Blogcritics Author: Socrates

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Chalmers Johnson's Blowback - The Costs and Consequences of American Empire: Is America in Decline?

Socrates — Sun, 6 May 2007 04:46:49 EDT

One of the enduring myths sedulously cultivated by apologists of American foreign policy is that America, the land of the free and the brave, is besieged by malevolent foreign powers. In the realm of pure thought unsullied by empiric evidence the lone superpower bravely battles rogue states to prevent free societies from nuclear extinction. As Michael Howard, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford says, “For 200 years the United States has preserved almost unsullied the original ideals of the enlightenment: the belief in the God-given rights of the individual, the inherent rights of free assembly and free speech, the blessings of free enterprise, the perfectibility of man, and, above all, the universality of these values”. But is the record of the ‘defender of freedom’ in contemporary history unblemished? “Two hundred years (of US history) is illustrated by a century of literal human slavery,” writes Chomsky in Deterring Democracy, “and effective disenfranchisement of Blacks for another century, genocidal assaults on native population, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the turn of the century, of millions of Indochinese, of some 200,000 Central Americans in the past decade.”Since September 11, criticism of the Empire has attained respectability. The word Empire has appeared in mainstream newspapers and books critical of American foreign Policy have been resurrected. One such book is Blowback, written by Chalmers Johnson. Interestingly, this book, which was written during the year 1998-99, received little attention in the mainstream press. Philip Zelikowin, a former member of the National Security staff of President Bush Senior, dismissed Blowback as a comic book. The terrorist attack on the WTC changed all that and the book was reprinted seven times in less than two months. Unintended Negative ConsequencesJohnson, who is the president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus at the University of California, views the events of September 11 not with hysteria but with scholarly detachment. “The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not attack America,” he writes in his preface, “as political and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked American Foreign Policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders who became enemies only because they (assassins) had already become victims.” With refreshing candour he admits, “Many aspects of what the American government had done abroad virtually invited retaliatory attacks from nations and peoples who had been victimized.” Recent events only confirm this. The massive bombing of Afghanistan which the US launched on October 7, 2001, killed many innocent people and inflicted untold misery on men women and children of an already war torn country. The deployment of overwhelming military force on the peasants of Vietnam in the recent decades and military action in Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Serbia and Kosovo only produce ‘unintended negative consequences throughout the Islamic and underdeveloped worlds.’ The casual arrogance with which President Clinton ordered the firing of nearly eighty cruise missiles (at a cost of $750,000 each) into a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, and an old mujahideen camp site in Afghanistan is another instance of its imperial hauteur. The military response was in retaliation to the bombings of American embassy buildings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The grudging admission of error in intelligence reports came on September 2, 1998, when the US secretary of defense said he was unaware that the plant made medicines and not nerve gas. The fact that the plant made affordable medicines for the poor people of Sudan went largely unnoticed in the US media. No word of sympathy was uttered by Clinton who justified the military action on the ground of repelling ‘imminent threat to our national security’. Clinton’s abrasive secretary of state Madeline Albright made matters worse by her tactless remark that Sudan was a viper’s nest of terrorists. In the streets of Sudan tempers ran high and street protesters waved placards accusing Clinton of diverting public opinion from his sexual misadventures with his White House subordinate. The memories of injustice linger on and the image of an arrogant superpower using disproportionate military force on small defenseless countries evokes moral outrage among the victims. The situation is ripe for terrorist attacks on the Empire leading to the endless cycle of violence and retaliation. Johnson explains that the word "blowback" was coined by the CIA. The word was originally used in poison gas warfare "to refer to the likelihood of battlefield gasses blowing back on the forces that have released them." In its political sense it first appeared in a CIA post-action report on the secret overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. The CIA helped to install the brutal regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi who ruled Iran with an iron hand for twenty-five years. The overthrow of the Shah regime by the Islamic clerics and the persistent anti –American sentiments in the region are rooted in recent history. In CIA argot, blowback simply means the ‘unintended and unexpected consequences of covert operations of the CIA which have been kept secret from the American public and, in most cases, from the elected representatives.’ Such covert operations are illegal, ill conceived and short term aimed at overthrowing foreign governments or helping launch state terrorist operations against target populations.The Soviet Afghan War One example that comes to mind is the American involvement in the Soviet Afghan war. The official version has it that US helped the mujahideen after the Russians invaded Afghanistan in Dec 24, 1979. If the memoirs of Robert Gates, former CIA Director (From the Shadow: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War) are to be believed, then a different picture emerges. It was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to be given to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, i.e., six months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The French weekly magazine Nouvel Observateur pursued this extraordinary story. The weekly interviewed Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski who confirmed Gates' account. The Nouvel Observateur put the following question to Brzezinski: "You don’t regret any of this today?" Brzezinski replied, "Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want to regret it?" The Nouvel Observateur posed another question to Brzezinski. "And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which had given arms and advice to future terrorists?" Brzezinski disdainfully answered, "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or collapse of the Soviet empire?" What was hidden from the American public is the loss of 1.8 million Afghan lives, some 2.6 million refugees and ten million land mines left in Afghanistan as a result of US secret operation. The bombing of the WTC on 9/11 was a blowback from the same organisation, which US helped to build in Afghanistan. Deadly SkillsWhat is concealed from the American public is that the US government trains the police/military of repressive regimes. In 1991, the US Congress passed a law authorising Joint Combined Exchange Training Programme (JCET). Though the law permitted the Special Forces to have overseas joint military exercises with foreign governments to train US soldiers, in actuality, the US Special forces are engaged in espionage activities. Under the guise of military exercises the Special Forces collect extensive information about the whole range of military capability of the foreign country they visit. The Special Forces also train repressive foreign regimes friendly to US interests in lethal skills such as advance sniper techniques, psychological warfare, close quarters combat, torture techniques to elicit confessions from suspects. Evidence is slowly emerging that the Turkish Mountain Commandos were trained by the Special Forces who used the skills against the rebellious Kurdish population killing at least twenty-two thousand of them. According to the manual entitled Doctrine for Special Forces Operations the main activity of the Special Forces is to give foreign military units instructions in Foreign Internal Defense (FID). The disastrous impact of such training programmes were felt in nineteen countries of Latin America, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Rwanda, to name a few.A Muscle-Bound CrackpotTom Plate, a columnist for the Los Angles Times, once described United States as "a muscle bound crackpot with little more than cruise missiles for brains.” US media glorify the warrior roles and justify the use of military force in world affairs. The reported statement of Madeleine Albright best exemplifies this: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are an indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future.” Echoing his concern Johnson observes, “In the decade following the end of the cold war, the US largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation.” In pursuit of its imperial dreams US maintains its elaborate military bases all over the world. Its military expenditure dwarfs imagination. Conservative estimate places the US military expenditure in the region of four hundred billion dollars a year. According to Brookings Institution study, it costs US $5.5 trillion to build and maintain its nuclear arsenal. The Pentagon Industrial Complex sets its own agenda and it has a voracious appetite for more and more resources. The military system has become an autonomous system. With corporate interests permeating the military, the civilian control over the military is at best tenuous. Policymaking is dominated by militarism, ‘a vast array of customs, interests, prestige, actions, and thought associated with armies and wars and yet transcending true military purpose’ which is the defense of its realm.Negative Economic PoliciesThe economic policies dictated by imperial ambition expose the US to blowback. The classic example of this is its relationship with East Asian client states. In the case of Japan, in order to further its cold war strategy of proving to the world that free market capitalism is the only mode of economic development, the US ‘treated Japan as a beloved ward, indulging its every economic need and proudly patronising it as a star pupil.’ The US used its influence to admit Japan into many International Institutions. The US transferred its crucial technology to Japan on concessionary terms and opened its markets to Japanese goods while tolerating Japan’s protection of its domestic market. This led to the hollowing out of key American Industries such as steel, consumer electronics, robotics, automotive, camera, and semi-conductor industries. This suicidal economic policy was also continued as a trade off to maintain US military bases in Japan. The long-term impact was that soon the American industries became uncompetitive vis-à-vis Japanese industries.With the huge US export market made available to them, Japan, becoming a five trillion-dollar economy, pursued an aggressive export led growth. It followed its own brand of state guided capitalism steering clear of market capitalism and the command economy of the Soviets. Increasingly, it expanded its production capacity. What was hidden from economic planners was that Japan generated industrial over capacity that threatened the health of the economy. The over capacity reached crisis point when other Asian countries such as South Korea, Hong-Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, emulated the fast catch up strategy of Japan. ‘There were too many factories,’ writes Johnson, ‘turning out athletic shoes, automobiles, television sets, semi-conductors, petrochemicals, steel and ships for too few buyers.’ The ripple effect of the over capacity is the increased competition between American and European MNC. This has resulted in corporations cutting costs by transferring the high paid jobs from the advanced economy to low wage developing countries. The global demand is on the verge of collapse, as rich countries do not generate demand on account of market saturation or stagnant or falling income of its people. In countries like China, Vietnam and Indonesia the workers who earn low wages cannot buy the goods produced by them. In East Asian economies financial capitalism spearheaded by the US played an important role in destabilising the economies. US played an aggressive role in making the East Asian economies to deregulate the capital market. The Wall Street Treasury Complex thrust the concept of capital mobility upon the East Asian countries. The nature of money pumped into the economy of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and Philippines was hot money. The financial inflows were short term, speculative, highly liquid and could easily leave the economy. The US accumulated vast funds (around 3 trillion dollars) especially in the mutual funds. These pools of capital were invested and transferred out of the Asian economies. The result was catastrophic: East Asian economies collapsed. Big American companies bought factories and businesses for a song. Proctor & Gamble picked up several South Korean state of art Companies at a fraction of the price. In Thailand, American Investment firms bought service, steel, and energy companies at throw away prices. The Carlyle Group sent Bush senior to Bangkok to evaluate opportunities to buy real estate at low prices. The economic meltdown resulted in the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. The smoldering anger of East Asians against US predatory capitalism is a potential source of retaliatory strikes against US interests in the region.There are worrying signs that the US is not able to pay for its huge military deployments and its military adventurism. The US uses its political clout to cajole its satellite countries to pay for its wars. For instance, Japan paid $13 billion to the US for the first gulf war against Iraq. According to Michael Hudson, author of Super Imperialism, the ballooning US balance of payments deficit is financed by the central banks of the world, which plough back the surplus dollars to buy US Treasury bonds. Blinded by its overwhelming military power the Empire hurtles relentlessly towards the future in pursuit of its hegemonic goals. Its inept elected representatives have surrendered their judgment to a cabal of unelected military experts. The unraveling of the Empire would have the same inevitability of a Greek tragedy: the hamartia of an inflexible empire bereft of adjustment and compromise colliding against the forces of blowback and imperial overstretch. The danger of the US alienating Europe, Russia East Asia and China politically cannot be ruled out. The threat of the dollars not flowing back into the American economy is a real possibility. The scenario is dangerous for the US economy as it may financially implode if foreign investment dries up.Imperial Overstretch“The two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power,” wrote Paul Kennedy in his magisterial survey The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, “whether in the military /strategical realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain those commitments; and whether it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of ever-shifting patterns of production.” Kennedy holds the view that this test of American abilities will be greater because it, like imperial Spain around 1600 or the British Empire around 1900, is the inheritor of a vast array of strategic commitments which had been made decades earlier when the nation’s political, economic, and military capacity to influence world affairs seemed so much more assured. ‘The United States now runs the risk of what might roughly called “imperial overstretch”: that is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligation are far larger than the country’s power to defend them simultaneously.’Johnson believes that America is in a state of decline. The signs are there for all to see: increasing estrangement between the population and their government, loss of moral authority among the elite, the appearance of militarism and the separation of military from the society it is supposed to serve. He quotes with approval David Calleo, professor of international politics, ‘The international system breaks down not only because unbalanced and aggressive new powers seek to dominate their neighbors, but also because declining powers, rather than adjusting and accommodating, try to cement their slipping preeminence into exploitative hegemony.’ Has the bell then begun to toll for the behemoth? Johnson answers the question with scholarly sang froid: “The danger I foresee is that we are embarked on the same path as the former Soviet Union a decade ago. It collapsed for three reasons -- internal economic contradictions, imperial overstretch, and an inability to reform. The United States has always been richer so it might take us longer for similar afflictions to do their work. But it is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on for ever.” Prophetic words? Only time will tell.

