A political error, logged for the record

Unsure of what the appropriate forum is for what was essentially a personal political error, I thought I should put it here in my blog, as sort of a public apology. The error I made has to do with this petition:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/no_way_us-colombia_fta/

A very good group of activists from Colombia and the US put this together to try to build support against the terrible Colombia-US-FTA. As a member of Pueblos en Camino, I sometimes send bulletins of information about Colombia or what we’re doing or our counterparts in Colombia. In this case, my co-collective member Manuel had already circulated the petition and wanted me to circulate it again along with various other pieces of info about Colombian President Uribe’s visit to the US.

The error comes here. There were a couple of paragraphs in the petition that one of our readers pointed out to me the first time we circulated it, and when I read them I also didn’t like them:

The FTA would result, like other treaties with Mexico and Central America, in increased unauthorized migration to the United States. NAFTA has been a disaster for Mexican farmers. It has driven many of them off the land, into the cities and northward to the United States in search of employment and income. If the Colombia FTA passes, we can expect more undocumented migrants.

The FTA would result in more unemployment among U.S. workers and pressure to lower wages in this country. Our workers would be exposed to competition with a labor market that is notorious for its extensive labor and human rights violations. U.S. workers are struggling for a living wage, and this would be a setback in that struggle.

What I should have done was sent the petition around, and afterwards, made some comment or reaction available to its authors. Instead, when I sent the petition, I added the following text before it:

“The petition for the US Congress – a flawed petition, as some of our readers have noted, making various concessions to US politics
– but one that makes some good points and had participation from Colombian activists in its preparation.”

I should not have done this. Manuel’s summary of this error was as follows, and I think he was completely right.

“What I think is a mistake is to qualify the petition-letter as flawed without presenting the reasons for this qualification as an opinion of two people, particularly when this letter is the product of a long and participatory process by many people who are part of the Mingas effort. From my perspective, the letter should have been circulated and included without comments, quoting the source, and the opinions and reactions to it signed and circulated as reactions to the letter. I am afraid that the comment “flawed” qualifies the letter from the editorial perspective of En Camino, which is, in fact not real and unfair to it.”

What were my reasons? Here is what I wrote when asked:

“[The other reader] pointed out that describing “unauthorized migration to the US” as a problem is a kind of concession to anti-immigrant sentiment that views migrants as a “problem” rather than a part of the US economy that serves elite interests. Similarly the argument that FTA would result in a setback for labor rights in the US could be viewed as a concession to privileging US workers, and to the notion that Colombian workers and US workers are intrinsically in competition (I’m not actually sure they are, if you did a sector-based economic analysis).”

But those reasons should have been offered to the authors first, without publicly calling the petition “flawed”. That was unfair and it did allow me to trump the views of all of the activists who worked hard to put this petition together. To them, I apologize.

Another round of climate denial

Two blogs ago I was expressing incredulity that the Dominion would provide a forum for climate denial in the form of Denis Rancourt, who has a good reputation as an activist but whose essays on the climate are preposterous. According to Rancourt’s blog, Rancourt has recently inspired sociologist and activist David Noble to tackle the climate issue in an essay that basically calls George Monbiot a dupe for his deference to politicized science. I find this all rather depressing. Rancourt and Noble’s anti-science arguments seem to me to leave people without any standard for evaluating arguments. I like science because the idea of science is that there is much about the world that can be understood, and that anyone can figure out how something works, it is a matter of time and effort. If it’s all politicized, then perhaps we can just cherry pick those scientific (or pseudoscientific) arguments that suit us and leave the rest. Certainly that is what Rancourt’s essay does, and that is also what Alexander Cockburn’s recent piece on the topic does – indeed, it relies on the same claims. Cockburn’s piece, like Rancourt’s, didn’t pass peer review at any (politicized) scientific journal, but it did get past the editors of ZNet, where I work. I did not think it should have, but I only saw it after the fact. In any case we asked George Monbiot to reply, which he did very effectively. So did some climate scientists, at the excellent site realclimate.org . It’s a bit of an embarrassment that long-discredited arguments are being trotted out by really respected leftists. I suppose it’s because it was Gore, rather than someone with a more decent record, who raised the profile of the issue. But this is one aspect of left behaviour I don’t agree with. It’s as if because the dems or the establishment say something, it’s automatically false. But I guess that’s a corollary of there being no factual matters and everything being political – no need to evaluate claims, if they’re coming from people with bad politics…

The recently-breaking (5-year old) Harper Afghan detainee abuse scandal

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have been reporting on the torture of detainees of the “war on terror” since about 2002. There are plenty of specific reports of people dying in detention, people being tortured to death, and so on. Some of that is documented in “Bleeding Afghanistan”, the book written by my friends Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls.

