Murder is murder

This posting is about universal civil rights and how U.S. citizens must regain respect for international law. The news-media's capacity for double-think (term taken from Orwell’s novel, 1984) is fully developed in 2009. All of us, seem to be able to accept without apparent cognitive dissonance these two events:

1. In Raleigh, North Carolina “Federal authorities are searching for an eighth alleged member of a North Carolina group that authorities say plotted "violent jihad" overseas, prosecutors said Tuesday…. Seven other men have been arrested on charges of supporting terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder abroad" (CNN, 29th of July, 2009). I underline that this plotting is considered to be a crime.

2. “ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The United States conducted two drone missile strikes in Pakistan's South Waziristan region Wednesday, killing at least 45 people, in the latest example of expanded direct American support for Pakistan's military offensive against key Pakistani insurgent leaders” (Saeed Shah, Wed Jul 8, 2009). I understand that this killing is considered acceptable by the U.S. government and new media, even patriotic.

First of all, I want to declare that I believe all assassination to be unlawful, immoral, and inefficient as a method of social control. I do not condone either side. But people’s capacity for choosing sides and saying that the same conduct is OK when “we” do it, but criminal if “they” do it is perplexing to say the least. According to the news sources I have seen and read, if you are Moslem and want to kill people, well, you should be tried and sent to jail, or even killed outright by a drone. But if you are part of the U.S. “war effort”, it's a patriotic thing to do.

In my book, murder is murder, even when the objective is a known criminal. Civil rights is one of democracy’s chief historical conquests: everyone has a right to his/her day in court. Kings and generals do not have the right to “hit” or “put people out” –to use the latest euphemisms for homicide.

In addition to all the killing, another result of all the violence in Pakistan, in which everyone (insurgents, U.S. drone-bombing, and local armed forces) participates, is:

“Pakistan is experiencing its worst refugee crisis since partition from India in 1947, and while the world may be familiar with the tent camps that have rolled out like carpets since its operation against the Taliban started in April, the overwhelming majority of the nearly three million people who have fled live unseen in houses and schools, according to aid agencies” (Sabrina Tavernise, June 17, 2009.

This is not right.

References:

1. CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/07/29/north.carolina.terrorism.charges/index.html
2. Saeed Shah, McClatchy Newspapers, Wed Jul 8, 6:33 pm ET, http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/3268368
3. Sabrina Tavernise, June 17, 2009, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/world/asia/18refugee.html
4. Ornate letter: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm

Michael Jackson: a shamanic figure

Image of a sculpture in Campeche, Mexico

I admit that I’m getting to this topic a bit late when everyone else has mercifully begun to think about other things. But I’d like to ask about the explosion of feeling caused y Michael Jackson’s death.

The first days afterward, CNN didn’t talk about anything else at all, even the wars, the massacres and all that was going on in Central America. The BBC was a bit less monothematic, but even that channel dedicated hours and hours of broadcasting time to it. Internet congestion was total.

Why? There hasn’t ever been this much outpouring of grief for one person. If we compare the concentration of broadcasting time over MJ with that given to the deaths of other figures (for example: María Callas, John Lennon, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Monseñor Oscar Romero, Salvador Allende, Augusto Pinochet, Mao Zedong) we have to admit that it has been disproportional. And I do not doubt that he was an excellent singer and dancer.

In his lifetime he attracted hostility and legal aggression, almost always related to some sort of moral repudiation. Again, why?

Here is a possible answer: he was a mythic, even shamanic figure. He wasn’t a man or a woman, an adult or a child, a father or a son, a black or a white, a hero or an “abnormal”. His “moon-walk was out of this world. We could only adore him or hate him.

The shamans break up our comfortable world views. They cause terror when everything we have hidden on the other side of the looking-glass shows up in the real world outside its oniric borders.

But we need the shamans because every-day life isn’t enough. We need more than work, homework, paying bills, shopping at the grocery store and the like. We need to penetrate normal-life barriers

Maybe Michael Jackson offered that. It is interesting that fantastic figures like Harry Potter and the Hobbits are so attractive. But they are clearly fictional. Michael Jackson was real.

The need to change economic values

Murray Dobbin published an article in Rabble that was republished by Common Dreams yesterday called “Imagine: Prosperity without Growth” that brings up an old, old reflection: how to socialize the economy without jeopardizing civil rights and the possibility of personal liberties like owning things.

There are all sorts of theoretical issues involved like the need to preserve the impetus that Capitalism has given science, invention, industry, and other forms of production. It is possible that all this has just been a medium-term loan from fossil energy sources, but the system of manufacture, distribution, and in general “entitlement” that this economic arrangement has provided has been indeed dynamic and fruitful.

One thing we cannot do is think that things will go on just as they have for the last century. The Left has to get busy and invent alternatives, or we will fall into dictatorships such as the world has never known, together with massive migrations and starvation. Maybe a few of the very rich will find islands or mountain tops to hide on, but most of us will not.

It is amusing when people talk about how we will save ourselves by migrating to new oxygen-based colonies under pressurized geodesic domes on Mars. The image comes to mind of the pictures of people fighting to be included on one of the escaping helicopters leaving the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon way back when: even if these colonies were to be constructed, do all these people from Grand Rapids, Omaha and Little Rock think they will be invited along for the trip?

We have very few answers yet. The Right is bereft of ideas that aren’t dreams of reproducing the good-old-days. Mr. Dobbin said:

“The magnitude of the moral crisis of the political right is staggering. The greed, dishonesty, hubris and psychopathic disregard for the public good renders the whole business elite utterly unfit to pronounce on anything -- not even on the economy, but certainly not democracy or how we run our collective affairs."

