The Rag Blog

PORT ANGELES – Saturday’s peace march was originally expected to include a visit to a symbolic graveyard, with a marker representing each one of the 3,195 U.S. fighters who have died in Iraq in the last four years.

Instead, marchers were greeted with a sign at Valley Creek Estuary Park saying the permit for the crosses and markers of the Arlington Northwest display had been revoked.

“I’m saddened to learn that the township will not allow us to erect the markers,” said Alan Johanson of Port Townsend.

The display – created by Seattle’s Chapter 92 Veterans for Peace, in conjunction with the Evergreen Peace and Justice Community – was planned to be erected Saturday on Front Street, first in Valley Creek Estuary Park, then on private land to the east of the park.

The original permit was issued the first week of March, said Rose Marschall, of the Clallam County Peace Coalition, an organizer of an anti-war protest held Saturday at Veterans Memorial Park, 217 S. Lincoln St.

That permit allowed the display in the park, she said.

On Thursday, the local chapter of the Veterans for Peace – who had invited the Seattle chapter to set up the display in Port Angeles – realized that the land intended for the display was not the city park but rather the privately-owned land just east of it.

The city rescinded the permit for the park.

Nelson Cone, of the Chapter 139 of Veterans for Peace, said Thursday he received permission from the landowner, Harry Dorssers – who lives out of the country, to use the land.

But on Friday, Dorssers rescinded permission, saying he had thought the display would be a tribute but that now he understood it to be a protest.

“Because of an impression given by the newspaper [Peninsula Daily News] that . . . it was a political statement, the principal landowner withdrew support,” Cone told those who attended the rally on Saturday.

The city issued a revised permit on Friday to Cone for use of the pavilion in the park, but it did not allow the placement of anything in the ground, said Bill Sterling, deputy recreation director.

In the second permit, the city cited the sensitivity of the estuary in disallowing the full display of markers there.

Cherie Kidd. a member of the Soroptimist International of Port Angeles-Noon Club had expressed concerns Thursday that the placement of more than 3,000 markers in the ground would harm the estuary area, saying the place was environmentally-fragile.

The club – which raised $1.26 million to build the 2.6-acre park along the western end of Front Street – never took a formal stand on the issue.

FORKS – The first terrorism checkpoint in the Northern Olympic Peninsula has spurred complaints and concerns that are reaching as far as Washington D.C.

U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks’ office received “a number of complaints and inquiries” Friday from constituents in the Forks area, said an aide to the congressman, D-Belfair.

Customs and Border Protection agents manned a roadblock on the southbound lane of U.S. Highway 101 north of Forks on Thursday morning.

They stopped some motorists to ask about their citizenship and birthplace.

The agents detained seven illegal immigrants, taking them to a detention center in Tacoma.

Dicks called Forks Mayor Nedra Reed about the situation, said George Behan, the congressman’s spokesman, on Friday.

Reed said that when Dicks visited Forks a few weeks ago, she told him she wanted him to work on immigration policy.

She told him that a policy that is “workable, viable, and structured” is important “so that people don’t have to live in fear.”

She told him Friday that her primary concern was the way the checkpoint invoked fear within Latinos living in Forks.

“We have worked hard to build relationship with Latino community,” Reed said.

“I do not want to see this action taken by the federal government impact the relationship we’re building.”

Reed said she was assured by the agency that it would provide the Latino community with the seven people’s names, which are typically not made public.

“I was encouraged that the border patrol will let us know who was picked up,” Reed said.

Best use?

Behan said the Congressman “has questioned whether this is the best use of border protection resources.”

Behan said Dicks planned to pass along to Customs and Border Protection some of the comments and concerns he has received.

“If there is a specific terrorist threat or legitimate information suggesting terrorist activity, there could be a cause for this type of search,” Behan said.

“But Customs and Border Protection staff shouldn’t function as immigration enforcement officers,” he added.

When the agency was reached after the checkpoint was taken down Thursday, Robert Kohlman, a field operations supervisor in the agency’s Blaine office, declined to say whether specific information or threats had prompted the checkpoint.

More checkpoints in Clallam County are planned in the coming months.

Just say nothing

Daniel Perez, intake and outreach coordinator, with the Tacoma-based Northwest Immigration Rights Project, said in light of Thursday’s action, he plans to visit Forks and help inform the Latino community.

“People are not obligated to answer immigration official’s question about status,” Perez said.

LONDON, 18 April 2006 — I have just read Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. It is a classic. Published in 1947, it analyses the nature of Japanese culture. Almost 60 years and many books later, it remains a seminal work. Like all great works of scholarship, the book manages to transcend the time and era in which it was written, ageing in certain obvious respects, but retaining much of its insight and relevance. If you want to make sense of Japan, Benedict’s book is as good a place to start as any. Here, though, I am interested in the origins and purpose of the book.

