War

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustrations: According to our government sources, which of the above two prisoners in “under duress?” Yep, you guessed it.

Right now, more Americans have died in Afghanistan this month than in any other month for the past 10,000 years. We bomb Pakistan daily. But really, we are so bombarded with absurdity from the right wing that we can’t keep up with the absurdity.

But let’s look at how this all happened. At one time, the Soviet Union (remember them?) was in charge of Afghanistan. We didn’t like this, so we recruited religious fanatics to give them trouble. One of them was Osama Bin Laden. Well, the Soviets left and the Taliban took over, much to our approval. They kept people quiet.

Meanwhile, Bin Laden kept migrating from place to place until we drove him back to Afghanistan. While he was there, he apparently planned and executed two attacks on the twin towers in New York, the second time getting them both as well as the Pentagon. W. Bush used this as a pretext to invade Afghanistan as a pretext to invade Iraq because of his Oedipal problems. Shit happened.

Obama got elected, partly for a promise to get out of Iraq and get Bin Laden. Now he has invaded Helmut (?) or Helmund province. I may not know for sure where Bin Laden is, but I am pretty damn sure he is not in the south of Afghanistan. The whole idea of capturing him is pretty much forgotten, so why the hell do we keep it up? The only reason is that it seems every American President wants his own war.

Let’s review some of the things: Republican Senators and Representatives positively run away from reporters when they are asked “Do you believe that President Obama in an American citizen?” The so-called “birthers” have them frightened.

Keith Olbermann is in hiding. Sort of like Randi Rhodes was. He is probably watching baseball right now.

Sarah Palin quit as Governor, supposedly to save Alaskans the cost of the Ethics investigation, WHICH SHE INSTIGATED HERSELF. Illustration next issue.

The health care reform (would you believe it?) is being opposed both by right-wing groups and the insurance companies. Such has been the case since Roosevelt – and our citizens can not do a damn thing about it. Even though we have the worst health care system in the industrialized world, the money says no changes.

Notice the Mid-East has been ignored lately as Israel warns of Iram getting the bomb. A great threat to Israel, of course, as it only has some 200 to 300 atomic weapons ready.

Here is an article on weapons and Israel:

Disarm Israel

A Utopia or a Vision for Peace

July 28, 2009

By Ilan Pappe

Ilan Pappe's ZSpace Page
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[Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications]

Whenever the possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state is mentioned by Israeli politicians, they take for granted that their interlocutors understand that the future state would have to be demilitarized and disarmed, if an Israeli consent for its existence is to be gained. Recently, this precondition was mentioned by the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu in response to President Barrack Obama's two states' vision presented to the world at large in his Cairo Speech in this June. Nentanyahu made this precondition first and foremost for domestic consumption: whoever has referred in the past to the creation of an independent state alongside Israel, and whoever does so toady in Israel envisage a fully armed Israel next to a totally disarmed Palestine. But there was another reason why Netanyahu stressed the demilitarization of Palestine as a condito sin qua non: he knew perfectly well that there was no danger that even the most moderate Palestinian leader would accept such a caveat from the strongest military power in the Middle East.

In Israel, as in the West, the vision of a demilitarized Palestine is accepted as feasible scenario where it would be regarded as totally insane and unhelpful to imagine a peace based on the demilitarization of Israel as well. This disparity in the attributes of statehood is part of a much larger imbalance in the international community perception of, and attitude towards, Israel and Palestine.

For most Israelis it would seem sheer lunacy to contemplate any future without the army playing a dominant and supreme role in the lives. Not for nothing, do scholars regard Israel not as a state with an army, but an army with a state. The state appears in the works some brave critical Israeli sociologists as a prime case study for a modern day militarized society; namely one in which the army affects deeply every sphere of life.[i] Imagining an Israel without such influence is more than a utopian vision, it is really an end of time scenario.

And yet demilitarizing both Israel and Palestine in the long run maybe the only way of ensuring normal and peaceful life for everyone who lives there and everyone who ought live there like the millions of Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homelands in 1948 and ever since. But this article does not evolve around one meaning of the verb Disarm, it is based on a wider, and admittedly a more fluid, interpretation of the verb. The more extended definition, it will be argued here, turns the idea of Disarming Israel into a more concrete political plan rather than a utopian scenario for a very distant future when the peace of the prophets would prevail.

Long before one can contemplate any significant reduction of arms, let alone disarmament of anyone involved in the Palestine issue, there is a need for a very different kind of disarmament as a pre condition for any successful reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. The wider context of disarmament is focused on Israel and less on Palestine, at least in its initial stages. There in no other current political, economic and military imbalances as the ones that exist between Israel and the few hundred Palestinian fighters (even the term fighters for these Palestinians begs some stretching of our imagination). As these imbalances were there ever since 1948, it stands to reason that only a transformative processes in the attitude and nature of the stronger party in the equilibrium will kick off any significant reconciliation on the ground. Throughout the one hundred years or so of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel were the stronger party and its policies towards the indigenous population of Palestine changed very little at that period.

This article is written under the premise that only a fundamental change in the basic Israeli policies towards the Palestinian and Palestine can lead to a change of attitude towards the Jewish settler community that came to Palestine in the late 19^th century and colonised the land. Contrary to the conventional Israeli and Zionist narrative, still trumpeted proudly in the West today, the harsh anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian policies of the Jewish state are not a reaction to Palestinian hostility or general Arab animosity; these very policies are the cause of the regional antagonism towards Israel and the Palestinian enmity to it. And hence, disarming here is a search for a way of exposing what lies behind the Israeli policies against the Palestinians since they are the source of the conflict and the reason for its persistence. Since these policies have by now triggered the introduction of nuclear weapons to the region, the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians, thousands of people in the neighbouring Arab countries, almost twenty thousand Jews in Israel, inflamed a new wave of anti-Semitism as well of Islamophobia and finally strained unnecessarily the relationship of the West with the Muslim world, these policies are a deadly weapon and as such should be disarmed.

These policies are the product of a certain ideology, Zionism, or to be more precise of a certain interpretation of the Zionist ideology. And hence disarming here means first and foremost persuading Israeli Jews that arming themselves with this ideological spectacles harms not only their Palestinian victims, but disables them from leading normal, quiet and secure life in the country they have chosen in the end of the nineteenth century as their homeland.

The Production of the Weapon

The Zionist movement appeared in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century as a movement propelled by two noble impulses. The first was a search by Jewish political leaders for a safe haven for a community that was exposed increasingly to a hostile environment and anti-Semitic ideologies and which had the potential in escalating to something worse - as indeed it did in the genocide of the European Jews in the Second World War. The second impulse was a wish to redefine Judaism, the religion, in a new secular form, inspired by the spring of nations around them when so many cultural, religious and ethnic groups redefined themselves in the new intoxicating way of nationalism. As mentioned the search for security and new self determination was noble and normal at the time. However, the moment these impulses were territorialized, namely gravitated towards a specific piece of land, the national project of Zionism became a colonialist one. This was also normal at the times, when Europeans, for a plethora of reasons migrated to non-European lands, colonised for them by force of expulsion and genocide by their greed governments. But noble it was not. Where genocide occurred alas there was no way back, but where colonization did not deteriorate to such criminality, which was the norm, the settlers went back to their countries of origins and the colonised became independent. The territory coveted by the Zionist movement was Palestine, after other territorial options were examined, and in it lived the Palestinian people for hundreds of years.

The first sellers arrived in the 1880s without declaring openly their dream of taking over the land and without disclosing openly their desire to cleanse the land from its indigenous population. Until the 1930s, the leaders of the settler community was preoccupied with gaining international support and legitimacy which the British Empire gave them with the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 and with grounding a foothold as a state within a state, which the British mandatory government allowed them. In that period their main predicament was that the Jews in the world did not fancy Palestine either as their salvation or destination. It was only with the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe that the validity of Palestine as a safe haven for the Jewish people made sense and the community of settlers grew in numbers. Still until the end of the British mandate, it consisted only one third of the overall population and possessed less than ten percents of the land.

It is in the 1930s that the ideological weaponry, soon to be translated into real arms of destruction, was forged. A formula emerged which became consensual and almost sacred to those who led the Zionist movement then and those who lead the state of Israel today: The formula was simple: for the Zionist project in Palestine to succeed, the movement had to take over as much of the land of Palestine and make sure that as few Palestinians as possible remain on it. This was - as cynical as it may sound - due to a desire to build a democratic state. The hope was to maintain eternally a Jewish majority that would democratically decid and vote for keeping the country Jewish. In the 1930s, an additional recognition sprang: there was no hope that then, or in the future, the indigenous people of Palestine would either diminish by numbers, or give up their natural right to live on their land as a free people. Thus for the ‘existential' formula to succeed you needed military power of enforcement. This did not only mean building an army, but granting the military a prominent role and domination over any other aspects of life in Palestine as a Jewish community. Critical Israeli sociologists followed with astonishment how systematic and ever expanding was the process ever since the conscious decision to militarise Zionism was taken in the 1930s.[ii] Political leadership, economic captainship even social and cultural prominence are all won and gained due to a military background or a career in the security octopus that runs Israel. Moreover, the major decisions on foreign and defence policy - especially towards the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular - were taken ever since the 1930s by generals. The end result is only too visible today in Israel: the budget and the economy as a whole, as well as the socialization process and educational system, are all geared to service the army.

An Army with A State

Thus the process of militarization of the Israeli society was intense and exponential. Israel indeed became an army with a state. Two aspects are in particular worth stressing in this context. The first is the militarization of the educational system. Since this part of the reality ensures the a militarised view perception on life is reproduced again and again with each new generation of young men and women who will only able to view the reality through the perspective of an armed conflict, military values and wars. The second is the prominent economic role the arms industry in Israel plays in the state's national product and in particular who crucial it is for its trade balance and export. Israel is the fifth largest exporter of military arms in the world and hence any anti-militarised discourse, let alone action and activity, can also be easily portrayed as undermining the very survival of the Israeli industry and economy.

