Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Is Japan REALLY a democracy? Peace campaigners locked up for free speech

The media in nominally democratic countries like Japan and the U.S. like to quote poliicians who talk about the lack of democracy in countries such as China or Burma. But the onus is on those who decry the lack of “democracy” in other countries to demonstrate their own commitment to it. Locking peace activists away for more than two months, as Japan has done in the case of several citizens who distributed anti-war literature to a Self-Defense Forces housing project, which has now been approved by the morally bankrupt Tokyo High Court, is certainly evidence that the Japanese government is on the same page as that of the more open repressive governments it pretends to disdain. It should be noted that those who distribute flyers for Pizza Hut and pornography have not enjoyed the same fate as the peace activists. Clearly Koizumi and company do not want SDF members to find out that the Bush-Blair war it is helping to prop up is illegal and immoral and therefore decide to refuse to take part.

Links
CITIZENS GROUP
http://www4.ocn.ne.jp/~tentmura/

Printable Version

Understanding the Anti-WTO Protests (from Japan Focus)

From APEC to WTO: trajectories of protest in Korea and East Asia

By Jamie Doucette and Owen Miller

Angry protests in Busan, South Korea during an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference there in November have alarmed Hong Kong police preparing for a mid-December World Trade Organization ministerial conference. Hong Kong police fear that the some of the groups who showed up to protest APEC may also bring strident street protests to Hong Kong. This article examines some of the trajectories of protest apparent at the APEC events by looking more closely at the national and international dynamics of Korean activism, revealing growing coordination between workers, farmers and anti-war activists, and the implications for the Hong Kong meeting.

The specter of farmer protest

Since Korean activist Lee Kyeong-Hae screamed “WTO kills farmers” before taking his life at the WTO protests in Cancun, Mexico in 2003, Korean farmers have directly targeted global trade talks as well as the Korean government’s own plans to liberalize its rice market. Under a deal negotiated last year with rice-exporting countries and the World Trade Organization, South Korea pledged to raise its rice import quota to 7.96 percent of total domestic consumption from the current four percent in exchange for a 10-year grace period before it must fully open up to rice imports. The Korean government has also tried to ease the pressure on Korean farmers by providing incentives to grow different grains and other agricultural products.

According to South Korea’s Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice (CCEJ), however, the Korean government has confused the public by claiming that it only plans to increase the imported rice quota to 7.9 percent. The CCEJ maintains that the 1988-90 statistics on which this figure is based are inflated compared to current levels of consumption; furthermore, the government has established separate quotas for rice importation for use in food and beverage processing which would also considerably inflate the amount of rice imported [1].

Nearly 150,000 Korean farmers rallied across the country in October to protest the bill and they also showed up en masse to protest APEC in Busan where WTO agricultural policy was one of the key topics tabled at the APEC leaders’ summit. Protests began on September 12 with a march of 20,000 in Seoul organized by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and People’s Action against APEC and Bush. They were quiet enough until 15 November, when the Korean Peasants League held a protest in Seoul. The League’s protest turned into a four-hour confrontation with police, leaving seven police buses burned out and many police and protesters injured, including Korean farmer Jeon Yong-cheol, who later died of head injuries. This was a precursor to the larger protest that took place in Busan on 18 November. Protest organizers had expected over 100,000 to show up; however, police stopped at least 70 busloads of protestors from the neighboring province of South Cholla from reaching the rally, in some cases stealing the keys from bus drivers. Still, 30,000 managed to rally in Busan and march on the summit. Korean farmers carried ceremonial effigies for two farmers who had committed suicide by drinking herbicide in the week previous to the conference as a protest against South Korea’s plan to liberalize its rice market.

In anticipation of a confrontation, riot police used armored buses and a double layer of shipping containers to seal off the bridges leading to the Busan Exhibition and Convention Center (BEXCO). In response, the protestors – mainly farmers – tied ropes to the containers and pulled them down, succeeding, under a barrage of water cannon, in dragging some of them into the sea [2].

What happened next was captured and circulated by the international media: well armed police – equipped with batons, shields and in some cases, three-meter steel pipes – clashed with protestors brandishing bamboo poles well into the evening.

Fearing that Korean farmers might contribute to similar mayhem at the WTO meeting in Hong Kong this month, officials sent police to South Korea for the APEC summit in order to “assess the characteristics of Korean protestors and devise ways of dealing with them [3],” and have warned the 1,500 Korean farmers who plan to join the protests that gatherings of 50 people or rallies of more than 30 require written notice in advance or will be considered illegal and broken up. In addition, anyone who organizes or participates in illegal gatherings or rallies faces up to five years in prison or more if property is damaged or traffic disrupted.

Growing internationalism?

There is something of a gloomy atmosphere hanging over the Korean left these days, primarily due to the recent corruption scandals in the left union federation, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), and the loss of the Democratic Labour Party’s seat in the worker concentrated city of Ulsan during recent by-elections. The unity between the KCTU and Korea’s other large labour federation, the FKTU, has recently crumbled over the issue of labour market restructuring. Besides the evident crisis in the labour movement there has also been talk of divisions in South Korea’s famously leftwing student politics. Nevertheless, changes are afoot that could bring the Korean left closer to global movements, such as the ‘anti-globalization’ or global justice movements.

