Friday, May 23, 2003
- Ignoble peace prize
Blush and Bare nominated for Nobel death prize
http://news.awse.com/06-Feb-2002/Entertainment/8104.htm
Hitler wins it in 1941
http://news.awse.com/06-Feb-2002/Entertainment/8104.htm
SEE HERE FOR ANTI BUSH-BLAIR PETITION
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/302184339
And this, orginally at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,900496,00.html
Given the fact that previous nominees include Adolf Hitler and Henry Kissinger, can anyone take the Nobel Peace Prize seriously, asks Paul Hamilos
Friday February 21, 2003
Which word connects Bono, the European Union, Jacques Chirac and George Bush? Peace, apparently. It has been announced that they have all been nominated, by the rather convoluted method by which these things are done, for this year’s prize.
Of course, this raises a number of questions: not least, who would pick up the prize if the European Union won it? And on whose mantelpiece would it find a home?
Added to this, we are not even two months into the new year, and Jimmy Carter is still basking in the glory of last year’s award. How can anyone put forward either Chirac or Bush?
With the war in Iraq not even started yet, it seems odd that the two are in the running. Putting aside the hawk’s view of the French president and the dove’s view of Bush, the idea that either of them is promoting world peace seems not only ludicrous but also an offence to the meaning of the word. Have those responsible for sending these nominations to the Nobel institute misplaced their dictionaries?
But then, this is nothing new for the Nobel peace prize. After all, Adolf Hitler was in the running in 1938. Yes, that’s 1938, not 1933 - after the persecution of the Jews had been established under the Nuremberg laws. This was also the same year in which Gandhi was nominated, although the committee agreed that he didn’t deserve recognition. Alfred Nobel, incidentally, also invented dynamite.
And there was also the famous comment by the American songwriter Tom Lehrer, who believed that “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize”.
In 1973, Kissinger, then the US secretary of state, was jointly honoured with his Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, for their roles in negotiating the Vietnam peace accord.
There was a certain irony in this, as Kissinger is accused of deliberately scuppering the peace talks in 1968, leading to the unnecessary prolongation of an already pointless war. His “peace efforts” in Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, Bangladesh and East Timor also failed to win universal praise. Le Duc Tho, quite understandably, declined to accept the award.
The Nobel peace prize, however, is not just for old war criminals. In 2001, Swedish MP Lars Gustafsson nominated football. All right, the beautiful game didn’t win, but what was he thinking? Surely such a prize can only be awarded for deliberate actions made by sentient beings (and whatever you think of David Beckham, nobody would accuse him of being that).
You might cite the famous Christmas Day match between German and English soldiers stuck in the trenches during world war one as an example of football’s unifying qualities. A brief look at the history books shows, however, that that particular game did not bring war to an end and that the sharing of half-time oranges failed to prevent them from killing each other a day later.
What is particularly startling about the peace prize is just how many of its recipients have been men, generally regarded as more the more bloodthirsty of the sexes. Of the 110 prizes that have been awarded, a dismal 10 have gone to women, including Mother Teresa (1979) and Aung San Suu Kyi (1991).
As these awards were met with far less outrage than that which greeted some of the male winners, it leads one to wonder why it is that men, who usually opt for war, are the ones who have generally gained the plaudits for peace.
The prize was inspired by Alfred Nobel’s secretary, Bertha von Suttner, who was nominated four times (nothing to do, of course, with Alfred being deeply in love with her) and was the first female winner in 1905.
But, despite the abundance of potential female winners that followed her, from the suffragettes to the feminist movement, we still prefer to congratulate the men for their efforts. Perhaps it is because society sees women as inherently peaceful creatures and that any man who has overcome his natural inclination to maim and slaughter is immediately deserving of some kind of award.
So where does that leave us in 2003? With a multi-millionaire Irish pop star; a French president who is stalling over Iraq for reasons of self-interest; an American leader whose peace credentials are at best dubious, at worst non-existent; and an institution, the EU, that is being torn apart by the upcoming war.
So, who should be in the running? Well, taking the lead from the Kissinger-Tho Le Duc award, I go for the Iraqi foreign secretary, Tariq Aziz, and his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld.
We may have to put up with a bloody, murderous war beforehand, but if these two can sit around a table before the end of the year to sign a peace treaty, surely they’re a shoo-in?
-Multimedia source for real info on U.S. invasion of Iraq
Introducing Pepperface
Pepperface was created to provide a multimedia source for real information regarding the US invasion of Iraq. We will continue to update this forum with information on the US continued occupation of Iraq, analysis of the media role in the US occupation of America, and anything else which may be of interest.
Further down the page you’ll find alternatives to the calculated idiocy aimed at social inebriates, which blathers out the television in a continual stream. We’ve provided links to online news broadcasts, media analysis programs, micro-radio stations, reports from people in Iraq, realtime video of Baghdad, IndyMedia sites, and other alternative news resources.
-GREENPEACE FILES MEDICAL ETHICS COMPLAINT AGAINST SENATOR FRIST FOR BLACKMAIL
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May, 19, 2003
Frist AIDS Bill Suggests Medicine Could Be Denied to African Nations If They Refuse Genetically Engineered Food Aid
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Greenpeace filed a complaint today with the State of Tennessee calling for an ethics investigation of Senator Bill Frist’s AIDS bill. The bill suggests withholding AIDS medications from African nations if they refuse to accept genetically engineered (GE) food aid. The Greenpeace complaint calls for the state to investigate and take disciplinary action, including calling for a formal public hearing, sanctioning Frist (a medical doctor), and revoking his license to practice medicine.
“While we strongly support this essential spending assistance for AIDS sufferers, Dr. Frist’s attempt to use African AIDS patients for unrelated political goals is reprehensible,” said Charles Margulis from Greenpeace. In threatening to withhold AIDS medication because certain African governments refuse to accept untested gene-altered foods, Senator Frist is practicing medical blackmail.
The Greenpeace complaint cites the codes of medical ethics of several U.S. medical societies, including those of the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians. Referring to these codes, the Greenpeace complaint cites three areas of ethical violations: Violations of Physician Responsibilities to Patients and Society; Violations of Physician’s Responsibility Regarding Informed Consent and Avoiding Coercion; and Violations of Physician’s Responsibility Regarding Conflicts of Interest.
In the complaint, Greenpeace explains Dr. Frist is attempting to coerce African nations into accepting food by suggesting that it could be tied to receipt of AIDS prevention funding. Such action flies in the face of the physician’s duty to protect and foster free, uncoerced choices&Dr. Frist’s attempt to blackmail AIDS patients is despicable and should be strongly censured.
The text of the Frist bill reads: “Although the United States is willing to provide food assistance to these countries in need, a few of the countries object to part or all of the assistance because of fears of benign genetic modifications to the foods. It is therefore the sense of Congress that United States food assistance should be accepted by countries with large populations of individuals infected or living with HIV/AIDS, particularly African countries, in order to help feed such individuals.”
Listed as witnesses in support of the Greenpeace complaint are the Global Aids Alliance, the Society of Women Against AIDS in Africa, and the Center for Environmental Health.
CONTACT: Charles Margulis, Greenpeace (202) 413-8512 (cell); Alisa Arnett, Greenpeace Media, 415-255-9221 x330.
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
-Police Attacks Against Activists, Indymedia in St. Louis and Urbana-Champaign
The other day we announced the Biodevastation 7 events, that were planned for St. Louis, Missouri from May 16 - 18:
http://tokyoprogressive.org/news/tpnews_comments.php?id=P437_0_2_0_C
We also had this story about Monsanto’s Roundup Ready in Denmark’s drinking water:
http://tokyoprogressive.org/news/tpnews_comments.php?id=P453_0_2_0_C
Well, now this from Indymedia.org:
“On May 16-17 in St. Louis police initiated a severe crackdown on activists during the protests against the pro-biotech World Agricultural Forum and concurrent Biodevastation 7 conference. The Biodev 7 conference, which was addressing issues of environmental racism, world agriculture and biowarfare, went on successfuly despite the heavy police presence. On May 16, St. Louis police - backed by federal agents - raided the Community Arts and Media Project (CAMP), home of the St. Louis IMC, and the Bolozone, a collective housing project, in anticipation of the Biodevastation conference and expected protests at the WAF. Police arrested protesters and non-protersers alike, without any provocation. The Secret Service illegaly entered one person’s home and later harassed his parents as well. St. Louis IMC is asking for support and for support of all those unjustly arrested.
At the same time that police were preparing the downtown area, on a public online forum called St. Louis Coptalk (SLC), police expressed a willful desire to harm peaceful protesters. One officer wrote, “Is it true we’re going to be issued the new tazers before next weekend?” and another replied, “I want that 220 Volt model that blows the teeth out of their head, just before they crap their pants.” The posts were soon removed from the web forum but Coptalk is still online.
Additionally,the Urbana-Champaign IMC performance space has been temporarily shut down by the city of Urbana for alleged fire code violations. “
The full stories are here:
http://indymedia.org/archive/features/current#8875
-’Love of country’ curriculum hit
Japan Times
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20030513b5.htm
By GARY SCHAEFER
The Associated Press
Few schools in Japan are complying with government guidelines suggesting that students be graded on how patriotic they are—and those that have face opposition from teachers, parents and citizens’ groups.
