Category: Antiwar writings

Hi folks. This is not a substantive post. I wanted to explain my absence and a few things that I hope to do here in the next few days.

I have had a few weeks in a row that have been busy, one of which is well worth writing about here (the others are not for this blog). The week in question is Oct 25-Nov 1, the week of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, which was an amazing experience. I will do a detailed review here.

Much has been happening in Colombia as well that I need to report on. President Uribe met with the indigenous who’d been mobilizing, but didn’t listen and missed the point. He fired some military personnel who’d been involved in shooting civilians, and General Montoya – the very general who planned the operation that freed Ingrid Betancourt – stepped down amid scandals. These are important events that aren’t getting much attention, like the election night invasion of Gaza that the Israelis conducted.

On the election, I’ll also see if I have anything to add to the unbelievable flood of material. One of the most forwarded pieces I have written was one I wrote just after the 2004 election called “the morning after”. The point of that one was something that my friend Robert Jensen would argue in Pakistan sometimes. People would say, “it’s not the American people we have a problem with, it’s the government”. Jensen would point out that the government isn’t a dictatorship and the people have responsibility, to the degree that they have power, which is to some degree. So, if the 2004 election was cause for despair, even though the election didn’t change the structure of power within the US or between the US and the rest of the world, then perhaps the 2008 election is cause for – don’t make me say it, please. I can say that I couldn’t disagree more with Mickey Z. He mocks leftists for trying to be strategic (I think they should be). He mocks the idea that leftists can pressure Democratic administrations based on a list of bad things that Democrats did (that doesn’t prove an absence of pressure, Mickey, just that there wasn’t enough pressure or that it was canceled out by stronger pressures). He mocks liberal shows like Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s (I think these shows made a big difference in the past few years and positive influences on the culture in various ways). Since I’ve said more than once that I don’t really think there’s something called “the left” in North America, I don’t think it’s fair game to mock that entity – I would rather think through some suggestions about how to bring such an entity into existence than read mockery of something that doesn’t exist (and needs to).

More writing (actual articles) soon…

Howard Zinn reviewed a book by elin o’Hara slavick called “bomb after bomb”. At the end of the review he mentions some of his thoughts on war. I think they are very good and bear repeating.

**

My own reflections on my experiences as a bombardier, and my research on the wars of the United States have led me to certain conclusions about war and the dropping of bombs that accompany modern warfare.

One: The means of waging war (demolition bombs, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, nuclear weapons, napalm) have become so horrendous in their effects on human beings that no political end– however laudable, the existence of no enemy — however vicious, can justify war.

Two: The horrors of the means are certain, the achievement of the ends always uncertain.

Three: When you bomb a country ruled by a tyrant, you kill the victims of the tyrant.

Four: War poisons the soul of everyone who engages in it, so that the most ordinary of people become capable of terrible acts.

Five:Since the ratio of civilian deaths to military deaths in war has risen sharply with each subsequent war of the past century (10% civilian deaths in World War I,50% in World War II, 70% in Vietnam, 80-90% in Afghanistan and Iraq) and since a significant percentage of these civilians are children, then war is inevitably a war against children.

Six: We cannot claim that there is a moral distinction between a government which bombs and kills innocent people and a terrorist organization which does the same. The argument is made that deaths in the first case are accidental, while in the second case they are deliberate. However, it does not matter that the pilot dropping the bombs does not “intend” to kill innocent people — that he does so is inevitable, for it is the nature of bombing to be indiscriminate. Even if the bombing equipment is so sophisticated that the pilot can target a house, a vehicle, there is never certainty about who is in the house or who is in the vehicle.

Seven: War, and the bombing that accompanies war, are the ultimate terrorism, for governments can command means of destruction on a far greater scale than any terrorist group.

These considerations lead me to conclude that if we care about human life, about justice, about the equal right of all children to exist, we must, in defiance of whatever we are told by those in authority, pledge ourselves to oppose all wars.

**

Despite not being a dispassionate reviewer, I wrote this review of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. In case you didn’t know, I’m not entirely without positive bias. And even with high expectations, the book really impressed. It seems to be doing quite well without my recommendation, but I would like to add my recommendation to the many that are out there. Hope you like the review.

http://www.zcommunications.org/through-the-lens-of-the-shock-doctrine-by-justin-podur

Review of:

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Random House, Toronto, 2007.

I’ve been seeing the shock doctrine at work my whole political life without knowing it, it seems. Like Naomi Klein, I was born in the 1970s, which she dates as the doctrine’s beginnings. I had just finished high school when my province, the Canadian province of Ontario, elected a mini-shock doctrine government that engaged in what Naomi Klein calls the three planks of the economic aspect of shock, the Chicago School, Milton Friedman approach: privatization, deregulation, cuts to social programs and protections.