A Tinto Brass fan and a cynical Bangalorean who's been known to display Chomsky-ist leanings.

The Good General: Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006)

Socrates — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 04:33:37 EST

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." — Henry Kissinger. Cited in "The United States and Chile: Roots and Branches" Foreign Affairs Magazine Jan 1975. Pinochet’s death on Sunday, 10th December, 2006 in Santiago Chile revived bitter controversies about his bloody military coup on 11th September 1973 overthrowing the lawfully elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende. On hearing the news of his death thousands of anti-Pinochet protesters gathered in the streets of Santiago disappointed that the General could not be tried for his crimes of genocide and his brutal torture of political opponents during the 17 years of his military regime. Judge Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who tried to extradite the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet from Britain, expressed the anguish of the protesters when he said, "Perhaps we would have liked to have tried Pinochet so victims would have received the compensation and reparation of a sentence. Unfortunately it has not been this way."1 Pinochet's military coup signaled the end of Democracy in Chile and ushered in an era of systematic crushing of political dissent in Chile. Old file pictures show the smoldering remains of La Moneda, the presidential palace in the heart of the nation's capital, Santiago, that symbolized the abrupt termination of Chile’s experiment with Socialist Democracy described by the Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda as "a long petal of sea, wine and snow.’ Even though the horrors of the Pinochet regime cannot be remembered perfectly, as human memory is short and fallible, an attempt must be made to exhume history in order to understand the tragedy that befell ordinary Chileans. Perhaps the starting point would be to turn to eyewitness accounts of the regime’s repression and human right abuses. Mike Gatehouse, who worked at the Chilean Forestry Institute, recalls the brutality of the early days of the regime. As he says in his own words, ‘We were taken to the National Stadium, Chile's equivalent of Wembley, a large football stadium with other sports facilities clustered around it. We were herded into a mustering area which was full of newly arrived prisoners in white coats, doctors and orderlies from several Santiago hospitals which had been raided that day, victims of a savage proscription by the far-right dominated Chilean Medical Association, which accused them of having failed to go on strike against the legal government. The 'cells' into which we were herded were the team changing rooms. There were 130 prisoners in ours, and at night we were so tightly packed that we could sleep only by lining up in rows and lying down 'by numbers', dovetailing heads and feet.’2 The systematic torture of factory workers, nurses, teachers, university lecturers proceeded in a clinically brutal fashion at the National Stadium. As Gatehouse again recalls ‘The man next to me in my cell was less fortunate. A Brazilian engineer, named Sergio Moraes, he had worked in a factory called Madeco. He was taken out for his first heavy interrogation two days before I was released. When he returned he could hardly hear or speak: he had been hooded and beaten about the head and ears with a flat wooden bat. He told us that among his interrogators were Brazilian intelligence officers.’3 The National Stadium, which became the torture center of the regime, claimed another victim, namely, the protest singer Victor Jara who was tortured to death. The tragic events of the coup and its aftermath is captured most movingly in the film Missing which is based on the real life story of an American filmmaker, Charles Horman, who was among those killed in Chile right after the 1973 coup.Equally revealing about the General’s junta, described most quaintly by the Economist as ‘ not the bloodiest of the military dictatorships that afflicted South America’, is the moving testimony of Victor Marrellinca who was 19-years-old when General Pinochet's tanks surrounded his university in Santiago, Chile. As he recounts his ordeal at the hands of DINA, the Chilean secret police, ‘I was tortured badly, very badly tortured. Both of my legs, my ankles were smashed up completely with rifle butts and also my chest bone was also and electric shocks. They used to put me in a, dip me into a big tank with sewage water and then lift me up completely naked, of course, and blindfolded and my hands tie up on my back and my legs also tie up and lift me up and put electric shocks everywhere, on all the sensitive parts on my body, especially the genitalia.’4 While it would be tempting to conclude that the acts of terror of the good General were confined to his own country, history records that he nurtured extra-territorial ambitions and put them to deadly practice. For those who believe that the attack on 9/11 on US soil was the most sensational act of terrorism would do well to pause and reflect on the events that took place in Washington DC on September 21, 1976. On this day the agents of the Chilean secret police organization, DINA, detonated a car bomb just blocks from the White House, killing a leading opponent of Pinochet's, Orlando Letelier, and his assistant Ronni Moffitt. ‘Letelier,’ says Roger Burbach, ‘was a man deeply committed to democracy and a more humane world who had served at the highest levels of the Allende government.’5 The assassination of Letelier was a part of an operation known as Operation Condor, which involved the joint operation of Chilean, Bolivian, Argentinean, Paraguayan, Ecuadorian, and Brazilian intelligence agencies to assassinate expatriates who were outspoken critics of fascist regimes.The murderous career of Augusto Pinochet is inextricably linked to US involvement in Chilean politics and its economy. That this significant fact was ignored by the mainstream US media is indeed strange and calls into question the claims of it being free and impartial in reporting international events where US interests are involved. ‘There is still virtually no discussion’ notes Roger Burbach, ‘ in the mainstream press of the complicity of the U.S. government in Pinochet's coup and long reign of terror. For most of the media, the denunciation of human rights violations starts and ends with Pinochet.’6 Apart from the alternative media and Bay Area mainstream press, which exposed the direct involvement of the Nixon administration in the coup, there has been deafening silence. Even in a recently published piece by Jonathan Kendell titled "Pinochet - a symbol of human rights abuse", the myth that the good General was alone responsible for human right abuses is resurrected, as there is not a word about US involvement in the coup.7 The catalytic events that rescued scholarship from obfuscation and exposed the cosy links between Pinochet and US was the extradition attempt of the Spanish Judge who wanted Pinochet to stand trial for the torture of Spanish citizens. On the basis of a Spanish arrest warrant the British Government put him under house arrest after the good general finished sipping tea with his friend Margaret Thatcher. The arrest of Pinochet for human rights abuse and use of torture forced the Clinton administration to make public documents that threw light on U.S. efforts to promote a coup in Chile, to block Allende's election, and to destabilize his administration once it took office. Moreover ‘through Freedom of Information Act requests, and other avenues of declassification,’ adds Peter Kornbluh of the non-profit National Security Archives, ‘the national security archives has been able to compile a collection of declassified records that shed light on events in Chile between 1970 and 1976.’8 They also pointed to the active involvement of Henry Kissinger and other officials of the Nixon administration in aiding and supporting Pinochet. The newly declassified documents made available to the public are indispensable for the understanding of US involvement and support of the Chilean Military Junta, which overthrew the elected government of Allende. Of course the declassified documents released bear the heavy mark of censorship by CIA as vital information such as names and places were blacked out with thick lines. Nevertheless, it provided valuable information for researchers. ‘We have learned the details of how the CIA goes about trying to foment chaos in a small country like Chile’ says Kornbluh, ‘we have here a document, for example, which is a blueprint of the CIA plan to create a coup climate where one doesn’t exist.’ 9 The US involvement in Chile dates back to the rising popularity of Salvador Allende, a medical doctor, who came close to winning the 1958 election for presidency. Allende incurred the ire of the US establishment as his political philosophy represented a threat to US economic interests in Chile. At the end of 1968, U.S. corporate holdings in Chile amounted to $964 million. During that year, U.S. corporations averaged 17.4 percent profit on invested capital, and mining enterprises alone turned an average of 26 percent. Copper companies, notably Anaconda and Kennecott, accounted for 28 percent of U.S. holdings, but ITT had the largest holding of any single corporation with an investment of $200 million. According to Laura Allende "over a 42 year period the copper companies earned $420 billion on original investments totalling $35 million."10 Allende’s political programme was to redistribute the highly unequal income of Chile where 2% of the people received 46% of the income. His economic reforms included nationalization of major industries including copper industries, agrarian reforms and expanding the ties of his country with socialist countries. The American policy experts feared that Allende would steer Chile on an independent path, which would be inimical to US corporate interests. Earlier in the 1964 election the CIA mounted a disinformation campaign aiming at scaring women from voting for Allende. One radio spot had a sound of a machine gun firing with a woman crying out, “ They have killed my child -- the communists.” The massive scare propaganda which involved conjuring up images of Cuban firing squads and the rolling of Soviet tanks had the desired effect: Frei received 56% of the vote to Allende’s 39%. Apart from the propaganda blitz planned and executed by CIA, the CIA also funded several grass root organizations run by a Belgian Jesuit priest Roger Vekemans who came to Chile in 1957.The CIA gave him $5 million to support anti-Allende political parties such as the Christian Democrats. The organizations were in the forefront of preaching the gospel of anti-communism.11 As Allende still remained a credible threat to US corporate interests in the 1970 elections, ITT pumped in $700,000 to his opponent Jorge Allesandri of the conservative national party, and used the advice of the CIA on how to channel this money safely. The president of ITT Harold Geneen offered $1 million to the CIA to help defeat Allende. Once Allende got elected, ITT formed a committee representing US corporate interests to weaken the political support for Allende. The committee included Treasury Secretary John Connally and his assistant John Hennessy (a man with solid Wall Street connections).12 Other corporations pursued independent strategies to tighten the noose around Allende’s neck. On the basis of evidence available from the ITT papers and other sources indicated that Anaconda helped finance a campaign of disruption before the election, and that it also joined with Kennecott in what was effectively sabotage in the copper mines. Ralston Purina cut back production sharply. NIBSA, the leading producers of brass valves and other fittings, a subsidiary of Northern Indiana Brass Company, shut down its plant and laid off 280 workers the day before Allende's inauguration. A representative of the parent company, Northern Indiana Brass, was accused of suggesting an "Indonesian solution" (killing all communists) for Chile. Purina, a subsidiary of Ralston Purina and the country's largest producer of animal feed, also cut production sharply.13 In a concerted strategy to strangle the Chilean economy the US commercial banks such as Chase Manhattan, Chemical, First National City, Manufacturers Hanover, and Morgan Guaranty, cancelled credits to Chile. Kennecot filed lawsuits against the Chilean government preventing the export of copper and the government was saddled with $150,000 in legal expenses. The US government also got involved in the economic destabilization of Chile under Allende. ITT lobbied the US government and asked for its support in cutting off economic aid to Chile. As ITT had access to Kissinger, William Rogers and the CIA, this was easily achieved. After 1970, the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Agency for International Development, and the Export-Import Bank either cut programs in Chile or cancelled credits. The economy of Chile went into a tailspin. Its foreign reserves fell from $335 million in November 1970 to $100 million by the end of 1971. "Not a nut or bolt shall reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.” said Edward M. Korry, U.S. Ambassador to Chile, upon hearing the news of Allende’s election as president of Chile. The ITT memorandum circulated privately in 1970 stated the object of the strategy succinctly ‘A more realistic hope among those who want to block Allende is that a swiftly deteriorating economy will touch off a wave of violence leading coup.’ The words proved to be prophetic as the hostile economic measures ground the economy to a halt. Chile was unable to buy food, medicines and spare parts. The American suppliers refused to sell spare parts to Chile even when offers were made to pay for it in cash in advance. The microbuses, taxis and state owned were immobilized, as no spare parts were available. This in turn led to the trucker’s strike and more economic chaos.14 Though Allende’s economic policies are blamed in mainstream media for causing economic hardship for the people of Chile the real culprit is the deliberate policy of US administration and the corporations to destabilize the economy of Chile. Mass discontent surfaced among the middle class on account of shortage of food and other essential items. Many shopkeepers hoarded goods only to sell them on the black-market. Some strikes such as the trucker’s strike of 1972 were funded by CIA to cause disruption in the flow of commodities. Meanwhile there was a steady barrage of anti-Allende propaganda in the news media. One newspaper had the screaming headlines ‘ Economic chaos! Chile on brink of doom!’ Allende’s party Unidad Popular again won the election in 1973 assuring him another three years of power. This increasingly frustrated the US administration and the destabilization campaign against his government sharpened and increased in its intensity as the days rolled by. Daily, there were acts of terrorism and assassinations by right wing groups fomented by the CIA. On the fateful day of the coup, US navy ships were present outside the territorial waters of Chile. U.S. observation, communications, and fighter planes roamed the Chilean sky operating from a nearby base in Argentina. The September coup was successful and with Allende dead Pinochet took charge. Immediate financial and political support was granted to Pinochet by the U.S. government, including orders to the CIA to "assist the junta in gaining a more positive image, both at home and abroad."15 For the people of Chile the legacy of Pinochet’s 17-year military rule was a painful one as more than 3000 people were either executed or simply disappeared. Another estimate puts death toll at 20,000 Chileans killed or disappeared and thousands more imprisoned and tortured. ‘Nobody knows how many people died during the coup,’ says BBC, ‘ but it goes without saying that many more died in the ensuing weeks and the military dictatorship that followed. Chilean liberals of all walks of life were rounded up and were either executed or #39;disappeared'.’16 The dreaded secret police DINA inflicted gruesome tortures on political opponents of the regime and many were thrown into the sea from the helicopters supplied by US with their bellies slit so that they would sink. The traumatic effect of the Pinochet genocide multiplies when the anguish of the victim’s relatives is taken into account. The curtain came down on the Pinochet regime in 1990 when he handed over power to the civilian government after losing the 1988 referendum for the continuation of military rule. He remained Commander-in-Chief of the Army, until March 1998. His last years were spent in obscurity until he gained international prominence for the wrong reasons, namely, his indictment for tax evasion and also for his indictment for the kidnapping and murder of Allende's bodyguards. He was placed under house arrest. He was also dogged by controversies relating to his amassing huge wealth and stashing it in foreign bank accounts under fictitious names. Pinochet died at the age of 91. In the obituaries the mainstream media blamed the good General for his genocide but a few such as the Economist record that the General ‘ rescued Chile from communism and went to turn it into the fastest-growing economy in Latin America by applying free market policies.’17 Of course this is another spin of the media and figures flatly contradict the myth of economic miracle of Chile under Pinochet. After Allende’s overthrow, national output dropped 15%, the unemployment rate rose to 20%, and wage reductions averaged 15%. If one compares the miracle years of Pinochet with production level of Chile at Allende’s time then a different picture emerges: Chile’s GDP in 1986 had only regained the 1970 level, real wages were still depressed, per capita consumption was 15% lower. In the next five years (1985-1990) the income of the top 10% increased by 90% while the share of wealth for the poorest 25% declined from 11% to 7%. The share of national income for labour fell from 47.7% in 1970 to 19% in 1990. 18 The economic legacy of the Pinochet regime could be best described as dubious. Pinochet who was known as the 'General with Dark Glasses' puzzled both his admirers and his opponents alike as to why he wore them. In an interview given in USA Today, Nov. 23, 1999 the good General candidly admitted, "Wearing dark glasses was a way of communicating. Lies are uncovered through eye movements, and I, on many occasions, was lying." For once the good general spoke the truth. 1: The Independent online edition- 13 December 2006. 2: Testimony: Detainee remembers Chile 1973-BBC News- Friday, 23 October 1998.3: Testimony: Detainee remembers Chile 1973-BBC News- Friday, 23 October 1998. 4: 30 years since Chilean coup ousted President Allende - The World Today - Friday, 12 September 2003 5: State Terrorism and September 11, 1973 and 2001 - Roger Burbach 08 September 20036: Pinochet and the Amnesia of the US Press - Roger Burbach7: Pinochet- a symbol of human rights abuse- Jonathan Kendell- New York Times News service.8: Chile and United States - declassified documents relating to the military coup, September 11, 1973- Peter Kornbluh.9: Online Newshour- Pursuing the Past- February 20, 2001.10: US responsibility for the coup in Chile - Daniel Brandt.11: Killing Hope - William Blum-ZED books-pages 207-208.12: US responsibility for the coup in Chile- Daniel Brandt.13: Gary MacEoin, No Peaceful Way: Chile's Struggle for Dignity, pp. 91-2.14: Allende’s Chile: An Inside View - Edward Bornstein- also refer How Allende Fell - James Petras and Morris.H. Morley.15: Pinochet and the Unraveling of the American Century - S. Brian Wilson-199916: 11 September 1973 - The Day Democracy Died in Chile - BBC.17: The passing of a tyrant - The Economist - December 16th 2006.18: Economic Democracy - J.W.Smith- page 159.

