Remora
Washington Post headlines the Italian strike that brought a million people into the street. NYT story about the Italian paralysis...
No, just joking.
Not that there wasn't a general strike -- a magical phrase to the IWW lefties among us -- in Italy. Not that it didn't paralyse Italy. Not that it didn't bring a million people into the street. But a fact like that is much too inconvenient for American papers.
Liberation, yesterday, had the story (which has spilled into the French election, today -- Jospin accusing Chirac of being a French Berlusconi):
Here's what it looks like in French:
Contre le projet de r�forme gouvernemental de l'article 18 du statut des travailleurs, qui r�glemente les licenciements abusifs, plusieurs millions d'Italiens ont r�pondu hier � l'appel � la gr�ve g�n�rale lanc� par les syndicats. Selon les chiffres des trois grandes conf�d�rations italiennes (CGIL, CISL et UIL), plus de 13 millions de personnes ont cess� le travail, le taux de participation atteignant pr�s de 100 % dans certains secteurs.
Paralysie. A Florence, pr�s de 400 000 travailleurs sont descendus dans la rue derri�re le leader de la CGIL, Sergio Cofferati (lire ci-contre), tandis que de nombreux cort�ges ont envahi les rues de Milan (300 000 personnes), Bologne (350 000), Rome (200 000) ou Palerme (100 000).
Translation:
Against the proposed governmental "reform"[ LI Note -- we have grown tired of the abuse of "reform" to mean corrupting the old Keynsian system of protecting the countervailing power of labor by acceeding to the most outrageous demands of capital. So we are putting the scare quotes into play. And if you don't like it, find your own translator] of article 18 of the labor code concerning abusive layoffs, more than a million Italians responded to the appeal for a general strike broadcast by the unions. According to the numbers of the three big unions (CGIL, CISL, and UIL), more than 13 million people stopped working, the level of participation attaining nearly 100% in certain sectors.
Paralysis
In Florence, nearly 400,000 workers descended in the streets behind the leader of the CGIL, Sergio Cofferati, while numerous groups invaded the streets of Milan (300,000 people), Bologna (350,00), Rome (200,000) and Palermo (100,000)
The NYT did have an article on the strike yesterday, and with typical Times hauteur , (the hauteur of the true globalist), surveyed the scene and asked what the fuss was about:
"Though the actual changes he has proposed are considered minor, labor leaders see this as the first step in a government plan to undermine job security. Then, too, Mr. Cofferati, who leads the largest Italian union, is considered a rising star on the left.The unions did succeed well enough that there was no television coverage of today's demonstrations � since journalists, too, were on strike.
Much of the center of Rome became a street carnival as protesters waved huge puppets of Mr. Berlusconi dressed as Napoleon and as the pope. Roberto Benigni, the actor and film maker, told a crowd in the Piazza del Popolo that he would not speak because he, too, was on strike."
Of course, to the Times, Berlusconi's labor law is only common sense. LI searched Gibbons Decline and Fall of the R.E. for a phrase evocative of the neo-liberal attitude in these fair States. Gibbon, he never fails us! Here is his description of the foreign policy, as we'd call it now, of the Roman Empire: "Those princes [of their outer dependencies], whom the ostentation of gratitude or generosity permitted for a while to hold a precarious sceptre, were dismissed from their thrones, as soon as they had per formed their appointed task of fashioning to the yoke the vanquished nations. The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude."
Quite.
Finally, since LI is in a hormonally lefty mood this morning -- there is good news from France, where the Trotskyist candidate, Arlette Languiller, a typist, is getting 10 percent in the polls -- ahead of the Greens and the Commies. Hooray!
This year, she has turned out to be a surprisingly sharp thorn in the side of the left-wing political establishment. Polls show that this retired, Trotskyist typist may get as much as 10 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections set for Sunday.
That could mean third or fourth place in a field of 16 candidates � ahead of both the candidates for the Communist Party and the Greens, the two left-wing parties that have been junior partners in the ruling government coalition for the last five years. The likely winners of the Sunday vote, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, are expected to garner just 18 to 22 percent each."
Apparently Arlette -- as she is known -- has come under the gun, since her numbers rose. The trotskyists have been accused of being cultists. Well, duh. Of course they are cultists. Trotsky's critique of bureaucracy preceeded the irresistable plunge into roccoco parlimentarian excess, factionalism, and distemper that has been the mark of every Trotskyist part every since. Who cares? Arlette isn't going to win -- she is simply going to make the powers that be nervous. That's her job.
Thursday, April 18, 2002
Wednesday, April 17, 2002
Remora
Hail Freedonia.
The Washington Post piece on the failure to kill or capture Osama would make a nice script for a latter day Marx brothers film. You have the man directing the battle of Tora Bora from Tampa, Florida, no doubt operating on intelligence that Tampa was in imminent danger. You have Jethro Bodine as president. You have the escape of the Great Satan, Osama himself, from a redoubt of caves built in the 80s, no doubt with the aid of the always generous Freedonian Intelligence Agency. And you have an absence of suggestions as to where Satan flew to -- although perhaps we should check with our hundred percent ally in the war on terror, Pakistan, for that one:
"Another change since Tora Bora, with no immediate prospect of finding bin Laden, is that President Bush has stopped proclaiming the goal of taking him "dead or alive" and now avoids previous references to the al Qaeda founder as public enemy number one.
In an interview with The Washington Post in late December, Bush displayed a scorecard of al Qaeda leaders on which he had drawn the letter X through the faces of those thought dead. By last month, Bush began saying that continued public focus on individual terrorists, including bin Laden, meant that "people don't understand the scope of the mission."
"Terror is bigger than one person," Bush said March 14. "He's a person that's now been marginalized." The president said bin Laden had "met his match" and "may even be dead," and added: "I truly am not that concerned about him."
Top advisers now assert that the al Qaeda leader's fate should be no measure of U.S. success in the war."
Limited Inc has been quoting all the greats recently -- Burke, Spencer. The appropriate quote, here, is obviously from Duck Soup. This is Trentino, the wily ambassador from Sylvania, asking his henchmen about their progress in overthrowing the new president of Freedonia, Rufus T. Firefly:
Chicolini: Well, you remember you gave us a picture of this man and said, 'Follow him?'...Well, we get on-a the job right away and in-a one hour - even-a less than one hour...
Trentino (excitedly and expectantly): Yes?
Chicolini: We losa-a the picture. That's-a pretty quick work, eh?
Do they watch Duck Soup in the Pentagon? LI can't help but wonder about the scorecard in the delicious scene painted by the Post. Did some flunky get it as a historic souvenir? In any case, it is nice that the war against terrorism, our rulers have decided, isn't about anything so mundane as terrorists. This is a confidence builder. This is a lifter upper. This is a shot in the arm. Man, for a while Limited Inc was entertaining paranoid fantasies. LI is obviously unable to comprehend the sublime plan. LI is obviously not rolling. He should roll. Let's all roll is the slogan. Our war against the Shadow, LI misunderstood as a war against the guy who organized the group that attacked the World Trade Center. Damn, that is such short sighted thinking! Obviously, the Shadow is Saddam Hussein, who might not have had anything to do with the WTC, but was soooo disrespectful to Bush's father! Now of course, after the true enemy of all mankind -- Mullah Omar, I believe his name was -- has fallen, we can get serious.
Let's point out the obvious. This is an administration that performed dismally before 9/11, and they seem to be reverting to a mindset that would allow another 9/11. An inability, for one thing, to understand that an illorganized group of 19 dissatisfied Saudis can do more damage to the Heimat than S Hussein has ever done.
But LI imagines the scene in the DoD.
I mean, look what-a we got, boss! We got a missile defense, we got a great ally in this Sharon, we got a war with Saddam coming up, as soon as we can find a reason for it, and a place to launch it from! Plus Tom Ridge personally working on our security problem. Boss! Boss!
Hail Freedonia.
The Washington Post piece on the failure to kill or capture Osama would make a nice script for a latter day Marx brothers film. You have the man directing the battle of Tora Bora from Tampa, Florida, no doubt operating on intelligence that Tampa was in imminent danger. You have Jethro Bodine as president. You have the escape of the Great Satan, Osama himself, from a redoubt of caves built in the 80s, no doubt with the aid of the always generous Freedonian Intelligence Agency. And you have an absence of suggestions as to where Satan flew to -- although perhaps we should check with our hundred percent ally in the war on terror, Pakistan, for that one:
"Another change since Tora Bora, with no immediate prospect of finding bin Laden, is that President Bush has stopped proclaiming the goal of taking him "dead or alive" and now avoids previous references to the al Qaeda founder as public enemy number one.