Later, I saw the shock doctrine – and people fighting it – in Chiapas, where, in 2000, the Zapatista communities were ringed with tens of thousands of soldiers, who would constantly, visibly drive around their communities in displays of force, on trucks and jeeps bristling with soldiers with weapons drawn. I saw it again in Colombia in 2001, in paramilitary-controlled Putumayo, where a series of spectacular massacres had brought peasants under the control of the government and paramilitaries and shocked them into forced acceptance of the poisoning of their lands by aerial fumigation.

Then, again, in Palestine in 2002, I witnessed the most carefully calibrated shock, to terrorize children and parents with tanks and bulldozers and bullets. A friend, a reporter, traveling into Gaza recently described entering through a long, pitch black tunnel. He was being watched, he knew, but he could see nothing, for dozens of meters as he walked along in sensory deprivation. Gaza itself has lived sensory deprivation on a massive scale, since Israeli warplanes destroyed its power plant last year. Two planes, this same reporter was told, flew one run, fired their missiles, circled back, fired again to make sure. Palestinian emergency crews rushing to the scene were intercepted by American-made Israeli helicopters and turned back. An Israeli torturer told a Palestinian child prisoner: “Your world looks big now, but I will put this hood over your head and then your world will become very small, and then we will talk again.” (See the book “Stolen Youth” for more information on Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children).

In Haiti in 2005, I saw the shock of another coup, designed to look just like a previous shock in 1991, with some of the same players, calibrated again to humiliate and degrade. A military and police force with close training ties to the US and Canada worked with a local elite to destroy a democratic government with a popular base. The coup took place on the bicentennial of the country’s independence, an extra humiliation inflicted on the whole society to add to the physical and political shocks. If in the Southern Cone dictatorships Naomi writes about, electroshock and disappearance were the symbols of torture, in Haiti the weapon was rape. From 1991-1994, the first coup, in addition to high profile massacres and assassinations that killed thousands, paramilitaries used rape repeatedly against political opponents. The same pattern occurred since 2004, with one study by Athena Kolbe and Royce Hutson estimating 35,000 rapes and 8,000 murders under the most recent coup regime.

Before reading the book, I’d understood these conflicts as being about racism and capitalism, the imposition of an economic and social model to benefit a few and all the violence required to force that model down people’s throats. For me, the book took the lens I’d developed and sharpened it immensely, revealing aspects of conflicts and social problems that are hard to make sense of otherwise. Organized chronologically, the book tells the story of the shock doctrine: the idea that violence, or shock, can be used to unmake people, or societies, and rewrite new rules, more favorable to the powerful, on a blank slate. Against that, Naomi advocates for a more real, impure, un-idealized, system: messy democracy, which leads, if people actually have a say, to progressively more economic equality.

To the believers in the shock doctrine, reality, full of real people with preferences of their own and ideas about the common good, is impure. And only violence can restore purity, on which a perfect capitalist solution can be placed. Of course, that capitalist vision is not the mathematical perfection of economics textbooks, but a world of corruption and impunity, in which a few people grow spectacularly wealthy and live above all rules and laws, while others are starved, bombed, tortured, and threatened.

The book made me see everything I’ve seen and done these past few years in a new light. The book does the same for the author’s own journeys. She describes how the book began when she spent about a year in Argentina (around 2003) and saw the echoes of the dictatorship of 1976-83, the lingering effects of the shock that the torture and disappearances of 30,000 people had inflicted on the society. In the years since, she traveled all over Latin America, to South Africa, to tsunami-afflicted Southeast Asia, to occupied Iraq, and to post-Katrina New Orleans.

Where others might have written a travelogue, Naomi’s genius was in seeing, in each of these situations, a different stage in the process of shock and recovery. Argentina was coming out of shock inflicted decades before. South Africans were reeling from economic shock inflicted while they were trying to recover from the many shocks of apartheid, not as far along in the process of recovery. Iraq was the place for experiments in whole new levels of shock, and New Orleans was where the lessons of those experiments were applied. This ability to build a narrative out of what might otherwise be viewed as random or disparate tragedies or horrors, is the true strength of the book. It also happens to be, as she points out, one of the best ways to defend oneself from shock, which depends on surprise.

The book has 7 parts. Part 1 describes the basics of the shock doctrine through the story of Ewen Cameron, a Montreal psychiatrist who carried out experiments on his unwilling patients for the CIA in the 1950s, destroying their personalities with electric shock, sleep and sensory deprivation, and drugs. Cameron is the doctor of physical shock. The economic shock doctor of the book is Milton Friedman and his ‘Chicago Boys’, whose attempts to impose ‘pure’ capitalism on socialist or mixed economies offer a precise analogy to Cameron’s attempts to erase personalities through torture. Cameron’s experiments ended up in torture manuals that guided the destruction of many people’s bodies in poor countries. Friedman’s doctrines ended up in economic policy documents that guided the destruction of these countries’ economies. The first laboratories of the shock doctrine were the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America – Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay (and Indonesia). These laboratories are described in Part 2, along with, in Part 3, a description of how the shock doctrine was adopted in the West, starting with Thatcher’s UK and Reagan’s US.