Korean workers did not come out in full force in Busan, but they joined protests leading up to it and participated in larger coordinating bodies such as NO to APEC and Korean People’s Action against the WTO. The KCTU has instead been focusing on a domestic battle against labour market restructuring. Contingent or non-regular forms of work have been expanding since the 1997 economic crisis in South Korea, after the union reluctantly agreed to concessions on labour reform. Recently, as the Roh government tries to position South Korea as an economic hub in the Northeast Asian region, there has been increased pressure to make the labour market more flexible, both to attract foreign investors to South Korea’s financial sector and to compete with other export oriented manufacturing economies.

The “Non-Regular Workers’ Protection Law,” which was expected to be passed in the April extraordinary session of the National Assembly was postponed till the present session due to labour protests and the breakdown of tripartite negotiations. The new law is comprised of three different bills that would expand use of temporary workers, ‘dispatched’ workers (casual or contract workers through staffing agencies), and revise labour arbitration processes.
In a January 2005 report to an OECD mission, the KCTU criticized the government’s failure to commit to the principle of “equal pay for equal work” for non-regular workers. “Without a written policy statement on the principle of equal pay for equal work,” the reports states, “there is no standard on which to judge discrimination. The major problem that irregular workers face is the infringement of their three basic labour rights---the right to organize, the right to strike, and the right to a collective bargaining agreement---due to a clear lack of accountability from employers.” [4]

The KCTU’s criticism was strengthened in the spring by a report from South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission criticizing ‘unreasonable discrimination’ against irregular workers. The Commission’s report was the product of a two-year taskforce study on irregular workers which reviewed their situation in light of the UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as major ILO conventions and the Korean Constitution, which guarantees the right to equal treatment for employees. Cho Young-hoang, president of National Human Rights Commission, urged adherence to the principle that non-regular forms of employment be adopted only ‘exceptionally and limitedly.’ Emphasizing equal pay for equal work, the commission stated that any new draft of the bill should clearly stipulate that a company can hire temporary workers only when there is an understandable need and, in addition, there should be a limit on the period that temporary workers can be used. [5]

On 1 December, the KCTU launched a nine-day general strike against the new labour package, despite the lack of support from the FKTU and disarray in some of its own unions. The KCTU allied with many of the farmer and student groups present at the APEC protests, holding a large joint protest on 4 December in Seoul in opposition to both the labor and rice liberalization bills, whose joint effect, they claim, will be a proliferation of low-paid, irregular forms of work.

While Korea’s social movements are simultaneously fighting rearguard actions on a number of fronts, and despite a lower-than expected turnout for the anti-APEC protests, many activists have positively assessed the results. Writing in the socialist newspaper Ta Hamkke, Kim Kwang-il noted that the protests exceeded earlier anti-globalisation demonstrations in Korea, and, perhaps more importantly, they revealed the sort of ‘unity in diversity’ that has become the trademark of the global justice movement. The throngs who converged at the bridges to the convention center on 18 November included farmers, workers, students, street vendors, environmentalists, health workers, women anti-war activists, gay rights activists and foreign migrant workers. Kim also notes that the protests represented the growing internationalism of the social movements in Korea as activists were inspired by recent events both in Argentina (the Mar del Plata demonstrations against the Summit of the Americas) and Washington (the massive anti-war demo of 24 September) [6].

This global outlook was well illustrated by the largely student rally that took place during the afternoon at the T’ogok junction before the group of around a thousand headed off to join the other protest marches converging at the bridges over to the BEXCO Center. The rally passed a resolution containing the following passage: “We oppose the neo-liberal globalization and war that are pushing the people of the whole world into greater poverty and inequality and threatening our peace.” [7].

A separate rally of protesting farmers of the Peasants League issued a statement that reveals a more nationalist attitude to the issues surrounding liberalization and the WTO, while at the same time recognizing the global dimension of the problem: We stand resolutely against the APEC summit, which prioritizes free trade and tramples on our national agriculture .… We proclaim to the whole world the determination of 3.5 million Korean farmers to defend our nation’s ‘food sovereignty’ by halting the APEC talks taking place in Busan today and preventing the opening of our rice market” [8].

After the protests, there was some criticism that the organizers had placed too much emphasis on the anti-Bush theme and not enough on the substantive issues of neo-liberal globalization, thus risking the potential of falling into a kind of blunt anti-Americanism that had been apparent on some placards and internet sites. Others expressed concern that the nationalist left had dominated the protests while the internationalist left had been too weak [9]. Both of these point to an older fault line on the Korean left between the long dominant nationalist tendency, with its focus on the issues of unification and the continued presence of US troops in South Korea, and the more outward-looking ‘new left’ and internationalist left. This tension existed in the older divisions between ‘National Liberation’ and ‘Peoples Democracy’ activists of the eighties and to some degree has continued to inform the trajectories of the radical left and civil society groups that emerged out of the democracy movement. Of course, similar tensions are found in social movements across the global south and even, to an extent, in the developed world where tension exists between initiatives aimed at stronger state control and economic sovereignty as part of the solution to the problems of neo-liberal globalization on the one hand, and grassroots initiatives that are more ambivalent concerning both state and market power.