A Tinto Brass fan and a cynical Bangalorean who's been known to display Chomsky-ist leanings.

The Dark Side Of Development Aid

Socrates — Wed, 6 Dec 2006 02:26:31 EST

'Public money is like holy water: everyone helps himself to it' - Italian proverb.The stereotyped image of a western aid worker is part of media folklore: a white woman dressed in pale blue frock, tired but pretty, measuring the circumference of black children’s arms or distributing biscuits to listless children with distended bellies. She is also seen on the scene of appalling epidemics directing workers to dig pit latrines. This powerful image is reinforced by the electronic media making the aid worker a potent symbol of the fundamental decency and rightness of international aid.The emotional appeal of mass suffering is strong and direct. The Pavlovian reflex is to reach for the chequebook and make contributions to voluntary charitable organizations such as Oxfam, World Vision, CARE Incorporated and Medecins Sans Frontieres. Voluntary agencies rake in huge funds estimated to be in the region of $2.4 billion a year to finance humanitarian aid work in poor countries.[1] The media attention on the Ethiopian famine raised the contributions to $ 4 billion in 1985. Total aid in 1987 was just over $50 billion. In the nineties it rose to $60 billion and today it is still growing.Hancock’s book, The Lords of Poverty is a passionate denunciation of the freewheeling lifestyles, prestige and corruption of the multibillion-dollar aid business. He points out that the charitable impulse is often exploited with appropriate media hype to make refugee crisis, earthquakes, floods and other catastrophes into money-spinners. The impulse, argues the author, is a double-edged sword as it on one hand raises huge money and on the other it stifles questions about the use of the money.The author is at his polemical best when he demolishes the myths of aid agencies. For instance, the Hunger Project received donations totaling $6,981,005 in 1985. Out of which a sum of $210,775 was passed on as grants to organizations involved in relief work. But the rest a staggering sum of around $6,770,000 was spent on enrollment services, committee activities, and fund raising and phone bills.[2] In 1984 The Hunger Project’s British office raised British pounds 192,658 from the public of which a paltry sum of pounds 7,048 went to the third world.[3]In 1985, International Christian Aid (ICA), a large US voluntary organization, failed to send a single cent to Ethiopia out of the $16 million raised for famine relief.[4] A close analysis of ICA’s 1983 expenditure showed that just 41% of its income went towards its humanitarian objectives. A similar example is that of Dallas based relief organization, Priority One International, which spent 18 cents out of every dollar it received for charity.[5]Disillusioned with his own experience as aid worker in Ethiopia during the famine in 1984-85, Hancock wryly observes that contrary to media reports that play up the relief workers as hard pressed saints, recipients of charity have expressed doubts about those who come to help. As one African refugee cheekily asked, ‘Why is it that every US dollar comes with twenty Americans attached to it?’[6] The truth of the matter is that in many third world disasters, considerable amount of money is spent on the expertise provided by the Americans and Europeans.According to a detailed report on refugee relief in South-East Asia most of the Red Cross staff enjoyed the food imported from Europe while the refugees starved. In Thailand the Swiss went in air-conditioned cars and spend their weekends on the beach.6 At the height of the drought in Sudan in 1985, the Hilton Hotel in Khartoum (room rent of $150) was full with aid workers to assess the tragedy.[7]‘The folly, irrelevance- and sometimes dangerous idiocy of much that passes as humanitarian assistance’ writes Hancock ‘are not publicized by the agencies.’[8] Hancock cites documented proof of relief work in Somalia where refrigerators flown in from US proved useless as they operated on 110 volts while in Africa they had to operate on 220 volts. Laxatives and anti-indigestion remedies were other favorites among aid agencies that were required to provide relief to the hungry. A Public Health Official in Nicaragua exasperatedly said, ‘whenever anybody donates a medicine, there just seems to be an overdose of milk of magnesia. We said we could use it to whitewash the building.’[9] Other useless items shipped to hot African countries were electric blankets and frostbite medicines from USA. Huge consignments of Go-slim soup and chocolate flavored drinks for diet conscious consumers were sent to starving Somalians.[10] Flimsy shoes were sent as emergency aid to Mozambique where woman have to walk several miles to fetch water.More controversially, the author asks a question which is central to the economies of the developing world, is aid helping the poor countries? Or is it creating dependency, which is exploited by the West? Hancock addresses the issue with a bluntness that is both honest and refreshing. According to him if all financial flows from North (Rich nations) to South (Poor nations) and from South to North are totaled an interesting fact emerges: since the early 1980’s as a result of decline of new lending by private banks coupled with repayments of high interest rates on old loans, the wealthy countries have been net recipients of funds from third world and not net donors to it even when Overseas Development assistance is taken into account. The amounts paid towards debt servicing by the poorer countries to rich countries between 1980 and 2001 came to $4,500 billion.[11] Thus the notion that the Rich countries aid or help third world countries is highly suspect on the basis of the negative transfers alone.‘In these closing years of the twentieth century’, concludes the author, ‘the time has come for the lords of poverty to depart. Perhaps when the middlemen of the aid industry have been shut out it will become possible for people to rediscover ways to help one another directly according to their needs and aspirations as they themselves define them.’[12] Only then we shall repudiate the false claims of the lords of poverty and discover the true meaning of economic empowerment. ----------[1] Aid for Development: The Key Issues, World Bank, Washington, DC, 1986.[2] National Charities Information Bureau, New York, 29 April 1986.[3] Sunday Times, London, 7 December 1986[4] Daily Mail, London, 14 January 1985.[5] Lords of Poverty, Graham Hancock, page 6.[6] Lords of Poverty, Graham Hancock, page 7.[6] Quality of Mercy, William Shawcross.[7] Lords of Poverty, Graham Hancock, page 8.[8] Lords of Poverty, Graham Hancock, page 12. [9] Plain dealer, quoted in Lords of Poverty, page 13.[10] Help Yourself: The Politics of Aid, Third World first Links Magazine no 20, Oxford, September 1984.[11] Who owes who, global Issues, page 83.[12] Lords of Poverty, Graham Hancock, page193.