In Part 4, Naomi illuminates aspects of history that have not had nearly enough attention. China’s Tiananmen square revolt and massacre was as much about the violent imposition of capitalism as it was about the violent suppression of democracy, she shows, citing author Wang Hui’s book China’s New Order. Poland’s working people, like Russia’s, dreamed not of capitalism but of socialist democracy and had those dreams crushed by violence and economic shock therapy. South Africans, after fighting apartheid for decades and setting out their economic vision in a document called the “Freedom Charter”, were out-negotiated by the elite who maintained the economic inequality of apartheid by presenting economic issues as “technical”, and by the US and international financial institutions who threatened them with economic collapse. The Southeast Asian “Tiger” economies were melted down and sold at fire sale prices to American corporations in the context of an entirely manufactured “crisis”.

Parts 5 and 6 establish the book as a solid and important document of a history that is now unfolding. As the victims of economic shock began to recover from the disorientation and organize across national lines in the “anti-globalization movement” that Naomi was a participant and chronicler of, a new and even more devastating series of shocks hit, and were exploited to take disaster capitalism to a new level. 9/11, the Iraq invasion and occupation, the Asian Tsunami, and Katrina are all analyzed here in terms of their use for disaster capitalists.

In Part 7, Naomi uses the same methods she’s used throughout the book – her knowledge and connections to movements in different parts of the world – to show how people are resisting, waking up from shock. This section is much more powerful than a call to arms – it is a report of what people are actually doing. The Brazilian landless peasants’ movement, the Argentine occupied factories, the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela, the shock-weary Lebanese who refused to be goaded into civil war in 2006, the dictatorship-weary Spanish who refused an authoritarian solution to the Madrid bombing in 2004.

In addition to illuminating hidden aspects of recent history and presenting a new way to view them, the “Shock Doctrine” provides a framework for analyzing other times and places. Afghanistan, for example, is a society that has been under continuous shock since 1979: first a 10-year occupation by the USSR, followed by a civil war, followed by the Taliban, followed by a 6-year US/NATO occupation. The result is a country with basically no infrastructure, some of the worst health and nutritional outcomes in the world, total poverty, millions of landmines, and as of this writing, hundreds of people being murdered in a US counterinsurgency war every week. Like they do on much of Africa, the wealthy countries debate not how to stop the shocks, but how to divide up the task of further torturing the country.

Using the shock doctrine to analyze the past, consider that the Nazi military doctrine of “blitzkrieg” was a kind of shock doctrine: air power and a rapid, concentrated, armored push for the enemy capital before a defence could be organized or mounted. This is not at all unlike what Naomi quotes of American “Shock and Awe” doctrine, which is to “seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events… rendering the adversary completely impotent”. Military historian Liddell Hart analyzed WWII in terms of the ratio of space and force. “Blitzkrieg” worked in France, but not in the USSR, where the Nazis were overstretched and ultimately defeated, at a tremendous cost to their victims.

How will the present “shock doctrine” fail? The shock doctrine ideal is of a “hollow state” which, rather than actually doing things, acts as a cash source for corporations which make super-profits but don’t actually deliver the goods in many cases. The hollow state’s “holes” are being filled in Latin America by organized workers and peasants and indigenous movements. These have, in some places, managed to get rid of “shock doctrine” governments and are trying to work out how to move forward. In the Middle East, the holes left by the hollow state – in providing health facilities, schools, security, emergency relief are being filled by religious-based movements like Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Mahdi Army in Baghdad. These movements arose in a context of shock, and won’t easily be shocked out of existence (the Israelis certainly tried in Lebanon in 2006, as did the Americans in Iraq with the ‘surge’). At home, Michael Moore’s “Sicko” reveals as eloquently as Naomi’s chapters on Katrina the hollowness at the core of the American social systems. If an organized movement could fill that hole, and the other holes of the socially collapsing US (as people in New Orleans are trying to do, Naomi reports), it might be possible for us to survive the next shocks that are on the horizon.