In this context it is worth considering how the nature of the current South Korean government inflects social movements. The government of former human rights lawyer Roh Moo-hyun has continued his predecessor’s ‘sunshine policy’ of engagement toward the North and instituted a more independent and nationalist stance toward the US that is widely supported among the younger generation of workers and urban professionals who grew up during the era of rapid development and anti-communist military dictatorship. This seems to reflect something of a fundamental divergence between the interests of South Korea’s newly ascendant political class and its traditional ruling groups, as well as the current US administration. While Bush administration policy toward North Korea has been rather indecisive over the past few years, the overall tendency has been to maintain the status quo in Northeast Asia, possibly as part of a more general China-containment strategy. This does not sit well with the views of those who seek a peaceful resolution to the Korean peninsula’s six-decade division, and is also at odds with sections of the South Korean elite who seek a ‘soft landing’ for North Korea and even have long-term ambitions for a future united peninsula that will become a major economic and political player in the region. With its recent joint industrial development in the North Korean city of Kaesong, South Korea can be seen as slowly integrating the North, while also potentially tapping cheap, North Korean labour as a source for greater competitiveness. A diluted version of this ambition to become a regional power can perhaps be detected in Roh’s recent pronouncements about Korea’s role as a ‘power balancer’ between China and Japan.

The Roh government is often described by the opposition Grand National Party (GNP), and by other forces on the right and far right of Korean politics as a ‘leftwing’ government, mainly for its allegedly pro-North and anti-American stance and for its perceived ‘pro-labour’ policies. The Korean political reality is, however, more complex. It is true that labour and students supported Roh during the impeachment moves against him, however, labour groups have maintained strong opposition to his labour reform proposals all along. Though the Roh government may have had some success in strengthening the social safety net, it has continued to suppress segments of the labour movement, failed to reform the outdated National Security Law and, perhaps most significantly, continues to pursue labour market reform, market liberalization and privatization policies with some vigour. Ironically, the GNP itself has slowly begun to support the policy of engagement with the North, while Roh Moo-hyun has demonstrated his loyalty to the United States by dispatching ROK troops to serve in Iraq, a move he felt necessary to give South Korea more room to maneuver on initiatives involving North Korea but which alienated many of his supporters.

These developments coincide with the rise of a new and more confident nationalism among the South Korean public that no longer sees North Korea as the main enemy. It is a double-edged sword that can be expressed in a cultural and at times chauvinistic nationalism, as has been seen in recent sporting events such as the 2002 Football World Cup and, perhaps more famously, the 2002 Winter Olympics controversy around the disqualification of South Korean speed skater Kim Dong-sung; the controversies with China over the history of the ancient Koguryo kingdom and Japan over the disputed Tokdo islets; or most recently, the public uproar over allegations made in a TV documentary against cloning pioneer and new national hero, Hwang Woo-suk. But this nationalism can also take on a left hue, with anti-imperialist undercurrents, as seen in the huge demonstrations that followed the killing of two middle-school students by a US armoured personnel carrier in 2002, or the current protests over the expansion of a US Army base at P’yongt’aek. These often contradictory nationalist currents inform the responses of the Korean left to neo-liberal globalisation and the spaces of resistance it chooses to occupy – spaces, sometimes, where there is the potential for a more internationalist outlook.

From APEC to WTO

Like the APEC protests, those planned for the WTO meeting in Hong Kong have the potential to increase future cooperation between social movements opposed to neo-liberal politics. Years of coordination at the World Social Forum and various regional and national social forums has led to stronger networks among activists than has been seen in past decades with numerous East Asian students, farmers and workers’ groups expected this year to protest the WTO ministerial. Thus, the protests are likely to take on a strong regional as well as global dimension.

The weeklong Hong Kong protest will provide these activists with a chance to explore their common interests and create new dimensions of protest. A remarkable amount of effort has been put into organizing the protests by local foreign migrant workers and their supporters, many of who are particularly apt at bridging between issues important to farmers, workers, and anti-war activists and providing a more internationalist focus. Foreign activists will also be joined in Hong Kong this month by domestic trade unions and human rights groups, as well as Anti-war activists who will be using the WTO meeting to protest the war in Iraq. Indeed, evidence of some synthesis of these interests is already apparent. South Korean farmers’ groups have printed protest headbands that read: Against WTO and BUSH, and events have been planned that draw on connections between multiple campaigns.

Nonetheless, certain groups are likely to be more prominent than others at the protests. The extensive farmers’ network of Via Campesina will be present in full force to continue to protest WTO talks on agriculture, as it has at previous WTO meetings; meanwhile, the presence of trade union movements is likely to be much more uneven. Though representatives from the larger international labour federations will be attending events, there seems to be less grassroots mobilization of workers than farmers, with the strongest foreign contingent of labour activists likely to be coming from India and Malaysia to protest the WTO’s general agreement on trade and services. Observers note that the fact that Hong Kong trade unions have come out against the WTO is also a positive step.

Alan Chen, a Hong Kong-based activist recently interviewed at chinaworker.org, is excited about the potential for WTO protests to draw in new constituents. Specifically, he discusses the prospects for involving more mainland Chinese activists in the global justice movement.

