 hectares – equivalent to half the area of Wales. CNN’s Ted Turner was more modest and acquired a mere 55,000 hectares. Joseph Lewis, based in Barbados, was satisfied with even less: 14,000 hectares. Douglas Tompkins, founder of the North Face apparel company and a self-proclaimed ‘environmentalist’, got 800,000 hectares in Chile and Argentina. Some of his lands surround the largest freshwater river in Patagonia.
El Bolsón, a town that used to be the destination of choice for Argentinean hippies, has become a place where young backpackers drink mate in the handicraft fair while dozens of real-estate agents and financial advisors offer uninhabited, virgin lands and exclusive access to green and blue lakes.
‘The land was given away as a gift,’ says Marta Maffei, an opposition leader and the former Vice-President of the Parliamentary Committee for Natural Resources and Human Environment Conservation. ‘The State was auctioned off, while national companies and lands were sold at a bargain price. Our country has extremely flexible laws and inefficient government control. Some economic groups have got enormous properties for nothing. They have come here to do easy business.’
For the Spanish conquerors, South America ended at the Patagonian border. Travelling in this region, the homeland of indigenous peoples, was considered dangerous. Even after independence the southern frontier was almost impassable. ‘The Indian problem,’ as it was called by the estanciero (rancher) oligarchy that dominated politics from Buenos Aires, was one of the few obstacles to building the European-style state they had in mind.
In 1878 General Julio Roca, using British money and an army equipped with Remington repeating rifles, headed for Patagonia in what was euphemistically called the ‘Conquest of the Desert’. The indigenous peoples, ancestral inhabitants of this ‘desert’, could not resist Roca’s army and were forced to retreat. Many died. In 1882 the Argentinean Embassies in Paris and London duly began to sell new estancias as large as 40,000 hectares.
That was the first privatization of Patagonia – it was not to be the last. Until 1989, when Carlos Menem became President, the Government had some degree of control. Since then official policy has been to welcome foreign investment of any kind as the best means of achieving economic development. The extranjerización (‘foreignization’) of land accelerated at a dizzy pace.
‘In Argentina there is no property register of fiscal [public] land,’ warns Pérez Esquivel. The boundaries between private and public property are ‘wire fences that walk, fences that estancieros put up wherever they want, and say: “This is mine. Period!”’
Following the 2001 economic collapse, the 300-per-cent devaluation of the currency and the bankruptcy of thousands of small landowners that followed, the price of land in Argentina fell sharply. Foreign investors were quick to take advantage of one of the weakest land regimes in Latin America.
According to the Constitution, indigenous peoples are the legitimate owners of the southern lands where their ancestors were born. ‘There is sort of an unwritten law that says property rights are above all other rights,’ comments Maffei. In 2004 she presented a Bill to Parliament aimed at halting further evictions of indigenous peoples. Even though the laws protecting them have been renewed, judges in the courts still act as if their rights did not exist. ‘Neither the Constitution nor the laws are respected in Argentina and, because of that, land continues to be sold with Indians on it,’ says Maffei.
Judicial rulings invariably privilege big estancieros. ‘The police are allowed to evict indigenous people by force and with absolute impunity,’ says Pérez Esquivel.
He intervened directly in one dispute. In 2002 Rosa Nahuelquir and Atilio Curiñanco made a formal request to reclaim the land where they and their ancestors were born, in a Mapuche community in the province of Chubut. The land is now owned by Benetton, the biggest landowner in Patagonia.
After waiting several months for a response, Rosa and Atilio decided to occupy 385 hectares on which to build a house, sow crops and raise animals. Atilio recalls that he wanted to ‘go back to the place where I was born, because my family, my mother, my father, spent their whole lives there. I wanted to return to that place too’.
But his return did not last long. Ten days later the police evicted Rosa and Atilio following an order from a provincial judge, who based his verdict on a title deed issued in 1886. That had been acquired by a British company after the Conquest of the Desert.
Atilio and Rosa feel that they belong to their land – but they do not have any title deed to prove it. In 2004 Pérez Esquivel published an open letter that read: ‘Mr Benetton… I would like to inform you that the people from whom you took 385 hectares of land, with the complicity of an unfair judge and using the weapons of money, are a humble Mapuche family with their own identity, with a heart and life that are fighting for their rights… You act with the same mentality as the conquerors.’
Luciano Benetton, worried about the impact that these words might have on his image as a ‘United Colours’ entrepreneur, announced that he would offer Pérez Esquivel 2,500 hectares of land elsewhere in Patagonia. The announcement came two days before a meeting of Nobel Laureates in Rome.
‘I never asked for that land,’ says Pérez Esquivel. He decided not to accept Benetton’s ‘gift’, arguing that the land had always belonged to the Mapuche community and that he did not have any right to act in their name.
Soon afterwards, Pérez Esquivel, Atilio and Rosa met with Benetton in Rome. Benetton rejected any possibility of giving up his rights to the 385 hectares of occupied land, so the Mapuche couple rejected the offer of the other 2,500 hectares and returned to Argentina.
‘Benetton says that he uses the land claimed by the Curiñancos to raise his sheep,’ Pérez Esquivel now recalls in the Buenos Aires office of his Foundation. In October 2005 Benetton, the multicultural entrepreneur, raised his offer to 7,500 hectares on another estancia he owns in the province of Chubut, but repeated that the Curiñancos’ ancestral land was non-negotiable.
