Open Book

Not Dead and The Saved

2009-12-15T10:59:10Z

NOT DEAD

They’ve been asked to wait in Paediatrics. It is five o’clock, already; and the sun is streaming in through the high, unopenable windows. Thrum, thrum, thrum, resounds the concert in the day room, and his name is Aiken Drum.
The Son is lying on top of the blanket. He has lately taken to wearing aggressively small jeans which he customises with black thread and biro drawings in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. He taps his dirty fingers on his ripped T-shirt. His large, glittering brown eyes sweep the empty ward.
“Look,” he says, in his new, adolescent, scratchy voice, “A Not-Dead.”
“What?” says the Mother. The Mother has been putting off her tiredness for so long that it tends, like a neglected middle child, to leap at her at the least chance. Just now it is sitting on her lap, arms tight around her neck, breathing the scents of Paediatrics into her mouth: strawberry syrup, toasted cheese, pee.

“A Not-Dead,” says the Son. “Look. Under the window.”
The Mother cranes round. She sees a baby sleeping in a plastic cot. It is wearing a pink woolly hat and cardigan and has oxygen tubes in its nose.

“See,” says the Son.
“It’s a baby,” says the Mother, crossly. “Someone’s baby.” But the baby’s eyes are too far apart, and it has a cleft palate, and its whole body has a flattened, spatchcocked look, as if it is trying to separate into two pieces, east and west, and the Mother is already worrying that there might be a crisis and she will be called upon to Do Something. The Mother is not a good choice for the parent of a chronic invalid. She is inhibited and impatient (often both at once) and she fears sick things: fallen fledglings, injured cats. Someone else always has to pick them up. Her ex-husband preferably, who is bluff and easy with illness, who would carry the Son, as a six year-old, casually around the hospital in his arms, the tubes draped jokily but handily over his shoulders—talents he is now wasting on a new, completely well, wife and child.
“She should be dead,” says the Son. “Like in nature. I mean if that baby was born in a primitive tribe she’d be dead in seconds.”
“So would lots of people,” says the Mother. “So would I.”
“I would,” says the Son. He raises his fists to his forehead, surveys the puncture wounds inside his elbows, and adds: “I’d be the deadest.” The Mother sighs. Once, the Son was prodigious and original, and the Mother was daffy and whacky, and they were on the same side: now they seem doomed to partake in endless EFL oral exams, with the Son taking the part of the difficult student, the one with the nose stud.
“You were a perfectly healthy baby,” she snaps.
“Not really,” says the Son. “Only apparently. I was born with it, remember. My tumour. That’s what the new guy reckons.” Oncology is a new favourite subject. So is genetics, and blame. The Mother decides not to meet the Son’s eye.
“Anyway,” she says, “we’re not primitive.”
“No,” says the Son, leaning back on his pillows. “We’ve got the technology now. And cos we have the technology, we have to save her. The baby. I mean the doctors and people, when a baby like that is born, they have to save her. It would be wrong to ask them not to save her, I can totally see that, cos then they would be like murderers.”
“And?” says the Mother.
“So then the person they save is not dead, but sometimes they’re not alive either. Like they need the technology to keep them going? Like they can’t be properly alive, but no one knows what to do with them? Not Dead. See?”
The Mother wakes up. She scents danger. She leans forward, and the Son fixes her with his shining eyes.
“I see them everywhere. You know? Not just in the hospital. Some of them are in disguise, but I can spot them. Like they have a little shiny outline round them, like in a game on a screen. They pixellate, Mum, they pixellate at me. Like: there, there, there. Shouldn’t really be here. You, you, you. Not really here. Me, me, me. Not-Dead.”
“No,” says the Mother, loudly, unsurely, “you’re alive.”
“I’m not dead,” says the Son, “because of the Machine, but where am I alive?”
“In your mind,” says the Mother. “You’re alive in your mind, that’s the thing. The life of the mind.”
Because the Mother believes this most sincerely. And so, during the long while they have to wait for the plasma and the trolley, for the Machine and the nurses, the Mother babbles about Robert Louis Stevenson, also sickly, also bookish. Then she enumerates to the Son the titles of all the books he loves the most, all the books they’ve read together, their favourite episodes, and, after a while, the Son says: “You know White Fang? I was thinking about that. I think it’s like a prequel to Call of the Wild. White Fang is Buck’s grandfather. You can work it out. There are, like, all these little clues.”
Then he curls down on the pillows, and chatters on about the great dog Buck, and how he is actually fulfilling the White Fang’s dream or maybe, like, the call of his genes when he runs into oblivion in the Canadian woods, and daringly the Mother takes his hand and folds it inside her own and remembers how soft it was when he was a little boy, really as soft as a petal, the curved veined petal of a magnolia in its brief springtime brilliance; and all the while the baby breathes in its tubing, its arms abandoned by its sides, its ribcage moving up and down with exaggerated depth in its pink covers, like a giant, disconnected, heart.
***
Three weeks later, they are in Acute General. They can’t be in a single room, because of the price of nurses. Because nurses have to watch him, now. Because, yesterday, the Son unplugged his Machine and watched silently as his life blood was pumped to the floor. And where was his Mother? His Mother was on her way to the library, that’s where, because her Son had said “Go and find a job, a life of your own,” that’s why. She was nearly there when she turned and sprinted back. She doesn’t know why.
Now they have pumped pints of blood back into his veins, now they have re-inflated his internal organs and wheeled him out of the ICU. Now the Mother and Son are going to have their first conversation. The tubes are out of his throat, but they seem to be in hers. They are in a bay with the curtains drawn. Acute General. Anyone could overhear.
“It was an impulse, Mum,” he says, to the ceiling tiles, his voice hoarser than ever. “One of those things. Try not to fixate, OK?”
“How can it be an impulse?” hisses the Mother, furiously, “to bypass six security systems?”
“Oh, I worked out how to do that ages ago,” carols the Son. “Sort of like chess. You know?”
The Mother taught the Son to play chess herself. Yes, she can see how he could do that: work it all out. And already, just two moves in, the Mother starts to weep, and the Son looks at her, then away.
“The thing is Mum,” says the Son, picking his nails, “You got it wrong.”
The Mother is prepared to accept she has got many things wrong. Which one, though?
“Robert Louis Stevenson?” says the Son. “Remember? He just wasn’t that ill, Robert Louis Stevenson. He could walk. He got to have sex. He grew fucking up. Mum. Not…” the boy gestures at his feet, sticking up in a little tent of blanket half-way down the bed.
The Mother slumps out of her chair and puts her head on the end of the bed. She is thinking about her love for her son. It was born at the same time as him, and she is not in control of it. She imagines it as very strong and not at all intelligent, something that moves about in the dark and grabs things. It has claws and tiny eyes, like a lobster.
“But your transplant,” says the Mother, “it could be anytime. Next month.”
“Yeah.” says the Son, “Exactly.” And they both remember the last transplant.
“What about me?” says the Mother, after a while. “What would I do without you? How would I feel?”
The Son sighs deeply. “Mum,” he says, “You have to see, don’t you? You have to see that I can’t be responsible for that?”
Paediatrics, again. They’ve been called in for the transplant. The Son beckons to the Mother conspiratorially.
“Look,” he whispers, “it’s the Not-Dead baby.”
The Mother peers through the gap in the curtains. In the opposite bay, flanked by machinery, is a cot and a pink-clad shape.
“Are you sure,” says the Mother, “it’s the same one? That was months ago. Wouldn’t she have grown?”
“Mum,” says the Son, “Haven’t you learnt anything? Of course she wouldn’t grow.”
Now a woman stands up, and draws the curtains of the bay. In the slice of light they glimpse the shadow of her belly.
“I hope she didn’t see us,” says the Mother.
“Did you see her?” hisses the Son “Pregnant! Holy moly!” and he collapses theatrically flat against his pillows. The Mother finishes pulling out her sofa bed, and lies on it. Her Son is staring at the ceiling, and has not re-plugged the iPod.
“Is it bad that she’s pregnant?” she says, after a while. In Paediatrics, there are pictures on the ceiling: Piglet and Pooh, walking into the sunset.
“No,” says the Son, “but it’s weird.”
“How weird?”
“Well, that baby is going to die. The Not-Dead one. I think it has Edwards Syndrome. I looked it up. So that baby will die, and then, just at the same time, she’ll have a new baby. And then what will they think?”
“Maybe,” says the Mother, though it is a bothering thought, “they’ll think they’ve got a new baby to love?”
“Yeah, and maybe they’ll think the old baby got a new body? You know? Transmutation of souls?”
“Would that be bad?”
“Not like, Hitler bad, but it is fucked up. Because, what I think is, your soul doesn’t exist. Your mind doesn’t, even. Your mind is a bit of your body.
It’s just the same. That’s what the Prozac tells you, Mum. See. Look at us. We’ve taken the pills, and they’ve changed our bodies, and that’s changed our minds. Here we are, having the transplant, happy campers. Different souls. See?”
“Yes,” says the Mother, who has brought Zopiclone with her and is about to take one, “I do see that. I see that point.”
“I’m going to put the light out now,” says the Son, and does. In the dark he says, in his Dalek voice from way back, from his Doctor Who phase,
“Tomorrow, I get my transplant. Then, I start to grow. I am on drugs that make me optimistic, so this is easy. Good night, mother-unit.”
The Mother’s pillow smells of rubber. The wall next to her head is padded vinyl. When the Son was little, she would lie here in Paediatrics and tell him they were camping out, in the Dormobile, lost in the French countryside. She tries to tell herself one of these stories now, but can only think of the Son’s illness, the long road, the many forks, and how, at each one, they have borne inexplicably left, further and further down B routes, nearer and nearer the sea. Recently, several people have told her that the Son owes her his life, but the Mother doesn’t feel that at all. It is she who owes him his, in the same way you owe a child a good picnic, when it is your idea to set out, and you who forgot the map, and now you are lost and there is no hope ever of the rain turning off.