This paramount position would not have been won without an occasional proof that the military force was badly needed. There were two types of military action: one was a cyclic confrontation with regular Arab armies, not always initiated by Israel - the 1973 was an Egyptian-Syrian initiative, but all could have been avoided had not the Israeli army wished to be engaged in the battlefield for the sake of its own moral, its status and the its dire need to experiment with weapons and exercise its soldiers. More importantly, each war enabled Israel to extend its territory in a never ending quest for a living space. The last round of this kind of military competition was in 1973 and despite an Israeli attempt to engage the Syrian army twice in 1982 and 2006; the Israeli army did not fight a war against a conventional army in the last thirty five years. Most of its weaponry, the most sophisticated and updated one in the world, was produced for huge land and air campaigns between mammoth regular armies, but instead it has been used in the last thirty five years mainly against unarmed civilians and guerrilla fighters. The collateral damage is unavoidable as are the doubts about the Israeli ability to engage in a genuine conventional war.

The second use of the military power was for implementing the Zionist ideal and the formula upholding it and mentioned above - namely the need to maintain a hold over most of Palestine with as little Palestinians in it, if the Zionist project were to survive.

It began with a carefully planned scheme of ethnically cleansing as many Palestinians as possible in 1948 when the British mandate came to an end. The British government decided in February 1947 after thirty years of rule to leave the question of Palestine in the hands of the UN with a genuine hope not to be involved any more in a country they developed on the one hand but helped to destroy by their pro-Zionist and anti-Palestinian policy, on the other. After the tribulations of the Second World war, the demise of British power in the world, a devastating economic crisis and loss of men on the ground, London had enough.

[iii]

The Palestinian political elite and the Arab neighbouring countries hoped the UN would deliberate long on what to do with a minority of settlers living amidst an indigenous majority, but they were wrong. The UN was quick to decide on granting more than half of the country to that minority. The world was looking of a quick way out of the Holocaust and forcing the Palestinian to give up half of their homeland seemed a very convenient and low price to pay. No wonder, the Palestinian leadership and the Arab League rejected publicly the UN plan. This plan was articulated in a UN General Assembly resolution in November 1947 offering the Palestinian mere 45% of their home land. The Zionist leadership although unhappy of being granted only 55% of the land, nonetheless realised that the resolution accorded them a historical international recognition in the right of dispossessing Palestine. The UN, on top of it, due to the Zionist acceptance and the Palestinian rejection rebuked the Palestinians, praised the Israelis and ignored the fact that on the ground Jewish forces began to evict by force the Palestinians from their homeland.

In February 1948, Within a year from the British decision to leave Palestine, the Zionist leadership began ethnically cleansing Palestine. Three months later when the British left, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were already refugees, pressuring the Arab world to take action. Which it did on 15 May 1948, but the limited number of troops it sent to Palestine were no match for the efficient Jewish forces and they were defeated. The ethnic cleansing continued and at the end of it almost a million Palestinians became refugees (half of Palestine's population) and with them disappeared half of the country's villages and towns, erased from upon the earth by the Jewish forces.[iv]

The use of force against the Palestinians as means of achieving control over territory and containment of population continued after 1948. It was used in 1956 to massacre Palestinian villagers who were part of the small minority of Palestinians who survived the 1948 ethnic cleansing and became Israeli citizens. Every now and then, but not too often, that minority would protest against its oppression and would be met by the powerful hand of the Israeli military and police authorities.

It was then used, and this time frequently, in the areas Israel occupied in June 1967: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Whenever, the Palestinians under occupation protested and struggled against the occupation, the Israeli military responded with all its firepower. Hence, tanks, aircrafts, navy destroyers and all the other weaponry used in conventional war theatre against armies of similar might were mercilessly employed against the urban and rural areas of the dense West Bank and the Gaza Strip, wreaking havoc and destruction of unimaginable proportions. Similarly in two onslaughts on Lebanon in 1982 and 2006 similar force was used to devastate the Lebanese urban and rural spaces.

Three chronological junctures are particularly worth mentioning in this respect in order to illustrate the ferocity of armaments when it is employed in order to implement a century old colonialist ideology. In October 2000, a frustrated Israeli army just forced to withdraw from southern Lebanon by the Hezbollah responded with its entire sophisticated armoury against a fresh Palestinian attempt to resist the occupation. For the first time F-16s and the mighty Merkava Tanks were used in an urbicide to subdue the rebellion.[v] This same military might, but with more collateral damage and cluster bombs was used against Lebanon in 2006 after the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by the Hezbollah. Finally, as is only too familiar by now the Israeli army experimented with the most lethal updated weapons, such as phosphorous bombs and fibber glass shells that surgically amputate the victims, in order to quell a rebellious Gaza strip suffering under the yoke of closure and starvation for more than eight years.

If one adds to the deadly arsenal Israel possess and which it had used in its sixty years of existence to the counter armament of its Arab neighbours, always engaged in a crazy arms race, first fed by the cold war then by the military industry in the world, one can see how any step towards defusing the ideological urge to use power could contribute to peace and reconciliation. Moreover, one has to consider the nuclear power Israel has which has not been used, although there are so far unfounded reports of the use of tactical nuclear weapons on several occasions. Atom bombs are still considered in Israel as a dooms day weapon to be used in case of an imminent defeat of the Jewish state. But I feel this is no more the main scenario in the political and military elite of the state. It is seen as the main factor enhancing the myth of Israeli invincibility, and hence the desperate attempt of Arab regimes such as in Syria and Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, Iran, to follow suit; all leading to an ever growing firepower keg that can explode at any given moment.

All this armament and its frequent use as noted is mainly, not exclusively, the product of an ideological paradigm. The paradigm assumes that a Jewish colonization of part of the Arab world was an inevitable and existential act for the Jewish people and could only be assumed by building formidable military power so as to gain full control of the land and reduce as much as possible the number of indigenous people on it. The arms amassed and their frequent use is not only a menace to the Palestinians, they prevent the Jews in Israel from leading a normal life and they pose a threat to the stability of the region, and quite probably beyond it. While defusing literally the arms, the arms industry and their employment is an impossible dream, and quite frankly a dangerous one as the Israeli aggression bred counter Arab aggression and armament that can end in a bloodbath of the people who live in Israel, if only one side is disarmed, diffusing of the ideology is feasible, reliable and peaceful.

Diffuse and Disarm: Past Attempts and A Future Road Map

In the 1980s, Israeli intellectuals, academics, playwrights, musicians, journalists and educators developed second thoughts about the validity of the Zionist ideology as their taken for granted reality. They were called for want of better term, post-Zionists; not anti-Zionists as their critique on Zionism varied in its intensity and severity. But all in all, their understanding of Zionism was very different from the way it was interpreted by the vast majority of Jews in Israel: in their depiction Zionism was and remained a settler colonialist movement, a militarised society and nearly an apartheid system. This post Zionist critique entered for a while into the public sphere and influenced, albeit in a very limited way, the educational curricula, some of the documentary films on Television and the general discourse. This new thinking was there for about a decade, during the 1990s. Then came the second Intifada, uprising, and the urge for openness subsided and almost totally disappeared.[vi]

The Jewish society in Israel in the beginning of the 21^st century has closed the door it prised slightly in the 1990s. Today, it became even more rigid in its ideological convictions and intransigence. Hence, all the factors mentioned above about militarism and armament are still relevant in this time and age. But it is this exposure of a harsh ideological society that may harness the seeds for a future change. The logic of the present ideological realities, and their military implications, are that one cannot hope for a change from within in the near future. Without this change, arms production, their leathal employment and their deadly impact will continue unabated. So it is urgent to look for alternative ways of changing a public mind and a political system, with the realization that a change from within is right now impossible.

In the face of more than a century of dispossession and forty years of occupation the Palestinian national movement and activists were looking for the appropriate response to the devastating policies implemented against them. They have tried it all, armed struggle, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and diplomacy: nothing worked. And yet they are not giving up and now they are proposing a nonviolent strategy -- that of boycott, sanctions and divestment. With these means they wish to persuade Western governments to save not only them, but ironically also the Jews in Israel from an imminent catastrophe and bloodshed. This strategy bred the call for cultural boycott of Israel. This demand is voiced by every part of the Palestinian existence: by the civil society under occupation and by Palestinians in Israel. It is supported by the Palestinian refugees and is led by members of the Palestinian exile communities.

This became a valid option because of a fundamental shift in public opinion in the West. And indeed if there is anything new in the never-ending sad story of Palestine it is the clear shift in public opinion in the West. Britain is a case in point. I remember coming to these isles in 1980 when supporting the Palestinian cause was confined to the left and in it to a very particular section and ideological stream. The post-Holocaust trauma and guilt complex, military and economic interests and the charade of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East all played a role in providing immunity for the State of Israel. Very few were moved, so it seems, by a state that had dispossessed half of Palestine's native population, demolished half of their villages and towns, discriminated against the minority among them who lived within its borders through an apartheid system and divided into enclaves two million and a half of them in a harsh and oppressive military occupation.

Almost 30 years later it seems that all these filters and cataracts have been removed. The magnitude of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is well known, the suffering of the people in the occupied territories recorded and described even by the US president as unbearable and inhuman. In a similar way, the destruction and depopulation of the greater Jerusalem area is noted daily and the racist nature of the policies towards the Palestinians in Israel are frequently rebuked and condemned.

The reality today in 2009 is described by the UN as ‘a human catastrophe'. The conscious and conscientious sections of British society know very well who caused and who produced this catastrophe. This is not related any more to elusive circumstances, or to the ‘conflict' - it is seen clearly as the outcome of Israeli policies throughout the years. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu was asked for his reaction to what he saw in the occupied territories, he noted sadly that it was worse than apartheid. He should know.

This qualitative change in public opinion and mood is visible in other Western countries; needless to say that in the vast world this has the been the case for years now. Similar mood prevailed at the hey day of Apartheid in South Africa. The reality there, then, and the reality in Palestine, now, prods decent people, either as individuals or as members of organizations, to voice their outrage against the continued oppression, colonization, ethnic cleansing and starvation in Palestine. They are looking for ways of showing their protest and some even hope to convince their governments to change their old policy of indifference and inaction in the face of the continued destruction of Palestine and the Palestinians. Many among them are Jews, as these atrocities are done in their name according to the logic of the Zionist ideology, and quite a few among them are veterans of previous civil struggles in this country for similar causes all over the world. They are not confined any more to one political party and they come from all walks of life.