In an interview with The Washington Post in late December, Bush displayed a scorecard of al Qaeda leaders on which he had drawn the letter X through the faces of those thought dead. By last month, Bush began saying that continued public focus on individual terrorists, including bin Laden, meant that "people don't understand the scope of the mission."
"Terror is bigger than one person," Bush said March 14. "He's a person that's now been marginalized." The president said bin Laden had "met his match" and "may even be dead," and added: "I truly am not that concerned about him."
Top advisers now assert that the al Qaeda leader's fate should be no measure of U.S. success in the war."
Limited Inc has been quoting all the greats recently -- Burke, Spencer. The appropriate quote, here, is obviously from Duck Soup. This is Trentino, the wily ambassador from Sylvania, asking his henchmen about their progress in overthrowing the new president of Freedonia, Rufus T. Firefly:
Chicolini: Well, you remember you gave us a picture of this man and said, 'Follow him?'...Well, we get on-a the job right away and in-a one hour - even-a less than one hour...
Trentino (excitedly and expectantly): Yes?
Chicolini: We losa-a the picture. That's-a pretty quick work, eh?
Do they watch Duck Soup in the Pentagon? LI can't help but wonder about the scorecard in the delicious scene painted by the Post. Did some flunky get it as a historic souvenir? In any case, it is nice that the war against terrorism, our rulers have decided, isn't about anything so mundane as terrorists. This is a confidence builder. This is a lifter upper. This is a shot in the arm. Man, for a while Limited Inc was entertaining paranoid fantasies. LI is obviously unable to comprehend the sublime plan. LI is obviously not rolling. He should roll. Let's all roll is the slogan. Our war against the Shadow, LI misunderstood as a war against the guy who organized the group that attacked the World Trade Center. Damn, that is such short sighted thinking! Obviously, the Shadow is Saddam Hussein, who might not have had anything to do with the WTC, but was soooo disrespectful to Bush's father! Now of course, after the true enemy of all mankind -- Mullah Omar, I believe his name was -- has fallen, we can get serious.
Let's point out the obvious. This is an administration that performed dismally before 9/11, and they seem to be reverting to a mindset that would allow another 9/11. An inability, for one thing, to understand that an illorganized group of 19 dissatisfied Saudis can do more damage to the Heimat than S Hussein has ever done.
But LI imagines the scene in the DoD.
I mean, look what-a we got, boss! We got a missile defense, we got a great ally in this Sharon, we got a war with Saddam coming up, as soon as we can find a reason for it, and a place to launch it from! Plus Tom Ridge personally working on our security problem. Boss! Boss!
Remora
King Gall
According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, gall is a "secretion of the liver known as � bile,� the term being also used of the pear-shaped diverliculum of the bile-duct, which forms a reservoir for the bile, more generally known as the� gall-bladder �. From the extreme bitterness of the secretion, � gall,� like the Lat. fel, is used for anything extremely bitter, whether actually or metaphorically. From the idea that the gall-bladder was the dominating organ of a bitter, sharp temperament, �gall� was formerly used in English for such a spirit, and also for one very ready to resent injuries. It thus survives in American slang, with the meaning �impudence � or � assurance.��
The older use of gall -- to mean bitterness, not presumption -- is illustrated in this quote from Thoreau's letter on John Brown:
"On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. I have noticed the cold- blooded way in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual "pluck"- as the Governor of Virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the cockpit, "the gamest man be ever saw"- had been caught, and were about to be hung. He was not dreaming of his foes when the governor thought he looked so brave. It turns what sweetness I have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that "he died as the fool dieth"; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that "he threw his life away," because he resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their lives, pray?- such as would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers."
Limited Inc's sweetness readily turns to gall -- every morning, about 9:30, when we finish reading the papers. The meaning bodied forth in American slang is well illustrated today, reader, in this quote from today's NYT's article about the rise and fall and rise of President Chavez of Venezuala:
"Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Ch�vez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however."
One feels, reading this, like Keat's Cortez, or one of his men: "when with eagle eyes/He star'd at the Pacific- and all his men/Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -/Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Silence, though, is perhaps not LI's best exercized talent. Wild surmise soon dissolved into wild laughter. Talk about a smoking gun! Isn't this the very attitude one always suspected? Isn't this too much? If only we had heard more of this in December, 2000, as the corrupt current POTUS and his crew were overthrowing the democratic election of Al Gore. As the current administration massaged the leaders of the coup against Chavez, did they assured them that time and custom will take care of any problems the seizure of power might cause in the consciousness of the people?
Ah! It all brings back the judicially "corrected" election of 2000. LI, nostalgically, looked up a pre 9/11 issue of Newsweek -- remember the era before 9/11? Before we declared war on Osama bin Laden, and brought down, with our slingshot, the wrong bird? Before the war on terrorism increasingly became a mere machination to disguise the essential corruption of the Bush administration, from its Power company powered Energy plan to its absurd tax giveaway to the top 5 percentile. Here's the beginning of the Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas article on the stolen election:
" Sandra Day O'Connor and her husband, John, a Washington lawyer, have long been comfortable on the cocktail and charity-ball circuit. So at an election-night party on Nov. 7, surrounded for the most part by friends and familiar acquaintances, she let her guard drop for a moment when she heard the first critical returns shortly before 8 p.m. Sitting in her hostess's den, staring at a small black-and-white television set, she visibly started when CBS anchor Dan Rather called Florida for Al Gore. "This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore's reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois. Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years.
O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor. Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to NEWSWEEK. Responding through a spokesman at the high court, O'Connor had no comment. O'Connor had no way of knowing, as she watched the early returns, that election night would end in deadlock and confusion--or that five weeks later she would play a direct and decisive role in the election of George W. Bush. O'Connor could not possibly have foreseen that she would be one of two swing votes in the court's 5-4 decision ending the manual recount in Florida and forcing Al Gore to finally concede defeat. But her remarks will fuel criticism that the justices not only "follow the election returns," as the old saying goes, but, in the case of George W. Bush v. Albert Gore, Jr., sought to influence them."
Did Bush's advisors tell the anti-Chavez people to get the courts in their pocket before they proceeded? It is important advice.
King Gall's foreign policy favors more legitimate rulers than the neo-Peronist Chavez -- such as Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Obiang has suddenly become rich with the discovery of oil in his country. The man is a friend of all that is beautiful and true -- if you don't believe LI, look at the terms of the oil contracts: 75 percent for the oil companies, 25 for Obiang and his cronies. Or, as they will call themselves, the sovereign nation of Equatorial Guinea. The Nation has a very nice report, by Ken Silverstein, on this obscure country. It is not obscure to Triton Energy, however. And Triton Energy is run by an old friend of GWBII:
"Perhaps best connected of all is Triton, whose chairman, Tom Hicks, made Bush a millionaire fifteen times over when he bought the Texas Rangers in 1998. Hicks's leveraged buyout firm, Hicks Muse, is Bush's fourth-largest career financial patron, according to the Center for Public Integrity."
Oil, money, blood, and a leader who, unlike Chavez, is thoroughly democratic -- which is how he gained his 92 percent of the vote in the last election. Life is so good.
However, Silverstein's story interests LI less as another tawdry adventure of the Bush administration than for the tergiversation of Equatorial Guinea's pr man in D.C., Bruce McColm. Bruce's upward and onward career really caught our eye:
"In addition to direct lobbying, the oil industry sought to improve Obiang's image by hiring the services of Bruce McColm, a former head of Freedom House who now runs the Institute for Democratic Strategies (IDS), a Virginia-based nonprofit whose stated mission is "strengthening democratic institutions." The Obiang regime's most tireless champion, McColm works closely with the government, which now pays him directly. (According to its latest nonprofit tax form, the IDS spent $223,000 in 2000, of which all but $10,000 went toward its Equatorial Guinea work.) In 2000 McColm sent a team of observers to monitor Equatorial Guinea's municipal elections, which it reported to be basically free and fair. "Electoral officials should be recognized for discharging their responsibilities in an effective and transparent manner," said an IDS press release at the time. "Observers generally felt that the positives of this election far outweighed the negatives." This was in marked contrast to a UN report that said the electoral campaign "was characterized by the omnipresence of the [ruling] party, voting in public and the intimidating presence of the armed forces."