A Tinto Brass fan and a cynical Bangalorean who's been known to display Chomsky-ist leanings.

The Fading American Dream

Socrates — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 02:40:33 EDT

"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.”-Woodrow Wilson [U.S. President during World War I] The policies of George W Bush can be construed as a significant event in American politics. For it has deeply polarized America into one deeply conservative dominated by militia groups, right wing Christian organizations and the other liberal which is steeped in the ideals of an egalitarian society.The truth of the matter is that the Christian Right, a dogmatic religious movement, is an important constituent of Bush’s Republican Party. They are also the biggest backers of Israel and Bush’s planned war against Iraq. According to Jim Lobe (Conservative Christians Biggest Backers of Iraq War) 69% of conservative Christians favored the war against Iraq. Almost two thirds of evangelical Christians supported Israel’s military action against the Palestinians[1].The Christian Right denounces abortion, gay marriages and opposes contraception and birth control. They are against the use of condoms to prevent AIDS. Since 2001 the Far Right Christian fundamentalists have assumed positions of power in the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Drug Administration and on commissions and advisory committees.The profiles of the appointees are controversial and make disturbing reading. Tom Coburn former Republican Congressman who was appointed to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS is reported to have forced condom manufacturers to label their products as ineffective. Dr. Joseph McIlhaney, Jr, appointed on the HIV and AIDS advisory council has a long and well-documented history of disseminating misleading data on condom failure rates. Dr. W. David Hager, appointed to the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee, is opposed to contraception. Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, appointed to the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee, is a strong advocate of abstinence and "rhythm method." Dr. Alma Golden, a Texas pediatrician who was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Population Affairs is a longtime proponent of abstinence as the only acceptable means of birth control. “Three years later this administration”, writes Stephen Pizzo in his article The Christian Taliban, “has established one of the most rigid sexual health agendas in the Western world”[2].Christian fundamentalism in America is the self appointed moral conscience of the American Creed and is rooted in religious intolerance. It believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, which is the master plan of God. The Holy Book is the source of wisdom of all matters social, political, and religious[3]. Its worldview is couched in delusional terms with the forces of evil powerfully ranged against it. As Pat Robertson says, ‘It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-biased media and the homosexuals who want to destroy all Christians.’ Paul Weyrich (founder of the Heritage Foundation and the free Congress Foundation) expresses his concern in Manichean terms; “"This [opposition to gay rights, abortion and feminism] is really the most significant battle of the age-old conflict between good and evil, between the forces of God and the forces against God."In the sphere of education, Christian Fundamentalists aggressively promote creationism, a doctrine that holds the view that earth was created only a few thousand years ago and not billions of years ago as modern science indicates. There is antipathy to the theory of evolution and Darwin is the devil incarnate.[4] Equally disturbing and ominous to the health of the American Republic is the growth of Militia Groups, which share a common platform with the Christian right in their denunciation of multiculturalism. The militia movement is the strange amalgam of race, religion and politics. The philosophy of the militia groups is the unfettered right of individuals to bear arms. The militia groups suffer from psychotic victim complex with the irrational belief that their government and the UN are persecuting it. The Aryan Nation, another militant group, espouses the cause of White Supremacy. In the church of Jesus Christ at Northern Idaho there is the sign at the entrance ‘For Whites Only’ along with the portrait of Hitler. One of the most notorious examples in recent times is that of Timothy McVeigh who was executed for bombing a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Since his execution, McVeigh has become a martyr in the annals of the Militia movement[5].Combined with the growth of Christian fundamentalism and militia groups is the ascendancy of free market ideology. The mythology of free market is that business is hampered by the nanny state. If the invisible hand of the market were allowed a free hand then there would be wealth creation. Free market ideology demands that the state should be a disinterested spectator while the businessmen go about their elusive quest of the market.In reality, free market requires the strong support of the state. The economic history of the United States illustrates this fact forcefully: The American State vigorously intervened in the economic life of the nation. As John Gray astutely observed that the foundations of American prosperity were laid behind the walls of high tariffs. Federal and State government were active in building railways and highways. The U.S. economy was opened up with an arsenal of government subsidies[6]. Much of American big business received the largesse of the state in the form of subsidies, tax cuts and tariff protection. Corporate critic Ralph Estes estimated that the public money flowing into corporate coffers in the year 1994 alone was in the region of more than two trillion dollars. Welfare measures for the poor and the vulnerable were pared to the bone.The direct consequence of market fundamentalism was the creation of economic insecurity by the deliberate government policy of freeing corporations from its social obligations. The freedom of the corporate executives to downsize the labor force, to hire and fire its workers at will destroyed the trust of the workforce[7]. From 1987 to 1991 big American corporations lowered their net payroll by 2.4 million workers. The downsizing happened when corporations made huge earnings. The profits went to the shareholders and CEO’s who gave generous compensation packages to themselves. This cynical practice produced a crippling sense of economic insecurity among the wage earners. Edward Luttwak in his article, Turbo-charged Capitalism and its Consequences, commented that most working Americans, lacking the formal safeguards of European employment protection laws or prolonged post employment benefits and the substantial liquid savings of their middleclass counterparts in all other developed countries, must rely wholly on their jobs for economic security and live in conditions of chronic acute insecurity. The sense of insecurity has enveloped the entire middleclass including professionals, as they must live on a day-to-day basis without knowing whether they would retain their jobs[8].More worrying is that though in the American economy there has been a steady rise in productivity in the past two decades yet the incomes for the majority has fallen or stagnated. According to Professor Edward Wolf the richest one per cent of the household owns 38% of all wealth. By 1998 the top 5% had more wealth than the 95% of the population. The bottom 20% has no wealth or savings.[9] The statistics on Income inequality is equally gloomy: over the last two decades the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest of families grew from 11 times to 19 times. According to a survey conducted by the Fortune magazine showed that in the 70’s real annual compensation for the top 100 CEO’s of American corporations averaged $1.3 million which was about 39 times more pay than that of an average worker. By the end of 1990’s the gap widened: the top Fortune 100 CEO’s took home $37.5 million or 1000 times more pay than the average American worker. Real incomes have stagnated at the middle level and declined at the bottom.Jared Bernstein, the co-author of The State of Working America 2002/2003, argues that in order to understand why a particular occupation pays less now than it did 20 years ago one has to look at structural changes such as higher unemployment, fewer union protections, lower minimum wages, large and unsustainable trade imbalances. Those are the kinds of factors that work against non-college-educated workers that find themselves with less bargaining power and thus are less able to claim their fair share of the growth.The deregulated labour market with fewer union protection and lower minimum wages has led to the creation of the underclass, rise in crime, and social tension. The unemployment levels are high among the blacks and racial minorities. The crackdown on crime and drug abuse has increased the prison population. In the last twenty years, the US prison population has risen by 566 per cent, from 300,000 inmates in 1981 to nearly 2 million in 1999. The alarming fact, often suppressed in the mainstream media, is that the rise in US prison population is unprecedented in democratic society. The United States outstrips other developed countries in its rates of imprisonment- 645 detainees per 100,000 of population, which is 6-10 times higher than that of the countries of the European Union[10]. La Monde Diplomatique says that the US prison system makes a direct contribution to regulating the lower segments of the labour market[11]. Recent figures available suggest that about two million persons are incarcerated in US prisons. “This means”, says Dermot Sreenan in his article “The United States of Captivity”, “that the prison population of the USA accounts for 25% of the entire prison population of the world. This figure is even more startling when you discover that the US only accounts for 5% of the global population”. The American Dream has turned sour. The power of the American Republic has passed from the hands of its people. Over the years the elected representatives have surrendered the mandate of the people to corporate elites: a regime change without the consent of the people. Social and Economic issues that affect the interests of the majority are framed to suit narrow corporate interests. The vision of the founding fathers of the Constitution has been subverted by stilling the voice of the people. The firewall between the Government and Corporations so essential for democracy has crumbled by the flooding of corporate money into government. The scandal of Enron, which for many years paid thousands of dollars to the Highest-ranking Washington politicians, exposed the cozy relationship between business and the Government. The government of the people, by the people, for the people, has faded for most of the Americans. 1 Conservative Christians Biggest Backers of Iraq War - Jim Lobe - October 10, 2002 - Commondreams.org 2 The Christian Taliban - Stephen Pizzo - March 28, 2004 - Alternet.org3 Fundamentalist World - Stuart Sim - Icon books -page13.4 Fundamentalist World - Stuart Sim- Icon books-pages 13-14.5 Fundamentalist World - Stuart Sim- Icon books-pages 10-11.6 False Dawn - John Gray - Granta - pages 104-105.7 False Dawn - John Gray - Granta - page-1088 Turbo-charged Capitalism and its Consequences - Edward Luttwak - London Review of Books - 2 November 1995- page 7.9 The Wealth Divide - The growing gap in the United States between the Rich and the Rest - Edward Wolf - Multinational Monitor - May 2003 - VOLUME 24 - NUMBER 5. 10 The Independent magazine 15 May 1999 quoted in The Week "America: the world's new gulag?" by Sasha Sabramski; 11 Le Monde Diplomatique July 1998 "Imprisoning the American Poor" by Loic Wacquant

A Tinto Brass fan and a cynical Bangalorean who's been known to display Chomsky-ist leanings.