A central message of “The Shock Doctrine” is that the power of shock, torture and war is in overwhelming and disorienting their victims, preventing them from seeing the interests and agendas that lie beneath. When she spoke to torture survivors, Naomi found that the ones who understood these political and economic agendas, who could understand the meaning of seemingly senseless and total violence, were better able to cope. Starting with the shock, Naomi skillfully and patiently exposes these filthy agendas, naming names and showing evidence of massive crimes. By doing so, she might help our shocked world cope – and fight – better, as well.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and activist. He can be reached at justin@killingtrain.com

So, today as promised a little discussion of James Ron’s book, “Frontiers and Ghettos”. The book is a comparison of state violence by Serbia in the 1990s and Israel in the 1980s. His argument is that the institutional context (whether the area is a ‘frontier’, where state authority is less intense or disputed, or a ‘ghetto’, where states have uncontested and intense control over people’s lives, what he calls ‘infrastructural control’) has an influence over the intensity of violence states wield. He compares the way Serbia behaved in Bosnia, its frontier, with Muslim-majority areas in Serbia proper, which were ghettos. He acknowledges that Muslims in Serbia proper did not experience wonderful conditions, but shows that the violence unleashed on Bosnia was far worse. Similarly, the things Israel did in Lebanon (frontier) in the 1980s were far more brutal than what Israel did in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza (ghettos), despite the brutality with which the first Palestinian intifada of 1987-9 was crushed.

Overall I found the analysis fascinating and the comparison of Serbia and Israel a very clever one. Given yesterday’s discussion of the blind spots of someone like Barbara Coloroso, who I don’t think would be able to make such a comparison, it’s refreshing to see someone like Ron, who’s a former Human Rights Watch investigator and a McGill academic, make these kinds of connections. He also takes the analysis closer to the present with Israel/Palestine, arguing that the second Intifada has seen the Occupied Territories become a kind of semi-frontier, where Israel unleashes horrific violence while also having extensive control. I believed, and wrote at the time of the Gaza ‘disengagement’, that the idea behind it was to do just that, to turn Gaza into a “frontier” (I didn’t have Ron’s language at the time but if you read what I wrote you’ll see that’s more or less what I was saying) so that Israel could unleash horrific, frontier-level violence on its people. That is, of course, what is happening now. Which brings us back to Coloroso, but let me say one last thing about Ron’s book before we go there. Towards the end Ron also asks if Palestinians in the WB/Gaza could take advantage of their ghetto status to wage a civil rights struggle, a struggle against apartheid and for democracy, rather than a two-state struggle which would simply turn the territories into a frontier targeted for destruction. He then dismisses this possibility because neither Palestinians nor Israelis want it (did white South Africans want apartheid to end?) and ends his book by saying perhaps Israel will one day just decide on ethnic cleansing. Two comments here. First, I don’t think the anti-apartheid struggle can be so quickly dismissed any more. Saying Israel won’t go for it is a capitulation to Israel’s racism, and of course our own racism and contempt for Palestinians, which, if we or Israelis can’t overcome, we’re all doomed anyway. Certainly no decent two-state settlement can occur if we all continue to sink into the ever lower levels of depravity and racism into which we are sinking. And second, it’s worth remembering that history won’t end with a second round of ethnic cleansing, any more than history ended in 1948 with the first round of ethnic cleansing. That doesn’t mean everything shouldn’t be done by people of conscience to try to avert that outcome. It might help avoid that outcome, however, if the racist planners recognized that ethnic cleansing is not a panacea even for their own plans and dreams of solving the “demographic problem”. Instead, it will just add one more atrocity, one more massive refugee population, one more set of implacable enemies and devastated human beings with less and less to lose.

And now back to Barbara. Barbara differentiates between wars and genocides, and uses analogies for both. Wars are like sibling rivalries. In sibling rivalry, negotiation and learning to live together, conflict resolution are the way to solve conflicts. And sibling rivalry on a mass level is war. Solutions to sibling rivalry are like solutions to war. But bullying is different. It has perpetrators and victims and bystanders. It is characterized by contempt and hatred and a massive power imbalance. Bullying on a mass level is genocide.

This made me realize that the metaphors people have about conflicts are part of why they can’t think clearly about them. How many people think of the Israel/Palestine conflict as sibling rivalry, rather than bullying? Probably most. And that impedes understanding, has them looking for negotiated solutions rather than ways to stop the bully and stop being bystanders to the bullying. Same with the Iraq war. Or the Vietnam war. Notice they’re all called wars? When they’re really not wars at all.

Next up, either Alfie and a tour through questions of motivation and rewards, or Alice and a tour of trauma and its effects.

Since I haven’t really followed her work over the past few years, I was a bit annoyed when I heard she had “quit”. Who is she to “quit”, and to do so so publicly, I wondered? War, empire, are filthy, despicable, genocidal affairs. Opposing them is not like a job that one can “quit”, is it? Opposing them, in my view, doesn’t even mean one is deserving of special praise. But then I read her exit note, and found it some of the best and most refreshing reading I have seen in some time.

Continue reading “Cindy Sheehan”