A SPIKE ON THE GRAPH

This is a new hospital, in the city where the Son now goes to university. The Mother had to get a taxi and a plane and another taxi; she had to ask at two reception desks; a junior doctor met her at the second and is now trotting beside her; he is saying the crisis has peaked, and new antibiotics and best foot forward, hopefully; but she can hardly hear him for the fire-doors swing-swinging in her head; and here they are: Cardio-Respiratory.
The Son is already stable. He is sitting up in bed, attached to, for him, a minor amount of apparatus. He will always be small, but his cheekbones are good, he is bonily handsome. “Lollypop head,” he says, of himself, “I should be on TV.” There are girls, now, and here is one beside him, importantly holding his hand. She has blonde hair in plaits and liquid dark eyes and an animated, elegant, deer-like way of holding her head and back. The mother makes the mistake of automatically discounting her and sinks on to the bed, her mouth open, her hands stretched out, her body pulsing forward, ga-ga-ga-ga, my dearest love.
“You don’t need to worry!” cries the Girl, “He’s come through! They never saw such a spike in the graph!”
And the Son gives the Mother a quick lift of the eyebrow and an embarrassed smile. He raises his hand but it is encumbered with tubes and with the Girl’s hand. He is about to drop out of college and marry the Girl; he is going to live on an organic farm with a group of medical emergency survivors called The Saved; he is going to give up meat, alcohol, and irony and assume white robes and quasi-Zen belief; he is going to surrender to the leadership of a tall, wintery, ex-kidney-patient named Attila; he will tell his Mother that he is dedicated to the celebration of the moment and meditation and macrobiotics and this is why she cannot visit him or speak on the phone; he will explain that all this is done with his free will and is legal and not a cult and that Attila has plenty of experience with private detectives; the resulting period of constant acute tension and mourning will last more than three years; and though his gesture may start as an embrace, it ends as a flat-handed, popish, stop-sign.
SAVED
A third hospital. This ward is Acute Assessment. Here is the Mother who has just sat down, and here is the Wife on the opposite chair. The Son is propped up on pillows with his eyes shut. His hair has come out in tufts, now, and his skin is yellow-green and mottled like slipware. Now he is thin as a November guy.
The Son opens his eyes. Something has happened to them: they have curdled or solidified, gone from beer, full of yellow lights, to toffee. It must be the Wife’s fault. The Son doesn’t greet the Mother. He says to her:
“It’s the baby. I can’t stand the baby.”
“What baby?” says the Mother.
“His baby,” says the Wife, pointing to a toddler playing in a shaft of sunlight on the other side of the ward. The light catches the filaments of his hair. A path of trembling air opens up between the Grandmother and that little dandelion head.
“He wants juice,” says the Son, “Then he wants milk. Then he spills it on the floor. Then he howls. I mean, is that reasonable? Does it strike you as reasonable behaviour?”
“When did you have the Baby?” says the Mother/Grandmother.
“Don’t you mean why?” says the Son.
“He’s fourteen months,” says the Wife, “He was born at the Farm. A water birth.” She makes a calm blank face and looks straight at the Mother, as a cat turns towards its enemy the blind spot between its eyes.
“I’m taking Jaybird back to the Farm now. OK?” she says. But the Son has his eyes shut. Too late, the Mother runs after the Wife, and at the ward door she puts her hand briefly on the Baby’s head and tries to smile but it comes out as a moan.
The Son opens his eyes for his mother. “They think I have a brain tumour,” he says. “They’re really pretty sure. Maybe even more than one brain tumour, they’re going to do a scan. Then they might want to do chemo but I can’t be bothered, I mean what’s the point, do you think?”
“Is that why you’re angry with the Baby?” said the Mother. She knows this doesn’t come first, but the heat of the Baby’s head is still burning in her palm. The trout, love, is thrashing in her chest.
“How should I know?” said the Son. “How can anyone know that, Mum?” And then he vomits on the floor, and fits, and his Mother, still squeamish after all these years, doesn’t know where to touch him and presses the alarm above the bed and the doctors come, dozens of them, more than even she has ever seen.
In Oncology, the Mother is shown images of the tumours. There are three: bore holes or storm systems or black beetles in the bright contour maps of her Son’s brain, and the consultant wants to operate or at the very least shrink them with chemo or radio. The Son is refusing all treatment, but, as the consultant says, he is not himself and should perhaps be sectioned.
“No,” says the Son, to the consultant, “This is really me. This is actually how angry I am. I am actually this angry with hospitals. I really do hate you. You are not doing anyone any good and I do not give you permission to put your fingers in my brain.”
But it is true he is also angry with everyone else. He can’t remember why he asked his Mother to come, and keeps shouting for her to be taken away. When Attila arrives, in his clean white nightie, carrying Tupperware boxes, the Son refuses to let him lay on hands, and calls the proffered macrobiotic curry a “cow-pat.” The Mother, watching from the next bay, smirks, and in a whirl of white, Attila catches her arm in his hairy hand.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he says, as the Mother blinks into his large-boned, plain face, “About laughing. My roshi had a tumour in his arm. He watched it grow, and he said to it ‘tumour, you will be the death of me.’ And then he laughed at the tumour. At first, we could not understand, but then we laughed with him, and after some days of laughing the tumour shrank and disappeared. I saw this with my own eyes. Now, laughing woman, will you laugh with me?” The Mother is shaking her head but Attila opens his big bearded mouth and laughs, mirthlessly and loudly, showing his teeth, big as a donkey’s.
“Holy moly” says the Son, and pulls his blanket over his head.
This, to the Mother, demonstrates that the Son is sane. But next, in comes the Wife, with the Baby (the Baby has a chemical effect on the Mothers’ vision whereby he is illuminated and everything else turns greeny-orange, like an old TV screen) and the Son turns his back on them and buries himself in his pillow. When the Baby tries to tug it off with his little plump hands, calling “funny dada,” the Mother witnesses the Son knock the Baby over on the lino, and in the stramash that follows, the screaming, fits and forcible injections, she coldly thinks that perhaps the Son should be sectioned, after all.
Now the Mother sits by the Son’s bed while he sleeps. When he wakes, his eyes are clear.
“You were right,” said the Son, “We shouldn’t have had him.”
“I didn’t say that,” she replies, “How could I? I wasn’t there.”
“You didn’t need to be,” he says, “I internalised your response.”
It is indecent, how much this pleases her.
“But you love him,” she says, hopefully, “The baby?”
“I expect so,” says the Son, “but I’m letting him down. You see?”
“Yes,” says the Mother, “It’s a terrible feeling.” But the Mother is smiling, because she is still looking into her boy’s eyes. Over the years, she has lived with many imaginary versions of the Son—a spry, unmarried one, most recently—but also a heavy-limbed footballing boy, also a big lad who picks up her bags at the station, easily, as if they were empty, also a grown man who lifts her off her feet, tight to his cashmere chest, and all of them have had these eyes, eyes with gold lights, with pinpoints of the true dear dark.
“Because this time,” says the Son, “I am going to die. And you have to let me. You really do.”
In the hospice, the tumours eat the Son’s brain rapidly, like chalk cliffs eroding in a storm. Things fall off: houses, people. So, when the Wife comes in, the Son turns to her and smiles, and her face opens in joy.
“Hello,” says the Son, “Have you come to visit me?”
“I brought Jaybird,” she says, indicating the child.
“Is he yours?” he says.
The Wife leaves the hospital at once, the Baby like luggage on her shoulder, and gets in a taxi, the Mother at her side all the way, pleading. “It isn’t you he’s forgotten,” says the Wife, and the Mother feels a goldfish flick of pleasure.
The tumours eat words, but for a long time they are unable to devour music. So, round the Son, everyone sings: “Food Glorious Food” and “Dance for Your Daddy.” For, in a single night, the tumours have swallowed 15 years of bad feeling against the Father. The Mother has called him, and he has come, salt-and-pepper haired, now, prosperous and contented and wearing sports shirts the Mother would never, not in a million years, have allowed him. In he strode and picked up his Son in his arms and the Son, barely audibly, started to hum “my bonny laddie…” Everyone, even the case-hardened hospice workers, wept.
The tumours cannot eat chess, and for as long as the Son can lift the pieces, the Mother plays with him. It induces healthy synaptic activity, say the doctors, and she should keep it up. The doctors do not think the same of White Fang, but the Mother reads it aloud anyway. There are pathways in the brain, she thinks, for her sledge and its dog. Deep down in the brain stem is a pebble which is the Mother and the Son, and this is where they are headed. The pebble is ivory and has an embryo etched on it, curled. “Speed Bonny Boat,” sings the mother to that embryo, “You Are My Sunshine.” All those sad songs.
One tumour is an electric storm: it shakes the Son’s body like a tree. Another tumour picks him up like a pillow and doubles him over and squeezes vomit from him. The third tumour sends his eyes back into his skull looking for something. Together, the tumours take him by the throat and he can’t swallow.
The Wife returns, with the indefatigable Attila. Attila says they have come to let the truth of the Son’s death colour their lives, and the Wife says nothing. No, they won’t bring the Baby. This is a decision the Farm has collectively made. The Son’s face is frozen now, anyway, so who knows who he knows? The Wife wipes it, and sits by him. All her hairstyles connote innocence, or Princess—Rapunzel, Hebe, coronet—and she has grown out of them, all at once, and not noticed.
More and more of The Saved gather and chant in the day room. The hospice complains, so Attila negotiates duties for them: vase-filling, visiting the unvisited. The Father sits among them, incongruous in his golfing jumper, helping with vases, holding his daughter-in-law’s hands, conversing with Attila. He is exactly Attila’s height and build, the Mother notes, their heads bend together above all the other heads, the tallest trees. The Father’s eyes are constantly wet, he is tireless, the anger, as Attila points out, is all on the Mother’s side.
If the Mother were more open to The Saved, and to spiritual meaning in general, she would not be so isolated. It is the Mother’s choice to walk this narrow path of unbelief, and to sit alone with the Son in the depths of the night. She knows it, and when, long after language started to leave him, she hears the Son say, “What people forget when they are afraid of dying is that when you die, you are ill. So you don’t mind really. Being ill is shit,” she tells no one. After all, maybe he didn’t really say that. Maybe she has just internalised his response.
The Saved and the Father agree on a plan. The Wife brings the Baby to the hospice garden. The Saved lift the Son out of bed and carry him, stiff and light as a charred log, outside. They hold him under the cherry tree and chant their mantras, the Father loudest of all on the Oms, while the Wife, a garland on her lovely head, helps the Baby stroke his cheeks with a bunch of blossom. The Mother watches all this from the hospice window, longing for the Baby, weeping, thinking she should have been asked.
But, when he does die, it is the Mother beside him. What happens is: he stops breathing and the Mother isn’t frightened, after all. One eye is open, and one shut, and she reaches across and closes the open one. There, now, Jonathon. The eyelid is warm and soft as a silk scarf left in the sun, but there is nothing living now in the hard round of the eyeball, not the least tick or twitch of life.
Then she stands up. Her name is Julia. It is nearly dawn. She goes out to the day room where her ex-husband and Attila and The Saved are sleeping, in their white robes, like so many discarded petals. She was going to tell them something, the thing she has learned, but already it is draining from her, disappearing like water poured over sand, and she lets them sleep on and just sits down.

Essay on democracy

2009-07-18T08:13:02Z

The Future of European Democracy

By Thomas Darnstädt
Card-carrying Europeans reacted in dismay to a recent far-reaching ruling on the EU's Lisbon Treaty by Germany's Constitutional Court. But the judges have in fact done Europeans a huge service by tackling the issue of how democracy can work in the era of supranational institutions.
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Do the people want to be deceived? Niccolò Machiavelli -- who was, it's safe to say, something of a cynic when it came to state power -- once wrote that anyone who wishes to reform a government "must, if his measures are to be well received and carried out with general approval, preserve at least the semblance of existing methods, so as not to appear to the people to have made any change in the old order of things, although, in truth, the new ordinances differ altogether from those which they replace."

