Month: June 2004

I was just reading the various pieces that ZNet republished from New Politics on the US elections. I would in particular recommend Steve Shalom’s piece. Steve has a way of summarizing all the arguments on all sides in a sympathetic way, and then presenting the last word on the topic, that is really impressive. Years ago when I was confused about drugs, his piece on the subject clarified things for me in a similar way.

I also enjoyed the harshness of Michael Hirsch’s piece on ‘Left Posturing’. Some quotes from it:

“Any politics has to start from an analysis of social forces. Social movements are weak, but not because their leaders failed to resist the siren call of access to the White House or the governor’s mansion. Idle chatter about “the class” or “the youth” or “the labor bureaucracy” and its misleaders only reinforces the left’s alienation from its own base because it substitutes assertions for analysis.”

…

“What is the left putting out — even that left that believes in realigning the Democratic Party? “U.S. Troops Out of Iraq,” or “Support Gay Marriages,” or “Defend Abortion Rights” are reactive programs that do not get to the heart of the American empire, harm the war makers where they live or deliver a body blow to sexual fundamentalists.”

“There is no left national agenda to guide any elected officials, though municipalities from Santa Monica and San Francisco to New York are better served and activists clearer about housing, health care, wages and other local needs.”

…

“Holding to a “socialist politics” without putting any forward means acting like émigrés in your own country, when the truth is there is no socialist politics, principled or otherwise, unless you make it so.”

I think these rebukes are well taken. Shalom’s piece is not as harsh, but the message is similar. He also thoughtfully addresses the “worse the better” claim that Bush may be the lesser evil because he is overstretching the empire. Both pieces are of value because they start from where we actually are, and deal with the actual balance of forces that we are facing in North America, without sacrificing principles.

Some more loathsome and fearful news on the Canadian elections. Harper’s conservatives were leading in the polls but now, apparently, the Liberals and Conservatives are ‘neck and neck’ in a ‘nail biting tug of war’.

The Conservatives tried to exploit a brutal murder of a child in Toronto by claiming the Liberals are soft on child pornography (the murderer said he was motivated to rape and kill the child because of child pornography). My own reaction is to think the Conservatives are defiling the child’s memory by exploiting her brutal murder for electoral ends. But ‘conservatives’ like these are adept at making such vile acts work for them.

Michael Moore told Canadians not to vote for Harper, saying as so many of us have been saying that it would be a tragedy for Canada to move in that direction as the rest of the world is trying to move away from that direction. I don’t share Michael Moore’s rosy view of Canada, but I have traveled enough in both countries and have had enough American friends visit me here to understand how he can feel a difference he doesn’t want to lose.

Moore’s analysis of the Canadian political situation isn’t far off though. Witness the fear of the Conservatives:

“I hope this doesn’t happen. Bush is going to throw a party (after the Canadian election). He’s going to be a happy man. (Harper) has a big pair of scissors in his hand. He wants to snip away at your social safety net. He’d like this to be the 51st State.”

And the loathing of the Liberals:

“They moved to the right (under Martin), which then validated the right.”

He wants his film (coming out on the 25th) to influence the election (on the 28th)

“Moore said the distributors here originally thought of delaying the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 until after the Canadian federal election, to avoid influencing the outcome — even though the film makes almost no mention of Canada.”

“And I said, no, no, no. Even if it’s just four days before the election, you’ve got to get something out there to inspire people to do the right thing here.

“This movie should say to Canadians, you want to join the Coalition of the Willing? Get ready to send your kids over to die for nothing, so that Bush’s buddies can line their pockets.””

There was a period a few months ago when there were many alternative and decent journalists in Iraq: Dahr Jamail (who is still there), Rahul Mahajan, Andrea Schmidt, Naomi Klein, and others. This coincided with the US invasion of Fallujah and a tremendous amount of news coverage of Iraq everywhere. Today though, there isn’t as much coverage of what’s going on. Alternative media (notably Dahr) are still there, there are still reports coming out on Iraq, but somehow, it isn’t dominating the news. And yet it seems like there is as much happening there as ever. The body count has certainly not abated, as the insurgents mount bombing attacks and the US forces continue to slaughter their way through civilian areas, including Fallujah.