For the Mapuche the location of land is very important. Claudia Briones, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires, clarifies the point. ‘The best way to understand the deep meaning that land has in Mapuche culture is to say “not only”. For Mapuches, land is “not only” the ground, it is “not only” a means of production and it is “not only” the material reality that one knows, because land has its own spiritual or supernatural forces – nehuenes.’
For Rosa and Atilio, as for thousands of displaced indigenous people, land is not just about a plot on which to plant pine trees, raise animals and find a way out of poverty. More importantly, it means returning to their origins and meeting again the nehuenes which Benetton has not yet been able to understand.
The degree of incomprehension is such that the new landowners have resorted to symbolic acts verging on the absurd. In 1997 the Benetton Group invested $800,000 in the Leleque Museum, which ‘narrates 13,000 years of history and culture in a mythical land’. Ana Ramos, from the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research, says the museum’s narrative describes the arrival of foreigners after the Conquest of the Desert as ‘The Age of Progress’. ‘It presents the Mapuche as invaders who came from Chile,’ says Ramos, ‘and thus indirectly tells the visitor that there are no legitimate indigenous people.’
Rosa and Atilio are still waiting for their little plot to be given back. Their story is just one among many that tell of police evictions, absent entrepreneurs and deaf judges. Most lawsuits ignore indigenous rights, and most estancieros – unlike Benetton – feel no need to cultivate a global image of tolerance.
The conflict is just one aspect of a much deeper process that affects this land of blue lakes and transparent rivers, endless plateaus, snow-capped mountains and thousands of kilometres without a trace of human beings.
Mining, commercial forestry and oil exploration have all been adding to the despoliation of this place. A relatively new issue has now joined this familiar litany of destruction.
‘Generally speaking, the sale [of Patagonian land] relates to a desire to control water sources or lakes,’ says Marta Maffei. She and other legislators were detained by private, armed security guards employed by Joseph Lewis when they tried to access Lago Escondido across his private land – even though the lake itself is formally in public ownership.
The Patagonian problem reveals how private property is invading public space. Can one person have exclusive access to freshwater rivers? Can a lake or an ancient woodland be inherited like a bank account? Can indigenous people’s memory and identity be privatized?
Politics can still provide answers. Just as there was once a consensus of the powerful in favour of privatization, so in Argentina today, after the 2001 collapse – the worst crisis in the country’s history – it is much more possible to articulate an alternative discourse; one where native cultures and land resources prevail over speculative investors and individualistic environmentalism.
Tomás Bril Mascarenhas is an Undergraduate Research Fellow at the University of Buenos Aires, where he is carrying out a project on the transformation of politics in Argentina’s capital district. He is an undergraduate teaching assistant at the Department of Political Science and a former volunteer with the New Internationalist.
1. Mario Rapoport (ed.), Historia económica, política y social de la Argentina (1880-2000), Ediciones Macchi, Buenos Aires, 2003.
2. Pv Weche Lafkenche, ‘Entrevista a Rosa y Atilio: “Así debe ser...”’, 27 May 2004. See http://argentina.indymedia.org/news/2004/05/199036.php
3. To read the correspondence between Luciano Benetton and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, visit the Patagonia Talk section of Benetton’s site http://www.benettontalk.com/
4. See: http://www.benettongroup.com/en/whatwesay/culture_society.htm
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
http://www.newint.org/columns/essays/2006/08/01/patagonia/
New Statesman:
Inside Iran
It is the country the west fears most - and knows least about. In our exclusive reports, Iranian writers describe the extraordinary contradictions of life under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "Loving Government" - and reveal how Iran sees the west. Maziar Bahari, a leading journalist, begins with a drive across downtown Tehran
Maziar Bahari
Published 11 September 2008
It's not a promising start, but I'm going to confuse you. That's how I feel about the situation in my country, Iran. If I'm supposed to remain true to my journalistic principles I have no choice but to share my puzzling observations with you. After 40 years of being an Iranian I can say it loud and clear: Iranian politics, economics, society and almost everything about Iran are confusing and confused.
Contradictions and double standards pervade every aspect of our social and political life. The country's economy is a shambles, but you can see more Gucci and Versace billboards than in Milan. Iranians are the most courteous people in their daily lives, but they behave like ruthless monsters when driving. Iranians don't like America, but they are the most pro-American country in the Middle East. Iran has become internationally known as a pariah state, but our president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, believes he is the most popular president in the world. Dozens of people are jailed or executed every month but the Iranian government calls itself "the Loving Government". And so on.
I'm in Tehran. To be exact, I'm in Victory Square on my way to see a recently divorced friend near Freedom Square. My cab driver is the septuagenarian Hassan Gharehbaghi, a little man with stubble and thick glasses. Hassan is on his mobile when I get in his car. I tell him the destination, and he continues talking with his son or daughter about the results of the university entrance examinations which were announced a few days ago. Every year, almost one and a half million Iranians take part in the exams and only about 300,000 get in. Around this time, the end of August, everyone talks about so-and-so getting in and so-and-so not making it. Those who make it become celebrities in their families. Those who don't think it's the end of the world. Suicide rates rise at this time of year. Hassan keeps on talking to his son or daughter who, it seems, hasn't received the best grades but has somehow managed to get a place. I can see the joy and pride on the face of the old man, who has tears in his eyes. He goes through the list of people who have to be invited to the party to celebrate his child's acceptance into university.