In June 1944, as the American offensive against Japan began to bear fruit, Benedict, a cultural anthropologist, was assigned by the US Office of War Administration to work on a project to try and understand Japan as the US began to contemplate the challenge that would be posed by its defeat, occupation and subsequent administration. Her book is written with a complete absence of judgmental attitude or sense of superiority, which one might expect; she treats Japan’s culture as of equal merit, virtue and logic to that of the US. In other words, its tone and approach could not be more different from the present US attitude toward Iraq or that country’s arrogant and condescending manner toward the rest of the world.

This prompts a deeper question: Has the world, since then, gone backward? Has the effect of globalization been to promote a less respectful and more intolerant attitude in the West, and certainly on the part of the US, toward other cultures, religions and societies? This contradicts the widely held view that globalization has made the world smaller and everyone more knowing. The answer, at least in some respects, is in the affirmative — with untold consequences lying in wait for us. But more of that later; first, why and how has globalization had this effect?

Of course, it can rightly be argued that European colonialism embodied a fundamental intolerance, a belief that the role of European nations was to bring “civilized values” to the natives, wherever they might be. It made no pretence, however, at seeking to make their countries like ours: Their enlightenment, as the colonial attitude would have it, depended on our physical presence. In no instance, for example, were they regarded as suitable for democracy, except where there was racial affinity, with white settler majorities, as in Australia and Canada. In contrast, the underlying assumption with globalization is that the whole world is moving in the same direction, toward the same destination: it is becoming, and should become, more and more like the West.

Where once democracy was not suitable for anyone else, now everyone is required to adopt it, with all its Western-style accoutrements.

In short, globalization has brought with it a new kind of Western hubris — present in Europe in a relatively benign form, manifest in the US in the belligerent manner befitting a superpower: that Western values and arrangements should be those of the world; that they are of universal application and merit. At the heart of globalization is a new kind of intolerance in the West toward other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.

The idea that each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics, its own novelty and uniqueness, born of its own individual struggle over thousands of years to cope with nature and circumstance, has been drowned out by the hue and cry that the world is now one, that the Western model — neoliberal markets, democracy and the rest — is the template for all.

The new attitude is driven by many factors. The emergence of an increasingly globalized market has engendered a belief that we are all consumers now, all of a basically similar identity, with our Big Macs, mobile phones and jeans. In this kind of reductionist thinking, the distance between buying habits and cultural political mores is close to zero: the latter simply follows from the former. Nor is this kind of thinking confined to the business world, even if it remains the heartland. This is also now an integral part of popular common sense, and more resonant and potent as an international language because consumption has become the mass ideology of Western societies. The fact that television and tourism have made the whole world accessible has created the illusion that we enjoy intimate knowledge of other places, when we barely scratch their surface. For the vast majority, the knowledge of Thailand or Sri Lanka acquired through tourism consists of little more than the whereabouts of the beach.

Then there is the phenomenon of Davos Man, the creation of an overwhelmingly Western-weighted global elite, which thinks it knows all about these things because it describes itself as global and rubs shoulders on such occasions with a small number of handpicked outsiders. Nor should we neglect its media concomitant, the commentariat — columnists who wax lyrical on these things even if their knowledge of the world is firmly bounded by the borders of the West. A couple of days at a conference in Egypt, India or Malaysia makes instant experts of them. So is much of modern Western opinion made.

The net effect of all this is a lack of knowledge of and respect for difference. Globalization has obliterated distance, not just physically but also, most dangerously, mentally. It creates the illusion of intimacy when, in fact, the mental distances have changed little. It has concertinaed the world without engendering the necessary respect, recognition and tolerance that must accompany it. Globalization is itself an exemplar of the problem. Goods and capital may move far more freely than ever before, but the movement of labor has barely changed. Jeans may be inanimate, but migrants are the personification of difference. Everywhere, migration is a charged political issue. In the modern era of globalization, everything is allowed to move except people.

After three decades of headlong globalization, the world finds itself in dangerous and uncharted waters. Globalization has fostered the illusion of intimacy while intolerance remains as powerful and unyielding as ever — or rather, has intensified, because the Western expectation is now that everyone should be like us. And when they palpably are not, as in the case of the Islamic world, then a militant intolerance rapidly rises to the surface. The wave of Islamophobia in the West — among the people and the intelligentsia alike — is a classic example of this new intolerance. When I wrote a recent article on the Danish cartoons, arguing that Europe had to learn a new way of relating to the world, I got nearly 400 e-mails in response. Over half of these were negative and many were frightening in their intolerance, especially those from the US, which were often reminiscent in their tone to the worst days of the 1930s.