The European Parliament in Strasbourg: How can democracy function in the era of supranational institutions?

The Florentine diplomat's wisdom was valid in the Renaissance, when the world was being fundamentally restructured, and it also applies to the restructuring of the international order in the 21st century. As stated in the European Union's Lisbon Treaty: "The functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy." Is this a promise? Or have they been reading Machiavelli again? Are they really telling us the truth about what they have planned for democracy?
Germany's Federal Constitutional Court proclaimed the truth on June 30. It ruled that the EU of the Lisbon Treaty does not satisfy the minimum requirements for a democracy of the type described in the German constitution, and the European Parliament is effectively little more than an expensive, Machiavellian glass façade. And without proper supervision by the national parliaments, the politicians in Brussels are not legitimized by the people, it ruled.

Admittedly the court did rule that the Lisbon Treaty is basically compatible with German law and therefore can eventually be ratified. But before it can be, further legislation must be introduced in Germany that would strengthen the national parliament's involvement in any major decision-making in Brussels.

So is EU democracy nothing but a shiny bauble? Criticism of the German court's ruling has grown with each day that passes since the decision was handed down. Prominent European intellectuals have vocally expressed their outrage at the court's reservations about further steps toward European integration. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer described the ruling as "outrageous" in an opinion piece for the respected German weekly Die Zeit. "The decision comes at a time at which our European neighbors and the Americans are increasingly gaining the impression that Germany is more and more turning away from Europe and is mainly interested in its own affairs," he wrote. "The Constitutional Court's decision strengthens this impression."
But this outrage conceals the fact that the ruling of the Karlsruhe-based Constitutional Court also represents the most important contribution yet to the future of democracy in the post-democratic era. The Karlsruhe judges are treating the European project the way it has long been seen by political scientists, as well as international law and globalization experts around the world, namely as the world's most exciting attempt to solve supranational problems with the help of supranational politics -- and to do so in a democratic fashion.

Can Western Democracy Work for Supranational Politics?

But how democratic can supranational politics really be? The judges' first important contribution is that they are taking the problem seriously. The hackneyed words of Europe's proponents are a mere smokescreen. A parliament like the European one is no democratic representation of sovereign populations if the vote of a citizen of Malta counts 12 times as much as that of a French citizen. A parliament like the one in Strasbourg and Brussels cannot legitimize the work of the European Commission, which effectively functions as a government, because it is hardly capable of controlling it.

It is naïve to believe that one can build a transnational super-state based on the model of conventional Western democracies, political philosophers argue. The difficulties do not lie solely in the attempt to channel the process of shaping the political will within large, heterogeneous areas like the European continent, across cultural and linguistic barriers, into an equitable process with a unified outcome. More importantly, there is a fundamental problem: Who exactly is the subject of this democracy supposed to be, as represented by its super-parliament? The people of Europe? It is not just the notoriously suspicious British, but each nation in Europe, which sees its sovereignty challenged when it is defeated in a vote. After all, being sovereign means, in a conventional sense, not having to do what another nation says.
Because it is so difficult (perhaps impossible?) to democratically control political actors in international institutions, constitutional experts and political scientists are working on alternatives to the Western nations' traditional model of democracy everywhere such organizations exist. What legitimizes the power of the World Trade Organization? Which parliament monitors the activities of the International Criminal Court? How democratic is the Basel Committee, which supervises banks' credit policies? And who monitors the voting behavior of the nuclear powers on the United Nations Security Council?

"Output" Democracy

Does democratic legitimacy still play any kind of role anymore? According to the Frankfurt-based sociologist and legal scholar Gunther Teubner, a web of regulations and norms has developed over the heads of citizens and nations as a result of international treaties, economic regulations, interest groups and non-governmental organizations. This complex of rules has a significant influence on the daily lives of people without ever having been approved by a parliament, he argues.

In this regard, the insistence on the classical model of democratic legitimization from the bottom up -- in other words, from the citizen to the state -- has become downright old-fashioned. European politics threatens to become hopelessly ineffective if it allows itself to become too closely tied to parliaments. It is not surprising that Europe, too, is to be streamlined in what Udo Di Fabio, a member of the Federal Constitutional Court and one of the authors of the June 30 decision, calls the "wake of the global community." Di Fabio's former colleague Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem has already reflected publicly on the possibility of "no longer securing legitimization solely through institutions and processes, but also through results."

In other words, the Brussels bureaucracy no longer needs to ask itself: What is the interest of citizens? Instead, it can ask itself: What is in the interest of citizens? And it also needs to try to convince Europeans of its legitimacy on the basis of its results. Heidelberg-based international law expert Armin von Bogdandy speaks of "gubernative (sic) law-making" and expresses similarly paternalistic ideas when he argues that it is the executive which should decide which rules are to apply in Europe.

These are ideas from the theory of so-called "output" democracy, in which more weight is placed on the persuasive power of results than legitimization through "input" from democratic opinion-shaping processes within the population.

The notion of Europe as an output democracy is an apt description of what is now happening in Brussels. For instance, last week's "output" from the EU's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, was probably convincing for a majority of European citizens: She fined two large energy providers, Germany's E.on and France's GDF Suez, €553 million ($781 million) each because of a profiteering cartel agreement between the companies. And it is correct to point out that this outcome could only be achieved because Brussels was not required to pay any heed to democratically elected decision-makers in Germany, for example. The German government may have no problems with legitimacy, but it is also immensely pro-industry. Germany's ruling grand coalition government would never have dared to inflict such a blow on a German energy giant like E.on.
Are we better off under this output democracy? Perhaps. The only disadvantage is that it isn't actually a democracy. The shaping of the political will in this brave new political world does not take place from the bottom up, but precisely the other way around.

The judges have taken a stance against this system. That stance is important not just because of their appeal to the democratic principles of the German constitution, the Basic Law, which, from the court's standpoint, are sacrosanct. It is -- and this is their second major achievement -- also a serious attempt to rethink democracy for the age of major supranational decisions.

German Parliamentarians Must See European Politics as Their Responsibility

The far-reaching responsibility which the Constitutional Court has given the German Bundestag -- and other national parliaments -- in relation to European politics, creates a new role for the traditional parliamentary system. Under the classical model of democracy, the parliament is responsible for every decision that is to be made within the territory of the community known as the "nation" -- in other words, for domestic policy. Members of parliament are only very indirectly responsible for those issues that affect others, namely foreign policy. Representing the nation beyond its borders has since time immemorial been the responsibility of the executive branch. Under that model, a member of parliament knows very little about foreign affairs.

But Europe is the ever-more-convincing proof that domestic and foreign policy can no longer be separated from each other. Each member of the government who sits on a council of ministers in Brussels is simultaneously carrying out both German and European politics. Each German representative on a council should, in the best-case scenario, take the EU's other 26 members into account when making decisions. Naturally he or she has taken an oath to serve German interests. But that is exactly why the European Union exists: so that everyone does not simply represent his or her own interests, but also considers the interests of others, in a spirit of solidarity. If the political arena is being relocated in this way from the nation-state to Brussels, then it is only logical that the sphere of responsibility of the parliament, which is elected to control the executive, should relocate too. That is exactly what the Federal Constitutional Court is demanding: The Bundestag -- even the Bundestag -- must become a European parliament. And Bundestag members must see European politics as their responsibility, and not just as foreign policy.

Governments Must Learn to Explain Europe

The most important counter-argument to this position is that members of parliament would be out of their depth under that scenario. In the past, they have failed miserably when confronted with challenges involving EU politics -- such as when the guidelines from Brussels regarding the European Arrest Warrant were being discussed. Then, too, it was the Federal Constitutional Court that in 2005 stopped the overhasty and unconstitutional implementation of the Brussels guidelines into German law. The Bundestag members who appeared before the Constitutional Court to argue their case stuttered like schoolboys in front of the judges. They could not say what they thought -- because they had not thought about anything.

In a representative parliament whose scope does not include big-picture politics, lawmakers are not used to taking responsibility for the actual subject matter of issues. Members of parliament play the role of providing a majority for the government -- or preventing it from forming a majority. End of story. Thus, it is not surprising that the Bundestag failed to reclaim for itself its right to exercise control when it came to the German laws relating to the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty.

Who, if not the Federal Constitutional Court, could have acted to change things? The Lisbon Treaty verdict is a massive appeal -- no, order -- to the people's representatives to finally engage with European issues. "A lot of work and little recognition," is how Bundestag member Gunther Krichbaum once described his work on the Bundestag's European Union committee, which he chairs. Is that all that Europe means for German democracy?

Card-carrying Europeans seem unanimous in the view that national legitimization of European decisions is impossible in the long run. A democracy consisting of 27 national parliaments would be too noisy, too slow and too nationalistic, they argue. But the Constitutional Court has neither ruled that political decisions by German government members who are on councils of ministers in Brussels need to be subject to approval by the Bundestag, nor ruled out further steps toward greater European integration. It is only trying to prevent the Bundestag from refusing to take responsibility for all these things. It is trying to prevent the situation where, in the words of the former Constitutional Court judge Dieter Grimm, "European politics continue to be conducted behind the Bundestag's back." The government should have leeway to make decisions in Brussels, just as it does in the national sphere, as long as it has the confidence of the Bundestag.

Tying European Union politics once again to the responsibilities of the parliament also means that future European integration will, in individual cases, need to be based on goals that can be communicated to the electorate. As of now, European integration is no longer something that will automatically continue by itself -- in individual cases, the government must be able to explain to voters the utility of further steps toward greater integration, and those steps need to have majority support. Explain Europe: That will be the challenge for all the fervent Europeans among German democrats.

Nothing Is Simple in a United Europe

The Constitutional Court's model of a Europe of European parliaments is not as impracticable as distraught Europeans are making it out to be. It all comes down to the Bundestag members -- in contrast to the election campaigners in the ranks of Bavaria's conservative Christian Social Union, with their garbled calls for grassroots democracy and the right to unlimited control -- thinking about how they can be good Europeans.

So far, however, Europe's political thinkers have only come up with provisional ideas about how that could work. The Munich sociologist Ulrich Beck, for example, talks of a creative political culture within a "Europe of differences." Under this model, national parliaments would promote, in the words of former Constitutional Court judge Dieter Grimm, "public discourse about European politics" within member states. The Frankfurt lawyer Erhard Denninger believes that a sense of "European solidarity" would emerge from an open competition between democracies.
And Ralf Dahrendorf, the respected German-British sociologist who died in June, even referred to ideas from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in a bid to endow members of Western parliaments with a Kantian categorical imperative to be cosmopolitan. In a play on a famous line of Kant's, Dahrendorf writes: "Act in a way that your action's maxim could be seen as a principle of a global civic constitution that administers a universal law."