Continue reading “The recently-breaking (5-year old) Harper Afghan detainee abuse scandal”

Climate change denial, in thin leftist wrapping paper

I just read (briefly) an interview with Denis Rancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa who claims climate change is not happening and that talk of climate change serves oil companies. My quick reaction is that this is like Michael Deibert on Haiti or Irshad Manji on Israel/Palestine and terror – reactionary politics wrapped up in some thin progressive language to either dupe or confuse leftists who would otherwise be the most solid advocates of progress (or decent survival). It will take more looking into his work to know the details, but I find his explanation for lay people unconvincing:

“I argue that there is no reliable evidence that the global average Earth surface temperature has increased in recent decades. I argue this by making a critique of how such trends are extracted, inferred and extrapolated from incomplete and artifact-laden data. I explain melting glaciers and receding permafrost as more probably arising from radiative mechanisms, linked to particulate pollution, land use/cover changes, and solar variations, rather than global warming. And I argue that atmospheric CO2 does not control climate, but is at best a witness of global changes. These arguments are technical but I have tried to present them as simply and clearly as possible in the article.

Radiative mechanisms, land/use cover changes, and solar variations – rather than global warming? And that the ice isn’t melting because of increases in temperature? Science advances through counterintuitive results, but that doesn’t make counterintuitive results true.

“More importantly, I argue that the real threat (the most destructive force on the planet) is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might and that you cannot control a monster by asking it not to shit as much. I argue that non-democratic control of the economy and institutionalized exploitation of the Third World (and all workers) must be confronted directly if we are to install sanity.”

This is a nonsequitur. It gets into political strategy, and what he says here is partly obvious and partly dubious (since no one serious is really saying what he is arguing against), but in any case has nothing to do with climate change or his claims about why the ice sheets are melting or that the average temperature has not increased.

Monbiot’s book, Heat, opens with four questions:

1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?
2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide raise the average global temperature?
3. Will this influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?
4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?

To get the answers they have liked to these questions, the denial industry has had to pay PR people to falsify scientific claims to set progress back a decade. Now someone like Rancourt comes along and answers them negatively, dismissing climate scientists as “political” and “consensus-driven” but from the left, instead of from the right. I suppose the timing was ripe for something like this, but I truly hope that people do not get fooled.

Two more books (with good titles)

“American Fascists” by Chris Hedges. A couple of little things annoyed me – like his tossing Hamas in with other fascist groups. But overall a very good and very scary book, whose title is descriptive. A good sequel to “what’s the matter with kansas” by Thomas Frank, and things have advanced since then. The main thing that I like is that he doesn’t advocate dialogue and recognizes that these people have to be fought. They have contempt for us, and there’s nothing to be gained by tolerating them.

“The Failure of Political Islam” by Olivier Roy. This is no anti-imperialist as far as I could tell, but some interesting stuff. Good title, anyway. Roy has an interesting argument: that as a political movement Islamism is based on reforming the individual, and because it’s based on reforming the individual it doesn’t develop comprehensive programs for transforming society, which limits it. It has gotten somewhere because of the failure of previous ideologies, nationalism, secularism, and socialism, but it too has failed, leaving the third world in an unresolved crisis. Fits with Vijay Prashad’s book’s idea about how the fall of the third world idea left the poor countries without a way out of their crisis. Vijay Prashad’s sequel, “Poorer Nations: A People’s History of the Global South”, promises to be a bit bleaker than his latest book…

Reading List

I have been reading books lately, and they’ve been great. Some environmental reading and some political reading. I’ll be reviewing some of the political ones, soon. Here’s the list.

-The Humanure Handbook by JC Jenkins. I have been reading about water issues and about things like the treatment wetlands and living machines developed by John and Nancy Jack Todd and written about in their popular recent book, “A Safe and Sustainable World” (also a recent read). But there is an alternative, JC Jenkins suggests, to trying to treat shit that’s in water – and that is to not put it there in the first place. To practice what Jenkins advocates you need some space – a backyard of your own, at least, and perhaps a garden for use of the compost. But by using thermophilic composting, using ample amounts of sawdust and other organic material, pathogens are removed and nasty odors dealt with, and the end product is good, non-toxic, non-dangerous compost. Doing this kind of thing in a city would require a public system, but more importantly it would require a change in attitudes, which leads us to the next book.