Policing Urban Crimes: The Broken Windows Theory

Socrates — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:10:35 EDT

He who steals an egg steals an ox. - A French saying quoted from The Scholarly Myths of the New Law and Order by DoxaJust two days before the French riots of Oct 27,2005, sparked by the deaths of two African teenagers in the underprivileged northeastern suburbs of Paris, the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy famously remarked, "Vous en avez assez de cette bande de racaille? Eh bien, on va vous en débarrasser." ("You've had enough of the dregs of society? Well, we're going to get rid of them for you.”) The Interior Minister took a tough stand on fighting crime on the streets by saying that certain cities in France needed ‘nettoyer au Kärcher’ (power washing). These comments proved inflammatory among the poor African youth, already facing racism, and the riots soon spread to nearly 300 cities of France leading to widespread torching of cars and destruction of public property.From the perspective of criminology, Mr. Sarkozy’s semantics about fighting crime and enforcing order is certainly colourful and controversial but conceptually not a novel idea. His police strategy towards urban crime is borrowed from the key concepts of broken windows and zero tolerance enunciated in American criminology. In fact, "over the past several years French politicians (as well as their English, Italian, Spanish, and German colleagues) of the Left as well as the Right," writes Loic Wacquant, "have travelled as one on a pilgrimage, to signify their newfound resolve to crush the scourge of street crime and, for this purpose, to initiate themselves into the concepts and measures adopted by the US authorities."[1] This new security doxa found favour with liberals as it was perceived as a rational policy resting on effectiveness and seemingly devoid of any ideological bias. The concept of broken windows was developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling who published their article titled Broken Windows: The police and Neighbour Safety in the March, 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. The authors posited their theory in the following words: "Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in run-down ones. Window breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing (it has always been fun)."[2] "The essence of Broken Windows," explains Charles Pollard, "is that minor incivilities (such as drunkenness, begging, vandalism, disorderly behaviour, graffiti, litter etc.), if unchecked and uncontrolled, produce an atmosphere in a community or on a street in which more serious crime will flourish."[3] In other words, crimes flourish because of lax enforcement. The prescription for broken windows is to shift policing from major crimes to traditional public order maintenance. As Wilson and Kelling note, ‘A great deal was accomplished during this transition, as both police chiefs and outside experts emphasized the crime-fighting function in their plans, in the allocation of resources, and in deployment of personnel. The police may well have become better crime-fighters as a result. And doubtless they remained aware of their responsibility for order. But the link between order-maintenance and crime-prevention, so obvious to earlier generations, was forgotten.[4] Nearly after a decade of the publication of the article the theory of broken windows was put to practice by the Republican Mayor Rudy Guiliani across New York City. He appointed William Bratton as the Commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) in 1994. The Guiliani-Bratton team honed to perfection a police strategy called Zero Tolerance, which some scholars point out was derived from the Broken Windows theory to tackle the high incidence of crimes in New York City. Bratton explains the theory in his paper Crime is Down in New York City: Blame the Police.[5] The paper lucidly expounds the specific strategy used in fighting street disorder and crimes, which plagued the streets of New York. A close reading of the paper gives one the impression that there was heavy emphasis on concentrated aggression and ruthless prosecution of petty crimes. Bratton chose to focus police action on subway fare evaders and homeless people who lived in the subways of New York. Soon the subways were declared crime free and reclaimed for the benefit of the citizens. Other offenders targeted were jaywalkers, the squeegee men (individuals who cleaned the windshields of cars trapped in traffic snarls and coercing the motorists to pay for their services), panhandlers, drunks, noisy teenagers and streetwalkers. The aggressive policing included searches, sweeps and arrests of individuals found loitering in streets even though they had not committed any crime under law. There was reorganization of the police force by flattening hierarchies and empowering the captains of precincts. Police officers were judged by statistical figures of arrests they made and promotions given. The police forces were expanded significantly from 27000 (1993) to 41000 (2001). Information technology was deployed and officers had greater access to computers. There was compilation of crime statistics, sharing of data, which made police deployments to crime-affected areas more effective.[6] Under Bratton, the NYPD became a formidable machine with an offensive outlook on crime and disorder. There is general agreement among academicians of criminal jurisprudence that crime in New York did drop. Murder decreased by 72% and total violent crimes by 51%. The remarkable turnaround in crime rates were largely seen as attributable to broken windows or its semantic variant, quality-of-life policing adopted by NYPD. Conservative policy makers lauded the efforts of Giuliani and Bratton in cleaning the streets of New York and assertively claimed that other states would do well to follow the Bratton Miracle. The influential Manhattan Institute together with the Giuliani Group has been propagating the policing philosophy to Latin America for curbing urban crimes. In the year 1998 alone nearly police officials from 150 countries visited NYPD to learn about the innovative techniques of crime control. In recent years the broken windows theory and the order maintenance strategy has been in the eye of a perfect storm. A note of dissent was struck by Bernard E. Harcourt, a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard University, who said, "the difficulty is that there is no good evidence for the theory that disorder causes crime. To the contrary, the most reliable social scientific evidence suggests that the theory is wrong. The popularity of the broken windows theory, it turns out, is inversely related to the quality of the supporting evidence."[7] Harcourt backs his conclusion by relying on a comprehensive study conducted by Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush on disorder in urban neighbourhoods. This study was based on careful data collection using trained observers. On a random basis, 15,141 streets of Chicago were selected for analysis. Sampson and Raudenbush found that disorder and predatory crime are moderately correlated, but that, when antecedent neighborhood characteristics (such as neighborhood trust and poverty) are taken into account, the connection between disorder and crime "vanished in 4 out of 5 tests—including homicide, arguably our best measure of violence." Sampson and Raudenbush conclude that attacking public order through tough police tactics may thus be a politically popular but perhaps analytically weak strategy to reduce crime.[8] Similar doubts were voiced by other research scholars who expressed grave reservation about adopting the New York style of policing. On the basis of a cross-city comparison of policing strategies and homicide rates, Anna Joanes observed that all of this attention has not been positive, as many NYC residents and observers have blamed this policy for the rise in police brutality and racial tensions and the loss of trust and respect for the police. New York has not achieved a greater crime reduction than that of all other U.S. cities. In fact, the three cyclical measures reveal that New York City’s decline was either equal to or below that of several other large cities, including San Francisco, San Jose, Cleveland, San Diego, Washington, St. Louis, and Houston. These other cities employ a variety of policing strategies. The fact that cities like San Diego and San Francisco employed different policing strategies but have experienced similar declines in their crime rates calls into question the claim that the NYPD’s tactics have produced an unrivaled decrease in crime.[9] According to Wacquant it is not the police who make crime go away. A trenchant critic of Giuliani-Bratton police work, Waquant puts forth the view that six factors independent of police work have significantly reduced crime rates in America. First, the boom in economy provided jobs for youth and diverted them from street crimes. Even though the official poverty rate of New York City remained unchanged at 20% during the entire decade of the 1990s, Latinos benefited by the deskilled labour market. The blacks, buoyed by the hope of the flourishing economy, went back to school and avoided illegal trade. Thus even though under-employment and low paid work persisted there was decline of aggregate unemployment rates which explains 30% decrease in national crime rates. Second, there was twofold transformation in drug trade. The retail trade in crack in poor neighbourhoods attained stability. The turf wars subsided and violent competition among rival gangs decreased. The narcotic sector had become oligopolised. This resulted in a sharp drop in drug related street murders. In 1998 it dropped below the one hundred mark from 670 murders in 1991. The change in consumption of drugs went from crack to other drugs such as marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamines, a trade which is less violent as it is based on networks of mutual acquaintances rather than anonymous exchange places. Third, the number of young people (age group between 18-24) declined. It must be noted that the young people in this age group are found most responsible for crimes. The AIDS epidemic among drug users, drug overdose deaths, gang related homicides and young criminals imprisoned eliminated this group by 43,000. This decline of young people resulted in the drop of street crimes by 1/10th. Fourth, the impact of learning effect that the deaths of earlier generations of young people had on the later generation, especially those born after 1975-1980, avoided drugs and stayed away from risky life styles. Fifth, the role played by churches, schools, clubs and other organizations in awareness and prevention campaigns exercised informal social control and helped to control crimes. Sixth, the statistical law of regression states that when there is abnormally high incidence of crime it is likely to decline and settle towards the mean.[10] Wacquant concludes that the dynamic interplay of the six factors was largely responsible for the drop in crime rates in America and the claim that policing alone was responsible for the drop in crimes at best rests on shaky empirical data.The concept of broken windows rests on a slippery theoretical slope. More problematic is the underlying notion that focusing "police activity on those social categories presumed to be crime vectors" could prevent crimes. The danger inherent in such a notion is that the police functionaries would be in a position to extra-legally harass the homeless, the destitute and the minorities. This has been well documented by law enforcement officials, academics and human rights groups. In a study conducted in 1999 by the New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer with the help of Columbia University’s Centre for Violence Research and Prevention, Spitzer concluded "in aggregate across all crime categories and precincts citywide, blacks were 'stopped' 23% more often (in comparison to the crime rate) than whites. Hispanics were 'stopped' 39% more often than whites." The racially discriminatory pattern is evident from the statistics available for the U.S.A. as a whole and for New York City, which shows that adults arrested for misdemeanors are disproportionately African –American in relation to their representation in the community.[11] The experience in other parts of the world has not been an encouraging one. For instance, The New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties has recorded that the zero tolerance policing has been racially discriminatory to the Arabic-speaking people.[12] Similarly, in South Africa there have been doubts whether zero tolerance would be acceptable to the public, as the memories of the repressive apartheid regime remains fresh in the minds of the people.[13]In the final analysis, the implementation of order maintenance policing may destroy the diversity and vitality of democratic society. As Bernard Harcourt eloquently sums up:"It is, in effect, a type of 'aesthetic policing' that fosters a sterile, Disneyland, consumerist, commercial aesthetic. It reflects a desire to transform New York City into Singapore, or worse, a shopping mall. The truth is, however, that when we lose the dirt, grit, and street life of major American cities, we may also threaten their vitality, creativity, and character." [14][1] The 'Scholarly Myths' of the New Law and Order Doxa. Loic Wacquant, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley.[2] Wilson, James Q, and Kelling, George. Broken Windows: The Police and Neighbourhood Safety. Atlantic Monthly, March 1982.[3] Charles Pollard. Zero Tolerance: Short-term fix, long-term liability? [4] Wilson, James Q., and Kelling, George. Broken Windows: The Police and Neighbourhood Safety. Atlantic Monthly, March 1982.[5] William Bratton. Crime is Down in New York City: Blame the Police. IEA Welfare Unit, Revised Second Edition, January 1998.[6] Randall G. Shelden. Assessing “Broken Windows’: A Brief Critique. Center On Juvenile And Criminal Justice.[7] Bernard E Harcourt. Policing Disorder. Boston Review.[8] Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush. Systematic Social Observation of Public Places: A New look at Disorder in Urban Neighbourhoods. American Journal of Sociology, 105 (2000): 637,638.[9] Ann Joanes. Does New York City Police Department deserve credit for the decline in New York City’s homicide rates? Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems, 33 (3): Spring 2000.[10] The’ Scholarly Myths’ of the New Law and Order Doxa. Loic Wacquant, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley.[11] Spitzer, ‘Stop and frisk’ practices. 89,123.[12] Zero Policing and Arabic-speaking young people. Micheal Hartley Kennedy, New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties, 2001.[13] Zero Tolerance: The hard edge of community Policing. Bill Dixon. African Security Review, Volume 9, No. 3, 2000.[14] Policing Disorder. Bernard E. Harcourt. Boston Review.