Go to the Freedom House site and you get this slogan:
"Freedom House, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization, is a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world. Through a vast array of international programs and publications, Freedom House is working to advance the remarkable worldwide expansion of political and economic freedom."
An admirable stance, n'est-ce pas? Don't think that Equatorial Guinea has become a much better country recently -- at least according to Freedom house, it rates a 7.7 in terms of freedom. According to FH's explanation of its rating system, "those whose ratings average 1-2.5 are generally considered "Free," 3-5.5 "Partly Free," and 5.5-7 "Not Free." This does not give the Bruce McColm's of the world pause, of course. Far from it. When someone like Bruce McColm acquires the moral capital that accrues from taking the honorable position that people should have a say in the government that has the power to incarcerate them, the goal is to leave, and then to gleefully squander your conscience as you defend the dictators whose money helps you dine out in Georgetown. Because in D.C., as we know, the NGO post is only a first step on the ladder. Shedding your entire moral character, and revealing yourself as a devil in human skin, is the process. Not of course that we wish to slander a man of McColm's sterling character, we only wish on him what, well, what King Lear wished on Goneril and Reagen. In the mean time, LI thinks he should take on a few of Rwanda's past rulers as his next clients. Or perhaps he already has.
King Gall
According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, gall is a "secretion of the liver known as � bile,� the term being also used of the pear-shaped diverliculum of the bile-duct, which forms a reservoir for the bile, more generally known as the� gall-bladder �. From the extreme bitterness of the secretion, � gall,� like the Lat. fel, is used for anything extremely bitter, whether actually or metaphorically. From the idea that the gall-bladder was the dominating organ of a bitter, sharp temperament, �gall� was formerly used in English for such a spirit, and also for one very ready to resent injuries. It thus survives in American slang, with the meaning �impudence � or � assurance.��
The older use of gall -- to mean bitterness, not presumption -- is illustrated in this quote from Thoreau's letter on John Brown:
"On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. I have noticed the cold- blooded way in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual "pluck"- as the Governor of Virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the cockpit, "the gamest man be ever saw"- had been caught, and were about to be hung. He was not dreaming of his foes when the governor thought he looked so brave. It turns what sweetness I have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that "he died as the fool dieth"; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that "he threw his life away," because he resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their lives, pray?- such as would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers."
Limited Inc's sweetness readily turns to gall -- every morning, about 9:30, when we finish reading the papers. The meaning bodied forth in American slang is well illustrated today, reader, in this quote from today's NYT's article about the rise and fall and rise of President Chavez of Venezuala:
"Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Ch�vez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however."
One feels, reading this, like Keat's Cortez, or one of his men: "when with eagle eyes/He star'd at the Pacific- and all his men/Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -/Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Silence, though, is perhaps not LI's best exercized talent. Wild surmise soon dissolved into wild laughter. Talk about a smoking gun! Isn't this the very attitude one always suspected? Isn't this too much? If only we had heard more of this in December, 2000, as the corrupt current POTUS and his crew were overthrowing the democratic election of Al Gore. As the current administration massaged the leaders of the coup against Chavez, did they assured them that time and custom will take care of any problems the seizure of power might cause in the consciousness of the people?
Ah! It all brings back the judicially "corrected" election of 2000. LI, nostalgically, looked up a pre 9/11 issue of Newsweek -- remember the era before 9/11? Before we declared war on Osama bin Laden, and brought down, with our slingshot, the wrong bird? Before the war on terrorism increasingly became a mere machination to disguise the essential corruption of the Bush administration, from its Power company powered Energy plan to its absurd tax giveaway to the top 5 percentile. Here's the beginning of the Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas article on the stolen election:
" Sandra Day O'Connor and her husband, John, a Washington lawyer, have long been comfortable on the cocktail and charity-ball circuit. So at an election-night party on Nov. 7, surrounded for the most part by friends and familiar acquaintances, she let her guard drop for a moment when she heard the first critical returns shortly before 8 p.m. Sitting in her hostess's den, staring at a small black-and-white television set, she visibly started when CBS anchor Dan Rather called Florida for Al Gore. "This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore's reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois. Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years.
O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor. Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to NEWSWEEK. Responding through a spokesman at the high court, O'Connor had no comment. O'Connor had no way of knowing, as she watched the early returns, that election night would end in deadlock and confusion--or that five weeks later she would play a direct and decisive role in the election of George W. Bush. O'Connor could not possibly have foreseen that she would be one of two swing votes in the court's 5-4 decision ending the manual recount in Florida and forcing Al Gore to finally concede defeat. But her remarks will fuel criticism that the justices not only "follow the election returns," as the old saying goes, but, in the case of George W. Bush v. Albert Gore, Jr., sought to influence them."
Did Bush's advisors tell the anti-Chavez people to get the courts in their pocket before they proceeded? It is important advice.
King Gall's foreign policy favors more legitimate rulers than the neo-Peronist Chavez -- such as Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Obiang has suddenly become rich with the discovery of oil in his country. The man is a friend of all that is beautiful and true -- if you don't believe LI, look at the terms of the oil contracts: 75 percent for the oil companies, 25 for Obiang and his cronies. Or, as they will call themselves, the sovereign nation of Equatorial Guinea. The Nation has a very nice report, by Ken Silverstein, on this obscure country. It is not obscure to Triton Energy, however. And Triton Energy is run by an old friend of GWBII:
"Perhaps best connected of all is Triton, whose chairman, Tom Hicks, made Bush a millionaire fifteen times over when he bought the Texas Rangers in 1998. Hicks's leveraged buyout firm, Hicks Muse, is Bush's fourth-largest career financial patron, according to the Center for Public Integrity."
Oil, money, blood, and a leader who, unlike Chavez, is thoroughly democratic -- which is how he gained his 92 percent of the vote in the last election. Life is so good.
However, Silverstein's story interests LI less as another tawdry adventure of the Bush administration than for the tergiversation of Equatorial Guinea's pr man in D.C., Bruce McColm. Bruce's upward and onward career really caught our eye:
"In addition to direct lobbying, the oil industry sought to improve Obiang's image by hiring the services of Bruce McColm, a former head of Freedom House who now runs the Institute for Democratic Strategies (IDS), a Virginia-based nonprofit whose stated mission is "strengthening democratic institutions." The Obiang regime's most tireless champion, McColm works closely with the government, which now pays him directly. (According to its latest nonprofit tax form, the IDS spent $223,000 in 2000, of which all but $10,000 went toward its Equatorial Guinea work.) In 2000 McColm sent a team of observers to monitor Equatorial Guinea's municipal elections, which it reported to be basically free and fair. "Electoral officials should be recognized for discharging their responsibilities in an effective and transparent manner," said an IDS press release at the time. "Observers generally felt that the positives of this election far outweighed the negatives." This was in marked contrast to a UN report that said the electoral campaign "was characterized by the omnipresence of the [ruling] party, voting in public and the intimidating presence of the armed forces."
Go to the Freedom House site and you get this slogan:
"Freedom House, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization, is a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world. Through a vast array of international programs and publications, Freedom House is working to advance the remarkable worldwide expansion of political and economic freedom."
An admirable stance, n'est-ce pas? Don't think that Equatorial Guinea has become a much better country recently -- at least according to Freedom house, it rates a 7.7 in terms of freedom. According to FH's explanation of its rating system, "those whose ratings average 1-2.5 are generally considered "Free," 3-5.5 "Partly Free," and 5.5-7 "Not Free." This does not give the Bruce McColm's of the world pause, of course. Far from it. When someone like Bruce McColm acquires the moral capital that accrues from taking the honorable position that people should have a say in the government that has the power to incarcerate them, the goal is to leave, and then to gleefully squander your conscience as you defend the dictators whose money helps you dine out in Georgetown. Because in D.C., as we know, the NGO post is only a first step on the ladder. Shedding your entire moral character, and revealing yourself as a devil in human skin, is the process. Not of course that we wish to slander a man of McColm's sterling character, we only wish on him what, well, what King Lear wished on Goneril and Reagen. In the mean time, LI thinks he should take on a few of Rwanda's past rulers as his next clients. Or perhaps he already has.