-Heat, by George Monbiot. An absolute must read for everybody. Everybody who saw ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and found Gore’s final lines about political will being a renewable resource insufficient is ready for Monbiot. Monbiot shows decisively that Kyoto is too weak and will not stabilize the atmosphere. Instead we need a 90% cut in emissions by 2030. Next he shows how this could be done, evaluating proposals for political as well as technical feasibility. This book is a major contribution to humanity. If we’re actually doomed, it won’t be thanks to George.

-Darker Nations, by Vijay Prashad. The word ‘beautiful’ applies. Vijay Prashad is someone whose books I always learn from and who always sends me thinking in interesting directions. He also always impresses me with how big he thinks too. It’s always the whole world, though that doesn’t mean he ever misses any details. He’s building a really stellar body of work and “Darker Nations” is an incredible contribution. It’s ‘a people’s history of the third world’, by which he doesn’t mean the history of all of the places (though he provides an impressive amount of that) but rather a history of the idea of the ‘third world’: independent, nonaligned, secular, socialist, nationalism. He traces the rise and fall of this idea and this movement, and he does so using a brilliant structure. Each chapter is the name of a city, usually a city where an important third world meeting took place, and he uses each chapter to delve into the politics of the time, as well as of the place.

-Holding the Bully’s Coat, by Linda McQuaig. A long overdue book about the recent changes in Canada’s foreign policy and our craven elites. McQuaig sees through the deceptions and she has both a wit and an indignation that is really refreshing. Especially after reading someone like George Monbiot, with his constant understatement, or Vijay, whose depth of analysis can make you feel like things couldn’t have gone any other way, it’s nice to read Linda and remember that this is actually an appalling situation and it shouldn’t be! I’m not done her book yet – in fact I think I’ll be going back to it tonight.

-I’ve also been reading some of the people Linda critiques in her book: JL Granatstein (Whose War Is It?), Andrew Cohen (While Canada Slept), Sean Maloney (Enduring the Freedom), David Bercuson (a book a year). They can make for demoralizing reading, so it’s especially nice to read Linda’s critiques.

-Anna Politkovskaya on Russia’s war on Chechnya. A friend recommended her to me and I picked up her book, which was very good. She was clearly a person of tremendous integrity and conscience. Amira Hass is the best comparison that comes to my mind.

Next to Politkovskaya in the library was the amoral and always useful analysis of the RAND Corporation, so I picked that up as well. Why should Americans read about Russia in Chechnya, the book asks? Because Americas enemies will look more like the Chechens than the Russians, and better that we learn from their mistakes than make our own, the book answers. RAND’s book came out a year or two before 2003.

The Thermopylae Psyop

First, I admit I loved the movie. Compelling characters, spectacular visuals, impressive choreography, good dialogue – including lots from the historical record. But it’s the kind of movie where the better the movie, the worse it is. But this isn’t a review of the movie 300. It’s not a take on its historical inaccuracies, which was beautifully done by a classics professor at the University of Toronto – with a very clever title (“Sparta? No. This is madness”)

Ephraim Lytle notes the following, worth reproducing in detail:


History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing… (snip)

And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan “freedom.” By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots… (snip)

300’s Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan’s education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb “to Spartanize” meant “to bugger.” In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.

This touches on 300’s most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded, this contingent flees. In Herodotus’ time there were various accounts of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained, fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.

No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300’s vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.

Now I know what you’re going to say. It’s just a movie, get over it. But Frank Miller, who wrote the 300 comic, and the filmmakers, who rendered it faithfully, didn’t make 300 the story of the heroes of Gondor fighting the orcs of Mordor. They used ‘Spartans’ and ‘Persians’ – they used history, where they chose to, and they departed from history where they chose to, and if you want to use history then you had better be prepared to answer for historical inaccuracy. If it were a monster movie or fantasy, it would have been good. Although even then, the racial imagery (handsome white heroes killing huge numbers of depraved and monstrous black villains) would have gotten obnoxious at times, as it did in the Lord of the Rings films.

But the fantasy author, Guy Kay, who uses history in his work but does change the names so that he doesn’t have to be constrained by the history, wrote about this problem more effectively than me, in his criticism of the Mel Gibson movie about the American Revolution, the Patriot. In that movie, Gibson has an English military person round up Americans and burn them in a church – an atrocity committed by the Nazis (and probably – though Kay doesn’t talk about it – by any number of British and American and Spanish colonists in the Americas against indigenous people and african slaves) but not committed by the English against the American colonists. Kay describes a press conference at which Gibson was confronted with the invention of this atrocity for the film, also worth reproducing at length I think:


Mel Gibson offered a blunter and more effective rejoinder. ‘Lighten up.’ he essentially told the assembled and outraged scribes, ‘It’s just a movie.’

