“I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.

—Archbishop Oscar Romero, September 23, 1979.

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To aid us in our ongoing efforts to awaken and educate, please disperse Mind Detox widely……

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1. Crocodile tears by John Steppling and Guy Zimmerman

The white world is sinking beneath its own intellectual and moral vomit. When the voice of Europe is Gordon Brown and Nick Sarkozy, and the US features the arrogant and simply nasty visage of Dick Cheney and George Bush, then what can be said? But point fingers they will, at those nasty Chinese, or backward Persians or Africans. A billionaire ex-coke head alkie deserter is president. His VP is a Wyoming hick with a mean streak and a one dimensional drive for power. Behind them are the eternal ruling class elites that we can trace back to DuPont and Carnegie…and beyond. No wonder people back away mentally from trying to tweeze it all apart. It’s the age of unreality. Bad faith and unreality.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=506

2. The Dalai Lama—what Richard Gere won’t tell you

These days, the Dalai Lama is “packaged” internationally as a non-materialist holy man. In fact, the Dalai Lama was the biggest serf owner in Tibet. Legally, he owned the whole country and everyone in it. In practice, his family directly controlled 27 manors, 36 pastures, 6,170 field serfs and 102 house slaves.

When he moved from palace to palace, the Dalai Lama rode on a throne chair pulled by dozens of slaves. His troops marched along to “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” a tune learned from their British imperialist trainers. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards, all over six-and-a-half feet tall, with padded shoulders and long whips, beat people out of his path. This ritual is described in the Dalai Lama’s autobiography.

The first time he fled to India in 1950, the Dalai Lama’s advisors sent several hundred mule-loads of gold and silver bars ahead to secure his comfort in exile. After the second time he fled, in 1959, Peking Review reported that his family left lots of gold and silver behind, plus 20,331 pieces of jewelry and 14,676 pieces of clothing.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=507

3. Hope, Change, and Pissing in the Wind by Patrice Greanville and Jason Miller

Some think we gain time for such organization under the Democrats. Problem is, the Democrats and their half measures that appear to thwart the capitalist juggernaut are what keeps the masses enthralled with the system and in effect dissuade them from joining the struggle against it. The public will not do what needs to be done until professional and charismatic charlatans like Obama are revealed for what they are. Band-aid solutions by the Democrats will not stop the slide toward the disaster and chaos guaranteed by the dynamics of the system.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=642

4. the moment of truth | money, honey… by Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Plato is rolling in his wormy tomb and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics have long been forgotten. Only Caligula could like such entertainment. Family devastation and ruin as “entertainment”.  And foolish I, years ago did not believe a friend when he told me that soon enough Fox would be running Live Nude Executions! Well, they’re damn close. (Did I mention this was on Fox? Where else would it be. Hell, even programs like the Simpsons that are on Fox make fun of Fox because everybody knows that Fox long-ago sold its soul to the devil in favor of profit and viewership – but hey, who said you had to be moral when it comes to TV reading. The hell with the Fourth Estate and responsibilty as that: this is news as infotainment, shrink-wrapped and ready for take-out.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/tantcjo/?p=39

5. A 98 Year-Old Teaches Me About “The Great Work” by Carolyn Baker

For Marion, “the Great Work” is one’s understanding that one is the global brain and that all beings of the earth-animal, plant, mineral, and the elements of earth-are part of the earth family or community. It also means for Marion an understanding that nature never gives up and that the “blessed unrest” to which Paul Hawken repeatedly refers and which is also the title of one of his books, refuses to be crushed. The Great Work means understanding that we are not separate from, but are part of, the earth community and that nothing is more important than cherishing, protecting, and preserving it. In other words, we are the earth-not some disconnected entity– endeavoring to sustain itself.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=225

6. Chilling by Guy Zimmerman

Dick Cheney is a fascinating study in this regard. He has this ability to sound cogent and reasonable, and the person most in the grip of the delusion that he is fundamentally sane is…Dick Cheney himself. No matter what the situation, Dick would gather all the facts…bloodlessly analyze those facts…and decide that the only rational course of action would be to deploy the most extreme and massive aggression that could possibly be wrung out of one’s resources. He would announce this conclusion with a doleful, resigned sigh…and this little act of Dick’s would be utterly convincing to the man himself, in the moment.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/voxpop/?p=273