Monday, April 15, 2002
Remora
"We are a humane army."
"I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces; but who are the images of the great Pattern as well as you or I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not." -- Edmund Burke
I've extracted this quote from a letter Edmund Burke wrote in defense of his prosecution of Warren Hastings to the painter Joshua Reynold's niece. She'd written Burke on behalf of a friend to ask him, politely, if he knew what he was doing. It's a nice example of the way pressure is exerted to destroy dissent -- you don't need a police force when there is a steady supply of Miss Palmers, generation after generation, to imply that, well, the dissenter is embarrassing himself among her sort.
From the Guardian:
The man in charge of the operation is Brigadier-General Eyal Shlein. Shlein, like Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, denies the Palestinian claims that a 'massacre' took place. Their version is that those who died were combatants in very heavy fighting. Shlein believes few civilians were killed, despite the claims of those at the hospital and the evidence of the dead and wounded we see there. Shlein believes too that the Israeli army showed restraint while operating in Jenin. 'There would have been no problem completing the operation immediately,' he told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on Friday. 'But we are a humane army.
"Whether the white people like it or not." The pathos of the conditional rings down the ages, at least for LI, sitting here in our isolation, impotent critic of all we survey. For surely one of Miss Palmer's questions -- not the one she put into words, but the one underneath all the ones she put into words -- was how a man like Burke could make himself an advocate of, well, a lower, duskier race. One that was certainly not Christian. One whose deaths couldn't be measured in the same proportion as good White deaths. And certainly Burke lived among the set of "the white people", the whitest, in fact, in the land. The Whig Aristocracy, Lord Rockingham's coterie, the London coffeehouse intellectuals. Yet Burke was too Irish not to know he had a secret sharer as he moved among these groups; it was not Conrad's secret sharer, that Blond Uber-Englishman in which the slav was at last washed away; no, this was the Catholic mother, this was Dublin, this was the sometimes over-excited (some would say affected) speech. This was a line within himself, creating zones. And definitely there was a zone to be crossed into, and out of which, in raids on the inexplicable, came that famous talent for indignation in elevated language. The banned zone within himself.
From the LA Times:
But also Saturday, rescuers discovered two other members of the family still alive. The rescuers plucked the couple--Abdullah Shobi and his wife, Shamsa--from their living room, which was under a mass of stone and dirt.
The recoveries seemed to bolster allegations that the Israeli army--as it invaded towns and cities across the West Bank and met stiff resistance--bulldozed homes with people still in them. Similar tales have emerged from the Jenin refugee camp, site of the most widespread destruction and highest death toll in any of the fighting.
An army spokeswoman said Saturday that efforts are always made to notify the residents of a home that is to be demolished. She said the army destroys only buildings that have been used as explosives factories or sniper positions.
The Shobis' neighbors gave a different account. Although fighting, gunfire and explosions had raged for days, the family was not involved. The neighbors said the bulldozer approached from the plaza in front of the Shobi home and began attacking. The building collapsed, with the family inside.
We appeal to Burke sane -- where to his Tory fans he appeared most mad -- from Burke mad, the Burke who, as the enemy of "theory in politics," was eventually driven to an excess of theory, theory as the perennial policing of theory. Burke's reactionary philosophy centers around the sort of paralogism that, in another context, would be sorted out by Godel: the idea that a meta-theory of politics that found theory in politics to be illegitimate was not, itself, a theory, and not itself subject to the fanaticism Burke felt was consequent upon the application of theory to human affairs. It was a paralogism that called upon the same apocalyptic language, the same world wide militancy, as its opponents.
"As for me, I was always steadily of the opinion that this disorder [the French Revolution] is not intermittent. I conceived that the contest once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion; but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last. I never thought we could make peace with the system, because it is not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself we were at war."
From the New York Times:
For Israeli forces, it is also an especially dangerous mission. This is not an American-style military campaign that uses airstrikes for weeks or even months before ground troops are deployed.It is urban warfare, with soldiers moving alley to alley, house to house, searching for militants amid booby-trapped homes. Twenty-four Israeli soldiers have been killed and 124 wounded since the operation began on March 28.
The raids have also led to charges by Palestinians that hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, which the Israeli Army says is one of the main sanctuaries for the militants. The Israelis have adamantly rejected allegations that their troops have attacked civilians.
And so this is the tone of the "white people's" newspaper of note -- a paper which holds that bullets can kill an Israeli soldier, but Israeli bullets can only lead to "charges", a social condition in which, for psycho-pathological reasons, the hate America crowd, parlor politicians of Europe, and other assorted malcontents have some kind of problem with the program. They hear the "let's roll," and they don't want to roll, these people. The inherent humanity of Israeli weaponry must be one of the wonders of the world. In today's paper, the IDF, which was quite happy to report one hundred to two hundred Palestinian deaths, for domestic consumption, last week, is now claiming that the dead number in the dozens. A change that will no doubt be echoed in further stories about Jenin, and contrasted with the especially dangerous missions mounted by the government of Sharon. And LI is ready to concede that there is something mystical about the transfiguration of Palestinian flesh, properly shredded, or crushed in a house, into so many words, mere words. First comes the righteous act, then the "charges." We are watching white people's history unfold before us, entranced and horrified by the spectacle, readers.
"We are a humane army."
"I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces; but who are the images of the great Pattern as well as you or I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not." -- Edmund Burke
I've extracted this quote from a letter Edmund Burke wrote in defense of his prosecution of Warren Hastings to the painter Joshua Reynold's niece. She'd written Burke on behalf of a friend to ask him, politely, if he knew what he was doing. It's a nice example of the way pressure is exerted to destroy dissent -- you don't need a police force when there is a steady supply of Miss Palmers, generation after generation, to imply that, well, the dissenter is embarrassing himself among her sort.
From the Guardian:
The man in charge of the operation is Brigadier-General Eyal Shlein. Shlein, like Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, denies the Palestinian claims that a 'massacre' took place. Their version is that those who died were combatants in very heavy fighting. Shlein believes few civilians were killed, despite the claims of those at the hospital and the evidence of the dead and wounded we see there. Shlein believes too that the Israeli army showed restraint while operating in Jenin. 'There would have been no problem completing the operation immediately,' he told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on Friday. 'But we are a humane army.
"Whether the white people like it or not." The pathos of the conditional rings down the ages, at least for LI, sitting here in our isolation, impotent critic of all we survey. For surely one of Miss Palmer's questions -- not the one she put into words, but the one underneath all the ones she put into words -- was how a man like Burke could make himself an advocate of, well, a lower, duskier race. One that was certainly not Christian. One whose deaths couldn't be measured in the same proportion as good White deaths. And certainly Burke lived among the set of "the white people", the whitest, in fact, in the land. The Whig Aristocracy, Lord Rockingham's coterie, the London coffeehouse intellectuals. Yet Burke was too Irish not to know he had a secret sharer as he moved among these groups; it was not Conrad's secret sharer, that Blond Uber-Englishman in which the slav was at last washed away; no, this was the Catholic mother, this was Dublin, this was the sometimes over-excited (some would say affected) speech. This was a line within himself, creating zones. And definitely there was a zone to be crossed into, and out of which, in raids on the inexplicable, came that famous talent for indignation in elevated language. The banned zone within himself.
From the LA Times:
But also Saturday, rescuers discovered two other members of the family still alive. The rescuers plucked the couple--Abdullah Shobi and his wife, Shamsa--from their living room, which was under a mass of stone and dirt.
The recoveries seemed to bolster allegations that the Israeli army--as it invaded towns and cities across the West Bank and met stiff resistance--bulldozed homes with people still in them. Similar tales have emerged from the Jenin refugee camp, site of the most widespread destruction and highest death toll in any of the fighting.
An army spokeswoman said Saturday that efforts are always made to notify the residents of a home that is to be demolished. She said the army destroys only buildings that have been used as explosives factories or sniper positions.
The Shobis' neighbors gave a different account. Although fighting, gunfire and explosions had raged for days, the family was not involved. The neighbors said the bulldozer approached from the plaza in front of the Shobi home and began attacking. The building collapsed, with the family inside.