Not even the Federal Constitutional Court could have said it in a more complicated way. But then nothing is simple in a united Europe.

.

Filmed by a New York banker

2009-04-08T12:02:46Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/apr/07/g20-police-assault-video

The police story changed as the evidence against them mounted. The occasions where protesters smashed windows appear contrived too, with banks of press photographers ready and waiting, and police video cameramen inside the bank poised to capture the breaking of a window at the Royal Bank of Scotland, by hooded "protesters" who, I suspect, will never be apprehended.

There appears to be no regard for civil liberties - particularly the right to conduct a peaceful protest - under New Labour. The Labour Party, in opposition, were appalled and vociferous in their condemnation of police brutality during the Miners Strike of the early 1980's, which they directly attributed to the orders Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Now, the agents of the state are at it again, presumably so nothing will spoil PM Gordon Brown's Obamic Moment?

It doesn't really add up. There are those in the Metropolitan Police who know they can get away with murder, because they pulled it off with no apology in the case of Jean Charles Menezes. That set a frightening precedent.

Ironic that the police were grassed by a banker, whose interests they were supposedly there to protect.

from Counterpunch

2009-01-11T12:23:05Z

Weekend Edition
January 9-11, 2009

Why Hamas is Not the Issue
Gaza: History Matters
By ELAINE C. HAGOPIAN

Mohammed, age six, marched with determination to his bedroom, put on a record of the Fatah marching song, picked up a wooden toy rifle and marched out to the balcony. He pointed the rifle to the sky where minutes ago, Israeli planes flew over dropping bombs on Palestinian refugee sites. Mohammed told me he wanted to be a pilot so he could fight Israeli warplanes. “But Mohammed, the Palestinians do not have planes.” “I don’t care, I will fight them whatever way I can.” Was a resistance fighter born this minute or was he a “future terrorist”? (Beirut 1973)

How does one explain the horrific fate that has befallen caged Gaza – a land saturated with rubble and body parts – carpet-bombed by air, invaded by ground, attacked by sea? Put to the test of history, Israeli “explanations” fail the credibility test.

History matters. Israel conquered and occupied Gaza (along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem) in 1967. Hamas was an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers. In Gaza, it provided a network of social welfare institutions supporting the poor. During the first Palestinian Intifada (literally “shaking off” the occupation), a Hamas resistance military wing was formed. Israel and the US favored and met with Islamic Hamas leadership as a counterforce to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Fatah faction then dominant in the Intifada. As Hamas later strengthened, Israel reversed the process.

History matters. Palestinians have consistently resisted Israeli dominance over their lives. Gazan resistance has been especially problematic for Israel. In the 1970s, before Hamas, Ariel Sharon was charged with “pacifying” Gaza. Sharon imposed a brutal policy of repression, blowing up houses, bulldozing large tracts of refugee camps, imposing severe collective punishment and imprisoning hundreds of young Palestinians.

Domination and colonialism are contrary to the United Nations Charter. The legitimacy of struggle for self-determination by peoples under colonial and foreign domination was reaffirmed in U.N. General Assembly resolution 2787 (December 6, 1971). As others before them, Palestinians have and do exercise the legal and moral right to resist.

History matters. In 2005, Israel withdrew its illegal colonial settlers from Gaza. Israeli scholars Uri Davis, Ilan Pappe and Tamar Yaron noted in a Counterpunch article at the time that the primary motive of the evacuation of the settlers was to remove them from harm’s way in anticipation of an intensified future mass attack on Gaza.

History matters. After Hamas won elections in 2006, its leadership accepted a two-state solution based on the pre-war June 4, 1967 borders, but this was unacceptable to Israel. Earlier, Israel destroyed secular Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Arafat for failing at Camp David in July 2000 to comply with its demands to accept permanent Israeli control over Palestinian life and land confined in enclaves. Hamas became the new challenge to Israel’s vision.

The facts of history affirm that Israel will not accept a sovereign Palestinian state on any part of historic Palestine. Hamas is not the issue. All Palestinian leaders sooner or later, secular or Islamic, are declared unacceptable partners for peace no matter how much they concede to Israel. That Israel hides behind the “Hamas Islamic threat” today to destroy it as a potential partner is becoming transparent.

Today, Palestinian Authority President Abbas’s Fatah “security force” is used against Hamas supporters on the pretense that Abbas could be accepted by Israel as a satisfactory “partner” but for Hamas. Both before and after Hamas won the 2006 elections, Abbas fared no better than Arafat though he conceded more. In fact Jonathan Cook’s new book, Disappearing Palestine,” describes the persistent Israeli strategy to achieve the diminution of Palestine. Nonetheless Abbas continues to comply with Israeli/US demands, faulted by his people and humiliated by his keepers.

The picture changes when history matters. Treating Israeli war crimes as historically detached events, unrelated to its Zionist ideology and militaristic strategy to control all of Palestine, becomes more transparent each day.

Israel has a choice: by accepting Palestinian rights under international law now and jettisoning its exclusivist ideology and militarism, Israel secures the future of its people in a shared Israel/Palestine; or by continuing its present policy of ruthless repression of indigenous Palestinians and denying them self determination, it cultivates an intensified and unyielding native resistance. Israel has always chosen the latter. Will President-Elect Obama have the courage to help Israel embrace the first?

Elaine C. Hagopian is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Simmons College, Boston

Interesting documentary from the Media Foundation.

2009-01-03T12:33:19Z

Posted Jul 22, 2006, this documentary provides a useful point of comparison with today's coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza, which has been widely blamed on the Palestinians in the mainstream media:

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=50287

primrosepath77 @ 2008-12-18T09:13:00

2008-12-18T09:13:54Z

Strange happenings in Baghdad, as the outgoing Dubya suffers “the worst insult in the Arab world”—assault by footwear. The foot being the lowest part of the body, this is as bad as it gets, apparently; it takes me back to a cheerful montage of images from Iraq in 2003, when Iraqis seemed to be queuing up to rub the soles of their shoes against portraits of the vanquished Saddam. Now every journalist and blogger can polish up their pearl of wisdom one more time and explain, pace Wikipedia, just how profound the contempt this gesture indicates is.

I’m interested, though, in a rather more pragmatic question: just how effective is it to insult someone in an alien cultural idiom? Bush, naturally enough, looked bewildered, but he ducked speedily and seemed none the worse for wear afterwards. Gordon Brown, I suspect, would have stolidly absorbed the blows; Obama would probably have caught one shoe in each hand before throwing them across the room for three points into a waiting waste-paper basket. But none of them, surely, would actually have been offended. The message would have come across much more clearly if the journalist had done something more traditionally American, like casting aspersions on the president’s parentage, motor vehicle, football team, taste in music, or pretzel-consuming ability; while simultaneously performing a thoroughly international gesture for emphasis.

After all, it’s common courtesy to research the ways of foreign visitors so that one doesn’t accidentally offend them. By the same logic, it’s surely common sense to research the ways in which one can cause maximum offense to foreign visitors. In America and Britain, footwear-lobbing (not to mention wellie wanging) is a jolly, even a folksy, kind of sport, like Morris dancing or buffalo chip throwing: more likely to raise a smile than hackles, with the possible exception of a well-aimed high heel. Then again, were George Bush to invite his critic to join him in lobbing a few Texan buffalo chips, I imagine the Iraqi would soon be begging for shoes…

How one state of affairs was transformed into another state of affairs.

2008-11-11T12:53:18Z

Next Saturday world leaders meet in Washington to discuss new rules for the global financial system (though little will be achieved with President-elect Obama absent). So far, thinking about this matter has scarcely got beyond calls for better banking regulation: a microeconomic issue that is doubtless important but misses the main economic plot. The Bretton Woods system of 1944 was set up to "promote a stable system of exchange rates". This system has gone. But any new agreement, will need to be equally ambitious in addressing the problem of exchange rates, because the prevailing "non-system" has played a major role in the wild credit boom that has led to the financial crisis.

The old system broke down because creditor countries such as Germany and France found it more convenient to accumulate dollar reserves than revalue their currencies. This enabled the US to run balance of payments deficits financed by printing treasury bills. But since these were ultimately exchangeable for gold, the system was unstable and came crashing down in 1971, leaving a world of floating exchange rates.

It is now east Asian countries, especially China, that have accumulated US treasury bills, paid out to finance current account deficits - recently running at $700bn a year. Asia's savings glut has its counterpart in the consumption glut of western states such as the US and UK.

This destructive conjunction can be traced to two interrelated projects of Asian governments. One was to accumulate US dollar reserves to insure against a repeat of the capital flight of 1997/8 and to avoid the humiliating conditions that the IMF imposed for rescue packages. The second was to keep exports growing rapidly to boost employment and growth. Exchange rate undervaluation, prohibited in 1944, was the policy weapon used. Asian governments intervened massively to buy dollars and resist market pressure for currency appreciation. Moreover, they "sterilised" their dollar purchases, preventing domestic price increases that would have eroded their export competitiveness. So balance of payments adjustment was blocked.

The excess Asian savings have been shovelled into housing bubbles in both the US and Britain - not directly, but by enabling our governments to pursue expansionary monetary and fiscal policies that stoked up credit expansions. In this way the global imbalances have contributed directly to the meltdown. For the past 10 years the US has, in effect, had no budget constraint. And what was true of the country as a whole was true of all those companies and individuals who piled up debt on the back of inflating asset prices. The IMF was marginalised because its central purpose, which was to prevent these huge imbalances from occurring, had been negated.

Two lessons follow from this story. First, a way must be found of meeting countries' reserve needs for crisis insurance, while avoiding the use of national currencies as international reserves. The simplest way would be to activate and build upon the IMF's ability to create special drawing rights as an international reserve asset. The IMF might also become an international asset manager, pooling countries' reserves and making them available to deficit countries.

Second, the global exchange rate system must help rather than hinder the correction of excessive imbalances. Ever since the IMF articles were amended in 1978, each country has been allowed unilaterally to choose any exchange rate regime that suits its goals and circumstances. We have ended up with a free-for-all that is radically flawed from a systemic viewpoint. The US and Europe are floating but the Japanese and Chinese currencies, as well as those of a number of other Asian countries, are undervalued, but closely tied to the US dollar.