7. Obama’s Denial: The fear of a Black Messiah: Part Two of Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism by Juan Santos

And the Obama’s false claim is nothing like a mistake. His claim is a conscious and deliberate lie, one meant to appeal to white people and their win their votes, to comfort them with the illusion that “everything’s changed” when nothing essential has changed. Jim Crow has simply been replaced with mass criminalization and mass incarceration; a figurative social prison has been replaced with literal chains and bars in a huge step backward in the direction of slavery, not toward any kind of “dream,” “hope,” or “progress.” You don’t call moving from Jim Crow conditions to conditions in which your people have the highest absolute numbers of prisoners of any minority in the world and call it “progress.”

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=649

8. The E.L.F.s are mad! Why aren’t we? by Jason Miller

Each day our industrial civilization thoughtlessly and carelessly launches ruthless violent assaults upon our world and its non-human animal inhabitants, yet when the Lorax finally does strike a blow against a Once-ler (as was the case in the Earth Liberation Front’s recent laudable destruction of several McMansions in the Seattle area) all Hell breaks loose. “Crack” teams of law enforcement circle the wagons and frantically scramble to eradicate the “terrorists” who had the audacity to violate our sacrosanct property rights and interfere with our ongoing rape of the Earth. As a society, it is permissible for us to continue a relentless march toward rendering our planet uninhabitable, but let a handful of individuals from the Earth Liberation Front destroy some precious manifestations of our perverse obsession with material possessions and the FBI offers a reward of $100,000 to ensure their capture.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=626

9. Necropolis Now: A Review of AS THE WORLD BURNS: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay in Denial, a graphic novel by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan by Adam Engel

The problem is not that animals, trees, mountains can’t “speak,” but that we can’t or won’t hear. The problem is, we’re in a world of six billion head-trips and most of us keep tripping over the same fat heads. The problem is our much vaunted “way of life.” For who or what in the world is more dangerous (within the Greater Machine itself) than the “productive citizen?” Even the “destructive consumer” converts some of the junk to energy before it becomes waste. We “productive citizens” produce and produce and produce only waste. Too much junk to be consumed. Too much junk for the planet – even to the depths of her polluted oceans — to absorb.

http://tantmieux.squarespace.com/cyrano-tant-mieux-articles-old/2008/2/27/necropolis-now-a-review-of-as-the-world-burns-50-simple-thin.html

10. The Raped Whores of Iraq: No Voice, No Hope by Suki Falconberg

At least the military ought not to have been ignorant of this fact—that war means forced sex and the wretchedness of raped-for-money bodies. Almost every military man at the Pentagon has seen prostituted bodies—used them, probably, since it is the rapist warrior way—is aware that sexual torture in the form of prostitution is a massive ‘by-product’ of war. Sadly, these military men consider it a trivial by-product of war. The 50,000 Iraqi women and girl refugees currently engaged in survival prostitution are apparently not even on their agenda of concerns. (This number comes from the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children.)

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=645

11. The Buddha’s last lesson was for humane work by Merritt Clifton

The point the Buddha made by his death, however accidental, is that if an animal advocate accepts eating meat in any form, that ethical compromise can ultimately poison the cause. If animals may be killed for meat, for example, it is difficult to argue that it is unethical to kill animals in experiments which might benefit millions of people and some animals too. If animals may be killed for meat, certainly it is not more harmful or disrespectful of their lives to use them for entertainment, or to wear their hides and pelts.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=495

12. Economic Meltdown and Crony Capitalism by Rowan Wolf

Interestingly, the question of why Bear Stearns ran into trouble was a “run on the bank.” The Business Week article states:”Jittery clients sought to take their money out of Bear Stearns, but Bear said Friday it did not have enough money on hand to meet all payments. When word of that got out, more clients demanded their money.” What it does not state is that those “clients” are governments and corporations - not you and me. I might add that T Bills are considered among the “safest” of investments. T Bill holders might be a bit jittery about their “safe investment” being thrown into a mortgage meltdown reportedly linked to predatory lending practices and massive foreclosures.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=223