“Fostering love of country” was added as a curriculum goal for sixth-grade social studies classes under guidelines first approved by the education ministry for the school year that ended last month.
Patriotism here is often associated with the jingoism trumpeted by Japan’s militarist government and forced upon students in the decades leading up to this country’s defeat in World War II.
The nonmandatory guidelines suggested that teaching patriotism would encourage children to take pride in their history and culture.
But according to a recent survey by a Japanese newspaper, less than 200 of Japan’s 24,000 public elementary schools are complying. Parents and citizens’ groups are protesting, and a spokesman for the nation’s largest teachers union said in an interview that he questioned the constitutionality of the guidelines.
“The freedom of belief is guaranteed by the Constitution and applies to children as well,” said Shinji Furukawa, a spokesman for the Japan Teachers’ Union. “We think it is very serious that this language has been included in the guidelines before the matter was debated by the Diet.”
Japan’s Asian neighbors, which bore the brunt of its past military adventures, have frequently criticized Tokyo for allowing wartime atrocities to be whitewashed in officially sanctioned textbooks.
Officials have defended the patriotism guidelines.
“The advisory council’s view was that it was important in international society for students to develop a sense of identity as Japanese,” education ministry official Yuiichi Sakashita said. “The idea is to teach kids to understand and appreciate their country and its history and traditions.”
The old curriculum for sixth graders called on teachers to foster a “love of Japan’s history and traditions.” The new version adds “love of country” to that list, Sakashita said.
A board of education official in the city of Fukuoka, where 51 elementary schools started giving grades for “love of country” in the last school year, said the decision had “nothing to do with nationalism.”
“We’re not grading students on how much they love their country,” Mamoru Shibata said. “It’s basically about how much interest they’re showing in their studies about Japanese history and culture.”
Such explanations have done little to placate critics.
“I think students are already taught enough about taking pride in their history and culture,” said Noriyoshi Mukoyama, principal of Tokyo’s Seisho Elementary School, one of the many schools that hasn’t added “love of country” to its report cards.
“I didn’t see any need to give a grade for that,” he said.
Schools implementing the grades have significant leeway in deciding what constitutes patriotism, since the ministry guidelines provide few specifics.
The very idea of having such classes is upsetting some parents.
“Who’s to say what patriotism is? How do you grade it?” asked Hiroaki Nakane, 49, whose daughter is a fifth-grader in Fukuoka. “The whole thing sounds like a return to the militaristic thinking in this country before the war.”
The matter is particularly complex for minorities, particularly the large Korean community. Korea was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945, and many ethnic Koreans in Japan descended from workers brought here forcibly as laborers.
“How is a Japanese teacher supposed to grade a Korean on love for country?” said Lee Han Eun, 32, who runs a Korean citizens’ group. “We’re worried that this is part of a broader trend toward nationalism—not just a question of report cards.”
Also from Friday, October 18, 2002
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20021018a8.htm
A government advisory panel on education has compiled draft amendments to the Fundamental Law of Education that call for nurturing children’s patriotism, morals and respect for Japanese culture, according to sources familiar with the panel’s discussions.
The Central Council for Education plans to hold subcommittee discussions on the draft on Oct. 24 before determining a rough plan on Oct. 30 for its interim report on the proposed amendments, the sources said on Wednesday.
The draft is to review the current 1947 “education constitution,” which emphasizes individual self-esteem and independence of children.
The draft says Japan’s education should aim to foster “tough” Japanese. It also calls for a new basic education law that would address the importance of education at home, lifetime education, and social volunteer work, according to the sources.
The draft does not say anything about changing the law’s preamble, which sets out the Constitution’s antiwar stance, or anything about reviewing Japan’s ban on religious education in public schools. The panel has not reached a consensus, the sources said.
The ministry earlier said it hopes to submit a bill to the Diet in 2003 that would amend the law after receiving suggestions from the council.
On Nov. 26, 2001, Atsuko Toyama, minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology, asked the panel to recommend within a year whether it thought the law should be revised.
She told the council at that time to consider recommendations made in December 2000 by the National Commission on Educational Reform, a private advisory panel to then Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori.
Mori’s panel proposed revisions focusing on points such as scientific and technological advancement, international coexistence, environmental problems, family education, respect for traditional culture, religious education and the need for a basic education promotion plan.
And from Thursday, October 10, 2002
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20021010a4.htm
Korean group protests grades for patriotism
FUKUOKA (Kyodo) A Korean citizens’ group here is protesting a report card used at local municipal elementary schools that includes an evaluation of students’ Japanese patriotism, group members said Wednesday.
Lee Bak Sung, a lawyer and director of Woori Sahwe, which means “our society” in Korean, said such an evaluation could lead to discrimination against students with foreign citizenship.
The group’s leader, Chong Gi Man, submitted a written demand Wednesday to Fukuoka City Hall that the item be eliminated from report cards.
The group has also called on the Fukuoka Prefecture bar association for help and has demanded that the municipal board of education eliminate the evaluation, according to Lee.
“Children using their ethnic (Korean) names will be subject to discrimination and prejudice. It sends a message to Korean residents of Japan and other foreigners that they should engage in studies as a Japanese,” Lee said.
There are some 500,000 Koreans with permanent residency status in Japan, including many who were forced to come to Japan to work as laborers during Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, as well as their descendants.
The Fukuoka City Board of Education said the section was among four items deemed worthy of evaluation in the field of social sciences when a committee of principals compiled a draft report card for use in fiscal 2002, which began in April.
Among the 147 municipal elementary schools in Fukuoka, 69 use the report card for sixth-grade students, board officials said.
The item allows teachers to evaluate whether children “cherish Japan’s history and traditions and have feelings of love toward the country, as well as try to identify themselves as Japanese in this world which aims for peace.”
Mamoru Shibata, an official of the Fukuoka board of education, said the issue should be considered flexibly in the future.
Meanwhile, an official of the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry suggested that the policy for handling foreign students is left to each school.
“The nation’s education will focus on educating its citizens, but we must also naturally respect the identities of Korean residents of Japan and other (foreigners),” the official said. “Each school needs to decide how to care for foreign children.”
-PATRIOT GAME: Love marks
The Asahi Shimbun (http://www.asahi.com/english/national/K2003050800188.html) This is the first installment of a three-part series on freedom of speech and patriotism in Japan.
An elementary school student in Fukuoka brought home a report card boasting straight A’s in social studies-except for one category. The lone blemish came because the student had not shown sufficient “love for Japan.’’
The student’s uncle, a lawyer of Korean ancestry, noticed an explanation on the new topic in his nephew’s first-term report card.
“In addition to having feelings of love for our nation and placing importance on history and traditions of the nation, an effort is made to possess a consciousness as a Japanese living with the hope for a peaceful world,’’ the explanation read.
Boiled down, it basically means students are being graded on their level of patriotism.
Elementary school students at 172 public schools in 11 prefectures are now evaluated on this new category, according to a national survey of sixth-graders’ report cards conducted by The Asahi Shimbun.
The patriotism category is apparently in response to new curriculum guidelines introduced in the 2002 school year that included the fostering of “feelings of love for one’s country’’ as an objective for sixth-grade social studies.
A mother in her 40s living in Maruoka, Fukui Prefecture, said she was stunned by the new report card brought home by her child.
“Why does `love for one’s nation’ have to be included at this stage?’’ she asked. “If evaluating the feelings of children spreads without the knowledge of parents and even the children themselves, it would be a throwback to the days before World War II.
“I am worried that the children will not speak out because of concerns that criticizing the central government or those in authority would lead to a lower grade,’’ she said.
The lawyer in Fukuoka questioned how it was possible to evaluate 11- and 12-year-olds on their love for their nation. The schools don’t seem to have a clear answer.
The lawyer asked the principal of the Fukuoka elementary school to eliminate the wording about patriotism, but the principal refused, saying the wording followed the education ministry’s guidelines.
The nephew’s “B’’ grade in patriotism was based on an overall evaluation of his interest and eagerness, according to the principal.
Sixty-three elementary schools in Fukuoka, or almost half of all that exist in the city, included a mark for “love for one’s nation’’ in their report cards. One teacher in charge of a sixth-grade class did not notice the peculiar wording of the new report card during a staff meeting when the draft of the report card was discussed.
But after the teacher realized what the draft report card meant, discussions were held with fellow sixth-grade teachers. They concluded that since it was impossible to grade the patriotism of students, everyone would be given a “B.’’
At other Fukuoka schools, efforts have been made to establish evaluation standards.
One elementary school in central Fukuoka is considered a model for others. The school set up an experimental class in social studies last June and allowed principals and teachers from other schools to observe. The topic of the class was the attempted Mongol invasions of Japan in the 13th century.
One student brought up the example of the Koryo dynasty in Korea and said that fighting to protect what was important was better than becoming a vassal state. Others said the problem could have been resolved through diplomatic negotiations.