Twin specters hang over the Middle East of the American imagination — the perceived rise in the geopolitical power of the region’s Shi‘i Muslims and the dark shadow cast by the sectarian reprisals that increasingly propel the Iraqi civil war. In the United States, pundits and Democratic presidential candidates point to the first specter as the ominous unintended consequence of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which, according to what is now conventional wisdom, strengthened majority-Shi‘i Iran at the expense of the US-sponsored order in the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi civil war, meanwhile, is the newest evidence for Americans that conflicts in the Middle East are intractable because they are, at root, religious. Many Americans have turned against the Iraq war not because the invasion was launched on false pretenses or lacked UN approval, but because they now see the well-intentioned US military trapped amidst what Newsweek called “violent sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the two main branches of Islam that have been at odds for centuries.” In Washington, former war supporters like Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD) have taken to calling for “passing the torch to the Iraqis, who are the only ones who can handle this ancient—I’d say primitive—sectarian dispute.”

If nothing else, the notion that a primordial Middle Eastern hatred explains the Iraqi civil war is distressing for its resonance with the canard that Jews, Christians and Muslims have been fighting over the Holy Land since time immemorial. Regular consumers of American news coverage believe that because upon each flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, historical primers inevitably appear in the newspapers to show that the confrontation is infused with religious attachments anchored deep in the past. Such primers are an abuse of history, because they substitute detours through antiquity for excursus of far more relevant contemporary events. Politically, they are pernicious, for they encourage passive public reactions—shrugs at hopeless tribalism or the stunned silence one would evince at a natural disaster. “They will never make peace,” many readers understandably conclude, before flipping to the sports page.

As with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the problem with the religious-sectarian narrative of the Iraqi conflagration is not factual inaccuracy per se. Violence has indeed plagued Sunni-Shi‘i relations from time to time, and several wars have been fought in the name of establishing one sect’s power or another, or at least been so justified by the aggressor. It is sadly true that the Iraqi civil war has a distinctly sectarian cast, and many Iraqis have certainly died or fled their homes simply because they are Sunnis or Shi‘a.

The problem is lack of historical context. Timelines do not tell us what caused outbreaks of “sectarian violence,” and they are especially poor at conveying multiple causes. Nor, crucially, does the existence of doctrinal differences between Sunnism and Shi‘ism teach us anything about the relationship between sect and politics—why and how communal aspects of identity take precedence over others, why and how religious identity becomes “sectarian” or chauvinist, why and how rulers mobilize feelings of communal belonging for political ends. This last point suggests that we search, in contemporary rather than ancient history, for the political moorings of the tenet that sectarian affiliation determines political motivation, and so explains current events.

03/17/07 “ICH” — The first confession released by the Bush regime’s Military Tribunals–that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed–has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato likens Mohammed’s confession to those that emerged in Stalin’s show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s.

That was my own immediate thought. I remember speaking years ago with Soviet dissident Valdimir Bukovsky about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He replied that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process.

That is what Mohammed did. We know he was tortured, because his response to the obligatory question about his treatment during his years of detention is redacted. We also know that he was tortured, because otherwise there is no point for the US Justice (sic) Dept. memos giving the green light to torture or for the Military Commissions Act, which permits torture and death sentence based on confession extracted by torture.

Mohammed’s confession of crimes and plots is so vast that Katherine Shrader of the Associated Press reports that the Americans who extracted Mohammed’s confession do not believe it either. It is exaggerated, say Mohammed’s tormentors, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

In other words, the US torture crew, reveling in their success, played into Mohammed’s hands. Pride goes before a fall, as the saying goes.

Mohammed’s confession admits to 31 planned and actual attacks all over the world, including blowing up the Panama Canal and assassinating presidents Carter and Clinton and the Pope. Having taken responsibility for the whole ball of wax along with everything else that he could imagine, he was the entire show. No other terrorists needed.

Reading responses of BBC listeners to Mohammed’s confession reveals that the rest of the world is either laughing at the US government for being so stupid as to think that anyone anywhere would believe the confession or damning the Bush regime for being like the Gestapo and KGB.

Humorists are having a field day with the confession: “’I’m a very dangerous mastermind,’ said Mohammed, who confessed to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Brink’s robbery, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the Lincoln and McKinley assassinations. Mohammed also accepted responsibility for spreading hay fever and cold sores around the world and for rained out picnics.”