13. Crisis and the Crossroads of History: The Need for a Radicalized Citizenry by Dr. Steve Best

The global Animal Liberation Movement is an abolitionist movement that demands the end to all forms of animal exploitation, not merely reducing suffering; like its 19th century predecessor, it demands the eradication of slavery, not better treatment of the slaves. Stolen from the wild, bred and raised in captivity, held in cages and chains against their will and without their consent, animals literally are slaves, and thereby integral elements of the contemporary capitalist slave economy.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=657

14. ARABIA: DREAM OR REALITY: A European Point of View by Gaither Stewart

The “liberal conservative” Romano, who in his career once taught at Harvard and the University of California, labeled NATO an instrument of US foreign policy and military strategy, under the control of Washington, and antagonistic to Europe’s interests. From the start Afghanistan was America’s war, he charged, a war Washington now wants Europe to fight. He reasoned that if the American goal in Iraq was control of the region, then the USA should have allied with Saddam Hussein. His assessment of Hamas and Hezbollah corresponds to that of the European Left: they are political parties and welfare organizations with armed wings; negotiations with both are desirable and necessary for peace in the region.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=653

1. Undermining Bolivia by By Benjamin Dangl

President Evo Morales, the first genuinely leftist (and Aymará) leader of Bolivia is facing not only the usual counter-revolutionary betrayals and plots ignited by his country’s oligarchy, but those fielded by in-country US operatives. The book of destabilization, economic strangulation, social turmoil and military intervention is a time-tested standard manual for this type of “problem” in Latin America, or anywhere someone dares to defy the plutocratic mafia in Washington D.C.

read more

2. be bold and mighty forces shall come to your aid by sadi ranson-polizzotti

Oh yes, i wore a bunny suit to protests, i picketed General Motors when they were still crash-testing live pigs in cars and Gillette when they were still, rather fetishistically, applying make up to rabbits. I would have none of it. And i would be there every time, prompt and sporting my bunny costume and ready for business. I handcuffed myself to the Quabbin Reservoir to prevent it from being opened to hunters, after it had been closed for so many years that the deer would, quite literally, walk up to the deer and they would eat popcorn out of your hands. Talk about a canned hunt, of which, btw, there are many in which so-called hunters can go and, in a fenced in area, “hunt down” “wild” animals who are essentially kept prisoner there.

read more

3. Back to the Israeli Bombing of Syria by Rowan Wolf

It is difficult to imagine that retaliatory strike against Israel would not draw a U.S. military response. It makes little difference if such events unfold under Bush, or the next President of the United States - be he or she Republican or Democrat. The United States has long and vested interests in Israel which have been nurtured and supported (even in the face of proposed UN sanctions against Israel) through administrations of both parties. It is highly unlikely that Israel has much concern that the United States would not come to its “defense” regardless of the legality or wisdom of Israel’s “independent” actions.

read more

4. Kingdom of Excrement by John Steppling

I remember Peter Berg, the director of the new Universal film The Kingdom , from the one summer he participated at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. He struck me as an arrogant and superficial careerist, and later I wasn’t much surprised to see him appearing in various lightweight TV drama and the occasional studio film. Now, after twenty five years of sucking corporate studio cock he has made the single most offensive film of the decade. The kingdom in question is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (though it curiously resembles the San Fernando Valley for much of this tedious film). The plot is basically a laying out of every American foreign policy conceit one can think of, coupled to the requisite apologia for violence and then all awash in your basic orientalist islamophobic sterotyping of the Arab world.

read more

5. “NOT BY BREAD ALONE” (Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevesky’s THE GRAND INQUISITOR) by Gaither Stewart

In this short chapter, the Grand Inquisitor articulates his (the Church’s) devastating message: God is God and the Church is the Church; the Church does not believe in God and man no longer needs God; the Church promotes His work like a product and uses His name, but it renounces Christ; the Church does God’s work for Him; it is a Church without God.

read more

6. Health Care Reform for the Insurance Industry by Sharon Smith

With 47 million uninsured and many millions more underinsured, the current batch of bipartisan reform proposals brings the U.S. no closer to addressing its healthcare crisis than the Clintons’ disastrous plan in the 1990s-and for the same reasons. Instead of challenging the industry’s never-ending quest for profits, these proposals dangle the possibility of yet more profits. If anything, as Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, predicted, “You’re going to see the number of the underinsured grow enormously in the years ahead,” while those with illnesses will be those most affected.