The 37-year-old teacher wrapped up the talks by saying, “Regardless of whether you are in favor of or opposed to war, you all had the same feeling of wanting to protect Japan from invasion by a foreign nation.’’ Therefore, the teacher said, all students had feelings of love for Japan.
Grading on the category could be done by observing the students’ attitude, comments made and classroom notes, the teacher said.
The teacher also said that “feelings of love for one’s nation’’ could be fostered through research into the history and traditions of Japan, and that such love was similar to the love of the community and region where one was raised.
That line is similar to those espoused by Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers and education ministers, who have argued that current legislation contains “no provisions on love of country and respect for tradition and culture.’’
The Central Council for Education in March called for such provisions to be included in the Fundamental Law of Education.
Teachers and parents, however, argued the government is simply trying to push through nationalistic reforms without thorough debate. Although the revisions have yet to be made, opponents fear it is already too late, considering the implementation of the curriculum guidelines.
The education board of Gyoda, Saitama Prefecture, created a committee that, together with teachers, came up with a revised report card that included “love for one’s nation’’ for all 15 elementary schools.
Another sixth-grade teacher who did not realize the change in the wording until after the draft was approved felt the patriotism reference should be eliminated, but said raising the subject a year after it was implemented is next to impossible.
In the spring of 2002, teachers from the three elementary schools in Ujitawara in Kyoto Prefecture met to compile a new report card. A principal at the meeting said: “If any change is made to education ministry guidelines, we will be held responsible for explaining why the change was made. Therefore, no change in the guidelines was attempted.’’ (IHT/Asahi: May 8,2003)
- JCLU Proposes Anti-Discrimination Law
by Arudou Debito
The Japan Civil Liberties Union (, http://www.jclu.org), a group of lawyers and legal experts (who have been of fundamental help in defining Japan’s hazy Freedom of Information Act and pursuing the Otaru Onsens Case), released yesterday a proposal for a law eliminating racial discrimination in Japan.
This is not before time. Japan is the only OECD country without a law banning racial discrimination, and it shows (http://www.debito.org/otarulawsuit.html). Forwarding. Comments to the JCLU Ima ga shun. Read this over and digest very carefully (can you see any potentially overlooked cases or legal loopholes which should be filled?), because this may very well become law.
This proposal is to help make Japan a better place for everyone to live. We should give our input as constructively as possible. Thanks very much. Arudou Debito in Sapporo (, http://www.debito.org)
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
>From: Hirohiko Takasu
>Reply-To:
>Subject: RELEASE OF: PROPOSED OUTLINE FOR LAW
ON THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
>Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 17:41:19 +0900
If you have any ideas or questions about PROPOSED OUTLINE FOR LAW ON THE
ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, please mail to
-----------------------------------------------------------------
RELEASE OF:
PROPOSED OUTLINE FOR
LAW ON THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
(Draft Proposal Ver. 1 of JCLU Subcommittee for the Rights of Foreigners)
After much discussion, Japan ratified the International Convention on
the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 1996. However, the position
of the Japanese government has been that, “We do not recognize that the
present situation of Japan is one in which discriminative acts cannot be
effectively restrained by the existing legal system or in which explicit
racial discriminative acts, which cannot be restrained by measures other
than legislation, are conducted; therefore a law prohibiting racial
discrimination and other legislation is not considered necessary.”
[NB from Arudou Debito, to clarify for non-native speakers of English:
“The GOJ believes that the existing systems in Japan can restrain explicit
racial discrimination. Therefore explicit legislation banning racial
discrimination is not necessary."]
(Comments of the Japanese Government on the Concluding Observations of
the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
regarding report and examination of the Japanese Government).
Nonetheless, as the number of foreigners living in Japan continues to
increase year to year, in reality there exists strongly-rooted racial
discrimination here, which includes discrimination against foreigners in
labor, housing, the provision of services, and various other areas. In
the Hamamatsu Jewelry Store foreigner exclusion case and the Otaru Onsen
racial discrimination case, claims seeking compensation from the
proprietors of discriminating businesses were upheld based on the
International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
However, such cases are just the tip of the iceberg. Relief under the
Convention and in the courts, by themselves, are clearly inadequate for
the elimination of discrimination. To truly do away with discrimination,
we need to specify and define clear rules as to what constitutes
unacceptable discrimination, clarify the responsibility of national and
local governments in the elimination of discrimination, and enhance
relief measures.
As evidenced by discrimination against foreigners, the existing
mechanism for the protection of human rights centered on the
Constitution and the courts is inadequate to provide relief for actually
occurring abuses of human rights, and as such there are heightened calls
for the creation of new mechanisms. Currently, debate is underway
concerning the establishment of a domestic human rights body, but the
fact of the matter is that nearly no debate has ensued concerning
substantive law that will be applicable to such a body.
This subcommittee has targeted the enactment of substantive law for the
elimination of racial discrimination as one facet of new and effective
human rights protection mechanisms, and the members set forth below have
prepared a draft proposal outline therefor. “Buraku” discrimination and
other serious discrimination based on traits other than race also exist
in Japan, but we believe that the coverage of all discrimination under
one law is not necessarily appropriate since each form of discrimination
has its own characteristic aspects. As such, this subcommittee focused
on the issue of discrimination against foreigners, and drafted a special
law concerning racial discrimination which also addresses discrimination
against foreigners.
Premised on the establishment of a truly independent national human
rights body, for the time being we will assume that such a body will
implement the racial discrimination elimination law. While it is
necessary to also examine and propose specific relief procedures,
initially we will propose the substantive law as a springboard for
debate, and subsequently we will examine procedural issues.
Furthermore, the repeal of the nationality clause of the Livelihood
Protection Law and measures for the realization of civil service
employment rights are necessary in the event this racial discrimination
elimination law is enacted. In addition, depending on the manner in
which relief measures are prescribed, reservations concerning Article
4(a) and (b) of the International Convention on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination may have to be withdrawn.
This proposed outline was prepared as a springboard for debate, and we
request your opinions towards improving the proposed outline.
March 15, 2003
Japan Civil Liberties Union
Subcommittee for the Rights of Foreigners
Shun Hashiba (Attorney at Law)
Akira Hatate (Labor Issues Researcher)
Toshiaki Fujimoto (Lecturer at Kanagawa University)
Mie Fujimoto (Attorney at Law)
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
PROPOSED OUTLINE FOR
LAW ON THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
Draft Proposal Ver. 1 of JCLU Subcommittee for the Rights of Foreigners
1. Purpose
This Law seeks to contribute to the realization of a society that
respects those human rights recognized under the Constitution and
international law, by eliminating racial discrimination through the
prohibition of racial discrimination by all persons and the enactment of
measures designed for the relief and prevention of harms therefrom.
2. Definitions
In this Law, the term “Race” shall mean race, color of skin, ethnicity,
nationality or national origin.
In this Law, the term “Racial Group” shall mean any group comprised of
persons who share a specific Race.
In this Law, the term “Public Official” shall mean any staff member of
national or local public entities, and persons otherwise engaged in
civil service pursuant to law or ordinance.
In this Law, the term “Racial Discrimination” shall mean the following actions:
(1) (Direct Discrimination) Treating any person at a disadvantage to
others in the same circumstances, based on Race;
(2) (Indirect Discrimination) In comparison to others, the application
of an apparently neutral rule or standard working to the disadvantage of
a person belonging to a specific Racial Group. Provided, however, that
the foregoing shall exclude instances in which said rules or standards
are objectively justifiable for a reasonable purpose, and the means for
achieving said purpose is both necessary and appropriate;
(3) (Harassment) Acts related to Race, that have the purpose or effect
of intimidation, insult, derision, or the creation of an otherwise
unpleasant environment, or that have the purpose or effect of damaging
the dignity of specific person(s) shall be deemed as discrimination
under Paragraph (1).
The following acts shall not constitute Racial Discrimination:
(1) To the extent necessary for the purpose, differing treatment in
cases where different treatment based on nationality is truly unavoidable;
(2) In cases in which by the nature of a certain occupation,
characteristics related to a specific Race correspond to definitive
working conditions, the purpose for the establishment of said conditions
is just, and the conditions are proportionate to the purpose, the
differing treatment based on said characteristics;
(3) Special measures enacted for the purpose of preventing or rectifying
disadvantages related to Race.
3. General Prohibition of Discrimination
No person shall suffer Racial Discrimination.
4. Specific Areas
[Labor]
1) Employers must not engage in Racial Discrimination in the following
matters or otherwise in connection with labor contracts:
(1) Recruitment and hiring;
(2) Work hours, wages, days off and leave, work safety and sanitation,
and other labor conditions;
(3) Assignments and promotions;
(4) Education and training;
(5) Benefits;
(6) Mandatory retirement, resignations and dismissals
2) Job placement organizations, job training organizations and
organizations granting qualifications must not engage in Racial Discrimination.
3) Labor unions, employer groups, and other occupational groups must not
engage in Racial Discrimination for entry into said groups and in the
treatment as members of such groups.
4) National and local public entities must not engage in Racial
Discrimination, including in matters of hiring and promotions.