In December, if there are 10,000 demonstrating against the WTO, it will come across in China and it will be reported all over the world, on the internet and so on. It will be a good opportunity to tell Chinese working people that… it is common farmers and workers who have come to protest against the WTO, which the Chinese government has always hailed as a great success. [10]

Chen notes that workers at mainland Chinese firms have cause for concern about the WTO, as their wages are influenced by the Chinese government’s ability to intervene successfully and build up its larger state-owned enterprises – a task which will be made more difficult when China’s full accession to the WTO is completed. It seems though, that any potential integration of Chinese workers and farmers into global protest networks is likely to be a very gradual process, as has been witnessed in the ongoing attempts at dialogue between the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the All China Confederation of Trade Unions. Nevertheless, if the spark of interest in the global justice movement that Chen feels Chinese people may attain from witnessing large anti-WTO protests on Chinese soil is realized, it is possible that a variety of new alliances may be made.

There are fears that opposition to the WTO may cause Hong Kong police to crack down on protest in ways similar to the repression in Busan and at other international meetings. From the inside alone, the WTO faces challenges: there has been sharp divergence between members of the WTO over its agricultural policies, with delegates from poorer countries increasingly organized collectively against any policy that could potentially displace farmers. Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South has speculated that disagreement over agriculture alone may cause trade talks at the WTO to collapse in coming weeks [11]. Thus, activists fear that the Hong Kong administration may try to minimize public images of dissent using similar methods to the South Korean government. Prior to the APEC protest, the Korean government prevented 998 members of foreign NGOs with records of protesting global trade meetings from entering the country. It also circulated a list of 400 other activists who were to be closely monitored. Busan was no exception to the pattern of excessive policing at other international summits, with some 47,000 police and additional private security forces on hand to prevent protesters from getting anywhere near the BEXCO convention center.

Like South Korea, Hong Kong has circulated lists of protestors that will be prevented from entering the country, among them many South Korean farmers. Hong Kong has also created a designated protest pen for demonstrators, and surrounded it with fencing, while 10,000 police will be patrolling conference venues and protests. Locally, the Hong Kong People’s Alliance, a network comprised of some 30 local farmer, worker, and other activist groups, from trade unions to organizations of foreign domestic workers, has been negotiating with authorities over venues for rallies and public protest. Organizers expect around 10,000 participants for their Action Week against the WTO beginning on 13 December.

The upcoming WTO demonstrations provide an important venue with the potential for expanded regional and international coordination among farmers, workers, and anti-war activists, and the potential to expand the movement to China. If the APEC protests were any indication, East Asian activists are increasingly involved in the difficult task of overcoming national and international tensions among themselves and organizing against neo-liberalism and war, at home and abroad.

Jamie Doucette in Vancouver edits a blog on Korean social movements at http://twokoreas.blogspot.com. Owen Miller in London writes a blog on Korean and Northeast Asian history and politics at http://kotaji.blogsome.com. This article was written for Japan Focus and posted on December 7, 2005.

Notes

[1] Citizen’s Coalition for Economic Justice. “Withdraw the rice negotiation and reconsider the process.” CCEJ website 11 January 2005.
[2] Kim To-gyun, et al., “Kungmin taehoe mamuri… kyongch’al, swaep’aip’u tulgo chinap.” [As the citizen’s rally comes to an end… police attack with steel pipes.] Minjung ui sori, 18 November 2005.
[3] Hong Kong police official Alfred Ma, quoted in “Hong Kong urges Korean protestors to behave at WTO meeting.” Chosun Ilbo, 23 November 2005.
[4] KCTU Report on Recent Situation of Labour Laws and Industrial Relations For the Meeting with OECD Mission 18th January, 2005.
[5] Korea Herald (2005.04.15)
[6] Kim Kwang-il. “Sam man myong i pusi wa ap’ek e pandaehae haengjinhada.” [30,000 march to oppose Bush and APEC.] Ta Hamkke 68, 26 November 2005.
[7] “1 ch’a kungmin taehoe mamuri.” [The first citizen’s rally comes to an end.] Ch’am sesang, 18 November 2005.
[8] Kim To-gyun, et al., as above.
[9] Ra Un-yong, “Pan ap’ek t’ujaeng ui namgin kot.” [The legacy of the anti-APEC struggle.] Ch’am Sesang, 22 November 2005.
[10] Interview with Alan Chen, Chinaworker.org. 30 November 2005.
[11] Walden Bello, “Nothing to gain, everything to lose: Developing Country Prospects.” 25, November, 2005.

ISSN: 1557-4660

Printable Version

WTO meeting in Hong Kong: Our World is not for sale!

by Vandana Shiva

The WTO Ministerial at Hong Kong has already failed. For the corporate world it has failed because smaller, poorer developing countries are starting to have a say in outcomes of WTO negotiations. With the backing of peoples power on the streets they walked out of the Seattle and Cancun ministerial, exercising the highest power in democracy, the power to say ‘no’, the power exercised by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the power of non-cooperation with unjust rule.

Doha was the first ministerial after Seattle had failed. No new “round” should have been launched at Doha. That is why the slogan of the people’s movement was “No new round: Turn around”. The Doha Ministerial was to have been primarily for “implementation” issues – the mandatory reviews of the problematic agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) imposed on the world through the Uruguay Round of undemocratic negotiations.