So far the British government, and the other Western governments, are not moved. They was also passive when the anti-apartheid movement in Britain demanded of its government to impose sanctions on South Africa. It took several decades for that activism from below to reach the political top. It takes longer in the case of Palestine: guilt about the Holocaust, distorted historical narratives and contemporary misrepresentation of Israel as a democracy seeking peace and the Palestinians as eternal Islamic terrorists blocked the flow of the popular impulse. But it is beginning to find its way and presence, despite the continued accusation of any such demand as being anti-Semitic and the demonization of Islam and Arabs. The third sector, that important link between civilians and government agencies, has shown us the way. One trade union after the other, one professional group after the other, have all sent recently a clear message: enough is enough. It is done in the name of decency, human morality and basic civil commitment not to remain idle in the face of atrocities of the kind Israel has and still is committing against the Palestinian people.

The validity of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions option is a first step in triggering a process of disarming Israel from its lethal ideology and its practical and real arms. Boycotts and outside pressure have never been attempted in the case of Israel, a state that wishes to be included in the civilised democratic world. Israel has indeed enjoyed such a status since its creation in 1948 and, therefore, succeeded in fending off the many United Nations' resolutions that condemned its policies and, moreover, managed to obtain a preferential status in the European Union. Israeli academia's elevated position in the global scholarly community epitomises this western support for Israel as the ‘only democracy' in the Middle East. Shielded by this particular support for academia, and other cultural media, the Israeli army and security services can go on, and will go on, demolishing houses, expelling families, abusing citizens and killing, almost every day, children and women without being accountable regionally and globally for their crimes.

Military and financial support to Israel is significant in enabling the Jewish state to pursue the policies it does. Any possible measure of decreasing such aid is most welcome in the struggle for peace and justice in the Middle East. But the cultural image in Israel feeds the political decision in the west to support unconditionally the Israeli destruction of Palestine and the Palestinians. The message that will be directed specifically against those who represent offiiccally the Israeli culture (spearhead by the state's academic institutes which have been particularly culpable in sustaining the oppression since 1948 and the occupation since 1967), can be a start for a successful campaign for disarming the state from its ideological constraints(as similar acts at the time had activated the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa).

Outside pressure is effective in a state in which people want to be regarded as part of the civilized world, but their government, with their explicit and implicit help, pursues policies which violate every known human and civil right. Neither the UN, nor the US and European governments, and societies, have sent a message to Israel that these policies are unacceptable and have to be stopped. It is up to the civil societies to send messages to Israeli academics, businessmen, artists, hi-tech industrialists and every other section in that society, that there is a price tag attached to such policies

There are encouraging signs that the civil society, and particular professional unions, is willing to expand their pressure. The achievements are symbolic in legitimizing a demand for disarming the state from its practices and ideological prejudices.

Pressure is not enough if an effective diffusion of the ideology that produces the weaponry is desired. It should be complimented by a process of re-education in Israel itself. As noted in the beginning of this article, the chances for a change from within in Israel are very slim. A pressure from the outside is called for because there is an urgent need to prevent the continued destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people. However that does not mean that one should give up the attempt to diffuse the ideological weapon by education and dissemination of alternative knowledge and understanding. The two are actually interlinked. Those very few, and brave, ones who toil relentlessly in Israel to re-educate their society from a pacifist, humanist and non Zionist perspective, are empowered by those who pressure the state to act along these lines and leave behind the old habits of aggression and militarization.

I would like to mention in this respect one particular group ‘New Profile'.[vii] It is committed to introduce to, and disseminate among, the younger Israelis the idea of pacifism. They are the ones who inform young recruits that even according to the Israeli law you are allowed to declare conscientious objection from serving in the IDF on pacifist grounds. They produce educational material to counter the militarized educational system and take part in debating these issues. They became potentially so successful that the Israeli security service declared them a menace and a threat to national security. Their pure, simple message of the sanctity of life, the stupidity of war and militarism, is not yet connected to a more mature political deconstruction of the reality in Israel and Palestine, but it will be one day and could serve a potent transformative agent. And maybe because it is so pure it is so effective.

The Palestinians of course have an agency in this as well. Non-violence, rather than violence, has less immediate effect on alleviating an oppressive reality, but has long term dividends. But on one can interfere at this stage in the liberation movement torn by different visions and haunted by years of defeat. What is important is ask for a Palestinian contributing to a post-conflictual vision free of retribution and revenge. A non militarised vision for both Jews and Arabs, if transformed from the realm of utopia and hallucination into a concrete political plan can help enormously together with the outside pressure and the educational process from within in disarming ideologically the state of Israel.

Finally, the Jewish communities in the world, and in particular Western world, have a crucial role to play in this disarmament. Their moral and material support for Israel indicates endorsement of the ideology behind the state. Thus it is not surprising that in the last few years a voice of the non-Zionist Jews is increasingly heard under the slogan ‘not in my name'. The main weapon official Israel uses against the outside pressure or any criticism for that matter is that any such stance is anti-Semitic. The presence of Jewish voices in the call for peace and reconciliation accentuates the illogical way in which the state of Israel tries to justify the crimes against the Palestinians in the name of the crimes perpetrated in Europe against the Jews.

Conclusions

The project of disarming Israel is thus presented here as an ideological diffusion. It begins with asking people concerned with the realities in Palestine and Israel, for whatever reason, to learn the history of the Zionist project, to understand its raison d'être and its long term impact on the indigenous people of Palestine. Hopefully such knowledge about the history would associate the violence raging in that land with the historical roots and the ideological background of Zionism as it developed throughout the years.

The recognition of the past and present role of the ideology that necessitated the building of a fortress with one of the most formidable armies in the world, and one of the most flourishing arms production industry, enables activists to tackle tangible goals in the struggle for peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine, and in the general struggle for disarmament in the world

An efficient process of ideological diffusion should avoid unnecessary demonization, a clear distinction between political systems and ‘people' as such, a good understanding of knowledge production, of information manipulation as well recognition in how educational systems are indoctrinated and who governments engage with conjuring up a world distorted representations and demonised images. This is an essence a strategy of activism that would begin a a very tough dialogue with a state and a society that wishes to be part of the ‘civilized' world, while remaining racist and supremacist. In it lives a society that does not wish, or is unable, to see that its ideological nature and its policies locate it within the group of rouge states of this world. For good or for worse, what academics in the West would teach about Israel, what journalists would report about it, what conscious and conscientious people would think about it and what eventually politicians would decide to do about it, is a key for a drastic change in the horrific reality on the ground in Israel and Palestine. This dismal reality has repercussion not only to peace in the Middle East but in the world as a whole. But it is not a lost case, and now is the time to act.

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[i] Uri Ben Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

[ii] Henry Rosenfeld and Shulamit Karmi, ‘The Emergence of Militaristic Nationalism in Israel', International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 3:1 (Fall 1989), pp. 30-45.

[iii] See Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951, London: MacMillan, 1988.

[iv] See Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006.

[v] The wish to use as fierce military power as possible in order to regain the power of deterrence in admitted by the most senior military generals in the book Boomerang written by two senior Israeli journalists. See Raviv Druker and Offer Shelach, Boomerang, Tel-Aviv: Keter, 2005.

[vi] See Ilan Pappe, ‘The Post-Zionist Discourse in Israel', Holy Land Studies, 1:1 (2002), pp. 3-20.

[vii] See their website www.newprofile.org

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From:	Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL:	http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22146

Bush Trapped

t is significant that we the people tend to forget that W is the reason the country is in the frigging mess it is. And he has disappeared off the stage. Actually he is in hiding - if he goes abroad, he runs the risk of getting arrested and extradited to Spain for his was crime activities. Poor dear; that must really cut into his speaking engagement income. Not that he can string three words into a coherant sentence. Not that his rich bastard friends will let him down.

Rabbis as "Crime Bosses"

THE ABSURD TIMES

Overheard: Need an organ transplant? Contact your local Rabbi.

Obama loosing himself

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration by Hugh Ralinovsky: Barak Obama, our president, as a function of time (going from left to right, obviously). We are about 1/2 way there.

Do you realize that more of "our guys" have been killed in Afghanistan this month that any previous month? Also, more civilians killed by us ever in Pakistan? Perhaps the most eggregious behaviour by Israel in over two decades, especially in occupied land? More government money gone into financial institutions than ever before? Why wasn't all this so-called stimulous money sent directly to the people? They would know how to spend it.

Still, all the above is difficult to even probe with the right wing effecting its smokescreen of inanity. Sarah quits. Tina Fey gets Emmy awards. Republicans are going on sexual rampages all over the place while preaching abstinence. There must e a conspiracy.

Anyway, I wanted to get this illustration out as I have had it for about a week already and found no big occassion to meld it into an issue. It really is about all there is to say.

Another Bush II -- Chomsky

>

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: One of you thought this would be a good illustration. Sorry, I forgot to ask why.

Now, does anyone remember why we are in Afghanistan? Everyone remembers 9/11, but the attack on our memories has been so severe that hardly anyone remembers that we went there, we were told, to capture Bin Ladan. What the hell are we doing there, then? "Hey Mr. Taliban -- Tally me banana?" It seems every U.S. President has to have his own war. and this is Obama's.

Any truth that Obama is encouraging Palin, Sanford, and all the other scandels just so he can run his war?

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Anyway: here is the interview with Chomsky I promised:

AMY GOODMAN: Today, a Democracy Now! special with one of the most important dissident intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky.

Born December 7th, 1928, in Philadelphia, by the age of ten he was writing an extended essay against fascism and about the Spanish Civil War. At fourteen, he was in New York, getting his education, as he tells it, in the back of the 72nd Street subway station, where his uncle ran a newspaper stand. The front of the subway station, that's where people ran in and out buying newspapers quickly. But at the back, a little less trafficked, that's where people stopped and had political discussions about the news in the papers they did or didn't buy.

At sixteen, he was at the University of Pennsylvania, where he got his doctorate. He became a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of twenty-six. He remained there for more than half a century and continues to teach there today.