We appeal to Burke sane -- where to his Tory fans he appeared most mad -- from Burke mad, the Burke who, as the enemy of "theory in politics," was eventually driven to an excess of theory, theory as the perennial policing of theory. Burke's reactionary philosophy centers around the sort of paralogism that, in another context, would be sorted out by Godel: the idea that a meta-theory of politics that found theory in politics to be illegitimate was not, itself, a theory, and not itself subject to the fanaticism Burke felt was consequent upon the application of theory to human affairs. It was a paralogism that called upon the same apocalyptic language, the same world wide militancy, as its opponents.
"As for me, I was always steadily of the opinion that this disorder [the French Revolution] is not intermittent. I conceived that the contest once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion; but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last. I never thought we could make peace with the system, because it is not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself we were at war."
From the New York Times:
For Israeli forces, it is also an especially dangerous mission. This is not an American-style military campaign that uses airstrikes for weeks or even months before ground troops are deployed.It is urban warfare, with soldiers moving alley to alley, house to house, searching for militants amid booby-trapped homes. Twenty-four Israeli soldiers have been killed and 124 wounded since the operation began on March 28.
The raids have also led to charges by Palestinians that hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, which the Israeli Army says is one of the main sanctuaries for the militants. The Israelis have adamantly rejected allegations that their troops have attacked civilians.
And so this is the tone of the "white people's" newspaper of note -- a paper which holds that bullets can kill an Israeli soldier, but Israeli bullets can only lead to "charges", a social condition in which, for psycho-pathological reasons, the hate America crowd, parlor politicians of Europe, and other assorted malcontents have some kind of problem with the program. They hear the "let's roll," and they don't want to roll, these people. The inherent humanity of Israeli weaponry must be one of the wonders of the world. In today's paper, the IDF, which was quite happy to report one hundred to two hundred Palestinian deaths, for domestic consumption, last week, is now claiming that the dead number in the dozens. A change that will no doubt be echoed in further stories about Jenin, and contrasted with the especially dangerous missions mounted by the government of Sharon. And LI is ready to concede that there is something mystical about the transfiguration of Palestinian flesh, properly shredded, or crushed in a house, into so many words, mere words. First comes the righteous act, then the "charges." We are watching white people's history unfold before us, entranced and horrified by the spectacle, readers.
Saturday, April 13, 2002
In the book LI mentioned in the last post � The Siege, by Conor Cruise O�Brien � there�s a
quotation from a critic, Edward Alexander, that is much on our mind today. Alexander, glossing
a poem, exudes a telling phrase: �... the Jewish people finds itself caught in a conflict between
the covenant and the historic necessity to survive within history...�
Indeed. But we are living, just as the evangelists say, in the end time -- the time when this kind of talk, this pattern of thinking, this use of a coy theology to justify the regretable theft, the imperial murder, has collapsed in on itself, corrupted by its own sentimentality. The covenant and the historic necessity have converged; the messianism of one coincident at all points with the irrationality of the other. Covenant and historic necessity are hauled out by thugs, ultras, gunmen, and news personalities to rhetorically drape any wretched activity whatsoever that can be enforced on one set of skin and bones by another, favored set. So watch: History wrenches concrete from concrete in Jenin; history blows itself up in the marketplace in Jerusalem, and survives; then it is ambushed on the West Bank, eleven dead, and
it survives. It whispers to soldiers that wouldn�t it be a good idea to use civilians as shields to advance on terrorist nests? Its spokesman come on the radio and admire themselves and their government for sparing life and limb by not carpet bombing encampments of refugees. With malice towards none, and a few missiles towards all, here we have a perfect moral stance for our times. It is a morality that dances on its own immoral means and jeers at critics.
Well. What did we go out in the killing fields to see, kiddies? A reed broken in the wind? Or
this:
Powell was only about a mile away when today's blast happened, about to board a helicopter for
a tour of Israel's volatile Northern border region with Lebanon. His helicopter did a turn in the sky to allow the secretary to survey firsthand the bombing site, where glass and metal mixed with body parts and a severed head across a wide area of asphalt.
Or this:
JENIN, West Bank, April 11 -- There is the Fashafsheh family. According to their relatives, the mother, father and 9-year-old son were killed when an Israeli tank fired a shell through their living room in downtown Jenin and an Israeli bulldozer plowed into the thick walls of their home, smashing it down on top of them.
There is Rina Zayyed, 15, who said she was struck in the chest by a bullet as she sat at home
with her father and brother. An Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery, she recounted, and a fragment hit her.
And there is Khadra Samara, 33, who said she shepherded more than a dozen children as she fled from house to house to house in the adjacent Jenin refugee camp, under repeated assault from Israeli bulldozers and missiles that, house by house, nearly toppled the walls on top of them
Well, those are definitely some stories we could have gone out to see. But they aren't stories of much interest to, say, the New Republic. This week the magazine runs two stories on the Jenin operation, and both of the stories are pumped. The smell of massacre in the morning agrees with these guys. However, in the tumult of emotions attendent on seeing the enemy and his wife smashed by the finest American weaponry, the writers come to two completely opposite conclusions: one that Hamas� infrastructure has escaped the Israeli sweep,the other that it has been destroyed by it.
Both, however, conclude that the Palestinian will and ability to retaliate has been severely impeded. Both were written before the bus bombing, and before yesterdays return of the repressed bombing in Jerusalem.
To everything, there is a spin, it says in Ecclesiastes. The spin in preparation was that Sharon, in spite of petty criticism, launched an absolute operation that worked. The new justification will be that the Palestinians haven't been tamed yet. Robert Wright, with whom LI usually has no truck, had a sensible column about this in Slate last week which predicted, wrongly it turned out, that Sharon's hardcore strategy would pay off in the short run, and diminish the likelihood of suicide bombing. The two final grafs in his piece,consonant with that prediction, and with the puppylike excitement of the TNR reporters, makes a very LI-like point:
"And we shouldn't be beguiled by short-run success. If terrorist bombings indeed abate after the current incursion, prepare yourself for the inevitable Charles Krauthammer column touting the success of Sharon's iron-fist policy. It's a natural sequel to Krauthammer's column belittling the significance of the "Arab Street" after the Street failed to boil over and depose any Arab regimes in the wake of the Afghanistan war. In both cases, the fallacy is the same: failing to see 1) that metastasizing hatred can work slowly, beneath the surface; 2) that, increasingly, hatred needn't be mediated by a regime (or a quasi-regime, like the Palestinian Authority) to be lethal; and 3) that the lethal leveraging of hatred�the hatred-death conversion factor�will probably grow exponentially over the next five to 10 years, as lethal technologies advance and spread. (Hamas recently moved from crude fertilizer bombs to sophisticated plastic explosives.)
Unfortunately, Krauthammer's time horizons mirror those of many politicians in a democracy. If your goal is to keep your poll numbers up for a few months or even years, it may pay to be crudely, crowd-pleasingly tough on terrorists while avoiding the messy and frustrating spectacle of addressing terrorism's causes: Just do the immediately popular things and hope that the long-run cost of your negligence doesn't show up until your successor takes office. If that is your ambition, Ariel Sharon is a fine role model."
quotation from a critic, Edward Alexander, that is much on our mind today. Alexander, glossing
a poem, exudes a telling phrase: �... the Jewish people finds itself caught in a conflict between
the covenant and the historic necessity to survive within history...�
Indeed. But we are living, just as the evangelists say, in the end time -- the time when this kind of talk, this pattern of thinking, this use of a coy theology to justify the regretable theft, the imperial murder, has collapsed in on itself, corrupted by its own sentimentality. The covenant and the historic necessity have converged; the messianism of one coincident at all points with the irrationality of the other. Covenant and historic necessity are hauled out by thugs, ultras, gunmen, and news personalities to rhetorically drape any wretched activity whatsoever that can be enforced on one set of skin and bones by another, favored set. So watch: History wrenches concrete from concrete in Jenin; history blows itself up in the marketplace in Jerusalem, and survives; then it is ambushed on the West Bank, eleven dead, and
it survives. It whispers to soldiers that wouldn�t it be a good idea to use civilians as shields to advance on terrorist nests? Its spokesman come on the radio and admire themselves and their government for sparing life and limb by not carpet bombing encampments of refugees. With malice towards none, and a few missiles towards all, here we have a perfect moral stance for our times. It is a morality that dances on its own immoral means and jeers at critics.