A Tinto Brass fan and a cynical Bangalorean who's been known to display Chomsky-ist leanings.

Western State Terrorism: The London Connection

Socrates — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:54:55 EDT

Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State, once said, " Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role." The Bush-Blair axis lays bare the dilemma faced by the British ruling elite after the end of the Second World War. The Empire collapsed and Britain's status in the world was greatly reduced to that of a second rate power. The political elite including the top echelons of the Foreign Office formulated the strategy of playing the second fiddle to US global interests. The essence of the Special Relationship is for Britain to align itself politically as a junior partner in an orbit of power predominantly under American aegis as a way of preserving some great power status. In his book Web of Deceit, Mark Curtis, a former research scholar at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, has written a searing indictment of British Foreign policy and ' rescues the historical and documentary record from a web of distortion and self-serving illusion'. "The Washington - London axis is not only special to the two elites; it has been a pillar of world order for over five decades" writes Curtis, "The two leading western powers have, since 1945, colluded to shape the global economy and much of international affairs to their interests. The US has clearly led the strategy, which in the early postwar years meant replacing British power with their own, notably in the middle-east;" Britain plays a secondary role in supporting brutal family regimes in the Gulf States which maintain the oil order to favour Western (US and British interests). In the United Nations, Britain serves US interests by voting for US in the Security Council resolutions. In Economic forums, Britain aggressively pursues economic liberalisation to aid US and British businesses. Under the New Labour Government of Tony Blair the relationship has only deepened with the US in a number of ways. Blair is clearly an uncritical supporter of Bush's illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the US-Britain relationship eerily resembles the client/satellite relationship of the erstwhile USSR and its allies. British Ministers and senior diplomats serve as US diplomats to push through the resolutions of its Big Brother at the UN. Sharp differences rose when US imposed tariffs on British steel in early 2002, which were swiftly patched up to pound defenseless countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan to submission. Tony Blair, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, is the newest US ambassador and he relishes his role as the top advisor for Bush. He is the chief propagandist for the Bush government and is a master of telling half-truths. For his domestic constituency, there is constant spin that his Faustian pact with the Neo-Liberal Bush administration is imbued with benevolence and high moral purpose. When it came to power in 1997, the New Labour tom-tom was the high ethical purpose of its foreign policy and its 'force for good in the world'. One of the classic exponents of the hoax was none other than Robin Cook, the foreign Secretary, who declared that the new foreign policy under Tony Blair would have an ethical dimension. When asked to provide one example of the ethical dimension, he replied that continuing the sanctions against Iraq would be one such instance. The grotesque irony was lost on the media that the illegal sanctions killed thousands of Iraqi women and children.Britain's basic benevolence in foreign policy is largely in the realms of myth making. It is to the credit of scholars such as Mark Curtis who cut through the "Big Lie" layer by layer and exposed the mendacious nature of British imperialism. Delving into official records available in the Public Record Office in London, he constructs a frightening picture of cruelty, venality and hypocrisy of the British elite in pursuit of its imperial agenda.In recent times, Britain's sordid record as a gross violator of human rights dates back to 1948 when she declared emergency in Malaya and began a particularly vicious war against the poor and marginalised Chinese labour force. A Colonial Office report in 1950 disclosed that Malaya's rubber and tin mining industries were the biggest earners for primarily British businesses. As the conditions in the mines owned by British capital was appalling, the Chinese workers struck and demanded better wages and living conditions. The strikes caused financial losses to the British interests and brought about draconian measures being imposed on the trade unions. To counter the insurgency force of the Malay Chinese of around 3000-6000 Britain conducted 4500 airstrikes in the first five years of the war. Close to 709000 pounds of bombs were dropped on the insurgent encampments. 500-lb fragmentation bombs (forerunner of the notorious cluster bomb) were also used in the unequal conflict between the British Military and the insurgents. Defoliants supplied by the Chemical giant ICA were widely used to destroy crops. Systematic torture was used in interrogation procedures of the British forces to elicit information about the whereabouts of the insurgents. Decapitation of dead guerillas served as means of identification especially when the bodies were rotting in the jungles. Displaying dead bodies of the guerillas in public was another barbaric method to instill fear in the Chinese squatters. As the Scotsman newspaper quaintly observed it was good practice as ' simple-minded Chinese are told and come to believe that the communist leaders are invulernable.' The insurgency was crushed but that did not prevent the notorious Sir Gerald Templer, the High Commissioner of Colonial Malaya, to fatuously observe ' the answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in winning the hearts and minds of the people.' The hearts and minds of the Malay Chinese were won by putting into effect the infamous Briggs Plan. This resettlement programme forcibly evicted the Chinese squatters from their villages and located them in a new village surrounded by barbed wires with searchlights round the periphery to keep an eye on the movements of the squatters at night. The resettlement camp was nothing but a concentration camp. The resettlement camp was source of cheap labour for the rubber estates. The brutal campaign ended on a self-congratulatory note for the British commercial interests. After all, the Chinese workers learnt the spiritual joy of hard work in rubber estates and their vagrant minds were disciplined for their own good. However, the true nature of the repression surfaced when a lord blurted out 'What we should do without Malaya, and its earnings in tin and rubber, I do not know.' The British involvement in destabilizing the legally constituted government of Iran hardly finds mention in the mainstream British media. In August 1953, the M16 and the CIA organised a coup that overthrew the popular and democratically elected government of Mohamed Musaddiq and installed the brutal Shah of Iran. Britain's Churchill waxed lyrical about the operation and told the CIA agent who masterminded the operation that he 'would have loved nothing better than to have served under your command in this great venture.' The bone of contention was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company- later called British Petroleum, which was controlled and owned by British Government and British Investors. Under the popular government of Mussaddiq uncomfortable questions were asked about the sharing of oil revenues and the resentment grew among the nationalist forces in Iran as to why the government of Iran should get less revenues than AIOC. The dispute soon snowballed into a major crisis with the government of Musaddiq nationalizing the oil operations in May 1951. The Iranian government offered compensation that was legitimate from the perspective of international Law but it angered Britain. From that point onwards the government of Musaddiq was marked for a coup. Sir Donald Logan of the British Embassy in Iran declared 'Our policy was to get rid of Mossadeq as soon as possible.' The British preferred a strong dictator who could settle the issue of oil in favour of British interests without messy public discussion in the parliament.A fake mob bribed with CIA and M16 money staged huge demonstrations in Tehran. The mob was shown as the members of the Iranian Communist Party (Tudeh) to provide the pretext for the coup. Some were agents for the British who threw rocks at the mosques. The Shah's forces were completely equipped by the Americans with military hardware and after savage fighting in the capital the government of Musaddiq was defeated. The British elite claimed that Iran was free from Communism and blessed the murderous dictator Shah to rule Iran with an iron fist. Free Iranian citizens experienced their taste of freedom in the torture chambers of Shah's secret police the SAVAK. CIA trained the agents of SAVAK in gruesome torture techniques and the British M16 gave an advanced course in methods of persuasion. By all standards the Shah's regime topped the torture charts. The Shah was a star pupil that made the thickset master of Realpolitik Henry Kissinger to sing praises about his protégé ' the Shah is the rarest of leaders.' This rare leader and faithful ally of Anglo-American oil interests went on a blood bath killing 10,000 Iranians. The Shah met his fate in a revolution spearheaded by the Islamic clerics that toppled him. The intense anti-western feelings have their roots in the Anglo-American complicity of propping up the Shah of Iran that destroyed Iran's democratic institutions. The contemporary events in Iran suggest a twist of irony: The country is constantly lectured on its human rights violations by the duo Bush-Blair and to add to its poignant woes, it enjoys the dubious distinction of being called a Rogue State by US and Britain. With a kind of monotonous regularity that numbs the senses, theBritish Colonial Policy in Kenya has pursued in the same brutal and cynical fashion bereft of any moral or ethical values. In 1952 Britain declared a state of emergency in Kenya to quell the Mau Mau uprising against the Colonial government. The Mau Mau was largely drawn from the Kikuyu who constituted the largest ethnic group in Kenya. The racism and the exploitation at the hands of white settlers and the Colonial Government was the root cause of the hatred and the intense Anti-European sentiments. The Kenyans were paid low wages and they lived in appalling conditions. The revolt was against the British Colonial repression. The Mau Mau uprising was not a communist plot to oust the British Colonial government but a nationalist movement to resist the British. As the colonial power could not find credible evidence for a communist plot, the Mau Mau revolt was represented as a sinister cult whose members indulged in sexual orgy, cannibalism, occult and black magic. The unrest grew as the British blocked the constitutional road to resolve the crisis. Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the Kenya African Union (KAU), organised a peaceful struggle against the British Government. The KAU in its declaration noted ' The chief characteristic of all labour- skilled or not.. is the low wages.....Due to this, ninety percent of our people live in the most deplorable conditions ever afforded to a human being .. Modern serfdom has come into being as cheap labour.' The reaction of the British was to jail Kenyatta for seven years on flimsy trumped up charges. The official version was that the unrest had to put down with paternal firmness with the same sorrow as a father giving his errant son six of the best. The paternal firmness found expression in extreme brutality and gross abuse of human rights. The declassified documents show that the declaration of emergency was done with the intention of curbing the popular nationalist movement and to make land and the rich mineral resources safe for the Colonial Power. In the brutal war between the Mau Mau and the government forces, both sides committed atrocities. The Colonial forces killed 10,000 Africans while the Mau Mau killed 32 Europeans. More white settlers were killed in road accidents in Nairobi than at the hands of Mau Mau. The colonial counter insurgency forces were given a free hand to shoot anybody if they were black. The Colonial Police used the most extreme forms of torture on Mau Mau suspects such as slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes. Some suspects were castrated; others had their fingertips cut off. Shortly after the emergency was declared, the Governor passed orders that it could detain whomsoever it wanted in nazi style concentration camps. A former officer in one of the detention camps in 1954-55 witnessed 'overwork, brutality, humiliating and disgusting treatment and flogging- all in violation of human rights.' The savage repression and brutal force were instrumental in putting down the uprising and killing about 1,50,000 Kenyans. After she gained her independence in 1963, the British Government cleverly maneuvered for a moderate government friendly to British interests to come to power. Even Kenyatta abandoned the nationalistic policies and gave concessions to the British. In the words of the political analysts Bethwell Ogot and Tiyambe Zeleza "Kenya (in 1978) was still a dependent export economy, heavily penetrated by foreign capital from all the major capitalist countries, so that she was more firmly and broadly integrated into the world capitalist system than at independence." The fruits of post independent Kenya were shared between the Kenyan ruling class and foreign interests. The men in bowler hats had finally won.The British perfidy in giving carte blanche to the Indonesian generals to murder close to one million Indonesians is a closely guarded secret and this terrible secret is rarely mentioned in the media. On the basis of declassified documents available, the British policy in Indonesia is shown in its