[Medical Treatment and Social Security]
1) All persons shall have the right to enjoy physical and mental health
to the maximum level attainable, free of Racial Discrimination.
2) All persons shall have the right to receive medical treatment as
required in emergencies to sustain life and prevent irreversible health
injuries, free of Racial Discrimination. Such emergency treatment must
not be refused based on grounds of undocumented residency or employment.
3) All persons shall have the right to participate in health insurance,
welfare pension insurance, National Health Insurance, and the National
Pension Plan free of Racial Discrimination.
4) All persons shall have the right to receive protection of livelihood
free of Racial Discrimination. Provided, however, that the foregoing
provision shall not apply to foreigners who have resided in Japan for
less than one year.
5) All persons shall be able to enjoy rights related to child welfare,
maternal and child health, pediatric healthcare, healthcare for
infectious diseases, welfare services for the disabled, welfare services
for seniors, public health, and the like, free of Racial Discrimination.
[Education]
1) No person shall suffer Racial Discrimination in any form or at any
stage in education.
2) National and local public entities must utilize all appropriate
methods in an effort to fulfill the special needs associated with
specific Racial Groups, including opportunities to receive ethnic
education, education of native languages, and education of the Japanese
language.
3) In no form and at no stage will education include content which
encourages Racial Discrimination. In particular, school-based education
must be oriented towards the elimination of racial discrimination.
[Housing]
No person shall suffer Racial Discrimination in the disposal (including
purchase and sale) of, or the use (including renting) of, real estate
for business use or housing for oneself or one?[ƒRs family.
[Provision of Goods, Etc.]
No person shall suffer Racial Discrimination in connection with the
receipt of any goods or services provided for public use including
retailers, transportation, accommodation, food and beverage
establishments, playhouses, and parks.
[Participation in Groups]
No person shall suffer Racial Discrimination in joining, withdrawing or
in the treatment as a member of those groups for which the public are
eligible to become members.
5. Prohibition of Discrimination and Incitement of Discrimination by
Public Officials
Public Officials must not engage in Racial Discrimination in their
positions as persons engaged in public service.
Public Officials must not incite Racial Discrimination against any
person. Incitement shall mean working to cause or bring about the
likeliness of a decision to carry out a specific act against a person,
regardless of whether through instructions, orders, solicitations or
other methods.
6. Responsibilities of National and Local Public Entities
The national government shall be responsible for the comprehensive
promotion of policies for the realization of the human rights recognized
under the Constitution and international law through the elimination of
Racial Discrimination.
Local public entities, in an effort to eliminate Racial Discrimination
in regional societies, shall give due consideration to the effect of
this Law in the administration and affairs of the local public entity,
shall enact ordinances, and shall otherwise be responsible for the
comprehensive promotion of policies for the elimination of Racial
Discrimination at local public entities.
7. Publicity and Promotion of Awareness of the Law
National and local public entities must widely promote awareness of
this Law by adopting adequate and affirmative publicity measures, and
must provide all persons with easy access to information concerning this
Law.
8. International Human Rights Law as a Supplemental Means for the
Interpretation of the Law
In the interpretation and application of this Law, consideration shall
be given to general interpretations and applications internationally
recognized in connection with the International Covenant on Human
Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination, and other conventions related to human rights.
-Democracy is the Free World’s Whore
by Arundhati Roy
by Arundhati Roy
Presented in New York City at The Riverside Church
May 13, 2003
Sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social Rights
http://www.cesr.org/
In these times, when we have to race to keep abreast of the speed at which our freedoms are being snatched from us, and when few can afford the luxury of retreating from the streets for a while in order to return with an exquisite, fully formed political thesis replete with footnotes and references, what profound gift can I offer you tonight?
As we lurch from crisis to crisis, beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think on our feet. On the move. We enter histories through the rubble of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests, and dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy cutters, our libraries.
So what can I offer you tonight? Some uncomfortable thoughts about money, war, empire, racism, and democracy. Some worries that flit around my brain like a family of persistent moths that keep me awake at night.
Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an “Indian citizen,” to come here and criticize the U.S. government. Speaking for myself, I’m no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.
Since lectures must be called something, mine tonight is called: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free).
Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are.”
I don’t care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be.
When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaida. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn’t any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion, and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the “Free Press,” that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.
Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.
Apart from the invented links between Iraq and Al Qaida, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the extent of saying it would be “suicidal” for the U.S. not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. (Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries - earlier there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, and Panama.) But this time it wasn’t just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was Frenzy with a Purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike, a.k.a. The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That’s Official.
The war against Iraq has been fought and won and no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. Not even a little one. Perhaps they’ll have to be planted before they’re discovered. And then, the more troublesome amongst us will need an explanation for why Saddam Hussein didn’t use them when his country was being invaded.
Of course, there’ll be no answers. True Believers will make do with those fuzzy TV reports about the discovery of a few barrels of banned chemicals in an old shed. There seems to be no consensus yet about whether they’re really chemicals, whether they’re actually banned and whether the vessels they’re contained in can technically be called barrels. (There were unconfirmed rumours that a teaspoonful of potassium permanganate and an old harmonica were found there too.)
Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient civilization has been casually decimated by a very recent, casually brutal nation.
Then there are those who say, so what if Iraq had no chemical and nuclear weapons? So what if there is no Al Qaida connection? So what if Osama bin Laden hates Saddam Hussein as much as he hates the United States? Bush the Lesser has said Saddam Hussein was a “Homicidal Dictator.” And so, the reasoning goes, Iraq needed a “regime change.”
Never mind that forty years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Ba’ath party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA, the new Ba’ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and political figures known to be leftists. An entire intellectual community was slaughtered. (The same technique was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor.) The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had a hand in supervising the bloodbath. In 1979, after factional infighting within the Ba’ath Party, Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq. In April 1980, while he was massacring Shias, the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi declared, “We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq.” Washington and London overtly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed him, and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses financially, materially, and morally. They supported the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to justify invading Iraq. After the first Gulf War, the “Allies” fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra and then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal.
The point is, if Saddam Hussein was evil enough to merit the most elaborate, openly declared assassination attempt in history (the opening move of Operation Shock and Awe), then surely those who supported him ought at least to be tried for war crimes? Why aren’t the faces of U.S. and U.K. government officials on the infamous pack of cards of wanted men and women?
Because when it comes to Empire, facts don’t matter.
Yes, but all that’s in the past we’re told. Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And only the U.S. can stop him. It’s an effective technique, this use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. Indonesia, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan - the list goes on and on. Right now there are brutal regimes being groomed for the future - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently declared that U.S. freedoms are “not the grant of any government or document, but….our endowment from God.” (Why bother with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?)
So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. Empire is on the move, and Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb).
But then perhaps chinks, negroes, dinks, gooks, and wogs don’t really qualify as real people. Perhaps our deaths don’t qualify as real deaths. Our histories don’t qualify as history. They never have.
Speaking of history, in these past months, while the world watched, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was broadcast on live TV. Like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the regime of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared. This was followed by what analysts called a “power vacuum.” Cities that had been under siege, without food, water, and electricity for days, cities that had been bombed relentlessly, people who had been starved and systematically impoverished by the UN sanctions regime for more than a decade, were suddenly left with no semblance of urban administration. A seven-thousand-year-old civilization slid into anarchy. On live TV.
Vandals plundered shops, offices, hotels, and hospitals. American and British soldiers stood by and watched. They said they had no orders to act. In effect, they had orders to kill people, but not to protect them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their business. The security of whatever little remained of Iraq’s infrastructure was not their business. But the security and safety of Iraq’s oil fields were. Of course they were. The oil fields were “secured” almost before the invasion began.
On CNN and BBC the scenes of the rampage were played and replayed. TV commentators, army and government spokespersons portrayed it as a “liberated people” venting their rage at a despotic regime. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: “It’s untidy. Freedom’s untidy and free people are free to commit crimes and make mistakes and do bad things.” Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist? I wonder - did he hold the same view during the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King? Would he care to share his thesis about the Untidiness of Freedom with the two million people being held in U.S. prisons right now? (The world’s “freest” country has the highest number of prisoners in the world.) Would he discuss its merits with young African American men, 28 percent of whom will spend some part of their adult lives in jail? Could he explain why he serves under a president who oversaw 152 executions when he was governor of Texas?
Before the war on Iraq began, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) sent the Pentagon a list of 16 crucial sites to protect. The National Museum was second on that list. Yet the Museum was not just looted, it was desecrated. It was a repository of an ancient cultural heritage. Iraq as we know it today was part of the river valley of Mesopotamia. The civilization that grew along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced the world’s first writing, first calendar, first library, first city, and, yes, the world’s first democracy. King Hammurabi of Babylon was the first to codify laws governing the social life of citizens. It was a code in which abandoned women, prostitutes, slaves, and even animals had rights. The Hammurabi code is acknowledged not just as the birth of legality, but the beginning of an understanding of the concept of social justice. The U.S. government could not have chosen a more inappropriate land in which to stage its illegal war and display its grotesque disregard for justice.