The friend I'm going to see was the bright star of his generation. He entered university in 1978 with the highest grades possible. A few months later, in February 1979, the Islamic Revolution happened, then the Cultural Revolution followed in 1980 and the universities were closed. He had to leave the country and continue his studies at the University of Houston. He recently divorced his wife of five years. He is desperate for a shoulder to cry on. He also wants to borrow £5,000 for the down payment on a flat in a not-so-chic neighbourhood of Tehran. Moreover, he has to pay about £300 per month in rent.
The price of housing has soared over the past three years, since the election of Ahmadinejad as president in June 2005. Rising house prices in Iran are usually a sign of economic insecurity. People invest their money in the most tangible of commodities - land - and not much else. Blessed with rising oil revenues, Ahmadinejad has managed to compensate for his mismanagement of the economy by distributing handouts. If you're getting married or buying a car or a house you can get loans at 12 per cent, with interest rates running as high as 18 per cent: in other words, sub-prime loans. But the handouts have made the president very popular among the Iranian poor, especially in small towns and villages. These were the same people who elected him in 2005 and most probably will vote for him again in 2009.
My divorced friend is not poor. In fact, he was doing well until 2005, when his medical equipment import company was hit by the international sanctions imposed as a result of Iran's nuclear programme. His revenues halved within a year, and were reduced a year later to 10 per cent of what they had been.
He thought he had hit rock bottom, but then his wife left him. His flat is in his wife's name. He had promised her five years ago when they married that he would eventually move back with her to America and would have children with her. He has procrastinated on both counts. So she has changed the locks on the door to their flat.
"How can she expect me to move to a country where they treat me like a terrorist?" he asks. "I lived in the US during the hostage crisis [when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 staff hostage from 4 November 1979 to 21 January 1981]. I had to hide my Iranian identity not to get beaten up, even at university."
"So why don't you raise a family in Iran?" I reply.
"How can she expect me to have children in a country where finding crack, heroin, crystal meth and opium is easier than finding a pint of milk? I have to pay thousands of dollars for a decent education in Iran and even then my children may not be able to find a decent job." Iran has the highest divorce rate in the Muslim world. Divorce here has gone up 7 per cent in recent years. Drug addiction and economic problems are the main reasons for this.
Raisin vodka and tax-free goods
My friend has two choices. He can either live full-time with his mother or try to sell his apartment in Houston, Texas, where he studied, and buy something much smaller in Tehran. For now he lives part-time in his office, where he has had to fire all 12 of his employees, and goes to his mother's house for a decent meal and a shower. I offer him extensive use of my shoulder. He will need it for a while. I don't have any money to give him. But it shouldn't be difficult for him to get a mortgage to buy a house, eventually. While the rest of the world is in sub-prime mortgage crisis, the Iranian government hasn't done anything to regulate borrowing since the election of Ahmadinejad. As a university professor, my friend wouldn't have any problem getting a mortgage. God willing, he will also find a way to repay the money at some point.
Like many men around the world who are reluctant to grow up, my friend entertains himself by watching Judd Apatow comedies. He asks me to get him bootleg versions of You Don't Mess With the Zohan and Step Brothers on my way to his office. At the time of writing, Will Ferrell's Step Brothers had only just been released in London but had been widely available in Tehran market for weeks. My friend has also ordered a gallon of raisin vodka in preparation for his night at the office. Drinking alcohol is forbidden in Islam, and selling alcohol is illegal in the Islamic Republic. But Iranian Christians, mostly Armenians, are allowed to produce alcohol for their own consumption. Naturally, they like to share their enjoyment of their produce with their fellow citizens. And, of course, they make some money from selling it. My friend's Armenian supplier is a former pilot. He earns more money distributing alcohol than an IranAir pilot, who has an average salary of around £500 per month, a very large amount for an Iranian.
But in Iran your official salary doesn't mean much. People usually have several jobs to make ends meet. They also try to make more money while doing those jobs. It is not unusual for teachers and government employees who have official monthly salaries of £150 to have a second job as a cab driver. Receiving bribes is an acceptable form of supplementing one's income. An Iranian pilot may officially earn £500 per month but he makes three times as much by bringing tax-free goods from abroad and selling them on the black market. Yet even if an IranAir pilot has an actual monthly income of £2,000, my friend's Armenian vodka supplier makes more than that and never wants to be a pilot again. The local products are not sufficient for the Iranian market. I once visited a very large warehouse, near Suleymaniye in Iraqi Kurdistan, filled with bottles of whisky, cognac and vodka destined for Iran. The owner of the warehouse was a happy man, with impressive love handles, who told me about his house in Majorca.
I'm supposed to pick up the illegal DVDs on the corner of Islamic Republic Avenue and Bobby Sands Street, next to the British embassy. The Iranian government named the street adjacent to the embassy after the Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer who died while on hunger strike in a British prison.
I once asked an Iranian official: how would he feel if the British named Princes Gate, where the Iranian embassy in London is located, Salman Rushdie Gate? He told me that there was no comparison - Bobby Sands is a martyr and Sal man Rushdie a heretic. He then told me that his next visitor had arrived and asked me to leave his office.