Sounds reasonable. Why should we expect accuracy from Hollywood? From any segment of pop culture? Since when are the movies or television or romance thrillers held to any standards of truth?

Well, it seems to me a good question, not a rhetorical one.

Why are they not held to such standards? Why are these frothy little summer entertainments ($100 million dollars worth) deemed immune, as Gibson suggests they should be, to allegations that they are lies? Insidious ones. Lies that erase and obliterate for huge numbers of people any vaguely accurate notion of events, or that diminish the terrible reality of a 20th century atrocity by making it seem to audiences that it was the sort of thing that also happened in an entirely different kind of war…
(snip)

I am deeply aware that ‘truth’ in history (or, indeed, in contemporary events) is elusive. That history is written by the winners, that past events may be seen in widely differing lights. That appalling things have been done over the centuries, by Huns, Vikings, Mongols, Conquistadors, warriors in so many holy wars … That we cannot always know what is really the truth.

We can know, however, what is a lie. The English did not perform a Gestapo church burning of innocents two hundred years ago… No such action was ever taken. Nothing even close to it occurred.

Nor, it seems to me, should we so mildly accept the ‘just a movie’ retort. The implied premise of this is: everyone knows it isn’t true, it is just for fun. The film industry seems to want it both ways. On the one hand they claim (with cause) to exert a hugely potent influence on the mores and thinking of our culture. On the other, whenever they are taxed with abusing that role, they retreat into ‘it’s just a movie.’ Why should popular entertainment be granted free rein to distort and mangle? Have we so completely accepted that our society will play fast-and-loose with such things? Is it our indifference that creates the climate for this? If so, might it not be time to reconsider such indifference?

I really like Kay – he’s one of my favourite novelists – he’s also thoroughly eurocentric. To find an atrocity comparable to what’s depicted in the film, he doesn’t look at what the Americans were doing to Indians all around in that same time period, but at what the Nazis did to the French. But his points and his questions are valid, important, and relevant to 300.

History is used to make points about the present. The target audience for 300 is young north american males – the cannon fodder of the war on terror. This movie has numerous messages, some of them subtle, some of them not subtle.

The subtle ones relate to the racial and sexual imagery. Heroism is manly and straight. Cowardice is effeminate and gay, and historical accuracy be damned if it conflicts (All the evidence suggests Xerxes was a bearded, average height, fairly austere dressing emperor, not a naked giant who wore nothing but gold jewelry and wanted to give Leonidas a massage). Heroism is white, cowardice is brown and black, and historical accuracy be damned (I don’t see any reason the Spartans would have been lighter-skinnned than the Persians, though I could be missing something. They seem to have chosen Africans to play Persians – or paint white people black – and men and women from the British Isles to play the Greeks). Heroism is about killing large numbers of inferior opponents. The point of life is glory, and a glorious death. Military people can be trusted, but others cannot (and indeed, politicians who argue for peace are probably paid by the other side and will rape your strong and capable but also somehow helpless and vulnerable wife while you are out fighting, though she will prove her strength and honor once again by killing the rapist).

The less subtle ones also involve distortions of history. The battle of Thermopylae didn’t buy Greece extra time they needed to organize politically for war. Thermopylae is presented as, basically, a psychological operation at which a small number of spartan forces took a symbolic action in order to increase the will to fight among the target of the psyop, the Greek population. In fact it was futile – as Lytle points out, the real battle was won at sea, by other Greek forces, and the final battle was won a year later. And there’s a message too – that you have to take a stand, fight and die, no matter whether there is a point to it or not. Or maybe the notion is that it’s not for you, young man, to decide what the point is – that will be decided by people who know better.

300 depicts Thermopylae as a psyop, and maybe 300 could be seen that way too. We have the 300 ‘free’ men (okay there were 7000 and they were slavers) fighting for democracy (ahem) a million Persians (okay there were not close to a million and they were no worse slavers than the greeks) – is this also to build the will to fight? Are we the target? Persia is Iran, after all. And if you search ‘criticism of 300 Iran’, you will get lots of angry Americans writing about how stupid Iranians are for getting so upset – don’t they get that it’s just a movie? The backlash to the backlash, which I suppose is, these days, as predictable as the original backlash or the precipitating incident (a movie like 300… or some cartoons of the prophet Mohammad, perhaps?)

But then again, maybe I should just get over it. It’s just a movie, after all.

Tanya Reinhart

I received news that Tanya Reinhart died suddenly in New York. She was always one of my guides on Israel/Palestine. When I went there in 2002 she was very helpful to me, personally, and I only didn’t get to visit her in person because I fell sick. It is far too soon for her to be gone – we all needed her for a lot more years.

Here’s her university page

Her wikipedia page

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