Well. What did we go out in the killing fields to see, kiddies? A reed broken in the wind? Or
this:
Powell was only about a mile away when today's blast happened, about to board a helicopter for
a tour of Israel's volatile Northern border region with Lebanon. His helicopter did a turn in the sky to allow the secretary to survey firsthand the bombing site, where glass and metal mixed with body parts and a severed head across a wide area of asphalt.
Or this:
JENIN, West Bank, April 11 -- There is the Fashafsheh family. According to their relatives, the mother, father and 9-year-old son were killed when an Israeli tank fired a shell through their living room in downtown Jenin and an Israeli bulldozer plowed into the thick walls of their home, smashing it down on top of them.
There is Rina Zayyed, 15, who said she was struck in the chest by a bullet as she sat at home
with her father and brother. An Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery, she recounted, and a fragment hit her.
And there is Khadra Samara, 33, who said she shepherded more than a dozen children as she fled from house to house to house in the adjacent Jenin refugee camp, under repeated assault from Israeli bulldozers and missiles that, house by house, nearly toppled the walls on top of them
Well, those are definitely some stories we could have gone out to see. But they aren't stories of much interest to, say, the New Republic. This week the magazine runs two stories on the Jenin operation, and both of the stories are pumped. The smell of massacre in the morning agrees with these guys. However, in the tumult of emotions attendent on seeing the enemy and his wife smashed by the finest American weaponry, the writers come to two completely opposite conclusions: one that Hamas� infrastructure has escaped the Israeli sweep,the other that it has been destroyed by it.
Both, however, conclude that the Palestinian will and ability to retaliate has been severely impeded. Both were written before the bus bombing, and before yesterdays return of the repressed bombing in Jerusalem.
To everything, there is a spin, it says in Ecclesiastes. The spin in preparation was that Sharon, in spite of petty criticism, launched an absolute operation that worked. The new justification will be that the Palestinians haven't been tamed yet. Robert Wright, with whom LI usually has no truck, had a sensible column about this in Slate last week which predicted, wrongly it turned out, that Sharon's hardcore strategy would pay off in the short run, and diminish the likelihood of suicide bombing. The two final grafs in his piece,consonant with that prediction, and with the puppylike excitement of the TNR reporters, makes a very LI-like point:
"And we shouldn't be beguiled by short-run success. If terrorist bombings indeed abate after the current incursion, prepare yourself for the inevitable Charles Krauthammer column touting the success of Sharon's iron-fist policy. It's a natural sequel to Krauthammer's column belittling the significance of the "Arab Street" after the Street failed to boil over and depose any Arab regimes in the wake of the Afghanistan war. In both cases, the fallacy is the same: failing to see 1) that metastasizing hatred can work slowly, beneath the surface; 2) that, increasingly, hatred needn't be mediated by a regime (or a quasi-regime, like the Palestinian Authority) to be lethal; and 3) that the lethal leveraging of hatred�the hatred-death conversion factor�will probably grow exponentially over the next five to 10 years, as lethal technologies advance and spread. (Hamas recently moved from crude fertilizer bombs to sophisticated plastic explosives.)
Unfortunately, Krauthammer's time horizons mirror those of many politicians in a democracy. If your goal is to keep your poll numbers up for a few months or even years, it may pay to be crudely, crowd-pleasingly tough on terrorists while avoiding the messy and frustrating spectacle of addressing terrorism's causes: Just do the immediately popular things and hope that the long-run cost of your negligence doesn't show up until your successor takes office. If that is your ambition, Ariel Sharon is a fine role model."
Thursday, April 11, 2002
Remora
Okay, LI is obsessed. You are tired of the Middle East. You want things the way they used to be around here. The eccentric flights into biz-olect. The homey essays about encyclopedias.
Well, forget it.
David Remnick's Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker is a bouquet of Cold War flowers of rhetoric. It exudes a sweet, poisonous smell. He even writes of the "parlor politicians" in Europe -- is this derived from the phrase, parlor pinks? Surely it is. I suppose the contrast is between those effete guys enjoying teas in roccoco-ish chambers and speaking French to each other (yuck!) while on the other side of the world, in the New World, our politicians are up at the crack of dawn, donning grease stained t shirts, smoking marlboros, roping and wrangling and squinting into the sun and getting long and tall and philosophical. Our politicians are like our usurping Potus. They are like Trent Lott. They are as honest and funloving a bunch of guys as you'd want to take out on patrol. And smart! Not in that parlor sense, not with a bunch of book larnin.' No siree, they was all trained at their grandmas knee on the good book and Horatio Alger, and has forsaken the word since then, since what is the point?
But the more interesting part of Remnicks' demagogery is another McCarthy-ite trope: moral equivalency. Remember the second Cold War, the Reagan phase, when we were hammered with that phrase? It has been a while since we saw it last. But here it comes again. We particularly enjoyed this passage:
"There is no moral equivalence between Arafat and Sharon: the first thrives on the idealization of martyrdom; the other now blunders while trying to stifle him. Nevertheless, history has seldom conjured two leaders less fit for their historical moment than Arafat and Sharon. (And those who stand in waiting�a murderer's row of Palestinian security chiefs and Benjamin Netanyahu�are no more promising.) Another party is needed, and this moment, like September 11th, demands American diplomacy, imagination, and intervention. President Bush was, at first, slow to engage at anywhere near the level needed. His actions, and the actions of his agencies, were contradictory and confused. One day early last week, when Bush was asked about criticism that he had not done enough to bring an end to the confrontation, he complained that in fact he had been making calls all morning. The President sounded put out; it was a tone familiar not from his best speeches after the September attacks but, rather, from his more feckless moments during the 2000 campaign."
We vote for "moral equivalence" as our favorite phrase in Remnick's piece, because unlike parlor politician, it is not mere vituperation. It supposedly means something, something deep. Demagogery is not mere ornament. It has to provide a content, however ersatz. So here we are in the Cold War again, with an 'us' -- see above, re squinting into sun politicos on ranches -- and a 'them'. There's evil Arafat, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a figure out of the Flintstones -- blundering, but no doubt decent and humane Ariel Sharon.
Well, all talk about the Middle East eventually gets around to history -- which is why, perhaps, the place seems so enigmatic and maddening to Americans, who officially believe history is something that comes in marble, with columns and a statue, that you visit on your D.C. vacation -- but that is otherwise irrelevant to anybody's life.
Yet because Remnick's Fred Flintstone is leading a party that actually has a history -- and because that history, with its roots in the Irgun, exhibits pattern that are on display in every one of Sharon's acts and speeches, and in the acts and speeches of his rightwing cabinet ministers -- LI would think that the New Yorker editor would have some feel for the past, here, as that force that portends the future. LI has been boning up on the Middle East himself, kiddies. We are reading Conor Cruise O'brien's book about Israel, The Siege. Though we are far from finished with that book, one thing clearly emerges from the history of Israel's founding. The PLO's model for statehood is not Algeria, it is Israel.
The Israel, that is, that countenanced a double track policy in its early years. The Israel that knew that its very existence depended on provisionally defying the world, or at least the Free World. On the one hand, the official Zionist line of peaceful coexistence, promulgated by David Ben-Gurion. On the other hand, the unofficial Irgun line of "by whatever means necessary." The Irgun line involved massive covert shipments of arms, assassination (as of the UN's mediator at the time, Count Bernadotte), and the deaths of as many Palestinian Arabs as was necessary to create the critical fright that leads to wholesale flight.
Since this history is a mere fifty years ago and less, burying it is still difficult. But les gens bien-pensants like Remnick, who have otherwise exhibited a ravenous thirst for information about, say, Stalin's crimes -- which stretch back sixty years and more -- seem to be satiated on a tepid version of Israel's founding, development, and present state. It is all in the heroic mode, a la Leon Uris, and bloodshed is what the Israelis suffered, instead of caused.
So we have this version of Arafat the terrorist, which is a top ten number for right wing pundits and moderates alike. How can the man actual debase the peace process by competing with more radical Palestinian factions? Such behavior would never be allowed in Israeli politics, right?
Come on. Are we serious here? Of course not. That's why, out of the ruins of the camps, the newspapers will be extracting, in the next few days, evidence from the IDF, the most neutral and kindly of armies. As the mounds of the Palestinian dead are buried, the papers will instead focus, with their eternal vigilance over right and wrong, on documents and weaponry.