read more

7. terrorism, tension, & resistance strategy by Gaither Stewart

Almost always polluted by propaganda, the distinction between “terrorist” and “resistance fighter” is extremely slippery, loaded with passionate subjectivism, and only an honest understanding of history can start to sort out the moral contents of such labels. Let us not forget that not too long ago American Minute Men were “terrorists” in the eyes of the British crown, and so were the French maquis, to the Nazi occupiers, during WWII.

read more

8. Meat’s Meat….So Let’s Eat by Jason Miller

There is plenty of room on our plates to accommodate a few slices of Lassie. Even here in our resource-hog of a nation people experience hunger. Why not run a hundred million or so Rovers through the meat industrial complex each year? We have no reservations about torturing and slaughtering billions of other sentient beings to satiate our lust for meat. Research has indicated that pigs are actually more intelligent than dogs and thus would be more conscious of their misery. So there is no valid moral objection.

read more

9. Tearing Down the Master’s House: An Interview with Derrick Jensen by Adam Engel

Engel: Why do you so few people resist, unlike in the 1960s or 1930s?

Jensen: If your experience is that your water comes from the tap and that your food comes from the grocery store, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them; if your experience is that your water comes from a river and that your food comes from a land base then you will defend those to the death because your life depends on them. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it’s very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.

read more

10. Barack Obama & the “End” of Racism by Juan Santos

Obama plays the role of a Black Cinderella. He does for Black folks what Cinderella does for girls. He shows that oppression and silence can be good for you – at least if you are the one the prince chooses, or if you are the one who gets to be the prince. It’s total fantasy. It’s a glass slipper that will break at the arch and be turned on us like a broken beer bottle or a jagged-edged knife; the same knife Obama has threatened to turn on the people of Iran and Pakistan.

read more

11. CJTV News and Commentary

Our Senior Contributing Editor (and friend) Joe Bageant, celebrated author of the sure-to-soon-become-a-classic DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS is interviewed by Australia’s 9AM show.

read more

IF YOU WANT TO BUY JOE’S BOOK, HERE’S THE LINK TO AMAZON.COM

[Cyrano's Journal Online does not receive any compensation from Amazon or any other entity. This link is provided as a courtesy to our readers.]
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JEREMY SCAHILL: I find it very interesting that the Bush administration is talking about international law and how international law needs to be upheld for the protection of the US embassy. That certainly is true, but notice the selectivity of when the Bush administration chooses to recognize that there actually is international law. I mean, this is an administration that refuses to support any kind of an effective and independent international criminal court, preferring to support these sort of ad hoc tribunals, which have been used against Yugoslavia and certainly with Rwanda.
In the case of Hillary Clinton, what’s particularly interesting is that she and her advisers, which include many of the key figures involved with the original bombing of Yugoslavia and, in fact, the architects of much of US policy in the 1990s toward Yugoslavia, people like Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, that Clinton holds this up as a sort of successful US foreign policy or international action.
And I think it’s important to remember that this declaration of independence from Kosovo was immediately supported by the Bush administration and many powerful countries in the world. I was recalling during the 2000 elections in the United States, being in Serbia and people joking that the worst thing that could happen to us is that Al Gore would be president, because then we’ll have the Democrats continuing to focus on us, and if Bush is president, he’ll ignore us. And, well, of course, Bush immediately recognized Kosovo, and that sort of seals the deal, in a sense.
But it’s important to remember how we got to this point. I mean, Samantha was talking a little bit about the broader context here. The fact is that this was sort of Clinton’s Iraq, in a way. He bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days with no United Nations mandate. I was at the UN the night that it began, and Kofi Annan was sort of beside himself that the action had been taken so swiftly, this military action, seventy-eight days of bombing of Yugoslavia under the auspices of NATO.
Wesley Clark was the commander of those operations, the Supreme Allied Commander. They bombed a Serbian television station, killing sixteen media workers; some of them were media workers, some of them were makeup artists, others were engineers. They directly targeted passenger trains and then fabricated a video afterwards to make it seem as though it was a split-second decision. They killed thousands of civilians.
And the fact was that the exaggerations of what was happening in Kosovo by William Cohen, the Defense Secretary at the time, who talked about a million missing people—then it was scaled back to 100,000, then 50,000, then 10,000, and now the official number is that there were 2,700 people that were killed, and there’s been no determination of their ethnicity. Now, I can tell you from being on the ground in Kosovo that some of the worst violence that occurred, slaughtering of Albanians, happened after the NATO bombing began. And the fact was that the US sabotaged the work of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in the weeks leading up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
And I think that what we have to understand here is that this is where the sort of liberals, like Hillary Clinton, come together with the neocons, because there are a lot of similarities between what happened in Yugoslavia and what happened in Iraq, with the lead-up to the war, the disregard for international law or international consensus, and then the outright killing of civilians under the auspices of a humanitarian intervention. read full debate at Democracy Now