At a Pentagon briefing during the days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned on his media cohorts who had served him so loyally through the war. “The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it’s the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you say, ‘My god, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?’”
Laughter rippled through the press room. Would it be alright for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth?
The last building on the ORHA list of 16 sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil. It was the only one that was given protection. Perhaps the occupying army thought that in Muslim countries lists are read upside down?
Television tells us that Iraq has been “liberated” and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a paradise for women-thanks to Bush and Blair, the 21st century’s leading feminists. In reality, Iraq’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Its people brought to the brink of starvation. Its food stocks depleted. And its cities devastated by a complete administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction of a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has lapsed back into the pre-Taliban era of anarchy, and its territory has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords.
Undaunted by all this, on the 2nd of May Bush the Lesser launched his 2004 campaign hoping to be finally elected U.S. President. In what probably constitutes the shortest flight in history, a military jet landed on an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which was so close to shore that, according to the Associated Press, administration officials acknowledged “positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush’s speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline.” President Bush, who never served his term in the military, emerged from the cockpit in fancy dress - a U.S. military bomber jacket, combat boots, flying goggles, helmet. Waving to his cheering troops, he officially proclaimed victory over Iraq. He was careful to say that it was “just one victory in a war on terror … [which] still goes on.”
It was important to avoid making a straightforward victory announcement, because under the Geneva Convention a victorious army is bound by the legal obligations of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration does not want to burden itself with. Also, closer to the 2004 elections, in order to woo wavering voters, another victory in the “War on Terror” might become necessary. Syria is being fattened for the kill.
It was Herman Goering, that old Nazi, who said, “People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.… All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
He’s right. It’s dead easy. That’s what the Bush regime banks on. The distinction between election campaigns and war, between democracy and oligarchy, seems to be closing fast.
The only caveat in these campaign wars is that U.S. lives must not be lost. It shakes voter confidence. But the problem of U.S. soldiers being killed in combat has been licked. More or less.
At a media briefing before Operation Shock and Awe was unleashed, General Tommy Franks announced, “This campaign will be like no other in history.” Maybe he’s right.
I’m no military historian, but when was the last time a war was fought like this?
After using the “good offices” of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million children dead, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the “Coalition of the Willing” (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!
Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don’t think so. It was more like Operation Let’s Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.
As soon as the war began, the governments of France, Germany, and Russia, which refused to allow a final resolution legitimizing the war to be passed in the UN Security Council, fell over each other to say how much they wanted the United States to win. President Jacques Chirac offered French airspace to the Anglo-American air force. U.S. military bases in Germany were open for business. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer publicly hoped for the “rapid collapse” of the Saddam Hussein regime. Vladimir Putin publicly hoped for the same. These are governments that colluded in the enforced disarming of Iraq before their dastardly rush to take the side of those who attacked it. Apart from hoping to share the spoils, they hoped Empire would honor their pre-war oil contracts with Iraq. Only the very naïve could expect old Imperialists to behave otherwise.
Leaving aside the cheap thrills and the lofty moral speeches made in the UN during the run up to the war, eventually, at the moment of crisis, the unity of Western governments - despite the opposition from the majority of their people - was overwhelming.
When the Turkish government temporarily bowed to the views of 90 percent of its population, and turned down the U.S. government’s offer of billions of dollars of blood money for the use of Turkish soil, it was accused of lacking “democratic principles.” According to a Gallup International poll, in no European country was support for a war carried out “unilaterally by America and its allies” higher than 11 percent. But the governments of England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe were praised for disregarding the views of the majority of their people and supporting the illegal invasion. That, presumably, was fully in keeping with democratic principles. What’s it called? New Democracy? (Like Britain’s New Labour?)
In stark contrast to the venality displayed by their governments, on the 15th of February, weeks before the invasion, in the most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen, more than 10 million people marched against the war on 5 continents. Many of you, I’m sure, were among them. They - we - were disregarded with utter disdain. When asked to react to the anti-war demonstrations, President Bush said, “It’s like deciding, well, I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security, in this case the security of the people."Democracy, the modern world’s holy cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content or meaning. It can be whatever you want it to be. Democracy is the Free World’s whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of taste, available to be used and abused at will.
Until quite recently, right up to the 1980’s, democracy did seem as though it might actually succeed in delivering a degree of real social justice.
But modern democracies have been around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy - the “independent” judiciary, the “free” press, the parliament - and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder.
To fully comprehend the extent to which Democracy is under siege, it might be an idea to look at what goes on in some of our contemporary democracies. The World’s Largest: India, (which I have written about at some length and therefore will not speak about tonight). The World’s Most Interesting: South Africa. The world’s most powerful: the U.S.A. And, most instructive of all, the plans that are being made to usher in the world’s newest: Iraq.
In South Africa, after 300 years of brutal domination of the black majority by a white minority through colonialism and apartheid, a non-racial, multi-party democracy came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal achievement. Within two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had genuflected with no caveats to the Market God. Its massive program of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has only increased the hideous disparities between the rich and the poor. More than a million people have lost their jobs. The corporatization of basic services - electricity, water, and housing-has meant that 10 million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population, have been disconnected from water and electricity. 2 million have been evicted from their homes.
Meanwhile, a small white minority that has been historically privileged by centuries of brutal exploitation is more secure than ever before. They continue to control the land, the farms, the factories, and the abundant natural resources of that country. For them the transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism barely disturbed the grass. It’s apartheid with a clean conscience. And it goes by the name of Democracy.
Democracy has become Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.
In countries of the first world, too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted. Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in an elaborate underhand configuration that completely undermines the lateral arrangement of checks and balances between the constitution, courts of law, parliament, the administration and, perhaps most important of all, the independent media that form the structural basis of a parliamentary democracy. Increasingly, the imbrication is neither subtle nor elaborate.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. The Financial Times reported that he controls about 90 percent of Italy’s TV viewership. Recently, during a trial on bribery charges, while insisting he was the only person who could save Italy from the left, he said, “How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?” That bodes ill for the remaining 10 percent of Italy’s TV viewership. What price Free Speech? Free Speech for whom?
In the United States, the arrangement is more complex. Clear Channel Worldwide Incorporated is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than 1,200 channels, which together account for 9 percent of the market. Its CEO contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush’s election campaign. When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war patriotic “Rallies for America” across the country. It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to cover them as though they were breaking news. The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.
As America’s show business gets more and more violent and war-like, and America’s wars get more and more like show business, some interesting cross-overs are taking place. The designer who built the 250,000 dollar set in Qatar from which General Tommy Franks stage-managed news coverage of Operation Shock and Awe also built sets for Disney, MGM, and “Good Morning America.”
It is a cruel irony that the U.S., which has the most ardent, vociferous defenders of the idea of Free Speech, and (until recently) the most elaborate legislation to protect it, has so circumscribed the space in which that freedom can be expressed. In a strange, convoluted way, the sound and fury that accompanies the legal and conceptual defense of Free Speech in America serves to mask the process of the rapid erosion of the possibilities of actually exercising that freedom.
The news and entertainment industry in the U.S. is for the most part controlled by a few major corporations - AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation. Each of these corporations owns and controls TV stations, film studios, record companies, and publishing ventures. Effectively, the exits are sealed.
America’s media empire is controlled by a tiny coterie of people. Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has proposed even further deregulation of the communication industry, which will lead to even greater consolidation.
So here it is - the World’s Greatest Democracy, led by a man who was not legally elected. America’s Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price have American people paid for this spurious presidency?
In the three years of George Bush the Lesser’s term, the American economy has lost more than two million jobs. Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis for the U.S. educational system. According to a survey by the National Council of State Legislatures, U.S. states cut 49 billion dollars in public services, health, welfare benefits, and education in 2002. They plan to cut another 25.7 billion dollars this year. That makes a total of 75 billion dollars. Bush’s initial budget request to Congress to finance the war in Iraq was 80 billion dollars.
So who’s paying for the war? America’s poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home-care patients, its teachers, and health workers.
And who’s actually fighting the war?
Once again, America’s poor. The soldiers who are baking in Iraq’s desert sun are not the children of the rich. Only one of all the representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate has a child fighting in Iraq. America’s “volunteer” army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians looking for a way to earn a living and get an education. Federal statistics show that African Americans make up 21 percent of the total armed forces and 29 percent of the U.S. army. They count for only 12 percent of the general population. It’s ironic, isn’t it - the disproportionately high representation of African Americans in the army and prison? Perhaps we should take a positive view, and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective. Nearly 4 million Americans (2 percent of the population) have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions. Of that number, 1.4 million are African Americans, which means that 13 percent of all voting-age Black people have been disenfranchised.
For African Americans there’s also affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya Sen shows that African Americans as a group have a lower life expectancy than people born in China, in the Indian State of Kerala (where I come from), Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica. Bangladeshi men have a better chance of making it to the age of forty than African American men from here in Harlem.
This year, on what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 74th birthday, President Bush denounced the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program favouring Blacks and Latinos. He called it “divisive,” “unfair,” and “unconstitutional.” The successful effort to keep Blacks off the voting rolls in the State of Florida in order that George Bush be elected was of course neither unfair nor unconstitutional. I don’t suppose affirmative action for White Boys From Yale ever is.