truest colours: rapacious, brutal and morally bankrupt. In 1965 Britain and USA gave support to the Army to oust the Indonesian Leader Sukarno. General Suharto who carried out the coup was a corrupt and murderous thug. The real target of the coup was the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Both the British and American policy experts were worried that the economic resources in Indonesia would be primarily used for the benefit of the Indonesian people and not western interests. The threat of independent development alarmed the British and American Planners. The army proceeded to hunt down the members of the PKI with the diabolical cruelty unparalleled in modern history. In the reign of terror that followed, the army would pick up any man or women suspected of being members of PKI and shoot them in cold blood. Even elderly persons were not spared. In one incident a village execution squad picked up a woman of 78 and executed her. The Officials of the State Department (US) nodded approvingly when the slaughter went on and gave their blessings to the Generals by providing them with small arms. The British were not far behind and supported Suharto to the hilt. The British Intelligence (M15) ran a propaganda campaign to smear the reputation of Sukarno and the PKI. The operation was conducted from a base in Singapore known as Phoenix Park. In an interesting letter addressed to the Foreign Office the British Ambassador to Indonesia Sir Andrew Gilchrist quaintly wrote, "I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be essential preliminary to effective change." By 1966 'the little shooting' led to the wholesale massacre of PKI and the "good generals" got a pat on their back for efficiently dispatching close to one million Indonesians to oblivion. The corrupt military regime of Suharto plundered Indonesia for nearly thirty years with the active support of Britain and US and the grateful general showed his gratitude by creating favourable business climate for western companies to take their share of the loot. Suharto was ousted in 1998 but the damage was done to the concept of an equitable society by the concentration of economic and political power vesting in the hands of the few. The British role in Kenya, Iran, Malaya and Indonesia showed that high ideal and benevolent purpose were empty rhetoric and the true purpose was to safeguard British commercial interests if necessary with brute force. Curtis admirably sums up thus: ' the first is how brutal in war, and abusive of human rights, British elites have been in the past, much more so than is usually presented. Second, they show Britain's overwhelming need to keep economic resources in Western hands- elites who give favourable treatment to Western business. Third, they show that the primary threat to British elite interests throughout the postwar period was not so much communism or Soviet expansion- the official threats intended for public consumption- but indigenous nationalism arising from within those countries. These nationalistic forces offered in many cases the prospect of real development for poverty-stricken populations. But they were crushed by Britain. Fourth, they reveal the British elites contempt for democratic, popular groups when they fail to promote British interests.' The contempt that the New Labour under Tony Blair has for international law is merely a continuation of its traditional colonial policies. Britain has become an outlaw terrorist state and has scant respect for the United Nations. Recent events only confirm this: Britains role in imposing one of the cruelest sanctions known to mankind was instrumental in killing ordinary women and children in Iraq. When other member countries of the Security Council wanted the sanctions to be lifted, Britain and US alone wanted the sanctions to stay. The sanctions, which grossly abused human rights of ordinary Iraqi men, women and children, destroyed Iraq as a country. The country was left without essential life support medicines. The most vulnerable sections of the society, namely, children died in thousands. UN estimates that the sanctions which were imposed in August 1990 were responsible for 500,000 children under the age of five dying in Iraq. Denis Halliday, the former UN coordinator for Iraq, provides more chilling statistics: the death toll for children is closer to 600,000 for 1990-1998; if adults are included the toll climbs to one million deaths.The unlawful aggression against Iraq in 2003 was without the UN mandate with other member countries refusing to pass the resolution for war. The pretext for waging the war was the time worn cliché: to protect the world from Weapons of Mass Destruction of Saddam Hussain. The Bush-Blair duo waged an illegal, immoral war destroying the basic infrastructure of Iraq such as water electricity and television stations, which is against international law. These constitute war crimes. The use of depleted uranium shells and cluster bombs on Iraqi people was gross violation of the Geneva Convention and crimes against humanity. Iraq, a proud country with a civilization dating back to ancient times, was reduced to the stone age. Also suppressed from the public and from international scrutiny was the imposition of no fly zones by the British and US that are illegal and contrary to international Law. What was also concealed from the public was the softening up of air defense systems of Iraq to pave the way for a full-scale war in 2003 commenced much earlier sometime in 2002. This crucial fact throws light on the charade of UN weapon's inspection team and the refusal of Iraq to cooperate with the UN team. US-Britain had already decided to attack Iraq and the controversy of the Iraqi obduracy was a ruse to cobble international support for its aggression. British complicity in aiding the US to wage war against Iraq is eloquent testimony of Britain becoming a global bully with the absurd pretension of enforcing international law.The Anglo-American aggression on Afghanistan is a variation of the same theme: Good versus Evil. The ostensible purpose was again a noble one: to destroy the Al' Qaida network and the Taliban regime. The added bonus of the noble war was to capture dead or alive the elusive Osama. In a ferocious bombing campaign that followed the unilateral declaration of war the US-British forces pulverised Afghanistan. In the first six months of the campaign more than 22000 bombs/ missiles were dropped. As usual the targets were civilians. One estimate places the civilians who died as a result of the aggression at 10,000 to 20,000. The Taliban fell but it was spurious claim that the Al'Qaida could be destroyed. The Al'Qaida did not have a centralised command and was not located in one geographical area. It was dispersed all over in the form of decentralised network.The raison d'�tre of the Anglo-American aggression on Iraq and Afghanistan was oil. The importance of controlling oil was understood by the British Foreign Office as early as 1947 as 'a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination.' 'Oil is designated to be controlled by the Western allies', adds Curtis, 'in the Middle East to ensure that industry profits accrue to Western companies and are invested in Western economies.' To further this goal both Britain and US have backed repressive regimes in oil producing countries that are supportive of US-British interests in the region. The US-British élites realised that western access to oil was threatened; The Saudi regime was shaky and bound to collapse, Iran was anti-west and Iraq was turning away from Britain and US. The crime of the Iraqi people was that their oil, the vital prize, was coveted by the US-British companies and they had the temerity to suggest that the prize belonged to them. In Afghanistan the reason was that Al'Qaida had to be destroyed as the organisation headed by Osama Bin Laden was opposed to the Saudi ruling family, who is the supporter of US interests in the region. The other reason is that the oil resources of Central Asia are considered to be vital to US interests. Afghanistan is located strategically to transport the oil through pipelines from Central Asia. Hence the necessity of having a change of regimes to one favourable to US-British oil needs. The Taliban had to go, as they were perceived as unreliable allies to accommodate US-British interests in the region.Apart from its imperial past, which is largely inglorious, and its junior partner status in aiding US in its acts of aggression, which is disgraceful, there is incontrovertible evidence that Britain sponsors global terrorism through its arms trade. Britain is truly a global player in the death business. It is the world's second largest arms exporter (after US) selling around five billion pounds worth of arms to 140 countries. For British armament industry mass murder is good business. British companies such as BAE Systems and GEC-Marconi rake in huge profits by supplying arms to unstable areas in war or civil strife. The tax subsidy for Research & Development is estimated to be in the region of one billion pounds a year. ' The Labour party,' adds Curtis, ' holds nearly 30000 shares in BAE Systems, which is reported to have donated 5000 pounds to Labour funds in 1998 and 2000.' According to a Report by the Campaign Against Arms Trade, the Labour party also holds shares of more than 45,000 in GEC and Vickers. The brisk sale of arms is given a fillip by arming both sides in a conflict. Notorious examples are Iran and Iraq, Greece and Turkey, China and Taiwan. Britain is also selling arms to both India and Pakistan who are locked in a senseless and bloody dispute over Kashmir. Britain armed Indonesia, which has one of the worst human rights records in history. The blood bath in East Timor was inaugurated first by repressive Suharto regime and then continued by successive Indonesian governments until international protests stopped the genocide. The people of East Timor killed by the Indonesian Military are estimated to be in the region of half a million. The British supplied Scorpion tanks to the Indonesian Military, which were used against Indonesians protesting against military brutality and bus fare increases. Britain supplies arms to poor developing countries, for example, Botswana, Gambia, Tanzania, Zambia to name a few. With Blair, as the Chief Arms Salesman, cheerfully announcing ' the Labour Government would be committed to creating the conditions in which the defense industries can thrive and prosper.' The prospects for the death merchants appear rosy.Britain plans and executes its own brand of terrorism through its shadowy arm: the M16. The covert operations of British Intelligence are shrouded in mystery and romance. In the novels of Ian Fleming, James Bond eternally battles against villains and saves the world from catastrophe. The available evidence suggests a different picture: it is a criminal enterprise largely engaged in subversion and assassination of political leaders opposed to British interests. It planned the assassination of Nasser in a quaint manner: M16 injected poison into chocolates meant for the Egyptian Leader but Nasser did not nibble. M16 also planned to assassinate the Indonesian Leader Sukarno who was opposed to Western interests. The M15 plotted to ' zap' Ugandan President Milton Obote, Mufti of Jerusalem and Subhas Chandra Bose. One of the major terrorist acts of the 1980's was the car bombing outside a mosque, which killed eighty men, women and children and left more than two hundred injured. The agencies responsible - the CIA, Saudi Intelligence and Britain's M16- have not been exposed and brought to book. The most shocking is the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold who died in 1961 when the plane exploded. The latest evidence suggests British, US, and South African involvement. The letters uncovered by Archbishop Desmond Tutu disclosed the plans to place TNT in the wheel bay of the aircraft. The myth of the British policy being a force for good in the world is nurtured by the mainstream British media. Sordid details of British terrorism in pursuit of its hidden agenda are never exposed. Edward Herman, a media scholar, once said, 'it is the function of experts and the mainstream media to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.' 'When presented in the mainstream media', observes Curtis, 'none of these outcomes tend to elicit the horror they deserve; all are normal.' The brutality of Britain's colonial past is excised from the pages of history and its collaboration with US aggression is described as noble cause. Dissent and criticism are marginalised as being one of the many views on the subject. The elite consensus dictates the debate on various issues and invisible lines are drawn beyond which no journalist can traverse. The retail violence of the victims of Western domination and its allies are described as threats to International order while wholesale massacre by the Western Powers and its client states are described as beneficial force. Disproportionate force used in form of cluster bombs, tomahawk missiles, depleted uranium shells killing women, children and men are described as necessary costs to be borne in the war against terrorism. This is Blair's Britain where the victims are the unpeople, expendable people, who have died in the thousands whether in Iraq, or Afghanistan. They died in obscurity and lie buried in unnamed graves. But there is a glimmering of hope: millions of people, decent men and women, all over the world have stood shoulder to shoulder and have said in one voice 'No more blood for oil.' For the victims of Western State Terrorism, the unpeople, there is vindication of sorts: the vigorous dissent and exemplary scholarship of Chomsky, Edward Said, and Mark Curtis and the courageous journalism of John Pilger, David Monibot, and Robert Fisk have kept alive the suffering of the vanquished. The legacy they have left behind is an important one for mankind: that the victims of Western State Terrorism shall not disappear into the black hole of official history.

A Tinto Brass fan and a cynical Bangalorean who's been known to display Chomsky-ist leanings.