As usual, the powerful countries, driven by their even more powerful corporations wanted both to prevent the mandatory reforms of the agreements that establish corporate monopolies in agriculture, seeds and medicines, as well as to introduce new issues like non-agricultural market access (NAMA) and further distort the already distorted GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services). It is to introduce new issues that they refer to a new “Doha Round” when in fact we are in the implementation period of the Uruguay Round. To placate the developing countries with doublespeak, they refer to the “Doha Development Round”.

What is offered as the “Development Package” in the draft Hong Kong declaration of 26th November 2005 is “Aid for Trade” with World Bank and IMF further locking Third World countries in debt through loans for ‘trade related infrastructure” – more ports, more superhighways, leading to more green house gases, more climate change. This is not a “development package” but a recipe for environment disaster. World Bank is also pushing water privatization as trade related infrastructure.

The “Aid for Trade” package is in fact World Bank and IMF loans joining with WTO rules to impose trade liberalization on Third World Countries. Now that the marginalized and excluded players have learnt to exercise their power in WTO through non-cooperation, they are refusing to cooperate with demands for further trade liberalization in agriculture, and introduction of trade liberalization in services and industrial production. And they need to reject the “Aid of Trade” package in the draft Hong Kong Ministerial Text.

The Draft Hong Kong Declaration: A Retreat From The Doha Mandate

The Draft Hong Kong Declaration is an attempt to retreat from commitments made at Doha. Para 18 of the Doha Declaration addressed the extension of the protection of geographical indications provided for in Article 23 to products other than wines and spirits. These products are of interest to developing countries and include products such as Basmati rice (pirated and patented by Ricetec corporation of Texas) and Darjeeling tea. The Hong Kong Declaration makes no reference to extension of geographical indicators to other products.

Para 19 of Doha was an instruction to undertake the mandatory review of Article 27.3(b) of TRIPS and the review of the implementation of the TRIPS agreement under Article 71.1, taking fully into account the development dimension. The work programme of Para 19 related to review of TRIPS finds no mention in the Hong Kong draft.

The phasing out of export subsidies agreed to in Doha has disappeared in the new text.

The Doha text had reaffirmed “the right of members under the General Agreement on Trade in Services to regulate, and to introduce new regulations on the supply of services”. For Hong Kong this has been diluted to “with due respect to the right to regulate”.

On issues of interest to people and the Third World, Hong Kong is a regression with respect to Doha. On issues of interest to global corporations and rich countries, the Hong Kong declaration rushes ahead with expanding the WTO agenda.

“WTO: Shrink or Sink”

Since Seattle, the call of the people’s movement “Our world is not for sale” has been “WTO shrink or sink”, People’s movements want a shrinkage in the areas controlled by WTO. They want WTO out of Agriculture; they want IPR’s out of WTO. For the people of the world, and countries that bear the costs of trade liberalization, “shrink or sink” refers to shrinkage of corporate rights and WTO’s power’s over our lives and our resources.

Corporations and the powerful countries, which work on their behalf want an expansion of the areas under WTO’s control, but a shrinkage in the powers and participation of member countries.

The attempts to systematically marginalize implementation issues and subvert the built in right to reform and change in WTO rules and agreements as built into the Doha mandate are an example of political shrinkage as interpreted by the rich and powerful countries. New reference to plurilateral agreement in services to be imposed on developing countries are new directions for exclusion when participation in multilateral negotiations by the weaker member starts to become a block. For corporations and the US and EU the way forward is an even more asymmetric, unjust, non-participatory, undemocratic WTO. Their “Shrink or Sink” is shrinkage of democracy and peoples rights.

The powers that created WTO will not allow it to sink so easily. Therefore democratic shrinkage is the only option left to them. And democratic shrinkage means an even more naked display of brutal corporate takeover of our economies and securities than we have witnessed in the last ten years of WTO rule.

For the movements too, a new challenge emerges. While we want WTO to shrink to the old GATT, shedding both the new issues of the Uruguay Round – IPR’s, Agriculture, Services, Investment - and not taking on the new issues of the so called Doha Round, we also have to address the subversion of WTO’s shallow multilaterism with bilateral and plurilateral agreements.

We want shrinkage in WTO’s jurisdiction and mandate, but an enlargement of participation and rights of people and their government to have a say on issues of international trade, including which issues cannot be governed merely by rules for international commerce. Such issues include food and agriculture, biodiversity and medicines.

The Agriculture Agreement has already led to the killing of thousands of farmers. In India, nearly 40,000 farmers have been driven to suicides in the last decade due to trade liberalisation. In Cancun, Korean farmer Lee took his life. Two more Korean farmers committed suicide recently in protests against free trade in agriculture during the APEC meetings. Not only is WTO killing farmers, it is killing democracy.

The US dispute against EU on the GMO issue shows how WTO rules are being used to deny citizens their right to choose the food they eat. From remarks made by Mr. Supachai, till recently the WTO’s Director General, at an UNCTAD conference in Delhi on 28th November 2005, where he referred to the country “impeding GMO’s” having lost the WTO dispute, it can be inferred that Monsanto has successfully used WTO for forcing open European markets for GMO dumping, against the will of European citizens, and against the constitutional rights of thirty regions in Europe which have declared themselves to be GMO free.