While Professor Chomsky broke new ground as a world-renowned linguist, shattering all previous paradigms, he was also taking on the war in Vietnam. Throughout his life, he spoke out against US imperialism, from Vietnam to the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, from the death squads in Latin America to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and now to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Noam Chomsky turned eighty years old this past December. He has written over a hundred books. But despite being called "the most important intellectual alive today" by the New York Times, he is rarely heard or quoted in the mainstream media.

Today we spend the hour with Noam Chomsky. He spoke recently here in New York at an event sponsored by the Brecht Forum. More than 2,000 people packed into the Riverside Church in Harlem to hear his address. The title of his talk, "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours." This is Noam Chomsky.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, let me say a couple of words about the title, which, as always, is shorthand. There's too much nuance and variety to make any sharp distinction between us and them. And, of course, neither I nor anyone else can presume to speak for us. But I'll pretend it's possible.

There's also a problem about the word "crisis." Which one do we have in mind? There are numerous very severe crises. Many of them will be under discussion here in a couple of weeks at the United Nations in their conference on the world financial and economic crisis. And these crises are interwoven in very complex ways which make it—which preclude any sharp separation. But again, I'll pretend otherwise for simplicity.

Well, one way to enter this morass was helpfully provided by a current issue of the New York Review, dated yesterday. The front cover headline reads, "How to Deal with the Crisis." It features a symposium of specialists. And it's worth reading, but with attention to the definite article: "the" crisis. For the West, the phrase "the crisis" has a clear enough meaning. It's the financial crisis that hit the rich countries and therefore is of supreme importance.

But, in fact, even for the rich and privileged, that's by no means the only crisis or even the most severe of those they face. And others see the world quite differently. For example, the newspaper New Nation in Bangladesh. There, we read, "It's very telling that trillions have already been spent to patch up leading world financial institutions, while out of the comparatively small sum of $12 billion pledged in Rome earlier this year, to offset the food crisis, only $1 billion has been delivered. The hope that at least extreme poverty can be eradicated by the end of 2015, as stipulated in the UN's Millennium Development Goals, seems as unrealistic as ever, not due to lack of resources but to a lack of true concern for the world's poor." That's—they're talking about approximately a billion people facing starvation, severe malnutrition, even 30 or 40 million of them in the richest country in the world. That's a real crisis, and it's getting much worse.

In this morning's Financial Times, British business press, it's reported that the World Food Program just announced that they're cutting food aid and rations and also closing operations. The reason is that the donor countries have been cutting back in funding because of the fiscal crunch, and they're slashing contributions. So, a very close connection between the horrendous food crisis and poverty crisis and the significant, but less significant, fiscal crisis. They're ending up closing down operations in Rwanda, in Uganda, Ethiopia, many others. They have to—20 to 25 percent cut in budget, while food prices are rising, and the financial crisis, the general economic crisis, is bringing unemployment and cutting back remittances. That's a major crisis.

We might, incidentally, remember that when the British landed in what's now Bangladesh, they were stunned by its wealth and splendor. And it didn't take very long for it to be on its way to become the very symbol of misery, not by an act of God.

Well, the fate of Bangladesh should remind us that the terrible food crisis is not just a result of Western lack of concern. In large part, it results from very definite and clear concerns of the global managers, namely for their own welfare. It's always well to keep in mind a astute observation by Adam Smith about policy formation in England. He recognized that what he called the "principal architects" of policy—in his day, the merchants and manufacturers—make sure that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to, however grievous the impact on others, including the people of England, but far more so those who were subjected to what he called the "savage injustice of the Europeans," and particularly in conquered India, his own prime concern. We can easily think of analogs today. His observation, in fact, is one of the few solid and enduring principles of international and domestic affairs well to keep in mind.

And the food crisis is a case in point. It erupted first and most dramatically in Haiti in early 2008. Like Bangladesh, Haiti is a symbol of utter misery. And like Bangladesh, when the European explorers arrived, they were stunned because it was so remarkably rich in resources. Later it became the source of much of France's wealth. I'm not going to run through the sordid history. It's worth knowing. But the current food crisis traces back directly to Woodrow Wilson's invasion of Haiti, which was murderous and brutal and destructive. Among Wilson's many crimes was to dissolve the Haitian parliament at gunpoint, because it refused to pass what was called progressive legislation, which would allow US businesses to take over Haitian lands. Wilson's marines then ran a free election, in which the legislation was passed by 99.9 percent of the vote. That's of the five percent of the population permitted to vote. All of this comes down to us as what's called Wilsonian idealism.

Later, USAID instituted programs in Haiti to turn it—under the slogan of turning Haiti into the Taiwan of the Caribbean by adhering to the sacred principle of comparative advantage. That is, they should import from the United States, while working people, mostly women, slaved under miserable conditions in US-owned assembly plants.

Haiti's first free election in 1990 threatened these economically rational programs. The poor majority made the mistake of entering the political arena and electing their own candidate, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist priest. And Washington instantly adopted standard operating procedures: the moving at once to undermine the regime. A couple of months later came the military coup, instituting a horrible reign of terror, which was backed by Bush, Bush I, and even more so by Clinton. By 1994, Clinton decided that the population was sufficiently intimidated, and he sent US forces to restore the elected president—that's now called a humanitarian intervention—but on very strict conditions, namely that the president had to accept a very harsh neoliberal regime, in particular, no protection for the economy.

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with US agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms. Well, there's nothing at all surprising about what followed next. In 1995, USAID wrote a report pointing out, and I'm quoting it, that "the export-driven trade and investment policy" that Washington mandated will "relentlessly squeeze the domestic rice farmer." In fact, the neoliberal policies rammed down Haiti's throat destroyed, dismantled what was left of economic sovereignty, drove the country into chaos, and that was accelerated by Bush Number Two's banning of international aid, on totally cynical grounds.

In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti—France and the United States—combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The US denies him permission to return to the entire region. Haiti had by then lost the capacity to feed itself, making it highly vulnerable to food price fluctuation. That was the immediate cause of the 2008 food crisis, which led to riots and enormous protest, but not getting food.

The story is familiar, in fact quite similar, in much of the world. So, going back to the Bangladesh newspaper, it's true enough that the food crisis results from Western lack of concern—a pittance by our standards would overcome its worst immediate effects—but more fundamentally, it results from the dedication to Adam Smith's principles of business-run state policy. These are all matters that we too easily evade. They happen daily.

Along with the fact that bailing out banks is not uppermost in the minds of the billion people now facing starvation, not forgetting the tens of millions enduring hunger in the richest country in the world, well, also sidelined is an easy way to make a significant dent in the financial and the food crises. It's suggested by the publication a couple days ago of the authoritative annual report on military spending by SIPRI, the Swedish peace research institute, the scale of military spending is phenomenal, regularly increasing, this last year as well. Now, the US is responsible for almost as much as the rest of the world combined, seven times as much as its nearest rival, China. No need to waste time commenting.

This distribution of concerns reflects another crisis here, kind of a cultural crisis, that is the tendency to focus on short-term parochial games. That's a core element of our socioeconomic institutions and the ideological support system on which they rest. One example, now prominent, is the array of perverse incentives that are devised for corporate managers to enrich themselves. And, for example, what's called the "too big too fail" insurance policies that are provided by the unwitting public. And deeper ones. They're just inherent in market inefficiencies.

One such inefficiency, now recognized to be one of the roots of the financial crisis, is the under-pricing of systemic risk, a risk that affects the whole system. So, for example—and that's general, like if you and I make a transaction, say, you sell me a car, we may make a good deal for ourselves, but we don't price into that transaction the cost to others. And there's a cost: pollution, congestion, raising the price of gas, all sorts of other things, killing people in Nigeria because we're getting the gas from them. That doesn't count when we—we don't count that in. That's an inherent market inefficiency, one of the reasons why markets can't work.

And when you turn to the financial institutions, it can get quite serious. So it means that if, say, Goldman Sachs, if they're managed properly, if they make a risky loan, they calculate the potential cost to themselves if the loan goes bad, but they simply don't calculate the impact on the whole financial system. And we now see how severe that can be, not that it's anything new.

In fact, this inherent deficiency of markets, this inefficiency of markets, was perfectly well known ten years ago, at the height of the euphoria about efficient markets. Two prominent economists, John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, they wrote an important book, in which—called Global Finance at Risk, in which they spelled out the consequences of these market inefficiencies, which we now see, and they outlined means to deal with them. These proposals were exactly contrary to the deregulatory rage that was then being carried forward by the Clinton administration, under the leadership of those who Obama has now called upon to put band-aids on the disaster that they helped create.

Well, in substantial measure, the food crisis plaguing much of the South and the financial crisis of the North have common roots, namely the shift towards neoliberalism since the 1970s. That brought to an end the postwar, post-Second World War, Bretton Woods system that was instituted by the United States and Britain right after World War II. It had two architects: John Maynard Keynes of Britain and Harry Dexter White in the United States. And they anticipated that its core principles, which included capital controls and regulated currencies—they anticipated that these principles would lead to relatively balanced economic growth and would also free governments to institute the social democratic programs, welfare state programs, that had enormous public support around the world.

And to a large extent, they were vindicated on both counts. In fact, many economists call the years that followed, until the 1970s, the "Golden Age of Capitalism." That Golden Age led not only to unprecedented and relatively egalitarian growth, but also the introduction of welfare state measures. Keynes and White were perfectly well aware that free capital movement and speculation inhibit these options. Professional economics literature points out what should be obvious, that the free flow of capital creates what is sometimes called a "virtual senate" of lenders and investors who carry out a moment-by-moment referendum on government policies, and if they find that they're irrational, meaning they help people instead of profits, then they vote against them, by capital flight, by tax on the country, and so on. So the democratic governments have a dual constituency, their own population and the virtual senate, who typically prevail. And for the poor, that means regular disaster.