I remember reading Paul Sweezy’s and Paul Baran’s book in the 1960´s, “Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order” that was written from a Marxist point of view about how present-day Capitalism must grow to stay alive. The viability of that underlying requirement was also challenged by the “Club of Rome” some years ago when the participants questioned our Planet’s capacity to continue to supply the necessary energy and raw materials on a long-term basis.

One thing is clear: we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the Old Socialisms like the Soviet Union and Cuba. Even China, that calls itself "Communist", is in reality, and from an ecological point of view, an unchained, uncontrolled Capitalist Frankenstein's monster. While the dangers are great, and the threats of famine and political unrest are terrifying, we have, perhaps, time to create another way to live together.

Mr. Dobbin says that we should look toward how the Canadians have solved some health and environmental issues. And he offers an Internet link to a page created by the Sustainable Development Commission. We need to reconsider quality-of-life, peaceful coexistence, health, prosperity and, in general, satisfaction.

Will our Homo-Sapian genes permit us to do this?

References:

Murray Dobbin (Published on Monday, June 22, 2009 by Rabble (Canada). “Imagine: Prosperity without Growth”, available on Common Dreams at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/22-8

Sustainable Development Commission, available at: http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/prosperity-without-growth-background.html

Image in cartoon taken from Microsoft pop art option in PowerPoint.

Discard the generals

Source of Danziger cartoon


An old question: why do people prefer violent solutions that history shows to be ineffectual? From the earliest times, conquest, colonialism, apartheid, and other forms of violent repression arouse violent liberation responses. And the undoubted heroes that make it into legend are those who find peaceful solutions to injustice: Buda, Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Fehullah Gulen, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, Mother Teresa, the monks in Tibet, the anonymous boy who danced the tank to a stop in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

But somehow people continue to think they can accomplish something positive with armament.

From Manifest Destiny to the Alamo, from Korea to Vietnam, and now from Afghanistan to Pakistan, the people who sell us guns want us to use them. We fight “over there” and our kids shoot up their schoolmates "over here".

It’s time to find another way.

If a mouse in a Skinner-box always makes the wrong turn, it is
discarded as an experimental animal. Our generals always advise us to bomb’em back to the stone-age, and we follow patriotically along. Maybe we should discard some of those generals.

Obama and the Dogs of War

here is no end to war.






Chris Hedges in his article, “Becoming what we seek to destroy” says it well: We are

“ … guided by a president who once again has no experience of war and defers to the bull-necked generals and militarists whose careers, power and profits depend on expanded war, we are transformed into monsters.

This is the point: we are becoming the enemy. Every time we are confronted by the atrocities of the past, we chant, “Never again”. But we do not change.

The Pope once again decries the Nazi killings. But in the present-day, living-world the violence is the same, and the excuses are similar.

In Sri Lanka a well-fed government spokesman accuses the Tamil Tigers of killing the Tamils. This may be true, but we have heard authorities from different countries use the “human shield” excuse so many times for their massacres, it has become rhetorically suspect. The Israelis used the same language to justify the slaughter of the Palestinians. Now the United States says the killings and massive exodus en Pakistan are due to the same pretext: the “enemy” seems to practice self-immolation just to give us bad press. It is a problem of PR: the Associated Press went so far as to call the deaths “awkward”.


I am outraged, but it seems that power has a “Gatopardo” existence: the term refers to an Italian novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. In this novel the main character, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, negotiates and manipulates things so that his aristocratic family can continue to benefit even during Garibaldi's populist changes in the late 19th century.

In the same way, armies and arms manufacturers continue to market their wares and ply their trade even though so many of us scream bloody murder.

As always, let's enthusiastically let lose the dogs of war!

Prosperity and peace ≠ terrorism and war

But misery and revenge does equal terrorism and war


IMAGINE:

1. All that war money had been spent in the Middle East on irrigation, schools, hospitals, and the like.
2. Pakistan (and Afghanistan and Irak) had become prosperous.
3. The people had begun to demand democratic participation in their political and economic systems.
3. The ordinary Taliban supporters had decided that it was better to be prosperous. They had decided to send their kids to school, and had abandoned their armed struggle.
4. The Taliban leaders, responsible for all that violence, had been tried in legally constituted courts.
5. Those in the U.S. administration responsible for indiscriminate killing, torture, corruption, and other violence had been tried in legally constituted courts.

WOULD THE WORLD HAVE BEEN A SAFER PLACE?:

Disobey the wave!

Alter suffering yesterday in a man- (or woman-) eating traffic jam, I thought I’d post some useful techniques for avoiding so much despair.


The first is: disobey the wave!

First, an explanation. Traffic isn’t uniform. It moves in clusters or bunches as can be appreciated in a video that can be seen at this address. In slow-moving traffic the effect is more pronounced. From the air, the long string of cars looks like an expansion and compression wave, even though one’s immediate experience is just of starting and stopping the car.

We might say we obey a physical law just like any other inert particle of matter.

When I realized this, my wounded self-pride made me try to disobey the law. But then I noticed the effect my disobedience had on the cars behind me.


To achieve this we have to adopt a median speed and allow a space between our car and the one in front of us, a sort of an air-bag that grows in fast traffic and diminishes when the cars move more slowly. We are basically transmitting the wave to the empty space and for this reason we don’t have to start and stop so much. Our cars don’t over-heat and we get where we are going with less fuss and bother.

Another result is that all the cars behind us also have a more or less uniform speed.