Undervaluation may make sense for a small nation but it is dangerous collective nonsense if practised by a key country or by several significant countries. In the next quarter-century, as emerging countries catch up with the west, large exchange rate changes will be in response to fast productivity growth. Smooth realignments are unlikely if the free-for-all continues. It is crucially important, therefore, that the major countries agree on a common exchange rate system that promotes balance of payments adjustment. (Small countries tend to follow one or other major country.) A fixed rate between major currencies is one possibility, provided sterilisation is disallowed. But it would involve a loss of monetary independence - probably politically unacceptable as well as economically painful and inefficient. So the major currencies - the dollar, the yen, the euro, the yuan - will have to float. But unmanaged floating can lead to prolonged and manifestly insane exchange rate movements (for example the US dollar bubble in 1984/85) that can themselves cause macroeconomic instability.

That leaves only two realistic options. Exchange rates between major currencies could float in unmanaged fashion most of the time, but with occasional policy cooperation and coordinated intervention to prevent gross misalignments. Or more ambitiously, the major countries could decide to practise managed floating of a structured kind. They could periodically agree on exchange rates that are appropriate for global adjustment, intervention being permitted only to influence market exchange rates in the direction of the agreed rates. It is no good relying on the IMF. The organisation has to be led by a group of key economies that have significant weight in the world economy (currently the US, Europe, Japan and China).

The most we can expect of Saturday's conference will be an agreement to increase the liquid resources at the disposal of the IMF. Exchange rate reform will have to wait on the end of the crisis. But it is important to start thinking about it now.

primrosepath77 @ 2008-11-03T11:46:00

2008-11-03T11:48:21Z

Archeologists from the British Museum visited the historic site of Ur, Iraq, this weekend; the visit was part of an assessment of various archeological sites for damage and looting.

When Cyrus the Great of Persia captured Babylon in 539BC he must have been quite taken by the Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel and the palaces of cedar, decorated in gold and bronze.

Contrary to the standard operating procedure for invaders of his day and age, instead of laying waste to the place Cyrus set an example for the future by allowing his new possession to prosper, respecting its religion and cultural heritage.

Instead of shock, awe.

More than 2,500 years later, some of the surviving glories of what is considered to be the capital of the ancient world are to go on show at the British Museum, London, in an exhibition which opens on Nov 13. Visitors to “Babylon, Myth and Reality”, will see 100 objects, predominantly from the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar (605 – 562BC), including glazed panels from the Ishtar Gate, one of the entries to the fabled city, and enamelled lions from the walls of the Processional Way.

These remains are almost mythical, but what might make an even more profound impression on visitors will be the section of the exhibition devoted to the reality of the five years since the Second Gulf War.

What it highlights is the “carelessness” of the troops who set up camp on the site of the ancient city in May 2003 and proceeded to cause incalculable damage to the ruins and the relics that lay beneath.

The exhibition has already been shown in Berlin and Paris but, surprisingly, neither capital made anything of this cultural tragedy. The British Museum, however, pursuing its now familiar, eye-catching policy of relating the past to the present, as it did with Persia in 2005 and the Emperor Hadrian earlier this year, is not afraid to mix politics with pottery.

John Curtis, the keeper of the department of the Middle East at the British Museum, visited Babylon before the invasion and several times since, in a flurry of dramatic helicopter rides and a border dash, complete with highway robbers demanding antiques at gunpoint.

“It’s the same as the other shows in that we look at Babylon and what it means to European thought and tradition,” he says. “What makes ours different is that there is much more focus on Babylon today.”

Mr Curtis was one of the first to ring the alarm bells about the post-invasion vandalism. Not a man prone to exaggeration, as long ago as Dec 2004 he nevertheless filed a report saying: “It is regrettable that a military camp of this size should have been established on one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain.”

He listed the damage, including the digging of trenches, the building of a landing zone for helicopters that flattened the ground, deep ruts from vehicles and fuel leakage. Pieces of pottery and cuneiform inscriptions were found in banks of spoil and in the soil used to fill sandbags.

Nothing has happened since to change his sense of outrage.

“There is no excuse for what happened,” he says. “It was totally unnecessary. I have asked for a full-scale international investigation into the damage done to the site during its occupation by coalition forces.”

He has no time for the suggestion that this type of institutional vandalism is an inevitable consequence of war.

“The fact is that when Babylon was made into a military camp the war had already been won,” he says. “I don’t think it was necessary to establish a camp there at all. Maybe they did it because it has the same strategic advantages that made Babylon a capital city in the first place – on the banks of the river, on an intersection of routes and on slightly rising ground – and it was in an area which lies 90km south of Baghdad which had already been fenced to protect the site, so it was very convenient.

“But there is obviously no special advantage in making a camp there, because when the coalition closed the base down at the end of 2004, after all the controversy about the damage, they were quite happy to do so, even though it was at the height of the insurgency.”

It was not “political or deliberate”, he believes. “I’m a great believer in conspiracy theories but in this case it was just incompetence.”

The problem, he says, was that the coalition forces did not have archaeologists or other experts embedded who knew about Iraqi history or culture.

“That’s a retrograde step from even World War Two, when the troops in Italy and North Africa did have experts who were put to good use. It compares poorly with World War One, too, when there was much less destruction even though there were vast numbers of troops.”

More than 30,000 British troops – mainly Indians – died during the Mesopotamian campaign in the First World War, fought against Ottoman forces led by German commanders and waged chiefly to protect British interests in one of the world’s first oil refineries, at Abadan.

Donny George, an Iraqi archaeologist who was director of antiquities in Baghdad before leaving the country in Aug 2006, after receiving death threats against him and his family, insists: “The invasion troops knew that this was the city of Babylon. I believe that the original decision to have an army there was to protect it but then they thought it was a wonderful place for a camp and, little by little, it was developed into a very big base.”

He says that in April 2003, before the invasion, “American archaeologists gave the military the co-ordinates for thousands of archaeological sites. So they knew where they were, they had the names of the sites, everything. The damage could have been avoided.”

For Mr George, the exhibition has an important message to convey: “It is very important to explain that whatever the aims of the military were, they have done this damage to the country. Not only to Babylon but to the history of mankind.”

In addition to the destruction caused by the occupying forces, as many as 16,000 objects were looted from the Museum of Iraq in Baghdad alone, although about half have since been returned. Many were hidden away by Mr George in reinforced storerooms.

“I think the looting was organised,” says Mr Curtis, “but I don’t think it was organised by western criminal gangs or the Mafia, as some have suggested, but by local sheikhs and their tribes.

“It’s a huge problem trying to track the artefacts down. We don’t have much information about how much was dug up, who was doing the selling, how things were transmitted abroad and which market things ended up in.”

Since Dec 2004 the site has been protected by elements of the Iraqi paramilitary Facilities Protection Service but, says Mr Curtis, “The damage has been done. It has taken until now for a proper assessment to be agreed on and we are waiting for Unesco to draw up a management plan so that things can be put right.”

The US Senate has allocated some money and there is a proposal that the World Monuments Fund and the Getty Foundation should become involved. Nevertheless, “it will all take a long, long, time”, says Mr Curtis.

The Babylon exhibition itself is, of course, steeped in irony; that it is possible at all is thanks only to what amounts to European looting from another age. There are some valuable finds still in Baghdad, such as glazed brick panels, tablets, terracottas and jewellery, but they are, inevitably, trapped in Iraq and cannot form part of any exhibition staged abroad. Consequently, everything in the show will have come from the collections of the Louvre in Paris, the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin and the British Museum.

In May 2002, the Iraqi archaeological department demanded that artefacts removed by German archaeologists at the beginning of the last century should be returned. Mohammed Aziz Selman al Ibrahim, an official of the ministry of culture, said at the time: “I have anger, but what can we do? I appeal to the German government to give back our antiquities to Iraq.” Nothing was forthcoming.

Much of the Ishtar Gate, excavated between 1899 and 1914, was lifted and taken to Berlin, where it was reconstructed in 1930 and where it stands today. The Germans took many other treasures, including all but two of the 120 golden lions on the friezes which lined the Procession Way. Both the French and British also removed the spoils of their excavations.

Having created Iraq, which became a state in Nov 1920, the British imposed a monarchy on the new country but retained control until the Thirties. Under the country’s first Antiquities Law of 1922, it was decreed that foreign archaeologists should split their finds 50-50 with Iraq. Nevertheless, the proceeds of excavations by the colonial powers were often removed in bulk – such as the two shiploads said by some to have been removed by Gertrude Bell, the British archaeologist and political officer, and which allegedly ended up in Britain.

Bell was a vivid character who worked with TE Lawrence and the British government’s Arab Bureau to create Iraq out of the post-First World War carve-up of the Ottoman Empire. In a letter home, written as she worked on creating the new borders imposed on the region by the victorious western allies, she wrote: “I feel at times like the Creator about the middle of the week. He must have wondered what it was going to be like, as I do.”

The consequences of her “creation”, of course, reverberate today.

Nevertheless, Bell had a genuine love for the region and its history, and founded The National Museum of Iraq, an act that helped to make her an object of veneration to some when she died in Baghdad in 1927.

In her life she had encouraged the youthful nation to exploit the glories of Babylon as part of a British-orchestrated exercise in nation building.

Saddam Hussein also understood Babylon’s symbolic value and in 1985 started rebuilding the city on top of the ruins. To the dismay of archaeologists, he inscribed his name on many of the bricks in imitation of Nebuchadnezzar, and in glorification of himself. The inscriptions proclaimed: “This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq”.

“My complaint about Gertrude Bell,” says Mr Curtis, “is that she is one of the great imperialists and the notion of drawing lines through the map to create new countries irrespective of tribal allegiances or history has led to a lot of the problems we have today.”

Nonetheless, despite the mistakes of empires – past and present – he is cautiously optimistic that, like him, visitors will come away from the exhibition with the feeling that things will improve for Iraq.

Mr George, speaking from his exile as visiting professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, says: “I believe that this kind of exhibition and the material that is being shown will help to show people that Iraq is not a desert, not a place where people live in tents and have camels, but a great civilisation.”

A public service announcement from RFK Jnr

2008-10-22T08:34:15Z

Step one

2008-10-03T10:11:27Z

Orwell, you may recall, has an essay called "Literary Censorship in England" which was supposed to be the introduction to Animal Farm, except that it never appeared, in which he points out "look, I’m writing about a totalitarian society, but in free, democratic England, it’s not all that different", and then he says unpopular ideas can be silenced without any force, and then he gives a two sentence response which is not very profound, but captures it: He says, two reasons - first, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain things appear but second, the whole educational system from the beginning on through gets you to understand that there are certain things you just don’t say.

Type your cut contents here. There’s a filtering system that starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through and - it doesn’t work a hundred percent, but it’s pretty effective - it selects for obedience and subordination. Non conformists will be described as exhibiting"behavior problems" or... if you read applications to a graduate school, you see that people will tell you "he doesn’t get along too well with his colleagues" - you know how to interpret those things.

Some of the best-known investigative reporters in the United States have a highly cynical attitude toward the media. In fact, they regard the media as a sham. They constantly talk about how they try to... play it like a violin: If they see a little opening they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, "We stand up against power", very self-serving view. On the other hand, the better journalists, and in fact, the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists, have quite a different picture and, I think, a very realistic one.