The Tar Sands aren’t about Alberta, or even Canada. There is a developing network of pipelines and refineries connecting this giant spiderweb of oil from the very high Arctic of Alaska, to the American Mid-West, and all the way down to Texas. If the Middle East blows up, worse than it already has. If Venezuela or Russia shut off the energy tap - America and American oil companies plan to wring out the Canadian landscape for every last drop of oil. Canada is the security blanket for American motorists and power companies.

No Canadian political party, other than the Greens, has called for an end of Tar Sands development. The current government is totally oil-friendly, trying to remove impediments like environmental laws or native people. Royalties are lower than anywhere else on Earth, and the usual big corporate tax subsidies for oil are in place.

Government will never stop the Tar Sands, as long as political parties accept corporate donations. As the leader of the Liberals, the alleged climate man Stephan Dion said: No one can stop the Tar Sands. There is just too much money in it.

Only the workers, and the people of Canada, can fight off this vampire destroying the land, the water, and the atmosphere. Please get active.

I’m Alex Smith - and this is Radio Ecoshock. Download our weekly program, and tons of free green audio, from our Website, at ecoshock.org.

click the above and listen to MacDonald Stainsby speak on Canada’s TAR SANDS
The Tar Sands megaprojects in Northern Alberta, Canada are so horrible, so insane, I don’t really want to talk about it. In fact, most Canadians - and Americans, prefer not to think about this issue at all.

It is the world’s largest strip mining operation. It is Canada’s largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions. The Tar Sands are melting down gluey rock to feed America’s energy addiction.

As Stainsby will tell us, in this speech recorded in Vancouver January 20th, 2008 - in the Middle East, it takes about one barrel of oil to produce one hundred barrels of oil. A hundred to one gain in energy. But in the Tar Sands, it takes one barrel to produce just three.

Meanwhile, all the natural gas of Canada’s arctic, which was once destined to heat homes, is now earmarked for the Tar Sands, to melt down the rock. When that high quality gas is used up, the big oil companies propose to build nuclear power plants, instead.

The Northern Rivers are being drained off. It takes at least 4 liters of water to make one liter of oil. Giant toxic tailings ponds are building up, and leaching back into the river systems.

The strip mines can be seen from space….

I won’t go on. The Tar Sands, for all these reasons, and for the climate change they bring, have been called a crime against humanity.

MacDonald Stainsby tells us all we need to know, in a series of reality-checks for a society desperate for oil at any price. Stainsby describes himself as “Rad-Green” - part of a radical anti-capitalist green movement. In fact, he is a wide-ranging social activist, fighting against war, for unions, and against oppression of Indigenous people. He believes we are facing both Peak Oil, and severe climate change, at the same time.

MacDonald Stainsby’s articles are published in alternative journalist like CounterPunch, ZNet, BriarPatch and Dominion Magazine.

Let’s listen to MacDonald Stainsby, recorded by Radio Ecoshock, at the downtown Simon Fraser University campus.

—— 23 minutes of a powerful speech, loaded with facts that shock…———-

February 18, 2008

[…] What is it, this American morality? This righteousness? Is it our religious roots in the fable of the Puritan settlers, those super religious people who in their hardships were bigots, perhaps also practitioners of incest and racists soon morphing into dogmatic chauvinists who early-on labeled their dissidents and different-thinkers witches and demons.