Things seem to be happening in Afghanistan, a place that never made much news even when it was being invaded by the US and can hardly make news now that it’s only occupied, starving, and has insurgents making moves against the occupiers.

The last non-news item is Israel/Palestine, which is going through one of those periods of ‘calm’ when only Palestinians are being killed. There is a compilation of assassinations of Palestinians by Israel for September to April. The Israelis killed another two people, ‘suspected militants’ as the saying goes, in Nablus in an assassination with a car bomb on June 15. I read somewhere that the Israeli secret service conducted an assassination in Jenin earlier this week as well, though I haven’t been able to track down the source.

Showing their deep concern about armed factions in Haiti Canadians under the US mission in Haiti kicked down another Haitian door, this time of Dany Toussaint, a politician, and recovering some weapons.

Maybe they’ll do something about the heavy weapons the coup makers got in order to overthrow Aristide’s regime a few months back. Oh — wait — where did those weapons come from again? Hmmm… Stan Goff has some ideas.

In other Haitian door kicking news, ZNet’s posted an article by Haiti Action activists on the raid on the mayor of Milo by the UN troops, blogged here previously. Between these and the arrest of Lavalas activist and grandmother Annette Auguste, the UN is compiling an impressive record of raiding.

No doubt Haitians are feeling very safe.

Technicality: the troops conducting the raid on Dany Toussaint were Canadian, and none of the Canadian politicians said anything about it, so this will serve as the Fear and Loathing Report today.

Note 2: I just got a note from Justin Felux, who has written very good stuff on Haiti for ZNet (take a look at it on ZNet’s Haiti Watch) about the victim of this raid. It seems that the UN’s raids on So Anne and Mayor Moise were different from this one…

———-

Justin,

Dany Toussaint is a thug that has probably been an asset of the CIA for a long time. Haiti would be better off if those Canadian troops had shot him. While Toussaint has pretended to be a supporter of Lavalas since the 1991 coup, he has shown his true colors over the past few years.

In the 1980s he received training at the SOA and was a member of the hated Haitian military. When Washington restored Aristide in 1994, they were pushing Toussaint as one of Haiti’s new leaders. They clearly saw him as someone that would be useful to them in the future. The CIA made several overtures toward him in the late 1990s.

Toussaint was behind the murder of journalist Jean Dominique, and his gangs have been stirring up trouble in Port-au-prince for years now. This has all resulted in a lot of chaos and destabilization, as well as a fracturing of Lavalas, which is probably what it was designed to do.

Since then Toussaint has openly aligned himself with the opposition and has a close working relationship with Guy Philippe.

Open up markets or else. This is often the ultimatum governments of developing countries are given as they try to find a way out of severe poverty and economic stagnation. This “development” is anything but and has always come at a very very costly human price: death, displacement and deeper poverty. This is to say nothing of the real agendas motivating the U.S. and other industrialized countries to promote this form of gun-point development.

This week, Ecuador’s congress sent out a message that it will not give in to such outside pressures as it seeks to develop. On June 16, it rejected proposed legislation to open up government-owned oil fields in the Amazon to foreign oil companies. President Lucio Gutierrez, who came to office on a left platform, pushed to open up the oil fields for nearly two years in reaction to an IMF mandate stating that without such “reforms” of the oil sector, the agency would withhold $120 million in “aid.”

Among the international oil companies who pushed hard for the “reforms” were Occidental Petroleum of the U.S., Canada’s EnCana Corp., Brazil’s Petroleo Brasileiro and Spanish-Argentine giant Repsol – all of which would have gained supremely had the fields been opened up. The dismissal of the legislation came as a shock to foreign investors, who are used to getting their way when it comes to matters of “development.” Any subscription-free links to this fascinating story would be much-appreciated.

One last thought: Perhaps the country’s dealings with the deadly legacy ChevronTexaco left behind prompted the congressional vote this week.