WTO is clearly an inappropriate institution for making decisions on what farmers grow, and what people eat. These issues are best left to local, regional and national democracies. This is the content of food democracy and food sovereignty. That is why WTO must stop messing up with our food and agriculture systems.

Similarly, the WTO TRIPS agreement that forces countries to patent seeds and life forms, promotes biopiracy of traditional knowledge, and creates monopolies in seeds and medicines needs to change. A trade institution has no business to impose far reaching patent rules, which are denying people access to seeds and medicines. These issues too need to be returned to national democratic decision-making.

People’s power and developing countries won in Seattle and Cancun. The moral and political failure of WTO needs to be translated into the creation of alternatives at local, national and international levels.

Beyond Hong Kong, we will either go deeper down the road to democracy or the road to dictatorship. Which road is taken will depend on how successful movements are in building creative alternatives to WTO based on economic democracy and economic justice.

Printable Version

Chinese/English Links:民間監察世貿聯盟/Hong Kong People’s Alliance on the WTO, more links

People’s Action Week is the people’s alternative to the World Trade Organization’s 6th Ministerical Conference. Beginning on the 8th of December, and continuing until the end of the MC6, various local and international organizations have organized a wide range of workshops, seminars, and cultural events all focusing on the impact of the World Trade Organization on people. Keep up to date with what is going on during People’s Action Week and the HKPA’s response to the WTO negotiations, by frequently visiting this special section of the HKPA’s website. This section includes a complete programme list, press releases, daily…

English
Chinese

Another activist site in Hong Kong
http://www.inmediahk.net/public/index

UPDATES IN ENGLISH
http://junk-wto.blogspot.com/

And comments form the Institute for Public Accuracy

WTO Meets in Hong Kong

The World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference will take place Dec. 13-18 in Hong
Kong.

MARK WEISBROT, ,
http://www.cepr.net
An economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Weisbrot
said today: “According to a recent World Bank study [’Agricultural Trade Reform and the
Doha Development Agenda’], even a very successful Doha Round would lead to tiny gains for
developing countries—less than three-tenths of 1 percent and possibly even much
smaller. This is about 2 cents a day per person for developing countries. If this is the
best the World Bank expects from the Doha Round, shouldn’t those interested in poverty
alleviation be asking for a different agenda? ... What makes this so damaging is that
developing countries are being asked to make very costly concessions in exchange for
these barely measurable gains.”

DEBORAH JAMES, ,
http://www.globalexchange.org
James is the global economy director for Global Exchange. She will be in Hong Kong
during the WTO meeting. She said today: “After 10 years of experience with the WTO, civil
society and governments around the world are increasingly rejecting corporate
globalization in favor of more democratic systems of governance that protect jobs,
promote economic development, and safeguard our environment.”

LORI WALLACH,
Wallach is the director of Public Citizen. She said today: “Efforts to extend the
failed status quo trade and globalization model are facing growing opposition worldwide,
as we saw with the recent breakdown of FTAA talks at the Summit of the Americas in
Argentina. Countries are calling into question the conventional wisdom on the benefits of
this particular model of trade—NAFTA in this hemisphere and the WTO globally.”

DAVID WASKOW,
Waskow is the international program director of Friends of the Earth. He said today:
“These negotiations may force open developing countries to agricultural products from
rich countries, impoverishing small farmers and undercutting sustainable agricultural
practices. That reality will be made worse as tariff reductions in sectors such as fish
and forest products will fuel depletion of the natural resources that the poor in
developing countries depend on for their livelihoods.”

COLIN RAJAH,
Rajah is the international migrant rights program coordinator at the National Network
for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. He said today: “Through its ‘Mode 4’ deal, the WTO is
proposing to create a global guestworker program that will enable corporations to dictate
the flow of temporary workers—whose rights and immigrant status would be tied to their
employer, exposing them to significant abuse with no possibility of permanent residency.
It’s important to understand that trade agreements struck by the WTO have caused
communities to lose their livelihoods and forced people to migrate, while using
immigrants as cheap, disposable labor for corporations.”

ANURADHA MITTAL,
http://www.oaklandinstitute.org
Mittal is founder and executive director of the Oakland Institute. She will be in Hong
Kong during the WTO Ministerial Conference meeting and will host a daily live radio show
to be broadcast by KPFK in Los Angeles and other radio stations. She said today: “Our
broadcasts will include live panel discussions, interviews with politicians and analysts,
speeches, reports from street protests, press conferences, and official events.”

Printable Version

Is Europe Western?

by TAWADA Yoko

...Several years ago a new law was passed in Japan decreeing that the Japanese flag was to be raised at every ceremony taking place at schools and universities in the country. It determined the exact size of the flag. Otherwise, some people could decide to raise a flag that was smaller than a postage stamp. The law insisted that the flag was to be raised in the middle of the stage where it could be seen by everyone. At each of the ceremonies the national anthem in its original form was to be sung. Indeed there had been one incident where a music teacher had interpreted the anthem as a jazz number and had sung it in that style.....The Academy of Foreign Languages in Tokyo, for example, raised the national flag as instructed by the law, with one small difference: it also raised a further hundred and ten flags from other countries. That could only work once. A new “improved” law stipulated that no additional flags may be raised.....Old-style nationalism, like the national flag, has probably made a comeback in the last few years because the alternative form of nationalism based on industrial products no longer functions. People are no longer proud of companies that like to merge with foreign firms and lay off their employees. Moreover, most companies no longer belong to one country alone.....