In fact, one of the differences—one of the reasons for the radical difference between Latin America and East Asia in the last half-century is that Latin America didn't control capital flight. In fact, in general, the rich in Latin America don't have responsibilities. Capital flight approximated the crushing debt. In contrast, during South Korea's remarkable growth period, capital flight was not only banned, but could bring the death penalty, one of many factors that led to the surprising divergence. Latin America has much richer resources. You'd expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor and author, Noam Chomsky, speaking about "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours" at Riverside Church in Harlem. If you'd like a copy of today's show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. When we come back from break, Chomsky on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Earthdriver performing live at Riverside Church in Harlem, where more than 2,000 people packed in to hear the renowned MIT professor, author and activist, Noam Chomsky. We return to his address called "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours." Noam Chomsky spoke about US foreign policy and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

NOAM CHOMSKY: In AfPak, Afghanistan-Pakistan, as the region is now called, Obama is building enormous new embassies and other facilities on the model of the city within a city in Baghdad. These are like no embassies anywhere in the world. And they are signs of an intention to be there for a long time.

Right now in Iraq, something interesting is happening. Obama is pressing the Iraqi government not to permit the referendum that's required by the Status of Forces Agreement. That's an agreement that was forced down the throats of the Bush administration, which had to formally renounce its primary war aims in the face of massive Iraqi resistance. Washington's current objection to the referendum was explained two days ago by New York Times correspondent Alissa Rubin: Obama fears that the Iraqi population might reject the provision that delays US troop withdrawal to 2012. They might insist on immediate departure of US forces. Iraqi analyst in London—the head of the Iraqi Foundation for Democracy and Development in London—it's quite pro-Western—he explained, "This is an election year for Iraq; no one wants to appear that he is appeasing the Americans. Anti-Americanism is popular now in Iraq," as indeed it's been throughout, facts that are familiar to anyone who's read the Western-run polls, including Pentagon-run polls. Well, the current US efforts to prevent the legally required referendum are extremely revealing. Sometimes they're called "democracy promotion."

Well, while Obama's signaling very clearly his intention to establish a firm and large-scale presence in the region, he's also, as you know, sharply escalating the AfPak war, following Petraeus's strategy to drive the Taliban into Pakistan, with potentially awful results for this extremely dangerous and unstable state, which is facing insurrections throughout its territory. These are the most extreme in the tribal areas, which cross the AfPak border. It's an artificial line imposed by the British called the Durand Line, and the same people live on both sides of it—Pashtun tribes—and they've never accepted it. And, in fact, the Afghanistan government never accepted it either, as long as it was independent. Well, that's where most of the fighting is going on. One of the leading specialists on the region, Selig Harrison, he recently wrote that the outcome of Washington's current policies, Obama's policies, might well be, what he calls them, "Islamic Pashtunistan," Pashtun-based separate kind of quasi-state. The Pakistani ambassador warned that if the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism merge, we've had it. And we're on the verge of that.

The prospects become still more ominous with the escalation of drone attacks that embitter the population with their huge civilian toll, and more recently, just a couple days ago, in fact, with the unprecedented authority that has just been granted to General Stanley McChrystal, who's taking charge. He's a kind of a wild-eyed Special Forces assassin. He's been put in charge of heading the operations. Petraeus's own counterinsurgency adviser in Iraq, General David Kilcullen—Colonel, I think—he describes the Obama-Petraeus-McChrystal policies as a fundamental "strategic error" which may lead to the collapse of Pakistan. He says it's a calamity that would "dwarf" all other current issues, given the country's size, strategic location and nuclear stockpile.

It's also not too encouraging that Pakistan and India are now rapidly expanding their nuclear arsenals. Pakistan's nuclear arsenals were developed with Reagan's crucial aid. And India's nuclear weapons program got a major shot in the arm with the recent US-India nuclear agreement. It's also a sharp blow to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Two countries have twice come close to nuclear war over Kashmir, and they're also engaged in a kind of a proxy war in Afghanistan. These developments pose a very serious threat to world peace, even to human survival. Well, a lot to say about this crisis, but no time here.

Coming back home, whether the deceit here about the monstrous enemy was sincere or not—Johnson's case might well have been sincere—suppose that, say, fifty years ago Americans had been given a choice of directing their tax money to development of information technology, so that their grandchildren could have iPods and the internet, or else putting the same funds into developing a livable and sustainable socioeconomic order. Well, they might very well have made the latter choice. But they had no choice. Now, that's standard. There's a striking gap between public opinion and public policy on a host of major issues, domestic and foreign. And, at least in my judgment, public opinion is often a lot more sane. It also tends to be fairly consistent over time, which is pretty astonishing, because public concerns and aspirations, if they're even mentioned, are marginalized and ridiculed. It's one very significant feature of the yawning democratic deficit, as we call it in other countries. That's the failure of formal democratic institutions to function properly. And that's no trivial matter. Arundhati Roy has a book, soon to come out, in which she asks whether the evolution of formal democracy in India and the United States, in fact, not only there—her words—might turn out to be the "endgame of the human race." And that's not an idle question.

It should be recalled that the American Republic was founded on the principle that there should be a democratic deficit. James Madison, the main framer of the constitutional order, his view was that power should be in the hands of the wealth of the nation, the more responsible set of men who have sympathy for property owners and their rights. And Madison sought to construct a system of government that would, in his words, "protect the minority of the opulent from the majority." That's why the constitutional system that he framed did not have co-equal branches. The executive was supposed to be an administrator, and the legislature was supposed to be dominant, but not the House of Representatives, rather the Senate, where power was vested and protected from the public in many ways. That's where the wealth of the nation would be concentrated. This is not overlooked by historians. Gordon Wood, for example, summarizes the thoughts of the founders, saying that "The Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period," delivering power to a "better sort" of people and excluding "those who were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political power."

Well, all through American history, there's been a constant struggle over this constrained version of democracy. And popular struggles have won a great many rights. Nevertheless, concentrated power and privilege clings to the Madisonian conception, changes form as circumstances change.

By World War II, there was a significant change. Business leaders and elite intellectuals recognized that the public had won enough rights so that they can't be controlled by force, so it would be necessary to do something else, namely to turn to control of attitudes and opinions. These were the days when the huge public relations industry emerged in the freest countries in the world, Britain and the United States, where the problem was most severe. The public relations industry was devoted to what Walter Lippmann approvingly called a "new art" in the practice of democracy, the "manufacture of consent." It's called the "engineering of consent" in the phrase of his contemporary Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the PR industry.

Both Lippmann and Bernays had taken part in Woodrow Wilson's state propaganda agency, which Committee on Public Information was its Orwellian term. It was created to kind of—to try to drive a pacifist population to jingoist fanaticism and hatred of all things German. And it succeeded—brilliantly, in fact.

And it was hoped that the same techniques could ensure that what are called the "intelligent minorities" would rule, and that the general public, who Lippmann called "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders," would serve their function as spectators, not participants. These are all very highly respected progressive essays on democracy by people who—by a man who was the leading public intellectual of the twentieth century and was a Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy progressive, as Bernays was. And they capture the thinking of progressive opinion. So, President Wilson, he held that an elite of gentlemen with "elevated ideals" must be empowered to preserve "stability and righteousness," essentially the perspective of the founding fathers. In more recent years, the gentlemen are transmuted into the "technocratic elite" and the "action intellectuals" of Camelot, "Straussian" neocons and other configurations, but throughout one or another variant of the doctrine prevails. The quote from Samuel Huntington that you heard is an example.

And on a more hopeful note, a popular struggle continues to clip its wings, quite impressively in the wake of 1960s activism, which had quite a substantial effect on civilizing the society and raised the prospects for further progress to a much higher plane. It's one of the reasons why it's called the "time of troubles" and bitterly denounced, too much of a civilizing effect.

Well, what the West sees as the crisis, namely the financial crisis, now that will presumably be patched up somehow or other, but leaving the institutions that created it pretty much in place. A couple of days ago, the Treasury Department, as you read, permitted early TARP repayments, which actually reduce capacity. I mean, it was touted as giving money back to the public. In fact, as was pointed out right away, it reduces the capacity of banks to lend, although it does allow them to pour money into the pockets of the few who matter. And the mood on Wall Street was captured by two Bank of New York employees who predicted that their lives and pay would improve, even if the broader economy did not. That's paraphrasing Adam Smith's observation that the architects of policy protect their own interests, no matter how grievous the effect on others.

And they are the architects of policy. Obama made sure to staff his economic advisers from that sector, which has been pointed out, too. The former chief economist of the IMF, Simon Johnson, pointed out that the Obama administration is just in the pocket of Wall Street. As he put it, "Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here." And the "elite business interests" who "played a central role in creating the crisis…with the implicit backing of the government," they're still there, and they're "now using their influence to prevent precisely" the set of "reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive." He says, the economy—"The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them," which is no surprise, considering who constitutes and who backs the government.

Well, there's a far more severe crisis, even for the rich and powerful. It happens to be discussed in the same issue of the New York Review that I mentioned, article by Bill McKibben. He's been warning for years about the dire impact of global warming. His current article, worth reading, it relies on the British Stern report, which is sort of the gold standard now. On this basis, he concludes, not unrealistically, that "2009 may well turn out to be the decisive year in the human relationship with our home planet." The reason is that there's a conference in December in Copenhagen, which is supposed to set up a new global accord on global warming. And he says it will tell us "whether or not our political systems are up to the unprecedented challenge that climate change represents." He thinks that the signals are "mixed." To me, that seems kind of optimistic, unless there's really a massive public campaign to overcome the insistence of the managers of the state-corporate sector on privileging short-term gain for the few over the hope that their grandchildren might have a decent future.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor and author, Noam Chomsky, speaking about "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours" at Riverside Church in Harlem. When we come back, Chomsky on the environment and climate change. If you'd like a copy of today's show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Back in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: Mahina Movement performing live at Riverside Church in Harlem, as we return to the conclusion of Noam Chomsky's address. […] We return to Noam Chomsky's address, "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours."

NOAM CHOMSKY: A couple days ago, a group of MIT scientists released the results of what they describe as "the most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century," which "shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated" a couple years ago. And it "could be even worse than that," because their model does not fully incorporate positive feedbacks that can occur. For example, the increased temperature that is causing a melting of permafrost in the Arctic regions, which is going to release huge amounts of methane. It's worse than CO2. The leader of the project says, "There's no way the world can or should take these risks." He says, "The least-cost option to lower the risk is to start now and steadily transform the global energy system over the coming decades to low or zero greenhouse gas-emitting technologies." And there's very little sign of that.