As for the hand-wringing in Remnick's article about the settlements on the West Bank -- like every other American journalist, he assures us that the vast majority of the Israelis don't want them, don't need them, etc., etc. But by some magical force, some national impotence a la the Fisher King, they just can't seem to prevent them from happening. They just can't seem to connect, say, electing Ariel Sharon prime minister and the continuing support given to the West Bank settlements.
For a much more specific article about the politics of those settlements, go to Anthony Lewis' article in the NYRB.
. LI has been planning to comment on this surprising and slendid article for a couple of days, but we don't have time to right now. Look for it in the future, kiddies.
Okay, LI is obsessed. You are tired of the Middle East. You want things the way they used to be around here. The eccentric flights into biz-olect. The homey essays about encyclopedias.
Well, forget it.
David Remnick's Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker is a bouquet of Cold War flowers of rhetoric. It exudes a sweet, poisonous smell. He even writes of the "parlor politicians" in Europe -- is this derived from the phrase, parlor pinks? Surely it is. I suppose the contrast is between those effete guys enjoying teas in roccoco-ish chambers and speaking French to each other (yuck!) while on the other side of the world, in the New World, our politicians are up at the crack of dawn, donning grease stained t shirts, smoking marlboros, roping and wrangling and squinting into the sun and getting long and tall and philosophical. Our politicians are like our usurping Potus. They are like Trent Lott. They are as honest and funloving a bunch of guys as you'd want to take out on patrol. And smart! Not in that parlor sense, not with a bunch of book larnin.' No siree, they was all trained at their grandmas knee on the good book and Horatio Alger, and has forsaken the word since then, since what is the point?
But the more interesting part of Remnicks' demagogery is another McCarthy-ite trope: moral equivalency. Remember the second Cold War, the Reagan phase, when we were hammered with that phrase? It has been a while since we saw it last. But here it comes again. We particularly enjoyed this passage:
"There is no moral equivalence between Arafat and Sharon: the first thrives on the idealization of martyrdom; the other now blunders while trying to stifle him. Nevertheless, history has seldom conjured two leaders less fit for their historical moment than Arafat and Sharon. (And those who stand in waiting�a murderer's row of Palestinian security chiefs and Benjamin Netanyahu�are no more promising.) Another party is needed, and this moment, like September 11th, demands American diplomacy, imagination, and intervention. President Bush was, at first, slow to engage at anywhere near the level needed. His actions, and the actions of his agencies, were contradictory and confused. One day early last week, when Bush was asked about criticism that he had not done enough to bring an end to the confrontation, he complained that in fact he had been making calls all morning. The President sounded put out; it was a tone familiar not from his best speeches after the September attacks but, rather, from his more feckless moments during the 2000 campaign."
We vote for "moral equivalence" as our favorite phrase in Remnick's piece, because unlike parlor politician, it is not mere vituperation. It supposedly means something, something deep. Demagogery is not mere ornament. It has to provide a content, however ersatz. So here we are in the Cold War again, with an 'us' -- see above, re squinting into sun politicos on ranches -- and a 'them'. There's evil Arafat, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a figure out of the Flintstones -- blundering, but no doubt decent and humane Ariel Sharon.
Well, all talk about the Middle East eventually gets around to history -- which is why, perhaps, the place seems so enigmatic and maddening to Americans, who officially believe history is something that comes in marble, with columns and a statue, that you visit on your D.C. vacation -- but that is otherwise irrelevant to anybody's life.
Yet because Remnick's Fred Flintstone is leading a party that actually has a history -- and because that history, with its roots in the Irgun, exhibits pattern that are on display in every one of Sharon's acts and speeches, and in the acts and speeches of his rightwing cabinet ministers -- LI would think that the New Yorker editor would have some feel for the past, here, as that force that portends the future. LI has been boning up on the Middle East himself, kiddies. We are reading Conor Cruise O'brien's book about Israel, The Siege. Though we are far from finished with that book, one thing clearly emerges from the history of Israel's founding. The PLO's model for statehood is not Algeria, it is Israel.
The Israel, that is, that countenanced a double track policy in its early years. The Israel that knew that its very existence depended on provisionally defying the world, or at least the Free World. On the one hand, the official Zionist line of peaceful coexistence, promulgated by David Ben-Gurion. On the other hand, the unofficial Irgun line of "by whatever means necessary." The Irgun line involved massive covert shipments of arms, assassination (as of the UN's mediator at the time, Count Bernadotte), and the deaths of as many Palestinian Arabs as was necessary to create the critical fright that leads to wholesale flight.
Since this history is a mere fifty years ago and less, burying it is still difficult. But les gens bien-pensants like Remnick, who have otherwise exhibited a ravenous thirst for information about, say, Stalin's crimes -- which stretch back sixty years and more -- seem to be satiated on a tepid version of Israel's founding, development, and present state. It is all in the heroic mode, a la Leon Uris, and bloodshed is what the Israelis suffered, instead of caused.
So we have this version of Arafat the terrorist, which is a top ten number for right wing pundits and moderates alike. How can the man actual debase the peace process by competing with more radical Palestinian factions? Such behavior would never be allowed in Israeli politics, right?
Come on. Are we serious here? Of course not. That's why, out of the ruins of the camps, the newspapers will be extracting, in the next few days, evidence from the IDF, the most neutral and kindly of armies. As the mounds of the Palestinian dead are buried, the papers will instead focus, with their eternal vigilance over right and wrong, on documents and weaponry.
As for the hand-wringing in Remnick's article about the settlements on the West Bank -- like every other American journalist, he assures us that the vast majority of the Israelis don't want them, don't need them, etc., etc. But by some magical force, some national impotence a la the Fisher King, they just can't seem to prevent them from happening. They just can't seem to connect, say, electing Ariel Sharon prime minister and the continuing support given to the West Bank settlements.
For a much more specific article about the politics of those settlements, go to Anthony Lewis' article in the NYRB.
. LI has been planning to comment on this surprising and slendid article for a couple of days, but we don't have time to right now. Look for it in the future, kiddies.
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
Remora
Headline politics
At least 8 killed in Bus Bombing in Israel (NYT)
Toll Rises as Israel Presses on: 13 soldiers die; bus explosion kills 8, hurts 14; Sharon resolute (Boston Globe)
8 killed after Passenger Bus attacked in Israel (Washington Post)
Ambush in West Bank Kills 13 Israeli Soldiers (San Jose Mercury Mercury)
That much gone from the world, of skin,tissue, the delicate, fine optic nerve, the hands, the genitals, thought (thethinker dying), bad moods, bad relationships, love, the taste of coffee, hair. Burned, battered, bloody, done. Bad news.
But somehow, the headlines never seem to read: 150 dead inJenin; or, Israeli Troops Kill 150 in Camp. Somehow the headline writers neverget around to Palestinian dead except as the sort of cortege of Israeli dead.Somehow Palestinian dead never make the grade, never deserve the caps.Something about them, no doubt. They are, after all, living in a camp. And look at what they are finding in those camps! Weapons! Documents! My god, for all the world like, well, like a sovereign state, instead of the dependents that they were made to be by nature and art. Better than the beasts of the field, let's be human here -- but with no right of self determination. Rather, endowed with the right to wait, eternally.
Now, if by some miracle tanks rolled intoSharon�s compound, what interesting papers they would find. What weapons. Andof course those tanks would, as an iron semantic rule, be manned by terrorists.No two ways around that. Still, the publication of those documents and the exhibition of those weapons � including, in Israel�s case, surely, atom bombs �would be interesting, n�est-ce pas?
Let's scatter a few caveats.
Here is the thing. There are those who believe Israel is an illegitimate state. There are those who are anti-Semites, and simply want Jews killed or persecuted. There are those who mourn for the displaced Palestinians, and have no time for, say, the 150,000 Jews that were driven out of Iraq, or the comparable numbers driven out of a number of Arab nations in the fifties and sixties. Charles Krauthammer, our convenient devil doll, into whose prose LI likes to stick pins, had a point in a column he published a month ago:much of the Palestinian and Arab press is filled with ridiculous, immoral,sickening anti-jewish crap.