From two days ago, a piece by Greg Philo containing excerpts and summary from a book of the same name, Bad News from Israel, is just a must-read. The degree to which people are deliberately propagandized in the West on this issue is amazing, and this is the first book that systematically studies the process. Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle tears the arguments apart, and is equally indispensable, but the work of Philo et al. has a different program and does it very well. Read the essay, get the book.

What else in West Asia? It seems another Palestinian Prime Minister has bitten the dust, or wants to, anyway. It’s hard to know what a Palestinian PM can really do, hard not to understand why successive ones keep resigning. The only mystery is that they can still find people to take the job. Someone at IMEMC has taken the trouble to do a body count in one town in Gaza over the past two weeks: 13 dead, 82 wounded. I have a picture from the same town of the aftermath of Israel’s war against oranges in the region. There was also another assassination of a high-profile Palestinian leader in Jenin.

In the realm of speculation, there is a chilling line from Fisk’s latest article on ‘the war on learning’ in Iraq. The article begins:

“The Mongols stained the Tigris black with the ink of the Iraqi books they destroyed. Today’s Mongols prefer to destroy the Iraqi teachers of books.

“Since the Anglo-American invasion, they have murdered at least 13 academics at the University of Baghdad alone and countless others across Iraq. History professors, deans of college and Arabic tutors have all fallen victim to the war on learning. Only six weeks ago – virtually unreported, of course – the female dean of the college of law in Mosul was beheaded in her bed, along with her husband.”

Fisk recalls the strange and still unexplained looting of the museums in Baghdad. Here’s the really chilling part.

“Other university staff suspect that there is a campaign to strip Iraq of its academics, to complete the destruction of Iraq’s cultural identity which began with the destruction of the Baghdad Koranic library, the national archives and the looting of the archaeological museum when the American army entered Baghdad.

“Maybe the Kuwaitis want to take their revenge for what we did to them in 1991,” a lecturer said. “Maybe the Israelis are trying to make sure that we can never have an intellectual infrastructure here.”

If you haven’t seen Zeynep Toufe’s blog this morning, you should. The image will make your blood boil.

Also read Dahr Jamail’s latest blog entry for more on the unfolding atrocity in Iraq.

Naomi Klein had a good piece in the Globe and Mail about the international consequences of a Conservative victory yesterday. It was similar to what I wrote in this blog about a week ago. Canadians should read it, carefully. Here’s a quote — not the most moving in it, but a good summary quote:

It is a privilege not to be hated for your nationality, and we should not relinquish it lightly. George Bush has denied that privilege to his own people, and Stephen Harper would cavalierly strip it from Canadians by erasing what few small but important differences remain between Canadian and U.S. foreign policy. The danger posed by this act is not just about whether Canadians are safe when we travel to the Middle East. The hatred that Mr. Bush is manufacturing there, for the United States and its coalition partners, is already following the soldiers home.…

The hawks in Washington like to paint Canada as a freeloader, mooching off their expensive military protection, the continent’s weak link on terrorism. The truth is that around the world, it is blind government complicity with U.S. foreign policy, precisely the kind of complicity advocated by Mr. Harper, that is putting civilians in the line of terror. It is the United States that is the weak link.

I have often wondered about the maxim that “a people gets the government they deserve.” In the third world that ought to be modified to something like: “a people gets the government the United States installs or the murderous criminals the United States uses to try to overthrow the government the people wanted or never even wanted in the first place because it too had been installed by the United States or some previous imperial power.” But in the first world there really are choices — constrained ones, for many, but there are choices. It is usually other people who suffer the most for the choices first worlders make, but it does seem that Canadians are about to make a truly conscious choice to “relinquish the privilege of not being hated for their nationality”, to say nothing of other privileges won in decades of struggle. One of the most repugnant phrases in the whole televised debate series was seeing these politicians ask each other: “Will you take no responsibility for that, sir?” Out of their mouths, it seemed rather ridiculous.

And yet. It seems to me that Canadians have more choices than most people in this world. So maybe we should ask each other. “Will you take no responsibility for that, sir?”