Full article in the Kyoto Journal

Printable Version

Monday, December 12, 2005

ニュース&ヘルプ (12月)

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ADDED December 13, 2005

JAPANESE (UN)DEMOCRACY
Locking peace activists away for more than two months, as Japan has done in the case of several citizens who distributed anti-war literature to a Self-Defense Forces housing project, which has now been approved by the morally bankrupt Tokyo High Court, is certainly evidence that the Japanese government is on the same page as that of the more open repressive governments it pretends to disdain.
Articles and links here

IRAQ
Harold Pinter on U.S.-U.K (and Japan by default) War Crimes
The Nobel Prize winner did not mention Japan by name, but he included those who went along with the Bush-Blair deceptions and helped to prop up the lies.

Art, truth and politics
Pinter`s speech at the prize ceremony

Note that a story in which former British parliementarian Tony Benn, Pinter and more than two dozen others submitted war crimes charges to both United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and British legal authorities has been deemed non newsworthy by most press outlets. TokyoProgressive has written to major news organizations asking them why they have seen fit not to print the story. That story is here.

Robert Fisk on journalism, war, terror, good/evil and “democracy.. delivered by tanks & helicopters”

WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION PROTESTS IN HONG KONG
Understanding the Anti-WTO Protests
From APEC to WTO: trajectories of protest in Korea and East Asia

Our world is not for sale!
by Vandana Shiva, scientist and glabalization activist

Chinese/English Links:民間監察世貿聯盟
Many more links inside

CULTURE
Is Europe Western?
Writer TAWADA Yoko’s essay on nation, region, identity, orientalism: Several years ago a new law was passed in Japan decreeing that the Japanese flag was to be raised at every ceremony taking place at schools and universities in the country. It determined the exact size of the flag. ..The law insisted that the flag was to be raised in the middle of the stage where it could be seen by everyone...The Academy of Foreign Languages in Tokyo… raised the national flag as instructed by the law, with one small difference: it also raised a further hundred and ten flags from other countries.....

ENVIRONMENT
Worse Than Fossil Fuel: Biodiesel: the most carbon-intensive fuel on earth
Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic....In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44 x 10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota."(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals....The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy - and the extraordinary power densities it gives us - with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction....

ADDED December 3 2005

Japan’s Peace Constitution/映画日本国憲法

Japanese Americans and the Making of U.S. Democracy During World War II

How many people have died in Iraq?

Okinawa and the Revamped US-Japan Alliance 嘘とごまかしの重ね塗り/Masuoka Ken’s latest posting

The Bush Plan to Bomb Al-Jazeera: Press Freedom or Freedom to Bomb the Press?
(Also see The War on Al Jazeera)

Power Politics, the LDP and Willing Masses (Kato Shuichi)

Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warfare Program

Hu Jintao’s Strategy for Handling Chinese Dissent and U.S. Pressure

Search/ 検索

Other recent articles from Japan Focus are here:
Japan’s Deadly Game of Nuclear Roulette
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=460

Japan’s Hidden Arms Trade
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=459

Japan’s Kamikaze Pilots and Contemporary Suicide Bombers: War and Terror
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=458

Compensating Colonial Lepers, Slave Laborers and Hibakusha: Troubling Legacies and Evolving Standards of Postcolonial Justice in Japan
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=457

Family Ties: The Tojo Legacy
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=445

田中宇の国際ニュース解説
http://tanakanews.com/

Check out, also:

Alternative Links (Set encoding to Shift-JIS) dealing with these Japan-related and world issues from the recent past: Militarism, Japanese police, Immigration, Unemployment, Balkans, East Timor, Food, Environment, Kosovo, Labor, Latin America, Media, Health and Environment, etc. (some articles may be unavailable as links change over time)

EXCLUSIVELY READER CONTRIBUTED SECTIONS
As noted above , we have both English Reader and Japanese Reader weblogs that are available to registered members initially via the contact page. Note that both readers and editors contribute to the Links and Creative sections.

読者がつくるコーナー
東京プログレッシヴには、英語＆日本語両方のウェブログがあります。メンバーとして登録すればあなたも投稿できます。記事を投稿の許可を得たい方は、｢連絡・問合せ先｣ページからご連絡ください。投稿方法をお知らせします。

News Headlines from THE NEW STANDARD
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December 2005 Postings

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Donate to help cover hosting costs.
Search/ 検索
記事も随時募集/Send us an article!

ADDED December 13, 2005

Art, truth and politics
Pinter`s speech at the prize ceremony

Robert Fisk on journalism, war, terror, good/evil and “democracy.. delivered by tanks & helicopters”

WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION PROTESTS IN HONG KONG
Understanding the Anti-WTO Protests
From APEC to WTO: trajectories of protest in Korea and East Asia

Our world is not for sale!
by Vandana Shiva, scientist and glabalization activist

Chinese/English Links:民間監察世貿聯盟
Many more links inside

ADDED December 3 2005

Japan’s Peace Constitution/映画日本国憲法

Japanese Americans and the Making of U.S. Democracy During World War II

Okinawa and the Revamped US-Japan Alliance 嘘とごまかしの重ね塗り/Masuoka Ken’s latest posting

The Bush Plan to Bomb Al-Jazeera: Press Freedom or Freedom to Bomb the Press?
(Also see The War on Al Jazeera)

How many people have died in Iraq?