There are extremely good journalists in England, a number of them, they write very honestly, and very good material; a lot of what they write wouldn’t appear in the US. On the other hand, if you look at the question overall, I don’t think you’re going to find a big difference, and the few (there aren’t many studies of the British press), but the few that there are have found pretty much the same results, and I think the better journalists will tell you that. In fact, what you have to do is check it out in cases.

The Vietnam War. The British press did not have the kind of stake in the Vietnam War that the American press did, because they weren’t fighting it. Just check sometime, and find out how many times you can find the American war in Vietnam described as a US attack against South Vietnam, beginning clearly with outright aggression in 1961, and escalating to massive aggression in ’65. If you can find 0.001% of the coverage saying that, you’ll surprise me, and in a free press, 100% of it would have been saying that. Now that’s just a matter of fact - it has nothing to do with left and right.

Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait took place on August 2^nd. Within a few days, the great fear in Washington was that Saddam Hussein was going to withdraw and leave a puppet government, which would be pretty much what the US had done in Panama. The U.S. and Britain therefore, moved very quickly to try to undercut the danger of withdrawal. By late August, negotiation offers were coming from Iraq, calling for a negotiated Iraqi withdrawal. The press wouldn’t publish them in the US, they never publish them in England. It did leak however...

..but no there was not a debate - there was a debate about whether you should continue with sanctions, which is a different question... because the fact of the matter is, there is good evidence that by mid- or late-August the sanctions had already worked, because these stories were coming from high American officials in the State Department - former American officials like Richard Helm - they couldn’t get the mainstream press to cover them, but they did manage to get one journal to cover them - Newsday - that’s a suburban journal in Long Island, the purpose obviously being to spook out the NYT, because that’s the only thing that matters. It came out in Newsday and this continued until January 2^nd. At that time, the offers that were coming were apparently so meaningful to the State Department, that State Department officials were saying that "Look, this is negotiable, meaningful, maybe we don’t accept everything, but it’s certainly a basis for a negotiated withdrawal". The press would not cover it. Newsday did. A few other people did - check this - the first reference to any of this in England is actually in an article Noam Chomsky wrote in the Guardian, which was in early January.

Clinton said:"The year of big government is over, big government has failed, the war on poverty has failed, we have to get rid of this entitlement business" - that was Clinton’s campaign message in 1992. That’s the Democrats.

What you have now is a difference between sort of moderate Republicans, and extreme Republicans. Actually, it’s well known that there’s been a long standing... sort of split in the American business community; it’s not precise, but it’s sort of general, between high-tech, capital-intensive, internationally-oriented business, which tends to be what’s called "liberal", and lower-tech, more nationally-oriented, more labour-intensive industry, which is what’s called "conservative". Now, between those sectors, there have been differences and in fact, if you take a look at American politics, it oscillates pretty much between those limits.

Text of the President's speech

2008-10-01T16:04:48Z

My Fellow Americans,

It grieves me to see the livelihood of decent ordinary Americans, folk who pay off their mortgages and file their tax returns every April 15, threatened by the behaviour of irresponsible people in the financial sector. That is why I am planning to take the money away from ordinary Americans and give it to those irresponsible people. Because capitalism and democracy is the best system of government in the world, and you can't have capitalism without irresponsible people in the financial sector.

In normal circumstances I believe that companies which are managed badly should be allowed to go bust. But these are not normal circumstances. The market is not working, as people have lost confidence in the system. That is why, so that ordinary decent people will still be able to get credit to buy homes and pay their children through college, I must take all their money and give it to these very well paid people who mismanaged their companies. Because these are not ordinary people in normal circumstances who use monkey wrenches and stuff and can be allowed to lose their jobs as firms go bust. These are rich folk like me. Society needs rich folk, so unless you give away all your money to these very rich people now, you will end up poor and without a pension and you will die alone and miserable.
This is not like taking money for medical insurance or welfare. I can assure you none of this money will be wasted on poor people, and hardly any of it on black people. So unless we build a bipartisan consensus and you give all your money to me to redistribute to the extremely rich, the plain truth is you will end up poor.

Thank you.

George W Bush

A rose by any other name...

2008-08-29T09:13:40Z

(Steve Bell in the Guardian)

I saw voters from West Virginia being asked the "race question" on tv and they sidestepped it with breath taking elegance:

smirk: "what's his name again?"
smirk's wife: "Barack Hussein Obama"
smirk: "well you don't need to go any further than the name, da ya?"

Names matter. The guy on the other side's name is nearly the same as the guy in "Die Hard".

Some of the tv commentary has been beside itself with heaving analogy. Jon Snow, aging (the unkind might say senile) anchor of Channel Four News eulogized:" Bill Clinton took the audience and grabbed them by the frontal lobes of their brains"

:D

Georgia on my mind

2008-08-20T09:34:21Z

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there have been occasional reports from Georgia, which have stuck in my mind and niggled away.

It hasn't sounded a particularly well formed democracy. It hasn't sounded a safe and free society. It was only in February that the Georgian government was regarded as the prime suspect in the sudden death of a wealthy political exile in London - which turned out to be a heart attack. But it was clear from those first assumptions, that Georgian authorities were held in similar esteem as those who, it is widely accepted, had organized the polonium in the tea bags of the hapless Russian exile, Litvenchenko...

And this is what I turned up

Type your cut contents here.

Last November, in the midst of mounting protests against his regime, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili employed dictatorial methods against his opponents. On November 2, opposition demonstrations began in Tbilisi, demanding democratic reforms and the ouster of Saakashvili. These protests, while organized by billionaire media tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili, gave vent to grievances against government repression and the desperate living conditions of the population. They attracted tens of thousands to the streets of Georgia’s capital city.

The demonstrations continued until November 7, when the state police, acting on orders from Saakashvili, used tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons and truncheons to disperse the protesters. More than 600 required medical attention after the crackdown. On the same day, Special Forces raided Patarkatsishvili’s broadcasting corporation Imeldi, beating journalists and disabling equipment.

Saakashvili declared a state of emergency, suspending democratic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly. Independent broadcasting was halted even before the state of emergency was declared, and only the state-controlled television station was allowed to broadcast for a period of fifteen days. Imeldi was taken off the air indefinitely.

During the crackdown, Saakashivli called for snap elections to be held less than two months later, on January 5. The elections, held under conditions of political intimidation and repression, placed the opposition at an enormous disadvantage.

All media were under the de facto control of Saakashivli. In addition, two opposition leaders, Konstantin Gamsakhurdia and Shalva Natelashvili, were declared “wanted for treason.” The government accused them of conspiring with Russia to overthrow the government.

Patarkatsishvili, who likewise faced a government investigation for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government, began his campaign from Israel. He withdrew from the elections after the government released a recording of him attempting to bribe a police officer.

Patarkatsishvili died suddenly last February in London at the age of 52. Authorities attributed the death to a massive heart attack, but Patarkatsishvili believed the Georgian authorities were targeting him for assassination.

The early elections eliminated two other serious rivals for the presidency—former defense minister Irakli Okruashvili and lawyer Tinatin Khidasheli—both of whom were just shy of 35 years of age, the minimum, at the time of the vote.

Okruashvili fled the country shortly after the crackdown in what ABC News called “mysterious circumstances.” He had accused Saakashvili of corruption, but after being placed under arrest he was apparently forced to retract the allegations.

During the campaign, election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported that the credibility of the election had been placed in doubt by allegations that Saakashvili had used state money, blackmail and vote-buying. With rivals under arrest, under police investigation, in exile or legally barred from running for office, it is little surprise that Saakashvili won reelection. After his victory, the opposition claimed that the vote had been manipulated. His vote total surpassed by 20 percent that which had been projected by an opinion poll released one week earlier.

The Saakashvili regime faced international criticism from foreign capitals and human rights organizations for its assumption of dictatorial powers. Though the level of repression Saakashvili employed exceeded the measures that had been taken by his predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, against the so-called “Rose Revolution” that brought Saakashvili to power in early 2004, criticism from the United States was much more muted.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew J. Bryza, a close ally and personal friend of the US-educated Saakashvili, acknowledged that the State Department was “hearing more and more reports that people were grabbed from stores or that passers-by were beaten,” but concluded merely that “Things got out of control.”

NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer responded with little more than a wrist slap against the Georgian government, which was seeking NATO membership. He limited himself to the observation that “the imposition of emergency rule and the closure of media outlets” were not in line with “Euro-Atlantic values.”

In fact, the “excesses” of Saakashvili in putting down peaceful protests were not mere aberrations. The US State Department, in its 2008 “Country Reports in Human Rights,” listed the following in relation to the Georgian government: “at least one reported death due to excessive use of force by law enforcement officers, cases of torture and mistreatment of detainees, abuse of prisoners, excessive use of force to disperse demonstrations, poor conditions in prisons and pretrial detention facilities, impunity of police officers, continued overuse of pretrial detention for less serious offenses, lack of access for average citizens to defense attorneys, lack of due process in some cases, and reports of government pressure on the judiciary.”

The report went on to state: “Respect for freedom of speech, the press, assembly and political participation worsened, especially during the fall crisis. Other problems included reports of government pressure on the judiciary and the media, restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, and corruption among senior-level officials. Despite government efforts, trafficking-in-persons continued to occur.”

The so-called “color revolutions” in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004-2005) did not represent the spontaneous will of the masses. They were political coups orchestrated from Washington, with the aide of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) subsidized by the US government and private foundations.

Chief among the NGOs involved in Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” was the Liberty Institute, which was funded by the United States Agency for International Development’s Eurasia Foundation as well as billionaire financier George Soros’s Open Society Institute. The Liberty Institute’s co-founder, Giga Bokeria, took a Soros Foundation-funded tour of Serbia in February 2002 to learn how the Otpor, or “Resistance,” student opposition had ousted Slobodan Milosevic following a disputed election in the autumn of 2000.

Another US government outfit involved in the ouster of Shevardnadze was the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a center of international intrigue and subversion set up under the Reagan administration and relying heavily on the services of the AFL-CIO trade union bureaucracy. The Democratic Party wing of the NED, known as the National Democratic Institute, in the words of Wall Street Journal columnist George Melloan, “helped introduce Mr. Saakashvili to the methods insurgents in Serbia used to depose dictator Slobodan Milosevic.”

Saakashvili’s reelection last January was based politically on an appeal to rabid Georgian nationalism. The central plank of his campaign was a pledge to restore Tbilisi’s authority over the pro-Russian breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. They had established de facto independence as a result of bloody fighting with Georgian government forces that followed the revocation in March 1991 of the autonomy guaranteed them under the Soviet constitution.

Within months of his reelection, Saaskashvili was assuming unprecedented powers in what the Manila Times called “a distinctly undemocratic one-party state.”