Lying is also forbidden in Islam but, unlike alcohol, it is widely tolerated in the Islamic Republic. If you're caught with a bottle of raisin vodka you can receive 50 lashes on your buttocks. But lying has become something of a virtue among Iranian officials. The government spokesman has several times announced that he knew nothing about the resignation of such-and-such a minister, while the minister himself had announced his decision to resign days earlier. The head of the sports organisation praised the victorious Iranian Olympics team, even though Iran won only two medals at the Games. And the guy selling the illegal DVDs said that they were originals, but when I watch the film I can see the guy sitting in front of the dodgy cameraman in the auditorium choking with laughter on his popcorn as Will Ferrell sings "Por ti volare" at the end of Step Brothers.
To get from Islamic Republic Avenue (which used to be called Shah Avenue) to Freedom Square (formerly Shah's Memorial Square), I have to go through the busy traffic around Revolution Square (formerly 14 March Square, after the shah's father's birthday). Consecutive governments in Iran have acted as if by changing names they can change the nature of things. When the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were published in 2005, Danish pastries were officially renamed Muhammad flower pastries. (My American friends, don't laugh! Remember freedom fries?)
"A true, clean, patriotic Iranian"
I'm dozing off in the 35-degree heat while Hassan is still on the phone and his taxi is stuck in a traffic jam in Revolution Square. I'm sure suggesting that Islamic Iran needs another revolution to be free would bring a smile to the face of the US vice-president, Dick Cheney. For years, he has advocated overthrowing the Islamic government through military action, which he is sure Iranian people would welcome. But Cheney would snap out of that mindset, were he in a taxi with Hassan, who has finished his telephone conversation with his son or daughter and now is ready to talk to me.
Hassan declares himself an Ahmadinejad devotee. He has eight children. His eldest son was martyred in 1985 during the Iran-Iraq War. Like many Iranians, Hassan blames America more than any other country, even Iraq, for the war, which cost more than one million lives. He believes that, without American support, Saddam Hussein would not have been able to carry out his savage attacks against Iranian cities. He also believes that the only reason the Americans are against Ahmadinejad and Iran's nuclear technology is that they don't want Iran to be independent.
Like most Iranians, Hassan has a very good long-term selective memory. As we go through Revolution Square, he remembers the CIA coup against the nationalist government of Muhammed Mossadeq in 1953.
"I was here on 16 August 1953. I remember when people brought down the statues of the shah. But then Americans brought him back to power on 19 August," says Hassan. Revolution Square connects Revolution Avenue to Freedom Avenue, which used to be called Eisenhower Avenue, after the American president who helped the shah topple Mossadeq. "Ahmadinejad reminds me of Mossadeq. A true, clean, patriotic Iranian. But he is even better than Mossadeq. Because Ahmadinejad is also a good Muslim."
I ask Hassan why he still drives a cab at his age. "I'm a retired National Railway employee. But my pension is not enough to pay for my youngest son's tuition fees." Hassan's son studies at the Free University, a semi-governmental institution that charges more than state universities, although its degrees are not as valuable. The tuition fees are almost £5,000 per year, more than the average annual income of most Iranians. "So, life is not that good?" I ask Hassan. "I am happy that I'm healthy and can still work at this stage. Otherwise, my family would be in so much trouble," he answers.
"Those things" are a disgrace
Hassan can't understand any part of my divorced friend's story. "It's just unbelievable that people don't respect marriage any more. My youngest son is getting married and the government forces him and his wife to take mandatory family planning courses where they teach them about 'those things'."
By "those things" he means condoms. After the 1979 revolution, the government encouraged people to have more children. "Islam needs more soldiers" was the motto in those days. That created a population increase which scared the government in the early 1990s. Since then, Iran has acquired one of the world's best family planning programmes. Now, every couple who register to get married have to go through family planning classes where they learn about different methods of birth control, including condoms. "It's a disgrace that the government is trying to force people to wear 'those things'. I hope Mr Ahmadinejad changes that policy," says Hassan.
I find my friend half asleep at his desk. He's gone through a quarter of a gallon of raisin vodka. "I like this guy Ahmad inejad," are his greeting words to me. "Why?" I ask. "He's the only one with guts in this country." My friend is happy about Ahmadinejad's defence of an adviser who claimed that "Iranians are friends of Israeli people". The adviser has been chastised by the conservatives and reformists alike for his audacity in declaring compassion for the Zionists. The Grand Ayatollah asked Ahmadinejad to fire him. But the president defied all his critics and stood by him. The same Ahmadinejad who questioned the truth of the Holocaust and allegedly said "Israel will be wiped off the map".
After a long day in the heat thinking about the complexities of my country, my brain is frying. Or maybe years of working as a journalist in Iran are taking their toll on me. In any case, I put on the bootleg DVD of Zohan, in which Adam Sandler plays a counterterrorism agent whose real dream is to be a hairdresser. Now that is a character I can relate to. I, too, wish life was simpler. My friend is absolutely hammered. He's on the phone to his ex-wife, promising her that he is working on their immigration to the United States.
REPRESSION: THE NUMBERS
* 85
juvenile offenders on death row. Iran is the world's most prolific executioner of under-18s
* 30,000
estimated number of political prisoners
* 100
lashes given to a woman found guilty of adultery in August
* 500,000
rials (£30) - the fine for women who do not observe Islamic dress in public. The average monthly salary is £106
* 317
people were executed in 2007, including six juvenile offenders
* 11
years' imprisonment: sentence imposed on a journalist for founding the Human Rights Organisation of Kurdistan
* 4
male witnesses are needed to sentence a woman to death for adultery
Research by Katy Taylor
http://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2008/09/iran-ahmadinejad-government
New Statesman:
From shahs to sanctions – a timeline
Ed Hancox
Published 11 September 2008
* 21 February 1921
Reza Khan, a military commander, seizes Tehran in a coup d'état, crowning himself shah five years later and establishing the Pahlavi dynasty.