Well, furthermore, while new technologies are essential, the problems go well beyond that. In fact, they go beyond the current technical debates about just how to work out cap-and-trade devices being discussed in Congress. We have to face something much more far-reaching. We have to face up to the need to reverse the huge state-corporate and social engineering projects of the post-Second World War period, which very consciously—I mean, they very consciously promoted an energy-wasting and environmentally destructive fossil fuel economy; didn't happen by accident. That's the whole massive project of suburbanization, then destruction and later gentrification of inner cities.

The state-corporate program began with a conspiracy by General Motors, Firestone Rubber, Standard Oil of California to buy up and destroy efficient electric transportation systems in Los Angeles and dozens of other cities. They were actually convicted of criminal conspiracy and given a tap on the wrist, I think a $5,000 fine. The federal government then took over. It relocated infrastructure and capital stock to suburban areas and also created a huge interstate highway system under the usual pretext of defense. Railroads were displaced by government-financed motor and air transport.

The public played almost no role, apart from choosing within the narrowly structured framework of options that are designed by state-corporate managers. They were supported by vast campaigns to "fabricate" consumers with "created wants," borrowing Veblen's terms. One result is the atomization of the society and the entrapment of isolated individuals with huge debts. These efforts grew out of the recognition, that I mentioned, a century ago that democratic achievements have to be curtailed by shaping attitudes and beliefs, as the business press put it, directing people to superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption. All of that's necessary to ensure that the opulent minority are protected from ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, namely the population.

Let me just add a personal note on that. I came down here this afternoon by the Acela, you know, the jewel in the crown of new high-speed railroad technology. The first time I came from Boston to New York was sixty years ago. And there was improvement since then: it was five minutes faster today than it was sixty years ago.

While state-corporate power was vigorously promoting the privatization of life and maximal waste of energy, it was also undermining the efficient choices that the market doesn't and can't provide. That's another highly destructive built-in market inefficiency. So, to put it simply, if I want to get home from work in the evening, the market does allow me a choice between, say, a Ford and a Toyota, but it doesn't allow me a choice between a car and a subway, which would be much more inefficient. And maybe everybody wants it, but the market doesn't allow that choice. That's a social decision. And in a democratic society, it would be the decision of an organized public. But that's just what the elite attack on democracy seeks to undermine.

Now, these consequences are right before our eyes in ways that are sometimes surreal. A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal had an article reporting that the US Transportation chief is in Spain. He's meeting with high-speed rail suppliers. Europe's engineering and rail companies are lining up for some potentially lucrative US contracts for high-speed rail projects. That stake is $13 billion in stimulus funds that the Obama administration is allocating to upgrade existing rail lines and build new ones that would one day rival Europe's.

So think what's happening. Spain and other European countries are hoping to get US taxpayer funding for high-speed rail and related infrastructure. And at the very same time, Washington is busy dismantling leading sectors of US industry, ruining the lives of workers and communities who could easily do it themselves. It's pretty hard to conjure up a more damning indictment of the economic system that's been constructed by state-corporate managers. Surely, the auto industry could be reconstructed to produce what the country needs using its highly skilled workforce. But that's not even on the agenda. It's not even being discussed. Rather, we'll go to Spain, and we'll give them taxpayer money for them to do it, while we destroy the capacity to do it here.

It's been done before. So, during World War II, it was kind of a semi-command economy, government-organized economy. The whole—that's what happened. Industry was reconstructed for the purpose of war, dramatically. It not only ended the Depression, but it initiated the most spectacular period of growth in economic history. In four years, US industrial production just about quadrupled, and that—as the economy was retooled for war. And that laid the basis for the Golden Age that followed.

Well, warnings about the purposeful destruction of US productive capacity have been familiar for decades, maybe most prominently by the late Seymour Melman, whom many of us knew well. Melman was also one of those who pointed the way to a sensible way to reverse the project—the process. The state-corporate leadership, of course, has other commitments. But there's no reason for passivity on the part of the public, the so-called stakeholders, workers and community. I mean, with enough popular support, they could just take over the plants and carry out the task of reconstruction themselves. It's not a very exotic proposal. One of the standard texts on corporations in economics literature points out that "Nowhere…is it written in stone that the short-term interests of corporate shareholders in the United States deserve a higher priority than…all other corporate stakeholders"—workers and community, that's it. State-corporate decision has nothing to do with economic theory.

It's also important to remind ourselves that the notion of workers' control is as American as apple pie. It's kind of been suppressed, but it's there. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution in New England, working people just took it for granted that those who work in the mills should own them. And they also regarded wage labor as different from slavery, only in that it was temporary. Also Abraham Lincoln's view. There have been immense efforts to drive these thoughts out of people's heads, to win what the business world calls "the everlasting battle for the minds of men." On the surface, they may appear to have succeeded, but I don't think you have to dig too deeply to find out that they're latent and they can be revived.

And there have been some important concrete efforts. One of them was undertaken thirty years ago in Youngstown, Ohio, where US Steel was going to shut down a major facility that was at the heart of this steel town. And there were substantial protests by the workforce and by the community. Then there was an effort, led by Staughton Lynd, to bring to the courts the principle that stakeholders should have the highest priority. Well, the effort failed that time. But with enough popular support, it could succeed. And right now is a propitious time to revive such efforts, although it would be necessary—and we have to do this—to overcome the effects of this concentrated campaign to drive our own history and culture out of our minds.

There was a very dramatic illustration of the success of this campaign just a few months ago. In February, President Obama decided to show his solidarity with working people. He went to Illinois to give a talk at a factory. The factory he chose was the Caterpillar corporation. Now, that was over the strong objections of church groups, peace groups, human rights groups, who protested—were protesting Caterpillar's role in providing what amount to weapons of mass destruction in the Israeli Occupied Territories.

Apparently forgotten, however, was something else. In the 1980s, after Reagan had dismantled the air traffic controllers' union, the Caterpillar managers decided to rescind their labor contract with the United Auto Workers and to destroy the union by bringing in scabs to break a strike. That was the first time that had happened in generations. Now, that practice is illegal in other industrial countries, apart from South Africa at the time. Not now. Now the United States is in splendid isolation, as far as I'm aware.

Well, at that time, Obama was a civil rights lawyer in Chicago, and he certainly read the Chicago Tribune, which ran quite a good, very careful study of these events. They reported that the union was stunned to find that unemployed workers crossed the picket line with no remorse, while Caterpillar workers found little moral support in their community. This is one of the many communities where the union had lifted the standard of living for entire communities. Wiping out these memories is another victory in the relentless campaign to destroy workers' rights and democracy, which is constantly waged by the highly class-conscious business classes.

Now, the union leadership had refused to understand. It was only in 1978 that UAW president Doug Fraser recognized what was happening and criticized the leaders of the business community—I'm quoting him—for waging a "one-sided class war" in this country, a "war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society," and for having "broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress." That was 1979.

And, in fact, placing one's faith in a compact with owners and managers is a suicide pact. The UAW is discovering that right now, as the state-corporate leadership proceeds to eliminate the hard-fought gains of working people while dismantling the productive core of the economy and sending the Transportation Secretary to Spain to get them to do what American workers could do, at taxpayer expense, of course.

Well, that's only a fragment of what's underway, and it highlights the importance of short- and long-term strategies to build—in part, resurrect—the foundations of a functioning democratic society. One short-term goal is to revive a strong independent labor movement. In its heyday, it was a critical base for advancing democracy and human and civil rights. It's a primary reason why it's been subjected to such unremitting attack in policy and propaganda. An immediate goal right now is to pressure Congress to permit organizing rights, the [Employee] Free Choice Act legislation. That was promised but now seems to be languishing. And a longer-term goal is to win the educational and cultural battle that's been waged with such bitterness in the one-sided class war that the UAW president perceived far too late. That means tearing apart an enormous edifice of delusions about markets, free trade and democracy that's been assiduously constructed over many years and to overcome the marginalization and atomization of the public.

Now, of all the crises that afflict us, I think my own feeling is that this growing democratic deficit may be the most severe. Unless it's reversed, Arundhati Roy's forecast might prove accurate, and not in the distant future. The conversion of democracy to a performance in which the public are only spectators might well lead to—inexorably to what she calls the "endgame for the human race."

Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky the renowned MIT professor, linguist, author, activist, on "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours."

Obama Another Bush?

THE ABSURD TIMES

THE DECIDER

The illustration is a reprint Bush after he pronounced himself "The Decider." Shelley Berman did a great take off on that as a Judge in Boston Legal.

Obama is intelligent, smooth, has a sharp sense of humor, comes across as being on the "right side." After eight long years of seeing the cowboy and Dr. Strangelove run our country into the ground and humiliating the entire country with his buffonery, Obama can not help but to look good.

However, for awhile now I've become more and more irritated at his continuing so many of the same policies that Georgie Boy praised. Obama is, of course, better, but he needs to be pushed. As John Pilger points out, he is to the right of about 80% of the population of the United States, and that is not very encouraging. I have another transcript of a speech by Noam Chomsky that will make the point more definitively.

But first let's let Pilger talk.

AMY GOODMAN: From the events in Honduras, we step back to reflect how the media’s been covering the coup in that country. Last week, award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger was visiting the United States. He was born in Australia but has lived in London since the 1960’s and began his career as a hard- hitting war reporter covering the Vietnam War. He has written close to a dozen books and made over 50 documentaries on subjects ranging from struggles around the world for a more just and peaceful society and against western military and economic intervention, films on East Timor, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, and the United States.

Well, last week I had a wide- ranging conversation with John Pilger on Honduras, Iran, Gaza, the media, healthcare and Obama’s wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I began by asking John Pilger to comment on the current mainstream media and how it shapes our perceptions and priorities.

JOHN PILGER: I don’t believe anything as changed. If it is one to change in the middle east as other parts of the world, I think one of the really significant and building areas of discussion- and data has been building for the last few years—is just the kind of information we get through the so- called mainstream. We have many alternative sources of information now, not least of all your own program. though I wouldn’t call that alternative.