“State of Denial” is the title of Bob Woodward’s famous book on the Bush team’s road to disaster in Iraq, but it would have served just as well for a description of their Latin America policy. This week President Bush heads South for a seven-day, five country, trip to Latin America to see if he can counter the populist political tide that has brought left governments to about half the population of the region.

Carrying vague promises of a joint effort on ethanol production – but no offer to lower tariffs protecting the US market – President Bush hopes to entice Brazil into taking his side against his nemesis, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. This is a fantasy.

President Lula da Silva of Brazil made a point of visiting Venezuela for his first foreign trip after being re-elected last October. There, he presided over the dedication of a $1.2 billion bridge over the Orinoco river, financed by the Brazilian government, while he lavished praise on Chavez and gave the popular Venezuelan president an added boost in his own re- election campaign.

The Bush Administration’s policy of trying to isolate Venezuela from its neighbors has only succeeded in isolating Washington. Last week President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, speaking in Caracas, flatly rejected the notion that Argentina or Brazil should “contain President Chavez,” whom he called “a brother and a friend.” In another thinly-veiled swipe at Washington, Kirchner said: “It cannot be that it bothers anyone that our nations become integrated.” At the same time he announced that Venezuela and Argentina would jointly issue a “Bond of the South” for $1.5 billion.

If Washington is in denial about the political reality of Latin America, it is even more in denial about the economics. For twenty-five years our government has pushed a series of reforms throughout the region: tighter fiscal and monetary policies, more independent central banks, indiscriminate opening to international trade and investment, privatization of public enterprises, and the abandonment of economic development strategies and industrial policies. The Bush team thinks that these reforms, known as “neoliberalism” in Latin America, were just the right formula to stimulate economic growth.

In fact, Latin America’s economic growth over the last 25 years has been a disaster – the worst long-term growth failure in more than a hundred years. From 1980-2000 GDP per person grew by only 9 percent, and another 4 percent for 2000-2005. Compare this to 82 percent for just the two decades from 1960-1980, and it is easy to see why candidates promising new economic policies have been elected (and some re-elected) in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. They also came close to winning in Mexico, Peru, and Costa Rica.

The left governments that have introduced new economic policies have done pretty well: Argentina has grown by a phenomenal 8.6 percent annually for nearly five years, pulling more than 8 million people out of poverty in a country of 36 million. Bolivia has increased government revenue from hydrocarbons by about 6.7 percent of GDP, an amount that would equal $900 billion in the United States, and is using the additional revenue to help its majority poor. Venezuela is also using the government’s increased take of oil production to provide health care, education, and subsidized food for the poor. All of these governments have succeeded by implementing policies that Washington opposed.

President Bush will get a good reception from the right-wing governments he is visiting: his close allies in Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala. Colombia is in the midst of a huge national scandal over the responsibility of government officials for mass murder and assassinations of political opponents. More trade unionists are killed in Colombia each year than in the rest of the world combined. Guatemala is another right- wing ally with a terrible human rights record: two weeks ago, three Central American parlimentarians were murdered by a Guatemalan police death squad. All three governments have been linked to narco-trafficking, but President Bush will likely praise them for their cooperation in the war on drugs.

It’s all about denial. The political and economic changes sweeping Latin America are a serious break with the failed policies of the past. Washington’s influence has collapsed, and is not likely to recover.

[Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC]

[This column was printed by the Contra Costa Times (CA) on Sunday, March 11.]

The radio news magazine “Between The Lines” interviewed Yifat Susskind, communications director with MADRE, an an international women’s human rights organisation based in New York City. Yifat is also author of a report on violence against Iraqi women titled, “Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq.” The report, made public on March 6 at a meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations, exposes what it calls “the incidence, causes, and legalization of gender-based violence in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.”

The situation for Iraqi women since that invasion four years ago has deteriorated dramatically by every measure of daily survival: lack of access to clean water, electricity, food, education and jobs. And, as a result of the absence of personal security, women have virtually disappeared from public life in Iraq – yet their disappearance has been barely noted by media coverage of the war, which is not surprising. Our male dominated societies impose violence on women not just through physical brutality but also in a very silent way that makes womens’ submission almost appear to be natural. Pierre Bourdieu called it ‘a symbolic violence’, “a violence that is hardly noticed, almost invisible for the victims on whom it is perpetrated; a violence which is exercised principally via the purely symbolic channels of communication and knowledge (or, to be accurate, mis-knowledge).” While Iraqi women suffer from rape, torture, abduction and murder, the media, ignoring their plight, exclusively focuses on crazed males on both sides playing deadly war games. And when it counts the dead, it only mentions the combatants; women and children literally are un-accounted for.