* 16 September 1941
Reza's son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, is crowned shah following the Anglo-Russian occupation of Iran triggered by Reza's support for Nazi Germany.
* 1 May 1951
Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadeq nationalises the oil industry, which had been under British control. Britain imposes an embargo and a blockade. Mossadeq resigns the following year but is reinstated after a popular uprising.
* 19 August 1953
Mossadeq is overthrown in a coup engineered by the British and the Americans. General Fazlollah Zahedi is installed as prime minister and the shah returns from five days of self-exile.
* 26 January 1963
The shah launches the White Revolution, a programme of land reform and social and economic modernisation. After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini criticises the reforms, he is arrested, sparking riots in Tehran.
* 8 September 1978
Outbreak of strikes and mass demonstrations against the shah's authoritarian rule. Martial law is imposed on 12 cities.
* 16 January 1979
The shah and his family are forced into exile. Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran on 1 February following 14 years of exile, and the monarchy is abolished on 11 February.
* 4 November 1979
Islamic militants take 52 Americans hostage at the US embassy in Tehran, demanding the extradition of the shah from the United States. The crisis lasts 444 days.
* 22 September 1980
Iraq launches a full-scale invasion of Iran, starting the Iran-Iraq War. The conflict lasts until August 1988 and kills an estimated one million Iranians.
* 7-13 July 1999
More than 1,000 students are arrested after pro-democracy protests in Tehran.
* 10 October 2003
Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer and human rights campaigner, becomes Iran's first Nobel Peace Prizewinner; appointed the country's first female judge in 1975, she was forced to resign after the 1979 revolution.
* 24 June 2005
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tehran's ultra-conservative mayor, triumphs in the presidential elections.
* 8 August 2005
Iran announces the resumption of uranium conversion at its Isfahan plant but insists the nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes. The IAEA finds it in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
* 11 April 2006
Iran says it has succeeded in enriching uranium at its Natanz nuclear facility.
* 24 May 2007
The IAEA says Iran could develop a nuclear weapon in three to eight years.
* 25 October 2007
The US announces sweeping new sanctions against Iran.
* 9 July 2008
Iran test-fires the Shahab-3, a long-range missile it says is capable of hitting targets in Israel.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2008/09/iran-shah-tehran-british-reza
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Bachelet pide paz en honor a Chicho
Mensaje de la presidenta chilena por el 35° aniversario de la muerte de Salvador Allende
En la víspera de un aniversario que siempre polariza a la sociedad chilena y con la efervescencia política en alza por la proximidad de las elecciones municipales, la mandataria socialista llamó a la unidad nacional.
Por Christian Palma
Jueves, 11 de Septiembre de 2008
Desde Santiago
Transcurridas tres décadas y media desde que el presidente Salvador Allende fuera derrocado por la junta militar en Chile, aunque con matices, todavía quedan resabios de la polarización que se vivía en esos convulsionados años. Residuos rancios, añejos, que cada 11 de septiembre salen a relucir en este país marcado actualmente por una mitad que está atenta a la coyuntura política debido a la proximidad de las elecciones municipales –y a la posibilidad cierta de que la derecha asuma el poder en el 2010– y otra más joven con un claro sello apolítico y que lleva el cambio generacional en sus espaldas.
En este convulsivo escenario –azuzado en parte por cierta prensa de oposición–, la presidenta Michelle Bachelet rechazó las eventuales acciones de violencia que cada año colorean de rojo y gris la noche previa al día en que Chile perdió su cauce democrático y republicano en manos de los militares encabezados por el difunto dictador Augusto Pinochet.
“Mucha gente malamente cree que rememorar el 11 de septiembre es justamente actuar con la violencia que nosotros repudiamos el 11 de septiembre de 1973. Llamo por un lado a la tranquilidad, al derecho legítimo de quienes quieran conmemorar el 11 de septiembre, pero hacerlo en democracia, en paz..., espero que se privilegien sobre todo la democracia y el derecho de las personas y que, en la medida de lo posible, seamos capaces de unirnos tras un objetivo común de país”, sostuvo Bachelet en un mensaje que desde 1990 vienen repitiendo los mandatarios de la Concertación, sin mayores resultados.
En esa línea, el subsecretario del Interior, Felipe Harboe –considerado un duro para combatir la delincuencia y el hampa–, advirtió que ya están listos los operativos de seguridad (la detonación de una bomba en un barrio acomodado de Santiago y la detención de personas con propaganda que llamaba a la violencia iniciaron el martes la previa del 11). Sin embargo, apeló a la conciencia ciudadana y pidió a todos los sectores productivos y de transporte “no generar una sensación de inseguridad”, como ha sido la tónica en estos últimos días.
“Los padres y adultos deben evitar que niños que nada conocen del año ’73 participen en estas manifestaciones”, agregó resaltando que para evitar enfrentamientos en las fuerzas de orden y manifestantes, que el año pasado tuvieron como resultado la muerte del cabo de Carabineros Cristián Vera, es necesaria la cooperación de toda la población.