But for most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television. Even the internet for all its subversiveness has still a very large component of the mainstream. And that means we’re getting still either its this singular message about wars, about the economy, about all those things that touch our lives. All we are getting is what I would call is a contrived silence, a censorship by a mission. I think this is almost the principal issue of today because without information, we cannot possibly begin to influence government. We cannot possibly begin to end the wars.

All of this, it seams to me, has come together in the presidency of Barack Obama who is almost a creation of this media world. He promised some things, although most of them were more for us, and has delivered virtually the opposite. He started his own war in Pakistan. We see the events in Iran and Honduras in quiet subtlety, but very directly influenced in the time-honored way by the Obama administration. And yet the Obama administration is still given this extraordinary benefit of the doubt by people, who in my view are influenced by the mainstream media. It is a time when I think, where either we are going to begin to understand how the media really works, or we’re going to let that opportunity pass. Its almost a historic opportunity the we understand that the perception of our world is utterly distorted, most of the time through what are seen as credible sources of information.

AMY GOODMAN: John, talk about the contrast between the media coverage of the Iranian elections and the Honduran coup, and the response to it on the ground.

JOHN PILGER: Well, you know, you take the New York Times. The New York Times basically has said, in so many words, that the Iranian protests represent a mass movement, embracing the majority in the country. Now there is no doubt that among the people protesting, the many people protesting in the streets of Iran, are those who want another Iran, those who want greater freedoms, we have heard from that in the past, but without any smoking gun, without any credible information, without any evidence that that election in Iran was rigged. Rigged to get rid of something like 10 million votes. I mean, I don’t think anyone does in an election like in Iran or in the United States, there is a fraud. In most elections, there are. They may well have been extensive fraud in the Iranian elections. But the way our perception of those events in Iran has been manipulated is to suggest that this was a revolution that was said to overthrow the Islamic revolution of 1979. That is simply just not true. That has preoccupied the mainstream media. It has been on the front pages, and the top of the news and the networks.

Contrast that with Honduras, yes, it has been a news item, way at the end of Michael Jackson. As a main component of this news item has been the Obama administration’s alleged condemnation of the Honduran coup. But if you look at the condemnation, which is built on the fact they said, well they’ve tried to sway the Honduran military from staging the coup, and I have to say Hiliary Clinton does not want to call it a coup because she does so, the Foreign Assistance Act would kick in and she would have to withdraw all the military support to the 600 US military personal who are based in Honduras. But she said and administration officials have said, “Look, we tried to persuade the Honduran military from going ahead with this.” Well, you turn that around, and that means they knew that a coup was coming. And just beggars belief that they did not play a major role in the events–that may well have gone out of their control, they may well have not wanted the coup in its present form, in its present crude form to happen-but they knew about it.

It is so parallels the 2002 coup against Chavez. Now that story, what really is the kernel of that news story, it is really what really matters in that story, what did the U.S. play its traditional role or not, and why has the elected president of Honduras been kicked out of this country? That has been relegated. So, you have two news stories. You have the Iranian story of protests for freedom, that’s approved, thats a worthy story. You have the Honduras story of our friends in the south just getting a little bit of control, that is an unworthy story. Two different perceptions in two very, very important areas.

AMY GOODMAN:I want to play for you a clip of David Gregory on NBC. He replaced Tim Russert as the moderator of Meet The Press. And he was interviewing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the midst of the crackdown on the protest in Iran.

DAVID GREGORY: Does the United States have unique role to play here in continuing to support this freedom movement as you call it in Iran? An obligation to support the protesters to really give them moral support at the very least?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I think it is clear that the United States, the people of the United States, the president of the United States, free people everywhere, decent people everywhere, are amazed at the desire of the people there—and their willingness to come to stand up for their rights. I cannot, as I said, tell you what is going to happen. I can tell you what I would do, what we all would do in the face of demonstrations. As we speak, there is a demonstration right now outside my window, outside my office. Well, democracies acted differently. They do not send an armed agents of the regime to brutally mowed down the demonstrators. I called in these demonstrators that happen to be representative of a non-Jewish minority in Israel, the Druze community, they have certain protests about the financing of their municipalities. I called their leaders in. I talked to them and said, ‘How can I help you?” That is what democratic leaders and democratic countries do.

AMY GOODMAN: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. David Gregory didn’t ask him about, did not push him on this point of how the Israeli military deals with protests. But what’s your response to this, John Pilger?

JOHN PILGER: But no one ever presses an Israeli leader. Netanyahu or Olmert or any of them. There are given, Israeli leaders were given a legitimacy during what was unconditionally a massacre in December-January of this year. And the sum of that was to suggest, number one, that there was a war between Israel and Gaza and there wasn’t. There was an assault on Gaza that was aimed at civilians, on a defenseless country, a helpless country, a trapped people. And the second impression was that, yes, Israel is a democracy. And we will discuss this on television with you, we will discuss the finer points.

The way Israel is reported in the United States is media manipulation as almost as high art form. When people like Netanyahu whose very utterances and his background would suggest somebody, I think safe to say not credible, but somebody of well, those of us who would say somebody would be a prima facie war criminal, is given this kind of legitimacy. Not even questioned, not even challenged about the events in this country and his own extreme utterances. Yes, we have cartoon figures like Lieberman who is—as foreign minister very important, but rather grotesque character in a sense.

AMY GOODMAN: Avigdor Liberman

JOHN PILGER: He can be made perhaps or drawn out as the sort of strange that bad apple in the barrel. I think it is that legitimacy the mainstream media gives one side. And the sum of that, as far as Palestine is concerned is that there is no illegitimate occupation. There is no illegality. There is sum illegality as Obama referred to in his Cairo speech about the continuing building of settlements, but there is no suggestion that this is the longest, most brutal, illegal military occupation in our lifetime.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me just go to that for one minute. President Obama in Cairo giving his address in the Middle East, talking specifically about the settlements.

BARACK OBAMA: The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama in Cairo in his heralded address to the Muslim world. John Pilger, he says the continued expansion of settlements has to stop, your response? And an overall to his entire address?

JOHN PILGER: He says the continuing response, but what about all the settlements, the so-called settlements, colonies, that have so honeycombed the Occupied Territories over almost two decades? I thought the most significant aspect of that statement was he referred to the continuing settlements, leave the ones that have already been built. Let’s stop building them now. Of course, the Israelis, ever resourceful in this area, got around this very quickly. by issuing building licenses to those settlements that were about to be built and hadn’t been built as if they had been built so they would not fall into President Obama’s category.

I didn’t think President Obama’s Cairo speech added up to anything. Yes, it had different language. It did not use Bush’s aggressive “you’re with us or against us”. It was very soothing. I read one commentators rather apt description of Obama’s words as supplying a kind of mood music to the Middle East. But in the end, what did he offer? Did you talk about the law? The whole issue of Palestine is really about a respect for law. Did he go back to the 1976 resolution? There it is, it calls on the Palestine state. Did he reach out to the government in Gaza, which in spite of the media distortion, has time and again called for a two-state agreement in the Middle East? Did he make any move that would begin to resolve this injustice? Did he paint it as an injustice? Because that is what it is, in injustice on the scale that none of us in our own countries and in our own lives would tolerate. The answer is, no, he didn’t. This is not to suggest that there will be some helpful window dressing here and there, I don’t know. But, it seems to me that the pressure on Obama over the Middle East as in so many other issues, has been so minimal that he can simply perform as Bush-light.

AMY GOODMAN:He did however I believe for the first time for president admit the U.S.’s involvement in the 1953 overthrow of a democratically elected leader, and what was in Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq.

JOHN PILGER: But what a concession, Amy. We get 1953, you know, 56 years ago. That is easy. That is easy, but it is what has happened since then, the demonizing of Iran goes on, the lecturing of Iran, which is extremely political complex society, goes on. And the policy is unchanged. The crime always is independence. Iran is an independent state and has almost miraculously maintained itself in forms that we might not approve of, certainly, but it has maintained itself as an independent, major state in the Middle East. That is absolutely intolerable to the U.S. State.

And Obama has not shifted from that at all. He has made a number of patronizing appeals to the Iranians, but now, as he is in effect saying, the protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Tehran. Turn that around. What if it was suggested that protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Washington? But that of course is another side of double standards. I don’t believe anything has changed. If it is going to change in the Middle East as in other parts of the world, there has to be greater pressure from within the anti-war movements, within the peace movement, within all those groups that have allied themselves with the Democrats.

AMY GOODMAN: Renowned filmmaker John Pilger. We will continue with my interview with him in a minute. [Music Break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is “Democracy now!,” Democracynow.org, The War and Peace report. I’m Amy Goodman. We return to my interview with the Emmy-award winning filmmaker John Pilger.

John Pilger you’re not an American citizen, but I’d like you to comment on American politics. With the election certification of Al Franken to be the 60th Democrat in the Senate, the Democrats have a super majority, a filibuster-proof majority. They can pass anything they want. The question is from foreign policy to domestic policy, what exactly President Obama will do with this. Primary on his domestic agenda is health care. You come from Britain, though born in Australia. What are your comments on how this debate is being carried out in the United States? More than 70% of Americans say they want a public plan, but it’s pretty clear that even people within president Obama’s own party are terrified, or least getting millions of dollars from the health insurance and health-care industry. Explain your system in Britain.

JOHN PILGER: Amy, my impression gained over many years, and I do not think that I’d call myself honorary citizen, but I have certainly come to this country and lived in it for many years. My impression is that ordinary Americans are so far ahead of their politicians, so far ahead of their media, and so far ahead of all those who claim to be their betters and bestow on them stereotypes, that are almost contemptuous. Indeed you can go back to Madison, when he described he American public as at best meddlesome. I think if you look the credible polls, say those done by the Pew organization, then you will see the majority of the people of Americana are very dangerously subversive. I would say they may even be left-wing. This is a very worrying situation, of course. But the majority of them want the decency as you suggested, they want universal health care system. Now I am talking about two-thirds. I think the figure I saw was 70, 74%.