So we know who’s paying for the war. We know who’s fighting it. But who will benefit from it? Who is homing in on the reconstruction contracts estimated to be worth up to one hundred billon dollars? Could it be America’s poor and unemployed and sick? Could it be America’s single mothers? Or America’s Black and Latino minorities?
Operation Iraqi Freedom, George Bush assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via Corporate Multinationals. Like Bechtel, like Chevron, like Halliburton.
Once again, it is a small, tight circle that connects corporate, military, and government leadership to one another. The promiscuousness, the cross-pollination is outrageous.
Consider this: the Defense Policy Board is a government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon. Its members are appointed by the under secretary of defense and approved by Donald Rumsfeld. Its meetings are classified. No information is available for public scrutiny.
The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity found that 9 out of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board are connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts worth 76 billion dollars between the years 2001 and 2002. One of them, Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, is a senior vice president at Bechtel, the giant international engineering outfit. Riley Bechtel, the company chairman, is on the President’s Export Council. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group, is the chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said, “I don’t know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there’s work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it.”
Bechtel has been awarded a 680 million dollar reconstruction contract in Iraq. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaign efforts.
Arcing across this subterfuge, dwarfing it by the sheer magnitude of its malevolence, is America’s anti-terrorism legislation. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has become the blueprint for similar anti-terrorism bills in countries across the world. It was passed in the House of Representatives by a majority vote of 337 to 79. According to the New York Times, “Many lawmakers said it had been impossible to truly debate or even read the legislation.”
The Patriot Act ushers in an era of systemic automated surveillance. It gives the government the authority to monitor phones and computers and spy on people in ways that would have seemed completely unacceptable a few years ago. It gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation, purchasing, and other records of library users and bookstore customers on the suspicion that they are part of a terrorist network. It blurs the boundaries between speech and criminal activity creating the space to construe acts of civil disobedience as violating the law.
Already hundreds of people are being held indefinitely as “unlawful combatants.” (In India, the number is in the thousands. In Israel, 5,000 Palestinians are now being detained.) Non-citizens, of course, have no rights at all. They can simply be “disappeared” like the people of Chile under Washington’s old ally, General Pinochet. More than 1,000 people, many of them Muslim or of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained, some without access to legal representatives.
Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of “liberation” with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price of “New Democracy” in other countries is the death of real democracy at home.
Meanwhile, Iraq is being groomed for “liberation.” (Or did they mean “liberalization” all along?) The Wall Street Journal reports that “the Bush administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq’s economy in the U.S. image.”
Iraq’s constitution is being redrafted. Its trade laws, tax laws, and intellectual property laws rewritten in order to turn it into an American-style capitalist economy.
The United States Agency for International Development has invited U.S. companies to bid for contracts that range between road building, water systems, text book distribution, and cell phone networks.
Soon after Bush the Second announced that he wanted American farmers to feed the world, Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, was put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq. Kevin Watkins, Oxfam’s policy director, said, “Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission.”
The two men who have been short-listed to run operations for managing Iraqi oil have worked with Shell, BP, and Fluor. Fluor is embroiled in a lawsuit by black South African workers who have accused the company of exploiting and brutalizing them during the apartheid era. Shell, of course, is well known for its devastation of the Ogoni tribal lands in Nigeria.
Tom Brokaw (one of America’s best-known TV anchors) was inadvertently succinct about the process. “One of the things we don’t want to do,” he said, “is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we’re going to own that country.”
Now that the ownership deeds are being settled, Iraq is ready for New Democracy.
So, as Lenin used to ask: What Is To Be Done?
Well…
We might as well accept the fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give the U.S. Government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against U.S. military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities of terrorist strikes is futile. It’s like threatening Brer Rabbit that you’ll throw him into the bramble bush. Any one who has read the documents written by The Project for the New American Century can attest to that. The government’s suppression of the Congressional committee report on September 11th, which found that there was intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored, also attests to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both hold people responsible for the actions of their governments. They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly.
The U.S. government has already displayed in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued that it’s no different in the case of the psychology of nations. Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly.
Its “homeland” may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable. Already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets - Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds - government agencies like USAID, the British DFID, British and American banks, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and American Express could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the “inevitability” of the project of Corporate Globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.
It would be naïve to imagine that we can directly confront Empire. Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant. We could reverse the idea of the economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by Empire and its Allies. We could impose a regime of Peoples’ Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded with a contract in postwar Iraq, just as activists in this country and around the world targeted institutions of apartheid. Each one of them should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business. That could be our response to the Shock and Awe campaign. It would be a great beginning.
Another urgent challenge is to expose the corporate media for the boardroom bulletin that it really is. We need to create a universe of alternative information. We need to support independent media like Democracy Now!, Alternative Radio, and South End Press.
The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but, if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor’s chambers. Empire’s conquests are being carried out in your name, and you have the right to refuse. You could refuse to fight. Refuse to move those missiles from the warehouse to the dock. Refuse to wave that flag. Refuse the victory parade.
You have a rich tradition of resistance. You need only read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to remind yourself of this.
Hundreds of thousands of you have survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to, and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the United States, that’s as brave as any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland.
If you join the battle, not in your hundreds of thousands, but in your millions, you will be greeted joyously by the rest of the world. And you will see how beautiful it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared. Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated.
I hate to disagree with your president. Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people.
History is giving you the chance.
Seize the time.
-NY Times: Big and Small Lies
By Edward Herman (Z Sustainer Forums). To subscribe and help support Znet, go here:
http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm
ZNet Commentary
Little Versus Big Lies (and Structures Of Lies) May 20, 2003
By Edward Herman
One of Tom Lehrer’s finest songs was a parody in the style of Richard Dyer-Bennet’s often lugubrious ancient Irish ballads, in which a child confesses to having killed her parents and baked her baby brother in a stew; she admits this as she cannot tell a lie, because lying is a sin.
Well, the New York Times cannot tolerate Jayson Blair‘s performance because lying is a sin, a “grave breach of journalistic standards” (Executive Editor Howell Raines), an “abrogation of the trust between the newspaper and its readers” (Board Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.).
But the New York Times itself, both as a media institution and the product that is delivered in its name on a daily basis, is built and thrives on structures.of disinformation and selective information that constitute Big Lies. These structures do involve occasional direct lies, but far more important is their base in the conduiting of lies issued by official sources, lies by implication, and lies that are institutionalized by repetition and the refusal to admit contradictory evidence. It is possible to institutionalize a very big lie without actually telling a direct lie, although one can usually find them well represented as well.
Thus, for an old but enlightening example, the New York Times swallowed enthusiastically the Cold War propaganda claim that the KGB and Bulgarians had organized the shooting of Pope John Paul II in May 1981. The paper kept this propaganda gambit alive for years despite a mass of conflicting facts, not by lying but by the “preferential method” of news reporting in which the facts that fit the propaganda line are reported but inconvenient facts are ignored and contesting analyses bypassed.
Even when CIA official Melvin Goodman testified at congressional hearings in 1991 that the CIA knew that the KGB and Bulgarians had nothing to do with the shooting because the CIA had penetrated the Bulgarian secret services, the NYT suppressed this piece of information. In 1991 the paper reported that Allen Weinstein had gone over to Bulgaria to inspect files to find out the truth of the case, but it failed to report that he returned empty-handed.
There were occasional direct lies transmitted by the paper on this issue, but the Big Lie--the distinct impression conveyed by the paper in news and editorials that the KGB and Bulgarians were behind the papal shooting--was based on selectivity in choice of fact, the massive suppression of evidence, and confining opinion to those pushing the propaganda/disinformation theme (see Manufacturing Consent, 2002 edition, chap. 4 and Introduction).
This case was hardly exceptional. Throughout the Cold War, literal structures of lies dominated news coverage. One such structure was designed to inflate the Soviet threat, by exaggeration of Soviet military capabilities and claiming a Soviet intention and plan to conquer the world. This threat inflation was regularly displayed in allegations of “gaps” in weapons and “windows of vulnerability,” with the media regularly passing along these claims uncritically, then reporting--very quietly, and with a time lag sufficient for procurement contracts to be let-- that there had been no gap after all, but then allowing no lesson to be learned on the need for scepticism when the next gap was proclaimed.
In 1975 the CIA claimed that the Soviets had doubled their rate of military spending, and a CIA leadership (George Bush)-selected team of hardliners (Team B) issued a report in December 1976 alleging that the Soviets had achieved military superiority and were getting ready to fight a nuclear war. These claims were reiterated during the Reagan years. The CIA did finally admit in 1983 that their estimate of Soviet military expenditures had been mistakenly high, and Tom Gervasi made a very convincing case that the Soviets had inferior arms and defensive intentions in his 1986 book The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy. But the NYT cooperated fully in disseminating this structure of lies.