La derecha, que en la víspera prefiere guardar silencio por el lastre que significa ser relacionada con Pinochet, sacará la voz recién hoy –muy en su estilo– cuando las inevitables protestas y enfrentamientos den para criticar el accionar del aparataje antidisturbios del gobierno, tratando de sacar algún rédito más en su loca carrera por llegar a La Moneda.
Desde un ángulo diametralmente opuesto, cuatro jóvenes diputados –de no más de 40 años como promedio de edad– realizaron ayer una transversal e histórica reunión donde anunciaron un nuevo ciclo para la política chilena. Así, Marco Enríquez Ominami, del Partido Socialista (PS), Marcelo Forni y José Antonio Kast, de la opositora Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI), y Alvaro Escobar (Independiente), junto a jóvenes dirigentes, destacaron el inicio de una nueva era política y el deseo de muchos de poner la lápida a la transición.
Respecto de la marcha por la calle Morande 80, donde está la mítica puerta de La Moneda por donde entraban los presidentes de Chile hasta antes de 1973 (clausurada luego por Pinochet y reabierta con Ricardo Lagos), el ministro vocero de Gobierno, Francisco Vidal, dijo que las delegaciones autorizadas podrán hacerlo a partir de las 8 de la mañana de hoy, pero que la Intendencia aún está estudiando si autoriza el paso de la tradicional marcha –liderada por el Partido Comunista– que rinde honores al presidente Allende en el Cementerio General, la cual, de ser visada, sería el próximo 14 de septiembre.
“El gobierno va a hacer todo lo posible por equilibrar el legítimo derecho de miles de chilenos de marchar recordando a Allende un 11 de septiembre, en este caso el 14, pero también resguardando los símbolos de este país, del cual el presidente Allende hizo mérito, se defendió en esta casa hasta el último día y en consecuencia el gobierno no va a aceptar que en esta casa donde murió Allende hasta el último día, se le ataque”, sostuvo.
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-111364-2008-09-11.html
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CERN
Por Adrián Paenza
Jueves, 11 de Septiembre de 2008
Usted, como yo, alguna vez fue niño. Alguna vez, también, le debe haber pasado lo mismo que a mí: frente a un regalo, uno se quedaba jugando más con la caja que lo contenía, o el papel que lo envolvía, que con el propio juguete.
Peor aún: insatisfecho con lo que uno tenía delante, la idea era saber cómo estaba construido. La tarea implicaba tratar de “desarmarlo” ante la desesperación de nuestros padres. Por supuesto, el verbo “desarmar” tiene distintas connotaciones y definiciones posibles.
Ante el menor descuido de los adultos, desensamblar se transformaba en romper. Pero “romper” tampoco era suficiente. Lo que uno quería saber, el objetivo que buscaba, era el de descomponerlo en las piezas más chiquititas posibles. Y aun así sería insuficiente. Los martillos y tenazas servían hasta un cierto punto. El pueblo quiere saber, a esa altura, se transformaba en “el niño quiere saber”.
En tanto que adultos, los juegos tienen otra dimensión. Las herramientas son cada vez más sofisticadas, pero el deseo infantil permanece. Todavía, a pesar de la edad, uno quiere saber.
Ahora, en lugar de martillos hay aceleradores de partículas. En lugar del piso en donde quedaba todo desparramado, ahora hay un tubo gigante de 27 kilómetros de circunferencia y enterrado a 100 metros de profundidad. En lugar de poder ver con nuestros ojos, ahora hay que recurrir a sensores estratégicamente distribuidos. En lugar de trabajar solos, ahora hay 5000 científicos de todo el mundo. En lugar de un juguete de 30 pesos, ahora “el chiche” cuesta ocho mil millones de dólares. Y tardaron 14 años en construirlo.
Además, nosotros no teníamos ninguna teoría para confirmar o ratificar. No estaba en juego el principio u origen del universo, ni estábamos a la búsqueda de la decimotercera partícula elemental (el bosón de Higgs).
Como no había teoría para ratificar, el camino era siempre virgen. Cualquier descubrimiento merecía un paper interno. Todo estaba inexplorado, todo estaba por ser develado. En cambio, los adultos tenemos conjeturas, teorías. Avanzamos a tientas. Encontramos cosas en el camino, por supuesto, pero en el afán de incrementar el volumen del conocimiento, no siempre elegimos las direcciones adecuadas.
Sin embargo, el día 10 de septiembre del año 2008 quedará inexorablemente en la historia. Es que si hay UNA curiosidad por satisfacer, UNA pregunta por contestar es la del origen de todo, el origen del universo. Las religiones lo explican con la existencia de un ser todopoderoso.
Y está bien si uno acepta creerlo. Pero hay otro grupo de personas que tiene otras ideas y busca otros caminos. Y no por eso tienen que ser irrespetuosos con las creencias del resto, sólo que esa respuesta no parece del todo satisfactoria. Es una respuesta que ha tenido adaptaciones de acuerdo con las épocas.
Por supuesto, no quiero decir que la puesta en funcionamiento del acelerador de partículas binacional (suizo-francés) sea ni “la máquina de dios” ni “la máquina de descubrir”. Pero sí creo que el hombre se sigue dando todos los recursos de los que es capaz para encontrar respuestas científicas a sus dudas eternas. Por ahora siguen siendo conjeturas. Y a los adultos, como chicos que aún somos, nos interesa seguir jugando, y aceptar que cada respuesta sirve para disparar nuevas preguntas.