They want their country out of the colonial wars that they are fighting. The various wars, Afghanistan and Iraq. They want the government to take responsibility for those who cannot care for themselves. They want the “banks and the banksters”, as Franklin Roosevelt called them, brought to account. They have decent – I hesitate to call them radical views. They’re not radical, they are just the views of decency, but they are views at huge odds with their government, be it a Bush government or an Obama government, and their views are at odds with the media that claim to represent them, to be their agents as it were. And to watch the so-called debate, it is not a debate, Amy, its a farce.

What Obama is moving towards is what Hillary Clinton tried to before she allied herself with some of the worst elements in the health insurance business. What he is moving toward is a very messy version of the old system that will allow the old pirates still to run it, that certain insurance will be guaranteed, yes, on a Medicare basis. But it will be a mess.

AMY GOODMAN: Could you explain, because it is so unusual to hear about what other systems are without them just been described as socialist, and so you ended the discussion. Interestingly, Single-payer in the United States, most popular option and yet it is almost never mentioned in the media except by those who attack it. Canada has a system where the government pays for health care. In Britain, the doctors are employees of the state. Can you explain how the British medical system works and if it works?

JOHN PILGER: I have lived in the U.K. for most of my life and I have used the National Health Service and regard it as a treasure. I regard it as— I have had some of the best care for not particularly serious ailments, but I have had the best care that I could possibly have. What happens is, you go to a G.P., a general practitioner—and you can choose which one you want to go to in your area – you sign nothing. They simply have your name and address, and you are seen by that doctor. If there’s something that is required, you’re referred to a specialist. Where I live in London, I’m surrounded by five of the world’s major teaching hospitals. All of them run by the National Health Service.

The way the National Health Service is represented in the United States is truly scandalous. That word “socialist” is pulled out. It is kind of infantile almost. Yes it is socialist, if socialist is caring for the majority of the people and taking away the fear of being denied health care that so many millions of Americans have, they have this fear. Then yes, it’s a vast community operation that is highly imperfect, doesn’t provide enough care for the mentally ill, doesn’t provide enough care for the aged. In some parts of Britain, outside the major urban centers, it is not as good as it is if you say go to London and are near great teaching hospital as I am. But it is bereft of the kind of bureaucracy that means-test anyone coming into it. I don’t sign anything when I go into a hospital. I do sign when the doctors want to do something you have to sign a waiver, you know saying you understand it, and all that, but that’s it.

It’s so much part of people’s lives that one of the most conservative medical organizations, or at least it was in the world, British Medical Association, are the greatest champions of the national health service. Most of the research is done within the National Health Service. Why can’t there be something like this, not exactly the same, in fact, it could improve on it. France has the same. Italy has the same. Holland has the same. What is it about U.S. legislators that they appear to be so in bed with such powerful interest such as the insurance companies that they cannot represent their own people’s needs, their own people’s basic human rights? And that is what it is. It is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, actually. It is a human right to have this kind of medical care. It’s to take away fear. And all of us have experienced the fear of possible ill health. And I’ve interviewed so many people in the United States that I see them crippled, both by what is medically wrong with them, but by this terrible insecurity that takes over their lives, and the poverty that then consumes them as they try to pay for their medical care, its primitive.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, how you see especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan where President Obama says he is expanding the war, how you see it ending? You’ve done more than 50 documentaries, many of them about wars around the world. Also, the response of the British people, how you see what is happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

JOHN PILGER: Obama has begun a new war. There is in Obama war and that is Pakistan. The shaking of the hornets’ nest, if you like, in Pakistan, which this administration has done willfully, is a historic disaster. The creation of up to 2 million refugees in Northwestern Pakistan caused by the attacks by the Pakistanis government, egged on and paid for by the Obama administration, the use of electronic battlefield weapons such as drones and other unmanned vehicles. Drones have killed according to the Pakistanis authorities, American drones launched from I believe near Las Vegas have killed something like 700 civilians since the inauguration of president Obama. So there is a new war. It is a war in Pakistan. I believe there is a new jargon term in Washington called “Afpak”, which is, well almost beyond commenting on.

The Afghanistan War, so called, is really about building as Gates, Robert Gates the Secretary has said, has virtually admitted, is about building a number of secured permanent bases throughout that country and reinforcing the major facility at Bagram. The United States has no intention of getting out of Afghanistan. It is building one of its fortress embassies in Kabul, just as it is building a $1 billion embassy in Islamabad, just as it has built an enormous fortress in Baghdad. Whatever happens to American ground troops who eventually, yes, will be withdrawn, will make no difference to the significance of the American presence, the American, the violent American presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in Iraq. These are seen as places where the United States will have a permanent presence to be able to—a strategic position—where it will be able to monitor, and perhaps influence, and perhaps control the influences of its imperial rivals. Bagram is being extended. It probably has the worst record, if that is possible, then Guantanamo in terms of its human-rights abuses.

So what we will see as Obama has said, we will see American ground troops gradually withdrawn. But as they do so, the use of electronic weaponry and bombing will increase. Unless there is an understanding of this in this country, unless people stopped taking the pronouncements of governments at their word. When Obama went to Annapolis and said we’re getting out of Iraq and appeared to be giving a timetable, within a matter of weeks, I believe, General Casey contradicted him and said—we will probably be there for another 10 years. And other Pentagon generals put it even higher, 15 years.

No mention is made of the enormous American army of mercenaries who are in all those theaters of war, and Special Forces. No mention is made of the special forces operation inside Iraq come inside—I beg your pardon, inside Iran. $400 million was allotted to that particular secret war by Bush, in one of his signing decrees, which money has gone to both the Kurdish and Baluchi separatist movements. The whole region is being crafted, if you like, for a very, very long American colonial presence. Eventually, it will not need a standing army there. That is the future in that part of the world, as I say, unless people become aware of that and start to bang on the doors of government, of Congress, and of power in this country to expose it.

AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning filmmaker John Pilger. You can get a copy of the show at Democracynow.org. Late breaking news, Robert McNamara died in his sleep this morning in Washington, D.C.

Independence Day

THE ABSURD TIMES

one of you sent this more modern version of our Declaration of Independence:


"WHEN things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a man them rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any government don’t do this, then the people have got a right to give it the bum’s rush and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don’t mean having a revolution every day like them South American yellowbellies, or every time some jobholder goes to work and does something he ain’t got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, …, and any man that wasn’t a anarchist or one of them I.W.W.’s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain’t hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won’t carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won’t stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled:

He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against.

He wouldn’t allow no law to be passed without it was first put up to him, and then he stuck it in his pocket and let on he forgot about it, and didn’t pay no attention to no kicks.

When people went to work and gone to him and asked him to put through a law about this or that, he give them their choice: either they had to shut down the Legislature and let him pass it all by himself, or they couldn’t have it at all.

He made the Legislature meet at one-horse tank-towns, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things like he wanted.

He give the Legislature the air, and sent the members home every time they stood up to him and give him a call-down or bawled him out.

When a Legislature was busted up he wouldn’t allow no new one to be elected, so that there wasn’t nobody left to run things, but anybody could walk in and do whatever they pleased.

He tried to scare people outen moving into these States, and made it so hard for a wop or one of these here kikes to get his papers that he would rather stay home and not try it, and then, when he come in, he wouldn’t let him have no land, and so he either went home again or never come.

He monkeyed with the courts, and didn’t hire enough judges to do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never got what was coming to him.

He got the judges under his thumb by turning them out when they done anything he didn’t like, or by holding up their salaries, so that they had to knuckle down or not get no money.

He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.

Without no war going on, he kept an army loafing around the country, no matter how much people kicked about it.

He let the army run things to suit theirself and never paid no attention whatsoever to nobody which didn’t wear no uniform.

He let grafters run loose, from God knows where, and give them the say in everything, and let them put over such things as the following:

Making poor people board and lodge a lot of soldiers they ain’t got no use for, and don’t want to see loafing around.

When the soldiers kill a man, framing it up so that they would get off.

Interfering with business. Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.

When a man was arrested and asked for a jury trial, not letting him have no jury trial.

Chasing men out of the country, without being guilty of nothing, and trying them somewheres else for what they done here.

In countries that border on us, he put in bum governments? and then tried to spread them out, so that by and by they would take in this country too, or make our own government as bum as they was.

He never paid no attention whatever to the Constitution, but he went to work and repealed laws that everybody was satisfied with and hardly nobody was against, and tried to fix the government so that he could do whatever he pleased.

He busted up the Legislatures and let on he could do all the work better by himself.

Now he washes his hands of us and even goes to work and declares war on us, so we don’t owe him nothing, and whatever authority he ever bad he ain’t got no more.

He has burned down towns, shot down people like dogs, and raised hell against us out on the ocean.

He hired whole regiments of Dutch, etc., to fight us, and told them they could have anything they wanted if they could take it away from us, and sicked these Dutch, etc., on us.

He grabbed our own people when he found them in ships on the ocean, and shoved guns into their hands, and made them fight against us, no matter how much they didn’t want to.

He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms and ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and chdren, and don’t care which.

Every time he has went to work and pulled any of these things, we have went to work and put in a kick, but every time we have went to work and put in a kick he has went to work and did it again. When a man keeps on handing out such rough stuff all the time, all you can say is that he ain’t got no class and ain’t fitten to have no authority over people who have got any rights, and he ought to be kicked out.

When we complained to the English we didn’t get no more satisfaction. Almost every day we give them plenty of warning that the politicians over there was doing things to us that they didn’t have no right to do. We kept on reminding them who we was, and what we was doing here, and how we come to come here. We asked them to get us a square deal, and told them that if this thing kept on we’d have to do something about it and maybe they wouldn’t like it. But the more we talked, the more they didn’t pay no attention to us. Therefore, if they ain’t for us they must be agin us, and we are ready to give them the fight of their lives, or to shake hands when it is over.

Therefore be it resolved, That we, the representatives of the people of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, hereby declare as follows: That the United States, which was the United Colonies in former times, is now a free country, and ought to be; that we have throwed out the English King and don’t want to have nothing to do with him no more, and are not taking no more English orders no more; and that, being as we are now a free country, we can do anything that free countries can do, especially declare war, make peace, sign treaties, go into business, etc. And we swear on the Bible on this proposition, one and all, and agree to stick to it no matter what ha pens, whether we win or we lose, and whether we get away with it or get the worst of it, no matter whether we lose all our property by it or even get hung for it."