The paper did no investigative work and reporting on the truth of the claim of higher Soviet military spending, and their leading journalists dealing with defense issues (Richard Burt and Drew Middleton) regularly conduited claims of a growing Soviet threat. When the Team B report was issued in December 1976, displacing an internal report by CIA professionals that was more restrained, a front page article in the Times took the claims at face value, took no note of any political bias or purpose, allowed no contesting comment, and displayed no hint of the slightest scepticism or investigative effort.
During the Reagan era buildup, the paper continued to fail to investigate these claims. Tom Gervasi noted that in one important case where there was a conflict between Reagan claims and Pentagon data, a Times reporter said that the facts were “difficult to pin down.” But Gervasi pointed out that although billions of dollars were at stake, the paper made no effort to pin the facts down. They didn’t look closely at the data and compare it with the claims, nor did their reporters interview anybody; they simply dropped the subject. Gervasi had one opinion column in the NYT in 1981, and was thereafter ignored; his outstanding 1986 book was never reviewed in the paper.
Superhawk and scare-monger Richard Perle, by contrast, had seven op-ed columns in the Reagan-Bush years. The editorials supported a “prudent” military buildup, but this support rested on a major structure of lies and failure to investigate and report honestly that amounted to propaganda service to state policy (see further, my “All the News Fit to Print, Part 1: The Cold War,” Z Magazine, May 1998).
Coverage of the Vietnam war also rested on a structure of lies. Contrary to a mythology of a media hostile to the war, the NYT and its confreres all adopted apologetic premises from the beginning of U.S. intervention and only moved into a qualified opposition as the elite split on the war’s costs and benefits--to the United States.
The NYT always took it as a given that the United States was resisting somebody else’s aggression as it sought to impose a government of its choice on the resistant population; it accepted throughout that this country was protecting “South Vietnam,” even against the “internal aggression” of its own people; and it has never explained why the United States used napalm and chemical warfare only against the people in the south that it was allegedly saving.
In my favorite classic, James Reston, the most eminent NYT reporter and author of many of its editorials on Vietnam, stated that we were in Vietnam because of our “guiding principle” that “no state shall use military force or the threat of military force to achieve its political objectives.” As there was massive evidence that the U.S. puppet had no indigenous support and that he and his U.S.-sponsor relied entirely on U.S. military force to achieve their political objectives, Reston was stating a lie of Orwellian proportions.
Reston and his paper also accepted the various “demonstration elections” held in Vietnam as credible, despite the ongoing war and state terror, exclusion of all dissident candidates, and a clear war-promotional intention;
they took as honest the various “peace moves” carried out by President Lyndon Johnson, which were designed to keep dissenters quiet during the ensuing escalation of the war; they swallowed whole the Nixon-Kissinger interpretation of the Paris Peace agreement of 1972, according to which it was the enemy that misinterpreted and exploited the language of the agreement, not Nixon and Kissinger; and they got on the MIA-POW bandwagon that Nixon constructed to prolong the war, accepting the lies that this was a “humanitarian” not a political issue, and that the POW’s were “hostages.”
From 1950 into the 21st century the NYT has adhered to a structure of lies on the Vietnam war, which helps explain why it has never described the U.S. assault as “aggression” or suggested that this country owes reparations for aggression and the very serious war crimes committed by Johnson, Nixon and their subordinates (see further my “All the News Fit to Print, Part 3, The Vietnam War,” Z Magazine, Oct. 1998).
It is also easy to identify a structure of lies underlying the NYT treatment of the Kosovo war and its background. There was the usual demonization, with the demon portrayed as solely or uniquely responsible for the ethnic cleansing and killings, in exact accord with the demands of the imperial state. German, Austrian and U.S. responsibility for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the sequel of killings was and remains disappeared in the NYT.
Also absent has been reference to the important role of Tudjman and Croatian nationalists seeking both independence and lebensraum at the expense of the Krajina Serbs, Izetbegovic and his close Bosnian Muslim allies (plus his external allies, who included Osama bin Laden) striving for Muslim domination of Bosnia, and the KLA in Kosovo seeking independence as part of a search for a “Greater Albania.” Tudjman, Izetbegovic and the KLA all saw that it would be easy to get the U.S. and NATO to fight their cause, but the NYT never did.
Lord David Owen did see this as he tried to negotiate a settlement in Bosnia, where he found Milosevic much more amenable to negotiation than Izetbegovic and his U.S. supporters. This is why the important negotiator David Owen got minimal attention in the NYT, whereas party-liners like David Rieff and Michael Ignatieff were accorded much space. And just as the Soviet press failed to challenge the Moscow trials of 1936, so also the NYT has never doubted that the Hague Tribunal dealing with Yugoslavia is dispensing justice (see Diana Johnstone, Fools Crusade, Pluto and Monthly Review, 2002; Herman, “The Milosevic Trial,” Z Magazine, April and May, 2002).
A major structure of lies has long provided the framework for NYT news and opinion on Israel and Palestine. Thus the durable representation of Palestinian actions as terrorism, whereas Israel only retaliates and engages in counter-terror, is a lie by the blatantly biased assessment of causation and by the paper’s simple refusal to apply an invidious word to (Israeli) actions that conform exactly to standard definitions of the term.
For years the NYT claimed that the PLO refused to recognize Israel, which was false certainly since 1976; at the same time the paper did not point out that Israel refused to recognize ANY Palestinian authority, and that Israel had used both the false claim and the Israeli refusal as an excuse to avoid a negotiated settlement.
The NYT failed to recognize that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was in no way a response to “terrorism,” but on the contrary was to destroy any negotiation threat--a point clear to Israeli analysts and even easily read from official Israeli statements, but not compatible with Israeli apologetics and therefore not to be found in the NYT. The Times has never used the words “ethnic cleansing” to describe Israel’s steady encroachment on Palestinian lands for the benefit of Jewish settlers, although they used the phrase lavishly and with indignation to describe Serb actions in Kosovo.
Israel’s massive violations of Fourth Geneva Convention rules on proper behavior in “occupied territories” have been entirely ignored by the paper, and the meeting of the signatories of the Geneva Convention in Switzerland in December 2001, boycotted by the United States and Israel, was also black-holed by the NYT.
For the Times, the United States is the proper arbiter of the Israel-Palestine relationship, presumably unbiased as it stands alone with Israel funding Israel’s ethnic cleansing and violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, vetoing monitors for the occupied territories and any UN protests or actions to protect the cleansees. The paper’s downplaying of the ongoing brutal repression in the West Bank and Gaza strip, and Israeli attacks on and ouster of human rights activists and journalists, is perfectly geared to minimizing public attention and concern and therefore permitting a virtual genocidal process in the occupied territories (Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror, Seven Stories, 2003; Herman, “Toward A ‘Final Solution’ in the Occupied Territories?,” Z Net Commentary, Feb. 11, 2002).
In the case of the U.S.-British invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, once again the NYT has served as an agent of power rather than an independent institution capable of asking hard questions and providing a genuine public sphere. In the pre-invasion months as well as during the invasion, the paper provided lavish space to each claim and utterance of the war party, no matter how repetitive and self-serving.
The administration told numerous lies, pressed the intelligence services to come up with desired answers no matter what the evidence, and threatened and bullied dissenters, but as in the past with those falsified “gaps” and other “lies that were not shot down,” the NYT failed to toughen its standards on what constitutes news, it failed to put together serious analyses of the lie sequence, and continued to be conveniently gullible.
No awkward discussions of international law and the UN Charter prohibition of war as an instrument of policy. If the propaganda line was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the paper featured these claims, even to the point of giving front page space to Judith Miller’s notorious report on an Iraqi scientist who claimed that everything Bush had asserted was true--but with Miller never interviewing the man, only conduiting claims he allegedly made as filtered through Bush administration officials ("Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, One Iraqi Scientist is Said to Assert,” April 21, 2003).
While giving space to any Bush or Rumsfeld allegation unsupported by evidence, the paper failed even to mention the revelation in John Barry’s Newsweek report of March 3 that Hussein Kamel, a top-ranking Iraqi defecting official close to the seat of power (he was Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law) and who had run Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles programs, had told his interrogators in 1995 that Saddam had destroyed all of his chemical and biological weapons stocks and missiles to deliver them.
The paper did not find newsworthy former top weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s claim that 90-95 percent of Saddam’s chemical arsenal had been destroyed and that anything left was sludge, and neither Ritter nor Hans Von Sponeck have ever been given op-ed space in the paper, although better qualified than almost all NYT commentators to discuss the facts bearing on Iraq weaponry.
Similarly, Denis Halliday has also been absent from the op-ed slate. This fits another propaganda pattern: suppression of the fact that the sanctions policy enforced by the UN (read, U.S. and Britain) had killed vast numbers of Iraqi civilians. In accord with its propaganda service the NYT now provides a steady diet of articles that feature graves of Saddam’s victims, which helps justify the invasion. Mention of the even greater number of victims of the sanctions, which Halliday has described as “genocidal,” would interfere with this propaganda theme, so the NYT avoids it..
In sum, the really important lies are imbedded in a structure of word usages, frames of reference, and selection of facts and qualified commentators.