Saakashvili is the representative of one faction of the Georgian ruling elite. Including in its ranks former officials of the old Stalinist regime, the new financial oligarchy emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union, amassing its wealth by plundering the formerly nationalized economy.

In contrast to Western tributes to the economic growth and modernization of Georgia under Saakashvili, his government oversees a miserably poor and highly polarized society. Formerly one of the wealthiest Soviet republics, in 2007 Georgia ranked 108th in the world in per capita gross domestic product (GDP), below countries like Bhutan, Ecuador and Guatemala. Its GDP ranks 114th in the world, below that of Equatorial Guinea.

If it were a US state, Georgia’s GDP would rank at the bottom, equaling about one-third of Vermont’s. The official unemployment rate in Georgia stands at nearly 13 percent. More than one half of the population lives below the official poverty level. Over one quarter lives on less than $2 per day. Last year the average monthly pension was $30.

But Saakashvili’s pro-Western, “free market” economic policies have fostered the growth of a small but growing wealthy elite. Georgia earned the World Bank’s 2008 designation as “the number one economic reformer in the world” because it improved in one year from 112th to 18th in creating what is euphemistically called “a friendly business environment.”

What this means in practice is the scrapping of all regulations and encumbrances limiting the exploitation of the working class and the accumulation of personal wealth by a rapacious financial elite. In 2004, Saakashvili’s first year in power, his government abolished the progressive income tax and replaced it with a 12 percent flat tax.

primrosepath77 @ 2008-08-16T08:46:00

2008-08-16T07:47:09Z

Refugees tell a different story of six-day conflict

By Catherine Belton (The Financial Times, UK)

Published: August 16 2008 03:00 | Last updated: August 16 2008 03:00

The heaviest fighting ever seen in the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia has left refugees on both sides of the conflict.

The Ossetians who have fled north to the Alagir camp tell a very different story to those who view the events of the last week as Georgia's plucky struggle against a heavy-handed and imperialist Russia.

Many of their accounts are muddled, but the prevailing view in this camp on the Russian side of the Caucasus mountains is that Georgia's pro-western leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, tried to wipe out their breakaway enclave.

"The Georgian government just went mad," said Leyla Bessateva, who fled snipers and rockets to escape from the village of Dominis, 12km away from Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. "The Georgians came in and killed everyone. Who is guilty? It is Saakashvili. They burned all the houses, and they even set fire to the school and the hospital. Nothing remains. It all happened in one instant.

"They wanted to destroy South Ossetia in one night. All these villages, they encircled and took them."

Many of the refugees were stunned that after days of confrontations involving small arms between separatist South Ossetians and Georgian troops, Tbilisi then unleashed tanks and heavy weapons in attempting to seize Tskhinvali.

This camp houses 344 refugees, is the nearest to the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz and is the one most well-known to western journalists. The refugees' tales hand Russia potent fuel in a propaganda war and are certain to be used to accuse Mr Saakashvili of war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

A note pinned to a tree near the camp entrance calls for witnesses of atrocities committed by Georgian forces to report them to a Russian prosecutor in Vlad-ikavkaz. Law enforcement officers note the details of each new arrival.

Georgia's government said it was forced to attack by Russian peacekeepers and South Ossetians, who it says opened fire on their troops even after Mr Saakashvili had publicly declared a ceasefire on August 7.

Georgia and independent groups such as Human Rights Watch point to the heavy civilian casualties incurred when Russia bombed the Georgian village of Gori, near Tskhinvali.

One refugee, who had fled Tskhinvali and did not want to give his name, said: "Our president said that we will not start the shooting first, but no one is ever going to know [who did]," he said, referring to the South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity.

Rights groups close to the Kremlin have been called in to help the refugees deal with the psychological scars left by the six-day war. It is unclear whether Russian officials have told them news of the US's growing support for the Georgian regime, but it is starting to filter down into how many of them view the war. "They say the uniforms and guns all came from the United States," said Zaira Khurayeva a refugee from Dominis. "We hadn't heard anything about this until Condoleezza [Rice] came to Georgia. But where did they get such weaponry from and such uniforms? And where did they get the helicopters from?"

Russian TV has reported that the US army helped train Georgian soldiers. The last time Georgians and South Ossetians engaged in an all-out war, "they only had machine guns", Ms Khurayeva said. "Now they have rockets and tanks."

"They must have been Nato troops," added another refugee, who gave her name only as Medea. "The Georgians don't know how to shoot."

Other refugees spoke of the Georgian troops who had rampaged through their village and sent them into hiding along with other women and children in a cellar for two days. They eventually emerged and fled into the surrounding forest, only to be fired on by snipers.

Anna Neistat, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, said yesterday that evidence was mounting that most of the destruction of Tskhinvali was caused by Georgians.

The Georgians, however, say more damage came as the Russians fought to retake the town from Georgian troops.

While it could take years to piece together the events, for women such as Anna Kuzayeva, who spent two nights in a cellar with 300 people and rotting corpses under school number 6 in Tskhinvali before being taken to the refugee camp by Russian soldiers, only one thing seems clear.

"This war will continue," she said. "It's been going on in various ways for 15 years."

Hiroshima Day

2008-08-06T14:56:19Z

We saw another sun in the sky when it exploded."

"I looked to the forests around the city and they were on fire from the heat."

"All of a sudden there was a bright flash and everything around was bathed in intense light and heat."

At exactly 8:15 am on the 6th of August 1945, a U-S bomber dropped the first atomic bomb ever to be used in conflict on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That conflict was World War 2. Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on another Japanese city, Nagasaki. The conflict in Europe had already ended and when Japan surrendered five days later, the war was finally over.

The bombs not only helped end the war, they began the nuclear age. An atomic bomb was different to any bomb that had been used until then. It was a nuclear weapon, more than 2000 times more powerful than the largest bomb that had ever been used. It heated the air to 9000 degrees Celcius, burning everything in its path. The explosion generated a shock that flattened just about everything for 13 square kilometres.

140 000 people died; around one third of Hiroshima's population at the time. Thousands more have died since, from radiation poisoning and genetic problems. The most famous of those is Sadako.

Sadako Sasaki was two when Hiroshima was bombed. When she turned 11 she was diagnosed with Leukemia, due to radiation exposure.

Sadako made 644 cranes before dying when she was 12, and a famous children's book was written about her and read by people around the world. 60 years have passed since the bombing, and while it's hard to forget what happened, most people have been able to forgive.

Which means students like Ayumi and Hitomi from Hiroshima can come and study in Australia which was once an enemy of Japan. But no matter where they are in the world, they remember Hiroshima day.

"Hiroshima day reminds us of the importance of peace so that we never start a war."

The city of Hiroshima has been rebuilt, but not completely.

At Peace Park, children pray for peace. They learn about the effects of the bomb from survivors, who are known as Hibakusha. And they are shown around the Memorial Dome, which was the only big building to survive the blast. The damaged remains have been kept as a reminder of what happened.

primrosepath77 @ 2008-08-02T20:49:00

2008-08-02T19:53:44Z

Obama, The Prince of Bait and Switch

by John Pilger / July 30th, 2008

On 12 July, The Times (UK) devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the “high drama” and “meticulously practised routine” of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, “saving a life took precedence over [their] security”. Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that “47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday.”

Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British public. I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children. A 500lb US Mk82 bomb was dropped on her mud, stone and straw house. There was no “enemy” nearby. I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared in a fireball caused by another “precision” bomb. Inside were nine people — his wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband. Neither of these mass murders was news. As Harold Pinter wrote of such crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while The Times man was discomforted. Most were guests at the wedding party. Wedding parties are a “coalition” speciality. At least four of them have been obliterated — at Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the details, including the names of victims, have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report almost everything about the Afghan War through the public relations facilities of the British and American military.

The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan. This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007. “The most frequently used bombs,” the Air Force Times reports, “are the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided. . . ” Without this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America’s and Britain’s puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords once on the CIA’s payroll.

The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W Bush’s former spokesman Scott McClellan has called “complicit enablers” — journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a “good war”, the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power — because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, “bait-and-switch” Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Those who write of Obama that “when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush” demonstrate the same willful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton — and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, “ideology has surrendered entirely to ‘values’. . . there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilized limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain. . .”

Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.

John Pilger is an internationally renowned investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker. His latest film is The War on Democracy. His most recent book is Freedom Next Time (Bantam/Random House, 2006). Read other articles by John, or visit John's website.

Behind every smile, a brain - but is it switched on?

2008-07-20T13:33:28Z

This appeared in 1968 - and certainly I would have been reassured to know that Hertz girls were specifically trained in "diagramming a map" -

what is a diagram of a map? I have never seen one. Born too late, I guess.

The Undead Swan

2008-07-09T13:34:47Z

Iran has not atacked another country since 1734

2008-07-01T11:48:13Z

A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret.

Type your cut contents here.

The consensus view on Iran's nuclear program shifted dramatically last December with the release of a landmark intelligence report that concluded that Iran halted work on nuclear weapons design in 2003. The publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran undermined the CIA's rationale for censoring the former officer's lawsuit, said his attorney, Roy Krieger.

"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all," Krieger said in an interview.

In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to

sensitive information about Iran's nuclear program, Krieger said.

The informant provided secret evidence that Tehran had halted its research into designing and building a nuclear weapon. Yet, when the operative sought to file reports on the findings, his attempts were "thwarted by CIA employees," according to court papers. Later he was told to "remove himself from any further handling" of the informant, the documents say.

In the months after the conflict, the operative became the target of two internal investigations, one of them alleging an improper sexual relationship with a female informant, and the other alleging financial improprieties. Krieger said his client cooperated with investigators in both cases and the allegations of wrongdoing were never substantiated. Krieger contends in court documents that the investigations were a "pretext to discredit."

Krieger maintains that his client is being further punished by the agency's decision prohibiting him from fully regaining his identity. "He is not even allowed to attend court hearings about his own case," Krieger said.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on the specifics of the case but flatly rejected the allegation that the agency had suppressed reports. "It would be wrong to suggest that agency managers direct their officers to falsify the intelligence they collect or to suppress it for political reasons," he said. "That's not our policy. That's not what we're about."

The London leg of the Farewell Tour

2008-06-16T11:31:23Z

Proof positive that Christopher Hitchens is a total prat

2008-06-14T14:34:57Z

Taken from a much longer article. He burps and farts and booms. Bless my soul, what a character he is! He lives in America now and he is evidently admired for doubting the existence of god, among other things.

“Everything on North Korea and Iran is in one of these,” Hitchens said, pointing to a standalone bookshelf during a tour of his Washington apartment. “The ‘axis of evil’ shelf. We also have India—I just decided to put the India box there.” I remarked that it’s a rather Orientalist way to categorize his reading. “Well, exactly!” he replies with a smile.