Pre-Americanism! The same Americanism initiated then which today fosters the rights of the rich to become richer, the strong to trample the weak and the contempt for and the crushing of anything smacking of the social in our land, real trade unions and, heaven forbid, universal health care.

Meanwhile, out in the empire, as long as it is distant, the Puritan legacy instills blindness to the use of cluster bombs from the stratosphere and hidden torture in places with foreign names like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib … and while our neighbors in Haiti eat dirt, literally?

When I asked a friend and writer colleague in heartland America what he understands by Americanism, he stunned me and overwhelmed me with the following:

“From birth I have been immersed, enculterated, inculcated, and surrounded by the myriad toxic components of the ‘American Dream’ or ‘Americanism.’ There are some admirable aspects to ‘America’ but by and large we live in a spiritual/psychological sewer.” He then listed two dozen aspects of Americanism, which I repeat here: narcissism, greed, hyper-individualism, consumerism, capitalism, corporatism, faux democracy, media whoredom, asphyxiation of the Left, Christian fundamentalism, Mammon worship, moral retardation, militarism, imperialism, celebrity worship, wars on drugs and terrorism, prison industrial complex, mean-spiritedness, self-absorption, American exceptionalism, bullying, anti-intellectualism and the abandonment of many uninsured and homeless in the wealthiest nation on earth.

Whew! That is article, essay, denouncement and indictment…read full article

By Noam Chomsky on Feb.16/2008

[...] That Iraq is “a land of ruin and wreck” is not in question.. There is no need to review the facts in any detail. The British polling agency Oxford Research Bureau recently updated its estimate of extra deaths resulting from the war to 1.3 million - that’s excluding Karbala and Anbar provinces, two of the worst regions. Whether that is correct, or the true numbers are much lower as some claim, there is no doubt that the toll is horrendous. There are several million internally deplaced. Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the millions of refugees fleeing the wreckage of Iraq, including most of the professional classes, have not been simply wiped out. But that welcome is fading, for one reason because Jordan and Syria receive no meaningful support from the perpetrators of the crimes in Washington and London; the idea that they might admit these victims, beyond a trickle, is too outlandish to consider. Sectarian warfare has devastated the country. Baghdad and other areas have been subjected to brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and militias, the primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency strategy developed by General Petraeus, who won his fame by pacifying Mosul, now the scene of some of the most extreme violence.

One of the most dedicated and informed journalists who has been immersed in the shocking tragedy, Nir Rosen, recently published an epitaph entitled “The Death of Iraq,” in Current History. He writes that “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century” - a common perception of Iraqis as well. “Only fools talk of `solutions’ now. There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained.”

Though the wreckage of Iraq today is too visible to try to conceal, the assault of the new barbarians is carefully circumscribed in the doctrinal system so as to exclude the horrendous effects of the Clinton sanctions - including their crucial role in preventing the threat that Iraqis would send Saddam to the same fate as Ceasescu, Marcos, Suharto, Chun, and many other monsters supported by the US and UK until they could no longer be maintained. Information about the effect of the sanctions is hardly lacking, in particular about the humanitarian phase of the sanctions regime, the oil-for-peace program initiated when the early impact became so shocking that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had to mumble on TV that the price was right whatever the parents of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi children might think. The humanitarian program, which graciously permitted Iraq to use some of its oil revenues for the devastated population, was administered by highly respected and experienced UN diplomats, who had teams of investigators all over the country and surely knew more about the situation in Iraq than any other Westerners. The first, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest because the policies were “genocidal.” His successor, Hans von Sponeck, resigned two years later when he concluded that the sanctions violated the Genocide Convention. The Clinton administration barred him from providing information about the impact to the Security Council, which was technically responsible. As Albright’s spokesperson James Rubin explained, “this man in Baghdad is paid to work, not to speak.”

Von Sponeck does, however, speak; in extensive detail in his muted but horrifying book A Different Kind of War. But the State Department ruling prevails. One will have to search diligently to find even a mention of these revelations or what they imply. Knowing too much, Halliday and von Sponeck were also barred from the media during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq.