Slobodan Milosevic and The Tragedy of Yugoslavia

Socrates — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:33:02 EDT

History is a set of lies agreed upon. - Napoleon Bonaparte.Slobodan Milosevic who died on 11th March 2006 in Hague had the dubious distinction of being the only European Head of State (ex-president of Yugoslavia) to be charged with genocide and war crimes at the specially constituted International Criminal Tribunal at Hague. 'From 1991 to 1999,' says the Guardian in its obituary, 'he presided over mayhem and mass murder in south-eastern Europe.' 'He left a legacy of more than 200,000 dead in Bosnia' continues the Guardian, 'and 2 million people (half the population) homeless. He ethnically cleansed more than 800,000 Albanians from their homes in Kosovo.' The evil that men do is catalogued by the Guardian for the benefit of mankind 'Milosevic was first indicted for war crimes in Kosovo by Louise Arbour, the Canadian chief prosecutor in The Hague, in March 1999. Arbour's successor, the Swiss campaigner Carla Del Ponte, extended the charge sheet to include indictments on Croatia and Bosnia, in the latter case accusing him of genocide for his alleged collusion in the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim males at Srebrenica in July 1995.' It must be admitted that the Guardian's obituary of Milosevic is in strict conformity with the official story put forth by NATO and US Government to justify the US led NATO bombing campaign of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. The case against the Serbs and the arch villain Milosevic is aptly summed up by Diana Johnstone ' Yugoslavia was a "prison of peoples" where the Serbs oppressed all the others. It was destroyed by the rise of an evil leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who set out to create a 'Greater Serbia" by eliminating other peoples in a process called 'ethnic cleansing". Those other people sought to escape, by creating their own independent states. The Yugoslav army, actually Serbian, invaded them. In Bosnia, the invading Serbs tried to drive out the Muslims, who wanted to perpetuate an exemplary multi-ethnic society. The Serb ethnic cleansing killed 200,000 unarmed Muslims... At Srebrenica, the United Nations allowed the Serbs to commit genocide. Only the US bombing forced Milosevic to come to the negotiating table at Dayton. In January 1999, Serbian security forces massacred defenseless civilians in the Kosovo village of Racak. The Serbs were summoned to peace negotiations in Rambouillet, in France. Milosevic stubbornly refused to negotiate. NATO had no choice but to start bombing Yugoslavia. Masses of Albanians were deliberately driven out according to a preconceived plan called "Operation Horseshoe". Milosevic gave in, and NATO liberated the Kosovars from their oppressors.' Finally, popular revolt over threw Milosevic's government. This fairy tale ending of the Balkan crisis was widely praised in the Western media as one of beneficial effects of cruise missile humanitarianism. The official story of the Yugoslav crisis received a severe jolt by the publication of the book Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions written by Diana Johnstone who was the European editor of In These Times from 1979 to 1990 and press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from 1990 to 1996. Relentlessly and courageously, Johnstone rescues the tragic events of Yugoslavia from disappearing into the black hole of deception and NATO propaganda. Ms Johnstone fired the salvo at the NATO version of the story and challenged the accusation that the Serbians were primarily responsible for the mass killing of Bosnian Muslims and other non- Serbs incited by Milosevic. Concealed from public discussion were the facts that the Serbs themselves were subjected to ethnic cleansing. In September 1991, some 120 Serbs were abducted from the Croatian town of Gospic and brutally massacred. The western press never reported this massacre as ethnic cleansing of the Serbs who were frightened into moving out of Croatia. This crime was perpetuated on the direct orders of the Croatian Interior Ministry but never investigated and bought before the International Criminal Tribunal at Hague. Examples abound exposing the double standards of the US and NATO in selectively focusing on Serb atrocities while ignoring the horrific bloodbath of Serbian civilians by the Croatians and Bosnian Muslims. For instance, in 1995 hundreds of Serb civilians were killed in 'operation storm' and several hundred thousand Serbs were ethnically cleansed in Krajina, which was one of the biggest ethnic cleansing operations in the Balkan wars. One of the Croatian officers who led the attacks on the Serbs was Agim Ceku, an Albanian, who was trained by retired U.S army officers on contract to Croatia.Between May 1992 and January 1994 over a thousand Serbs were killed and their houses burnt. Nasir Oric, a Bosnian Muslim officer, ran these operations against the Serbs and he invited Western Reporters to his apartment where he presented his war trophies: videocassettes showing mutilated bodies of Serbs. Nasir Oric was also not charged of any war crimes. Serbs were forcefully removed from Srebrenica and slaughters were carried out in Serb towns. The media version of the events suggested that the Serbs were the aggressors and not that the Serbs were victims of non-Serb violence which led to the endless cycle of violence and massacres. A more balanced view to emerge was that of Lt General Satish Nambiar (Retd.) who was the First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the UN Forces in the former Yugoslavia. According to Lt General Nambiar, 'Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my experience all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no angels while the others would insist they were. We did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe none of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by the media.' Slipshod media reporting and biased coverage was also responsible for the vilification of Slobodan Milosevic as the demon who started the process of the disintegration of Yugoslavia by his nationalist quest of Greater Serbia and his view that non-Serbs had no place in Yugoslavia. The media campaign against Milosevic focused on his speech delivered at Kosovo Field in 1989 at the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo allegedly fanning hatred against Muslims and Albanians. Robin Cook, then the Foreign Minister of the UK, made the following accusation: "Milosevic used this important anniversary not to give a message of hope and reform. Instead, he threatened force to deal with Yugoslavia's internal political difficulties. Doing so thereby launched his personal agenda of power and ethnic hatred under the cloak of nationalism. All the peoples of the region have suffered grievously ever since." If the actual text of Milosevic's speech is examined then a different picture emerges. For instance, Milosevic said, 'Equal and harmonious relations among Yugoslav peoples are a necessary condition for the existence of Yugoslavia and for it to find its way out of the crisis and, in particular, they are a necessary condition for its economic and social prosperity'. In the words of Francisco Gil-White, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, "The speech is not devoid of a certain poetry and, given what I had been led to believe about Milosevic, I was amazed to find that it was *explicitly tolerant*. In other words, the entire point, structure, message, and moral of the speech -- in all its details -- was to promote understanding and tolerance between peoples, and to affirm the unity of all those who live in Serbia, regardless of their national origin or religious affiliation." After a through review of the text of the Kosovo speech made by Milosevic, Professor Gil White concluded 'This powerfully suggests that the Western media and the highest officials worked together in a campaign to sell the public a falsified version of this speech, in order to justify war.' The barrage of negative flak against Milosevic portrayed as Hitler and the Serbs as neo- Nazis reduced the complex forces behind the unraveling of Yugoslavia to a Manichean struggle between NATO representing the forces of Good and Milosevic/ Serbs as representing the forces of evil.For a balanced perspective on Yugoslavia it would be necessary to go back in times when post Tito Yugoslavia lost its strategic advantage with the West. Considered as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism under Tito who pursued an independent path steering clear of the Soviet influence, Yugoslavia lost its importance for the West when USSR crumbled at the end of 1980's. With access to easy credit cut off Yugoslavia went into a tailspin. As debt crisis enveloped Yugoslavia it was forced to adopt austerity measures dictated by IMF, which meant that it had to cut social spending and jobs. The richer republics of Slovenia and Croatia resented the sacrifices that were required and both the republics did not want to pay for the poorer ones. The economic crisis had the effect of destroying national solidarity and intensifying nationalistic resentment among the Croatians. The fracturing of Yugoslavia strengthened capitalism and soon secession pressures of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina traumatized the besieged country. Milosevic inherited a tortured legacy of Yugoslavia, a nation torn by nationalistic forces and deepening economic crisis. To add to his tale of woes, he could not push through the economic reforms suggested by the IMF/World Bank as he encountered resistance from Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Macedonia. Even though Milosevic favoured the structural adjustment programmes initially he was forced to abandon it as it became increasingly clear that it would lead to mass unemployment. The political costs were untenable and soon his party was perceived by free market ideologues as being opposed to the reform process which meant that the socially owned assets would not be replaced by privately owned capital. During the late 80's and early 90's most western governments had right wing governments that viewed East Europe as the last bastion of Soviet style communism trapped in the 'prison house of peoples'. There was unanimity of views binding U.S under Bush Sr. Britain under Thatcher and Germany under the Christian Democrats that something ought to be done about Yugoslavia. The concerted action of these right wing parties was to foster ethnic tensions within Yugoslavia and dub Milosevic as a dictator who oppressed the people of Yugoslavia. Thus there was a community of interests, which not only included the conservative parties of Britain, U.S, Germany, and Austria but also conservative clerical factions in the Vatican and right wing militaries in Latin America. Arms were sent to Croatia to create conflicts and armed violence. Anti- Milosevic factions grew in Yugoslavia supported and financed by the West. The U.S Congress funded Radio Free Europe, which spread the disinformation campaign about Milosevic. The role-played by Germany and U.S in dismantling of Yugoslavia require special mention, as there is very little discussion or debate in mainstream media. Serbia was attacked by Germany in the First World War and again during the Second World War. Croatians and Kosovo Albanians were allies of Germany. Under the fascist Ustashe rule in Croatia about 700,000 Serbs were massacred after Hitler invaded Yugoslavia. Germany followed the same strategy of dismembering Yugoslavia by stoking the flames of ethnic minorities. In 1991 when Yugoslavia began to crumble there was a vicious media campaign orchestrated by Bonn accusing the Serbian-communist power of Belgrade trampling the rights of the Slovenes and Croats. 'Bonn', writes Joan Hoey, ' began by leading the campaign to recognize the secessionist republics, Croatia and Slovenia. Yugoslavia has provided the opportunity not only for Germany's rise to power but also for Bonn's strengthened strategic alliance with America.' The U.S under the Clinton administration supported the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs with the intention of building bridges with the oil producing Middle East and Turkey. The cynical exercise of supporting Albanian Kosovars also served the long-term interests of U.S. in setting up of Camp Bondsteel, a permanent army base, in Kosovo. This base is strategically located in a strategic corridor in Kosovo and close to Thessalonika, an important Greek port. Camp Bondsteel is a high tech camp where electricity, transport and basics are supplied by Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, whose CEO was Dick Cheney. The death of Slobodan Milosevic in Hague has raised issues about his tragic role in Yugoslavian politics. Though he was venal, opportunistic and power hungry, he was no worse than the other politicians lionized by the West. Franjo Tudjman who sought the support of the Ustashe fascists in Croatia and Izetbegovic, a high profile Muslim Bosnian politician, who wanted Greater Muslim rule in Bosnia and whose idea of perfect society was Pakistan, were greater threats to multiethnic Yugoslavia. Perhaps history would be less harsh in its judgment of Milosevic than the obituary in the Guardian suggests: His place in the twilight years of former Yugoslavia would be that of a man who lost the battle to prevent the dissolution of Yugoslavia whether in Kosovo or elsewhere and when that dissolution happened he tried to protect the Serb minorities in new states by allowing them to remain in Yugoslavia or obtain autonomy in new rump states. Only then the tragic past of former Yugoslavia should be finally laid to rest.

A Tinto Brass fan and a cynical Bangalorean who's been known to display Chomsky-ist leanings.