The apartment where Hitchens lives with his wife, writer Carol Blue, and his daughter, Antonia, is cavernous but lacks much décor. Besides a grand piano in the living room, the only furnishings Hitchens seems to have acquired in two decades at this address are hundreds of books, many piles of which rest unshelved against the walls. His office in the apartment next door is equally spartan but for a pile of promotional books on the kitchen isle (the anti-liberal firebrand David Horowitz, among others, seeks a blurb from Hitchens for the back cover of his latest offering). A framed National Magazine Award rests on the back of the gas range, next to a refrigerator that houses a few bottles of water, a jar of mustard and little else.

Hitchens’ only television set is in the master bedroom. It’s a recent acquisition, Blue said, and she watches it more than he does. He hardly has time, he said, now that he’s working on a memoir.

“That’s now the next thing,” he says. “Till this is done I can’t do another book. I’m stuck with it now—I wake up thinking about it. And I’m reading other people’s memoirs and making notes, and I keep being reminded of it.”

When writing a memoir, it helps to have known everybody imaginable. As Hitchens discusses his autobiographical work, I recall another tendency in his literary journalism. He almost always hangs his reviews of living or recently deceased authors on an anecdote about his interactions with them. Reflecting in The Atlantic on Saul Bellow, Hitchens recalled a conversation with the author in which they ended up having “a strong disagreement” over Palestine. “I have several times devoutly wished that we could have had this discussion again,” he wrote. Perhaps most poignant was his account in The Nation of an evening spent with Jorge Luis Borges at his home in Argentina, where Hitchens buried their political differences in a shared love of literature by reading Kipling aloud to the aged, blind author.

When he doesn’t have any firsthand knowledge of a writer, Hitchens employs hypothetical conversations and “encounters that never took place.” H.L. Mencken and Evelyn Waugh almost met once, and Hitchens wishes they had.

And who knows - perhaps hypothetical conversations and encounters that never took place between himself and famous people?

His comeuppance can not be far off. I can scarcely contain myself!

primrosepath77 @ 2008-06-05T12:07:00

2008-06-05T11:07:53Z

Do I like this? Who knows? I merely hold it safe.

2008-05-15T11:41:07Z

"Each life converges to some centre
expressed - or still
exists in every human nature
a goal

Embodied scarcely to itself - it may be
too fair
for credibility's presumption
to mar

Adored with caution - as a brittle heaven
to reach
were hopeless, as the rainbow's raiment
to touch

Yet persevered toward - sure - for the distance
how high
unto the saints' slow diligence
the sky

Ungained - it may be - by a life's low venture
but then
eternity enables the endeavoring
again."
- Emily Dickinson

A breed apart

2008-05-10T09:35:09Z

Suicide victims who were abused as children have clear genetic changes in their brains, Canadian researchers reported on Tuesday in a finding they said shows neglect can cause biological effects.

The findings offer potential ways to find people at high risk of suicide, and perhaps to treat them and prevent future suicides.

And, the researchers said, they also offer insights into how neglect and abuse can perpetuate unhealthy behavior through the generations.

Moshe Szyf of McGill University in Montreal and colleagues studied the brains of 18 men who committed suicide and who were also abused or neglected as children, and compared them to 12 men who also died suddenly but from other causes, and who were not abused, although some had various psychiatric problems such as anxiety disorders.

They found changes in the genetic material of all 18 suicide victims. The changes were not in the genes themselves, but in the ribosomal RNA, which is the genetic material that makes proteins that in turn make cells function.

These changes involved a chemical process called methylation, a so-called epigenetic change involving the processes of turning genes on and off, they reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, available here .

"The big remaining questions are whether scientists could detect similar changes in blood DNA -- which could lead to diagnostic tests -- and whether we could design interventions to erase these differences in epigenetic markings," Szyf said in a statement.

Dr. Eric Nestler of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas said both drugs and psychotherapy may act to reverse some of these changes.

"Ultimately we believe that a person who gets better from psychotherapy is inducing changes in the brain," Nestler told reporters at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington where similar research was discussed.

Szyf's colleague, Michael Meaney, has shown in animals that parental abuse and neglect can affect the brains and behavior of offspring.

He has studied the brains of rats, for whom parental care can be demonstrated in how much the mother grooms her pups.

"You can put two rats on a table and tell which one is raised by a low-licking mother. The one reared by a low-licking mother is more nervous, and fatter," Meaney said in an interview at the Psychiatric Association meeting.

Images of the brain cells of the rats show the brain cells of low-licking mothers have fewer dendrites. These are the strands that help one neuron communicate with another.

Meaney, who also worked on the suicide study, said the research, taken together, demonstrates how early experiences can cause physical changes in the brain.

He said female rats reared by low-licking mothers reached puberty earlier, meaning they had more offspring.

Similar findings are true of humans, who often have children at younger ages when times are stressful. The best way to pass along genes in uncertain times is to have more children, he said.

Medvedev

2008-03-07T16:27:27Z

Most Russian and western observers see the man who has just been elected Russia's new president as at best a relatively liberal figure, if not a faceless opportunist. Some think Dmitri Medvedev will be merely a second Putin, whose election just means more of what we have seen during the last eight years. But Medvedev’s early political biography, as well as more recent statements of his on such issues as multi-party competition, freedom of the press and Russia’s relations to the west, point in a different direction. Should the Russian presidential administration come under the lasting and full control of Medvedev, the Kremlin will become a focal point of pro-democratic tendencies in Moscow. This development could lead to something not dissimilar to a second perestroika.

Medvedev’s CV differs in important respects from Putin’s. Both the outgoing and new Russian presidents were law students who grew up and studied in St Petersburg. Yet Medvedev, 13 years younger than his predecessor, has no known KGB background, and had already started to be active in politics during the heyday of Gorbachev’s glasnost, while Putin was still serving the KGB in Dresden. In early 1989, studying for an advanced law degree at Leningrad State University, Medvedev worked as an election campaigner for his professor Anatoly Sobchak—then a prominent leader of Russia’s emerging democratic movement running for a seat in the USSR parliament. This was, to be sure, only a brief episode in Medvedev’s biography. His subsequent political career followed a relatively straightforward trajectory: posts within St Petersburg city council and then inside Russian presidential administrations, and later chairman of the huge gas monopoly Gazprom, before his appointment by Putin as deputy prime minister. Yet Medvedev’s brief involvement in the Russian democratic movement is still significant. Back in 1989, it was not clear whether the Soviet system was coming to an end, and becoming an anti-communist activist still held a real risk.

Moreover, this rarely noted aspect of Medvedev’s biography correlates with those political announcements that have been shaping his public profile for the last years. The phrase the Kremlin usually deploys in defence of anti-western foreign and illiberal domestic policies—“sovereign democracy”—was rejected by Medvedev in an interview for the popular journal Ekspert in July 2006 as “a far from ideal term… when qualifying additions are made to the word ‘democracy,’ this leaves one with a strange aftertaste.” In an earlier interview, Medvedev had stated that, “I certainly do not see Russia’s role as that of an opponent of America,” and that, “it is obvious for me that Russia should position herself as a part of Europe.” Other quotes show that Medvedev seems to believe sincerely that Russia would benefit from competition among large parties, a strong civil society, active civic disobedience, an articulate opposition, multiple channels of information, an independent judiciary and a transfer of power by democratic means. While defending Putin’s strengthening of the state, Medvedev, in an interview for Moskovskii Komsomolets in September 2006, also said that this process should “in no way make… basic human rights and freedoms a victim of an increase of order.” He made clear that “to think that Russia has a special path and faces a specific set of challenges is absolutely naive.” Contrast this positioning with that of Putin in the last days of the Yeltsin regime in 1999: he created an image of himself as a non-nonsense security service officer: a tough leader not afraid to use force in order to bring “stability” to the north Caucasus and to fight Chechen terrorism.

Medvedev’s rise—especially his patronage by Putin since the early 1990s—certainly contains episodes of opportunism and hypocrisy. Yet Medvedev would not be the first Russian reformer to have a conflicted background. Before initiating a period of relative cultural liberalisation in the late 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev was a staunch Stalinist whose biography contained no indications that he might one day dismantle key components of Stalin’s system. Russia’s most radical democratic reformer so far, Mikhail Gorbachev, climbed up the Soviet career ladder from local Komsomol functionary to full Politburo member before becoming Soviet leader in 1985. But before this date, political scientists like Oxford’s Archie Brown had noted encouraging peculiarities in this party functionary’s biography and recommended paying him special attention. They pointed to examples like the fact that Gorbachev had, as a student, been friendly with a Czechoslovak communist who was later involved in the Prague spring of 1968. Perhaps most importantly, Gorbachev gave a speech in December 1984 in which he outlined much of what he would start doing two years later when he had more or less consolidated his position, and launched perestroika.

Gorbachev’s experiences as a young man, his political rhetoric before becoming the Soviet Union’s leader and his democratic reforms correspond with each other. We might expect a similar fit between rhetoric and action in Medvedev’s further rise, should the office of the president retain at least some of its prerogatives. Unless the Russian president becomes a mere figurehead, along the lines of the German presidency, Medvedev will acquire substantial powers within the coming weeks and months. If he is able to consolidate his position in the next couple of years, we should expect to see him attempt to change Russia’s political system in a direction similar to that in which Gorbachev tried to stir the Soviet Union’s. Such a move will encounter stiff opposition by many of Moscow’s dominant elite groups. Whatever the eventual outcome of such attempts, one thing is for sure: the period of relative macropolitical stability in post-Soviet Russia will soon be over.

In view of these prospects, why did Putin anoint Medvedev? Medvedev is one of the youngest members of Putin’s closer entourage. It has been said that Putin sees Medvedev, whose entire rise happened under his shadow, as his political son. Seeing himself as a statesman with a modern worldview, Putin might be purposefully intending to transfer power to a younger generation of politicians. And of course, there is the power of patronage: more than any other senior Russian politician, Medvedev owes his position to Putin alone.

Nevertheless, sooner or later Medvedev’s liberal and democratic views will come to the fore. The political outlook of Putin’s foster-son will eventually come into conflict with Putin’s legacy of “managed democracy”—a paradox reminiscent, in some ways, of Gorbachev’s turn against the Soviet system that his predecessor Andropov clearly wanted to preserve. Something else we might expect is that anti-western nationalists in Russian politics, culture, journalism and academia will unite against Medvedev, as they did in the late 1980s against Gorbachev. Back then, Russia’s nascent liberal democratic movement was able to stop the rising tide of anti-American obscurantism, and to lead Russia on the path to a first attempt to seriously democratise. Whether the coming conflict between pro and anti-western tendencies in Russia will lead to a sustained second attempt to make Russia democratic, and how Putin (in whatever role) will behave if confronted with such a situation are, however, issues one can only speculate about.