It is true, however, that Iraq is now a marginal issue in the presidential campaign. That is natural, given the spectrum of hawk-dove elite opinion. The liberal doves adhere to their traditional reasoning and attitudes, praying that the hawks will be right and that the US will win a victory in the land of ruin and wreck, establishing “stability,” a code word for subordination to Washington’s will. By and large hawks are encouraged, and doves silenced, by the good news about Iraq.

And there is good news. The US occupying army in Iraq (euphemistically called the Multi-National Force-Iraq) carries out regular studies of popular attitudes, a crucial component of population control measures. In December 2007, it released a study of focus groups, which was uncharacteristically upbeat. The survey “provides very strong evidence” that national reconciliation is possible and anticipated, contrary to prevailing voices of hopelessness and despair. The survey found that a sense of “optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups . . . and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis.” This discovery of “shared beliefs” among Iraqis throughout the country is “good news, according to a military analysis of the results,” Karen de Young reported in the Washington Post (Dec. 19).

The “shared beliefs” were identified in the report. To quote de Young, “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of `occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.” So according to Iraqis, there is hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, who are responsible for the internal violence, withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis.

The conclusions are credible, consistent with earlier polls, and also with the apparent reduction in violence when the British finally withdrew from Basra a few months ago, having “decisively lost the south - which produces over 90 per cent of government revenues and 70 per cent of Iraq’s proven oil reserves” by 2005, according to Anthony Cordesman, the most prominent US specialist on military affairs in the Middle East.

The December 2007 report did not mention other good news: Iraqis appear to accept the highest values of Americans, which should be highly gratifying. Specifically, they accept the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal that sentenced Nazi war criminals to hanging for such crimes as supporting aggression and preemptive war - the main charge against Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, whose position in the Nazi regime corresponded to that of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. The Tribunal defined aggression clearly enough: “invasion of its armed forces” by one state “of the territory of another state.” The invasion of Iran and Afghanistan are textbook examples, if words have meaning. The Tribunal went on to define aggression as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”: in the case of Iraq, the murderous sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing, the destruction of the national culture and the irreplaceable treasures of the origins of Western civilization under the eyes of “stuff happens” Rumsfeld and his associates, and every other crime and atrocity as the inheritors of the Mongols have followed the path of imperial Japan.

Since Iraqis attribute the accumulated evil of the whole primarily to the invasion, it follows that they accept the core principle of Nuremberg. Presumably, they were not asked whether their acceptance of American values extended to the conclusion of the chief prosecutor for the United States, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who forcefully insisted that the Tribunal would be mere farce if we do not apply its principles to ourselves.

Needless to say, US elite opinion, shared with the West generally, flatly rejects the lofty American values professed at Nuremberg, indeed regards them as bordering on obscene. All of this provides an instructive illustration of some of the reality that lies behind the famous “clash of civilizations.”

A January poll by World Learning/Aspen Institute found that “75 percent of Americans believe U.S. foreign policy is driving dissatisfaction with America abroad and more than 60 percent believe that dislike of American values (39 percent) and of the American people (26 percent) is also to blame.” The perception is inaccurate, fed by propaganda. There is little dislike of Americans, and dissatisfaction abroad does not derive from “dislike of American values,” but rather from acceptance of these values, and recognition that they are rejected by the US government and elite opinion.

Other “good news” had been reported by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker during the extravaganza staged on 9/11. Perhaps we should call the commander “Lord Petraeus,” in the light of the reverence displayed by the media and commentators on this occasion. Parenthetically, only a cynic might imagine that the timing was intended to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, so that by committing the “supreme international crime” they were defending the world against terror - which increased sevenfold as a result of the invasion, according to an analysis by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, using data of the government-linked Rand corporation.

Petraeus and Crocker provided figures to show that the Iraqi government had greatly accelerated spending on reconstruction, reaching a quarter of the funding set aside for that purpose. Good news indeed — until it was investigated by the Government Accountability Office, which found that the actual figure was one-sixth what Petraeus and Crocker reported, a 50 percent decline from the preceding year.

More good news is the decline in sectarian violence, attributable in part to the success of the ethnic cleansing that Iraqis blame on the invasion; there are simply fewer people to kill in the cleansed areas. But it is also attributable to Washington’s decision to support the tribal groups that had organized to drive out Iraqi al-Qaeda, to an increase in US troops, and to the decision of the Mahdi army to stand down and consolidate its gains - what the press calls “halting aggression.” By definition, only Iraqis can commit aggression in Iraq (or Iranians, of course).