These structures of lies can perform miracles of propaganda service: they can make massive ethnic cleansing into a “fight against terrorism, “ and they can transform an invasion of a virtually disarmed victim of 12 years of “sanctions of mass destruction” (whose 500,000 dead children were “worth it” [Madeleine Albright]), in clear violation of the UN Charter and opposed by a vast global majority, into a triumph of humanitarian intervention and liberation. In this context, the indignation at the misdeeds of Jayson Blair would seem to reflect a major case of missing a large forest for a small shrub.
Sunday, May 18, 2003
-Backlashes and Bare Asses: Anti-War Dixie Chicks Take Off All Their Clothes
by Cynthia Peters (ZNet), () who works for SEIU Local 285, and is an activist and writer.
Please support the Sustainer program at
http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm
What do you do if you are a trio of female country singers, who have spoken out against the war, and suffered some backlash as a result?
You pose nude on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, of course.
Such was the trajectory of the Dixie Chicks, popular recording artists from Texas, who told a London audience back in March that they were embarrassed to be from the same state as George Bush. According to the BBC News (4/24/03), anti-Chicks protesters have burned their CDs and even threatened to kill lead singer Natalie Maines and her fellow band members, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison.
Some say that sales of Dixie Chicks CDs have slumped, but others contend that singers’ anti-war stance actually improved their popularity. Michael Moore, citing an article by Frank Rich in the New York Times (4/6/03) wrote that “their album is still at 1 on the Billboard country charts and, according to Entertainment Weekly, on the pop charts during all the brouhaha, they ROSE from 6 to 4.”
Whether being anti-war helps or hurts the ratings of U.S. pop stars may be up for grabs. But what seems clear is that female nudity sells. What does it sell in this case? First and foremost, it sells copies of the May 6th issue of Entertainment Weekly—featuring, as it does, the eye-catching photograph of the three beautiful and naked Dixie Chicks. It also sells Dixie Chicks products since the cover story is great publicity for their music and their upcoming tour.
Maybe it also sells the anti-war message. The Dixie Chicks have used the publicity around their nude posing to reaffirm their anti-war stance (though Natalie Maines said she regrets her “disrespectful” choice of words at the London concert). Maybe it is positive for public debate that the Dixie Chicks managed to use Entertainment Weekly to bring an anti-war message into popular culture. Who cares if they had to be willing to pose nude in order to gain access?
Does it matter?
Yes, it does. Female nudity in this society is used by marketers to get people to buy things. Furthermore, and perhaps more damaging, it trains us to think of women as consumable objects, and it works to flatten complex human relationships (such as those expressed through sexuality), and convince us that human needs can be met in the marketplace.
I don’t know why the Dixie Chicks agreed to pose nude for Entertainment Weekly. Was it a publicity stunt designed to up their ratings? Or was it the most honest way they could figure to get their message out? Perhaps their motivations matter less than the possible effects.
One result of their nude posing is that it softens their anti-war stance. The Dixie Chicks’ nudity soothes their detractors by suggesting, “Look, you shouldn’t feel threatened by us. We’re just babes underneath it all.”
And the Dixie Chicks played into that by agreeing to pose in the nude.
They took off their clothes and took their place among a long list of objectified women whose bodies are used to sell everything from beer to real estate. You could almost get whiplash from the non-sequitur contained in the headlines, “Dixie Chicks Pose Nude in Response to Backlash.” How is posing nude a response to getting death threats? Who knows? But most of us don’t bother to ask the question because we are so used to consuming images of naked or scantily clad women whose job is to associate shopping with sexual allure.
Maybe by uncloaking themselves, the Dixie Chicks meant to reveal the labels that have been put on them since they came out against the war. In the photo, their naked bodies appear to be inscribed with the epithets as well as the praise that has been directed their way: “Dixie Sluts,” “Traitors,” “Saddam’s Angels,” and “Proud Americans” are the labels they “wear” for the cover photo.
The problem is, they flatten their message by making their sex appeal our entr饠to it.
Men don’t have to pose nude as a way to comeback after getting slammed for their ideas. Men are not expected to promote their opinions via the shape of their thighs or the curve of their backsides.
It would be nice if we had a culture that celebrated all our bodies and our sexualities. But we don’t. Is that the anti-war movement’s problem? I think so. Gender politics get played out in our movement just like they do in every niche of society. While we should support the Dixie Chicks in their anti-war efforts, we should also work to create public space for women to speak even when they don’t take off all their clothes.
I know that sounds radical.
But the Dixie Chicks remind us that gender plays a significant role in determining who gets to speak out, and how.
The peace and justice movement should be one small (but growing!) forum where women’s voices are not only allowed, but nurtured. We should promote women writers and speakers and activists from within our ranks—making sure we do not replicate sexist structures that leave men doing all the talking and women doing all the data entry. By taking care of these priorities in our own movement, we would be changing the gender balance in the mix of public voices. We would be re-writing the norms about who speaks out when and what happens as a result.
The anti-war movement has not done such a bad job in many ways. As reported recently in the L.A. Times (4/13/03), “There is a preponderance of female leadership in today’s antiwar movement, in groups national and grass-roots, with women taking the lead in organizing candlelight vigils and protest marches.”
Just as our analysis of world events must keep the left end of the political debate alive, so must our movements push to break down sexist barriers that limit women’s expression. The Dixie Chicks remind us that consumer culture doesn’t expect us to speak out, and if we do, it expects to be able morph the message into something that can be delivered via a beautiful blonde’s naked torso. That’s not the kind of world we want. Let’s be sure we’re doing our part to counter it and present alternatives.
-Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” Contaminating Danmark’s Water
Norfolk Genetic Information Network’s GM Watch
http://www.ngin.org.uk
(See the above for many more links such as FAQs: intro on GM- what is genetic engineering,
GM food guide,MONSANTO’s WEB OF DECEIT and more)
Danish drinking water resources are under attack from glyphosate - the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide - “against all expectations sieving down through the soil and polluting the ground water at a rate of five times more than the allowed level for drinking water”.
“When we spray glyphosate on the fields by the rules it has been shown that it is washed down into the upper ground water with a concentration of 0.54 micrograms per litre. This is very surprising, because we had previously believed that bacteria in the soil broke down the glyphosate before it reached the ground water.”
Just imagine wht it would be like if RR crops were commercialised
---
http://politiken.dk/VisArtikel.sasp?PageID=269614
Poisonous Spray on a Course Towards Drinking Water
by Anders Legarth Schmidt
Denmark’s most popular herbicide Roundup is polluting the underground water far more than previously thought. Agriculture uses yearly 800 tons of active glyphosate in herbicide. The Environment Minister is looking at taking steps to address this. The Danish drinking water resources are under attack from an unexpected quarter. The chemical glyphosate that is in the popular herbicides Roundup and Touchdown is against all expectations sieving down through the soil and polluting the ground water at a rate of five times more than the allowed level for drinking water.
This has been shown from tests done by the Denmark and Greenland Geological Research Institution (DGGRI) in an as yet unpublished article.
Believed Bacteria broke down glyphosate
“When we spray glyphosate on the fields by the rules it has been shown that it is washed down into the upper ground water with a concentration of 0.54 micrograms per litre. This is very surprising, because we had previously believed that bacteria in the soil broke down the glyphosate before it reached the ground water.”
It is the Environment Ministry that has given permission to use glyphosate - based on the producers [Monsanto’s] own research.
Used against Twitch and Thistles
Farmers spray glyphosate on their fields after the harvest to keep the soil free of twitch and thistles. It had been earlier found in wells in Roskilde and Storstroms regions as well as the Copenhagen district council area. Critics say glyphosate causes cancer, while its defenders call it a wonder herbicide.
Professor Mogens Henze the head of the Institute for Environment and Resources at Denmark’s Technical University, says that the consequence of the new knowledge is that water works in five to ten years will need to clean the water before Danes can drink it.
“The results show that glyphosate is polluting our drinking water. And unfortunately we have only seen the tip of the iceberg, because glyphosate and many other spray chemicals are on their way through the soil at this point in time. Politicians need to look at agriculture in relation to clean drinking water and decide what it is they are going to do.” says Mogens Henze, who isn’t blaming the farmers who use something that the authorities have allowed.
Use Doubled
Statistics from the Environment Ministry show that the use of glyphosate has doubled in the last five years. In 2001 800 tons was used and that made up a quarter of farmers total use of pesticides. This shows that glyphosate is the most used herbicide by farmers.
As a result of the new research from DGGRI the Environment Minister Hans Christian Schmidt is currently thinking about doing something about the use of glyphosate on Danish fields.
“It is simply not acceptable that this stuff is turning up in our groundwater in such a concentration so high over the acceptable level. If this is the case then we must react quickly” says the Environment Minister, who is awaiting a report from the Environment Ministry.
-Reject Nomination of Bush and Blair for Nobel Prize
Not a joke: Harald T. Nesvik, a Right-wing Norwegian Member of Parliament, has nominated U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush for the Nobel Peace Prize for their “decisive action against terrorism”. Sign this petition to tell you agree on rejecting Bush and Blair from Nobel Prize Nomination.
Reject Bush and Blair for Nobel PEACE Prize