"This indoctrination goes far beyond expunging Israel, literally, from Palestinian maps. It goes far beyond denying, indeed ridiculing, the Holocaust as a Jewish fantasy. It consists of the rawest incitement to murder, as in this sermon by Arafat-appointed and Arafat-funded Ahmad Abu Halabiya broadcast live on official Palestinian Authority television early in the Intifada. The subject is "the Jews." (Note: not the Israelis, but the Jews.) "They must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.' . . . Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them."
The tropes unchanged since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first manufactured by the Czar�s secret police (the Czar in question, Czar Nicholas II, was recently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church,to the world�s thunderous silence).
LI suspects that there are leftists whose flaming hatred for Israel overlaps with a not so latent anti-jewish bias.
But LI also knows that in the ecology of chauvinisms, one prejudice can exist quite nicely behind another prejudice � that the victims of a bias can themselves be biased. Victimhood confers no honor. In the best of cases it extends the imagination. If I suffer, I can imagine that my neighbor might suffer. That, at least, is one possible outcome of suffering. I wouldn�t bet the house on it, however.
All this to introduce one Effi Eitam, the man Sharon just inducted into his Cabinet, as a sort of fuck you to the Labor party.
Eitam is the head of the National Religious Party. Here's one summing up of the guy, from Ha'aretz:
Eitam's aim is to turn the national religious camp into a kind of bridgehead, a national avant-garde movement. According to Eitam, the Zionism of normality has run its course. So the mission of religious Zionism now is to lead the entire country toward a new horizon, a new purpose: to establish the Temple.
The thoughts of Eitam are instructive. Here, for instance, is his version of Eretz Israel:
"What has to be done with regard to the Palestinians?
"The immediate solution consists of three elements. First, get rid of this leadership. Second, to enter Area A [under full Palestinian control] and uproot the military terrorist capability. Third, to make it clear that there will be no foreign sovereignty west of the Jordan River. I am not sure that this is the time to organize what will happen east of the Jordan. But as for the area west of the Jordan, we have to state that no sovereignty will be established there other than that of the State of Israel."
And here are his thoughts on the means to that greater state;
And what will become of the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza?
"They will be residents without the right to vote. We have to obtain an interim settlement regarding their status. Not on the status of the territory - on their status. They have to be given a choice between enlightened residency with us or dark citizenship in the Arab states. The Arabs in Judea and Samaria will be able to make a free choice between a situation in which they will be Palestinian citizens who are residents of Israel, or citizens of their country who reside in the Palestinian state in Jordan and Sinai."
And what will induce them to cross to the other side of the Jordan? To emigrate?
"I don't want to be hypocritical. But I will put it like this: We do not need a declared emigration policy that encourages the emigration of Arabs. I think that we have to sincerely offer them an alternative of residency. Of course, whoever does not accept will have to be told: Your place is not with us. In a case like that, not even a wink is needed."
Yes, not even a wink, when a bullet will do. This isn't a man of muted views. Palestinians can read, oddly enough. They hear Powell say that the Bush administration is behind a Palestinian state. And they see that the Bush administration is very much behind the Sharon government, which includes Eitam. And they know that, in headline math, 150 palestinians do not equal 8 israelis. So they go for bombs instead.
It isn't hard to foresee where this is going.
Headline politics
At least 8 killed in Bus Bombing in Israel (NYT)
Toll Rises as Israel Presses on: 13 soldiers die; bus explosion kills 8, hurts 14; Sharon resolute (Boston Globe)
8 killed after Passenger Bus attacked in Israel (Washington Post)
Ambush in West Bank Kills 13 Israeli Soldiers (San Jose Mercury Mercury)
That much gone from the world, of skin,tissue, the delicate, fine optic nerve, the hands, the genitals, thought (thethinker dying), bad moods, bad relationships, love, the taste of coffee, hair. Burned, battered, bloody, done. Bad news.
But somehow, the headlines never seem to read: 150 dead inJenin; or, Israeli Troops Kill 150 in Camp. Somehow the headline writers neverget around to Palestinian dead except as the sort of cortege of Israeli dead.Somehow Palestinian dead never make the grade, never deserve the caps.Something about them, no doubt. They are, after all, living in a camp. And look at what they are finding in those camps! Weapons! Documents! My god, for all the world like, well, like a sovereign state, instead of the dependents that they were made to be by nature and art. Better than the beasts of the field, let's be human here -- but with no right of self determination. Rather, endowed with the right to wait, eternally.
Now, if by some miracle tanks rolled intoSharon�s compound, what interesting papers they would find. What weapons. Andof course those tanks would, as an iron semantic rule, be manned by terrorists.No two ways around that. Still, the publication of those documents and the exhibition of those weapons � including, in Israel�s case, surely, atom bombs �would be interesting, n�est-ce pas?
Let's scatter a few caveats.
Here is the thing. There are those who believe Israel is an illegitimate state. There are those who are anti-Semites, and simply want Jews killed or persecuted. There are those who mourn for the displaced Palestinians, and have no time for, say, the 150,000 Jews that were driven out of Iraq, or the comparable numbers driven out of a number of Arab nations in the fifties and sixties. Charles Krauthammer, our convenient devil doll, into whose prose LI likes to stick pins, had a point in a column he published a month ago:much of the Palestinian and Arab press is filled with ridiculous, immoral,sickening anti-jewish crap.
"This indoctrination goes far beyond expunging Israel, literally, from Palestinian maps. It goes far beyond denying, indeed ridiculing, the Holocaust as a Jewish fantasy. It consists of the rawest incitement to murder, as in this sermon by Arafat-appointed and Arafat-funded Ahmad Abu Halabiya broadcast live on official Palestinian Authority television early in the Intifada. The subject is "the Jews." (Note: not the Israelis, but the Jews.) "They must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.' . . . Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them."
The tropes unchanged since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first manufactured by the Czar�s secret police (the Czar in question, Czar Nicholas II, was recently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church,to the world�s thunderous silence).
LI suspects that there are leftists whose flaming hatred for Israel overlaps with a not so latent anti-jewish bias.
But LI also knows that in the ecology of chauvinisms, one prejudice can exist quite nicely behind another prejudice � that the victims of a bias can themselves be biased. Victimhood confers no honor. In the best of cases it extends the imagination. If I suffer, I can imagine that my neighbor might suffer. That, at least, is one possible outcome of suffering. I wouldn�t bet the house on it, however.
All this to introduce one Effi Eitam, the man Sharon just inducted into his Cabinet, as a sort of fuck you to the Labor party.
Eitam is the head of the National Religious Party. Here's one summing up of the guy, from Ha'aretz:
Eitam's aim is to turn the national religious camp into a kind of bridgehead, a national avant-garde movement. According to Eitam, the Zionism of normality has run its course. So the mission of religious Zionism now is to lead the entire country toward a new horizon, a new purpose: to establish the Temple.
The thoughts of Eitam are instructive. Here, for instance, is his version of Eretz Israel:
"What has to be done with regard to the Palestinians?
"The immediate solution consists of three elements. First, get rid of this leadership. Second, to enter Area A [under full Palestinian control] and uproot the military terrorist capability. Third, to make it clear that there will be no foreign sovereignty west of the Jordan River. I am not sure that this is the time to organize what will happen east of the Jordan. But as for the area west of the Jordan, we have to state that no sovereignty will be established there other than that of the State of Israel."
And here are his thoughts on the means to that greater state;
And what will become of the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza?
"They will be residents without the right to vote. We have to obtain an interim settlement regarding their status. Not on the status of the territory - on their status. They have to be given a choice between enlightened residency with us or dark citizenship in the Arab states. The Arabs in Judea and Samaria will be able to make a free choice between a situation in which they will be Palestinian citizens who are residents of Israel, or citizens of their country who reside in the Palestinian state in Jordan and Sinai."
And what will induce them to cross to the other side of the Jordan? To emigrate?
"I don't want to be hypocritical. But I will put it like this: We do not need a declared emigration policy that encourages the emigration of Arabs. I think that we have to sincerely offer them an alternative of residency. Of course, whoever does not accept will have to be told: Your place is not with us. In a case like that, not even a wink is needed."
Yes, not even a wink, when a bullet will do. This isn't a man of muted views. Palestinians can read, oddly enough. They hear Powell say that the Bush administration is behind a Palestinian state. And they see that the Bush administration is very much behind the Sharon government, which includes Eitam. And they know that, in headline math, 150 palestinians do not equal 8 israelis. So they go for bombs instead.
It isn't hard to foresee where this is going.
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