It is not impossible that Petraeus’s strategy might approach the success of the Russians in Chechnya, where fighting is now “limited and sporadic, and Grozny is in the midst of a building boom” after having been reduced to rubble by the Russian attack, C.J. Chivers reports in the New York Times, also on September 11. Perhaps some day Baghdad and Falluja too will enjoy “electricity restored in many neighborhoods, new businesses opening and the city’s main streets repaved,” as in booming Grozny. Possible, but dubious, in the light of the likely consequence of creating warlord armies that may be the seeds of even greater sectarian violence, adding to the “accumulated evil” of the aggression.

If Russians rise to the moral level of liberal intellectuals in the West, they must be saluting Putin’s “wisdom and statesmanship” for his achievements in Chechnya.

A few weeks after the Pentagon’s “good news” from Iraq, New York Times military-Iraq expert Michael Gordon wrote a reasoned and comprehensive review of the options on Iraq policy facing the candidates for the presidential election. One voice is missing: Iraqis. Their preference is not rejected. Rather, it is not worthy of mention. And it seems that there was no notice of the fact. That makes sense on the usual tacit assumption of almost all discourse on international affairs: we own the world, so what does it matter what others think? They are “unpeople,” to borrow the term used by British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis in his work on Britain’s crimes of empire - very illuminating work, therefore deeply hidden. Routinely, Americans join Iraqis in un-peoplehood. Their preferences too provide no options. [.....]     READ FULL ARTICLE

by Cosanna Preston

June 19, 2007

Imagine a community with no running water, where temperatures bottom-out below minus 40 degrees Celsius and the closest bathroom is an outhouse across the yard, through knee-deep snow. Imagine a community where a single 900-foot house is home to three generations with hammocks, couches, and cushions as make-shift beds; where tuberculosis lurks in the close-knit quarters and gas flares light up the windows, outpacing the morning sun. Imagine a community which sustained itself and its environment for hundreds of years but was swiftly destroyed and degraded in just four short years of oil development.

Now imagine that community in the praised ‘first-world’ country, Canada. This is the plight of the Lubicon Cree.

Despite the location of their traditional territory in Alberta, the richest province in the country, the Lubicon Cree have been sentenced to a life of tragedy. Since the 1930s they have struggled to settle their land claim but today over 70 years later they remain without a reserve—shunned by both the provincial and federal government—and left to fight for their very existence… read full article

[....] for the first time Bolivia is becoming democratic. So it’s therefore bitterly hated by the West, which despises democracy, because it’s much too dangerous. But when the indigenous majority actually took political power for the first time, in a very democratic election of the kind we can’t imagine here, the reaction in the West was quite hostile. I recall, for example, an article - I think it was the Financial Times - condemning Morales as moving towards dictatorship because he was calling for nationalization of oil. They omitted to mention, with the support of about 90% of the population. But that’s tyranny. Tyranny means you don’t do what the United States says. Just like moderation means that you’re like Saudi Arabia and you do do what we say.There are now moves toward autonomy in the elite-dominated sectors in Bolivia, maybe secession, which will probably be backed by the United States to try and undercut the development of a democratic system in which the majority, which happens to be indigenous, will play their proper role, namely, cultural rights, control over resources, political and economic policy, and so on. That’s happening elsewhere but strikingly in Bolivia.

The Bank of the South is a step towards integration of the countries. Could it weaken the IFIs, yes it can, in fact they’re being weakened already. The IMF has been mostly thrown out of South America. Argentina quite explicitly said, “Okay, we’re ridding ourselves of the IMF.” And for pretty good reasons. They had been the poster child of the IMF. They had followed its policies rigorously and it led to terrible economic collapse. They did pull out of the collapse, namely by flatly rejecting the advice of the IMF. And it succeeded. They were able to pay off their debts, restructure their debts and pay them off with the help of Venezuela which picked up a substantial part of the debt. Brazil in its own way paid off its debt and rid itself of the IMF. Bolivia is moving in the same direction..read full article