Ningún ciudadano va a mejorar su calidad de vida ni hoy ni mañana por la confirmación de la existencia del bosón de Higgs. Pero la humanidad toda será mejor, aunque más no sea porque habrá podido contestar una pregunta más. De eso se trata el juego.
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/index.html
The Independent: Cleared: Jury decides
that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Thursday, 11 September 2008
The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.
Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of "lawful excuse" under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.
The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain's green agenda and could encourage further direct action.
Kingsnorth was the centre for mass protests by climate camp activists last month. Last year, three protesters managed to paint Gordon Brown's name on the plant's chimney. Their handi-work cost £35,000 to remove.
The plan to build a successor to the power station is likely to be the first of a new generation of coal-fired plants. As coal produces more of the carbon emissions causing climate change than any other fuel, campaigners claim that a new station would be a disastrous setback in the battle against global warming, and send out a negative signal to the rest of the world about how serious Britain really is about tackling the climate threat.
But the proposals, from the energy giant E.ON, are firmly backed by the Business Secretary, John Hutton, and the Energy minister, Malcolm Wicks. Some members of the Cabinet are thought to be unhappy about them, including the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn. Mr Brown is likely to have the final say on the matter later this year.
During the eight-day trial, the world's leading climate scientist, Professor James Hansen of Nasa, who had flown from American to give evidence, appealed to the Prime Minister personally to "take a leadership role" in cancelling the plan and scrapping the idea of a coal-fired future for Britain. Last December he wrote to Mr Brown with a similar appeal. At the trial, he called for an moratorium on all coal-fired power stations, and his hour-long testimony about the gravity of the climate danger, which painted a bleak picture, was listened to intently by the jury of nine women and three men.
Professor Hansen, who first alerted the world to the global warming threat in June 1988 with testimony to a US senate committee in Washington, and who last year said the earth was in "imminent peril" from the warming atmosphere, asserted that emissions of CO2 from Kings-north would damage property through the effects of the climate change they would help to cause.
He was one of several leading public figures who gave evidence for the defence, including Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park and director of the Ecologist magazine, who similarly told the jury that in his opinion, direct action could be justified in the minds of many people if it was intended to prevent larger crimes being committed.
The acquittal was the second time in a decade that the "lawful excuse" defence has been successfully used by Greenpeace activists. In 1999, 28 Greenpeace campaigners led Lord Melchett, who was director at the time, were cleared of criminal damage after trashing an experimental field of GM crops in Norfolk. In each case the damage was not disputed – the point at issue was the motive.
The defendants who scaled the 630ft chimney at Kingsnorth, near Hoo, last year were Huw Williams, 41, from Nottingham; Ben Stewart, 34, from Lyminge, Kent; Kevin Drake, 44, from Westbury, Wiltshire; Will Rose, 29, from London; and Emily Hall, 34, from New Zealand. Tim Hewke, 48, from Ulcombe, Kent, helped organise the protest.
The court heard how, dressed in orange boiler suits and white hard hats bearing the Greenpeace logo, the six-strong group arrived at the site at 6.30am on 8 October. Armed with bags containing abseiling gear, five of them scaled the chimney while Mr Hewke waited below to liaise between the climbers and police.
The climbers had planned to paint "Gordon, bin it" in huge letters on the side of the chimney, but although they succeeded in temporarily shutting the station, they only got as far as painting the word "Gordon" on the chimney before they descended, having been threatened with a High Court injunction. Removing the graffiti cost E.ON £35,000, the court heard.
During the trial the defendants said they had acted lawfully, owing to an honestly held belief that their attempt to stop emissions from Kingsnorth would prevent further damage to properties worldwide caused by global warming. Their aim, they said, was to rein back CO2 emissions and bring urgent pressure to bear on the Government and E.ON to changes policies. They insisted their action had caused the minimum amount of damage necessary to close the plant down and constituted a "proportionate response" to the increasing environmental threat.
Speaking outside court after being cleared yesterday, Mr Stewart said: "This is a huge blow for ministers and their plans for new coal-fired power stations. It wasn't only us in the dock, it was the coal-fired generation as well. After this verdict, the only people left in Britain who think new coal is a good idea are John Hutton and Malcolm Wicks. It's time the Prime Minister stepped in, showed some leadership and embraced the clean energy future for Britain."
He added: "This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement. When a jury of normal people say it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave Government energy policy? We have the clean technologies at hand to power our economy. It's time we turned to them instead of coal."
Ms Hall said: "The jury heard from the most distinguished climate scientist in the world. How could they ignore his warnings and reject his leading scientific arguments?"
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ZNet:
US 'In Need of Rebellion'
By Howard Zinn
Source: AlJazeera.net
September, 11 2008
Al Jazeera speaks to Howard Zinn, the author, American historian, social critic and activist, about how the Iraq war damaged attitudes towards the US and why the US "empire" is close to collapse.
Q: Where is the United States heading in terms of world power and influence?
HZ: America has been heading - for some time, and is heading right now - toward less and less world power, less and less influence.
Obviously, since the war in Iraq, the rest of the world has fallen away from the United States, and if American foreign policy continues in the way it has been - that is aggressive and violent and uncaring about the feelings and thoughts of other people - then the influence of the United States is going to decline more and more.
This is an empire which is on the one hand the most powerful empire that ever existed; on the other hand an empire that is crumbling - an empire that has no future ... because the rest of the world is alienated and simply because this empire is top-heavy with military commitments, with bases around the world, with the exhaustion of its own resources at home.
[This is] leading to more and more discontent and home, so I think the American empire will go the way of other empires and I think it is on its way now.
Q: Is there any hope the US will change its approach to the rest of the world?
HZ: If there is any hope, the hope lies in the American people. [It] lies in American people becoming resentful enough and indignant enough over what has happened to their country, over the loss of dignity in the world, over the starving of human resources in the United States, the starving of education and health, the takeover of the political mechanism by corporate power and the result this has on the everyday lives of the American people.
[There is also] the higher and higher food prices, the more and more insecurity, the sending of the young people to war.
I think all of this may very well build up into a movement of rebellion.
We have seen movements of rebellion in the past: The labour movement, the civil rights movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam.
I think we may well see, if the United States keeps heading in the same direction, a new popular movement. That is the only hope for the United States.
Q: How did the US get to this point?
HZ: Well, we got to this point because ... I suppose the American people have allowed it to get it to this point because there were enough Americans who were satisfied with their lives, just enough.
Of course, many Americans were not, that is why half of the population doesn't vote, they're alienated.
But there are just enough Americans who have been satisfied, you might say getting some of the "goodies" of the empire, just some of them, just enough people satisfied to support the system, so we got this way because of the ability of the system to maintain itself by satisfying just enough of the population to keep its legitimacy.
And I think that era is coming to an end.
Q: What should the world know about the United States?
HZ: What I find many people in the rest of the world don't know is that there is an opposition in the United States. Very often, people in the rest of the world think that Bush is popular, they think 'oh, he was elected twice', they don't understand the corruption of the American political system which enabled Bush to win twice.
They don't understand the basic undemocratic nature of the American political system in which all power is concentrated within two parties which are not very far from one another and people cannot easily tell the difference.
So I think we are in a situation where we are going to need some very fundamental changes in American society if the American people are going to be finally satisfied with the kind of society we have.
Q: Do you think the US can recover from its current position?
HZ: Well, I am hoping for a recovery process. I mean, so far we haven't seen it.
You asked about what the people of the rest of the world don't know about the United States, and as I said, they don't know that there is an opposition.
There always has been an opposition, but the opposition has always been either crushed or quieted, kept in the shadows, marginalised so their voices are not heard.
People in the rest of the world hear the voices of the American leaders.
They do not hear the voices of the people all over this country who do not like the American leaders who want different policies.
I think also, people in the rest of the world should know that what they see in Iraq now is really a continuation of a long, long term of American imperial expansion in the world.
I think ... a lot of people in the world think that this war in Iraq is an aberration, that before this the United States was a benign power.
It has never been a benign power, from the very first, from the American Revolution, from the taking-over of Indian land, from the Mexican war, the Spanish-American war.
It is embarrassing to say, but we have a long history in this country of violent expansion and I think not only do most people in other countries [not] know this, most Americans don't know this.
Q: Is there a way for this to improve?
HZ: Well you know, whatever hope there is lies in that large number of Americans who are decent, who don't want to go to war, who don't want to kill other people.
It is hard to see that hope because these Americans who feel that way have been shut out of the communications system, so their voices are not heard, they are not seen on the television screen, but they exist.
I have gone through, in my life, a number of social movements and I have seen how at the very beginning of these social movements or just before these social movements develop, there didn't seem to be any hope.
I lived in the [US] south for seven years, in the years of the civil rights movements, and it didn't seem that there was any hope, but there was hope under the surface.
And when people organised, and when people began to act, when people began to work together, people began to take risks, people began to oppose the establishment, people began to commit civil disobedience.
Well, then that hope became manifest ... it actually turned into change.
Q: Do you think there is a way out of this and for the future influence of the US on the world to be a positive one?
HZ: Well, you know for the United States to begin to be a positive influence in the world we are going to have to have a new political leadership that is sensitive to the needs of the American people, and those needs do not include war and aggression.
[It must also be] sensitive to the needs of people in other parts of the world, sensitive enough to know that American resources, instead of being devoted to war, should be devoted to helping people who are suffering.
You've got earthquakes and natural disasters all over the world, but the people in the United States have been in the same position as people in other countries.
The natural disasters here [also] brought little positive reaction - look at [Hurricane] Katrina.
The people in this country, the poor people especially and the people of colour especially, have been as much victims of American power as people in other countries.
Q: Can you give us an overall scope of everything we talked about - the power and influence of the United States?
HZ: The power and influence of the United States has declined rapidly since the war in Iraq because American power, as it has been exercised in the world historically, has been exposed more to the rest of the world in this situation and in other situations.
So the US influence is declining, its power is declining.
However strong a military machine it is, power does not ultimately depend on a military machine. So power is declining.
Ultimately power rests on the moral legitimacy of a system and the United States has been losing moral legitimacy.
My hope is that the American people will rouse themselves and change this situation, for the benefit of themselves and for the benefit of the rest of the world.
[Howard Zinn is the author of, most notably, A People's History of the United States, a National-Book-Award- nominated text that investigates US history from the standpoint of the oppressed. Other books by Zinn include Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology and his 1995 autobiography, You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train.]
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18782
posted by attilav at 20:26
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