Power Politics, the LDP and Willing Masses (Kato Shuichi)

Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warfare Program

Hu Jintao’s Strategy for Handling Chinese Dissent and U.S. Pressure

Other recent articles from Japan Focus are here:
Japan’s Deadly Game of Nuclear Roulette
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=460

Japan’s Hidden Arms Trade
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=459

Japan’s Kamikaze Pilots and Contemporary Suicide Bombers: War and Terror
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=458

Compensating Colonial Lepers, Slave Laborers and Hibakusha: Troubling Legacies and Evolving Standards of Postcolonial Justice in Japan
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=457

Family Ties: The Tojo Legacy
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=445

田中宇の国際ニュース解説
http://tanakanews.com/

Check out, also:

TOKYOPROGRESSIVE SECTIONS
(1) Latest: Latest site-wide changes in English Also a Japanese listing.
(2) Blogging: Our blog plus best of other blogs
(3) Creative: Poetry, music, etc.Registered members can submit contributions as well.
(4) Japan News: News/Opinion
(5) World News : News/Opinion
(6) Links: Past stories of interest on Japan, Asia and the world, organizations and websites involved in social and political activism, etc. Readers can submit links too.

News Headlines from THE NEW STANDARD

Printable Version

Friday, December 09, 2005

Worse Than Fossil Fuel: Biodiesel: the most carbon-intensive fuel on earth

by George Monbiot

Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic.

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44 x 10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota."(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy - and the extraordinary power densities it gives us - with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. But substitutes are being sought everywhere. They are being promoted today at the climate talks in Montreal, by states - such as ours - which seek to avoid the hard decisions climate change demands. And at least one of them is worse than the fossil fuel burning it replaces.

The last time I drew attention to the hazards of making diesel fuel from vegetable oils, I received as much abuse as I have ever been sent by the supporters of the Iraq war. The biodiesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon. I am now prepared to admit that my previous column was wrong. But they’re not going to like it. I was wrong because I underestimated the fuel’s destructive impact.

Before I go any further, I should make it clear that turning used chip fat into motor fuel is a good thing. The people slithering around all day in vats of filth are perfoming a service to society. But there is enough waste cooking oil in the UK to meet one 380th of our demand for road transport fuel(2). Beyond that, the trouble begins.

When I wrote about it last year, I thought that the biggest problem caused by biodiesel was that it set up a competition for land(3). Arable land that would otherwise have been used to grow food would instead be used to grow fuel. But now I find that something even worse is happening. The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.

In promoting biodiesel - as the European Union, the British and US governments and thousands of environmental campaigners do - you might imagine that you are creating a market for old chip fat, or rapeseed oil, or oil from algae grown in desert ponds. In reality you are creating a market for the most destructive crop on earth.

Last week, the chairman of Malaysia’s Federal Land Development Authority announced that he was about to build a new biodiesel plant(4). His was the ninth such decision in four months. Four new refineries are being built in Peninsula Malaysia, one in Sarawak and two in Rotterdam(5). Two foreign consortia - one German, one American - are setting up rival plants in Singapore(6). All of them will be making biodiesel from the same source: oil from palm trees.

“The demand for biodiesel,” the Malaysian Star reports, “will come from the European Community ... This fresh demand ... would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia’s crude palm oil inventories"(7). Why? Because it’s cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.

In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production. “Between 1985 and 2000,” it found, “the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia"(8). In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia.

Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orang-utan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist(9). The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.

Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are now moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they’ve cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.

The British government understands this. In the report it published last month, when it announced that it will obey the European Union and ensure that 5.75% of our transport fuel comes from plants by 2010, it admitted that “the main environmental risks are likely to be those concerning any large expansion in biofuel feedstock production, and particularly in Brazil (for sugar cane) and South East Asia (for palm oil plantations)."(10) It suggested that the best means of dealing with the problem was to prevent environmentally destructive fuels from being imported. The government asked its consultants whether a ban would infringe world trade rules. The answer was yes: “mandatory environmental criteria ... would greatly increase the risk of international legal challenge to the policy as a whole"(11). So it dropped the idea of banning imports, and called for “some form of voluntary scheme” instead(12). Knowing that the creation of this market will lead to a massive surge in imports of palm oil, knowing that there is nothing meaningful it can do to prevent them, and knowing that they will accelarate rather than ameliorate climate change, the government has decided to go ahead anyway.

At other times it happily defies the European Union. But what the EU wants and what the government wants are the same. “It is essential that we balance the increasing demand for travel,” the government’s report says, “with our goals for protecting the environment"(13). Until recently, we had a policy of reducing the demand for travel. Now, though no announcement has been made, that policy has gone. Like the Tories in the early 1990s, the Labour administration seeks to accommodate demand, however high it rises. Figures obtained last week by the campaigning group Road Block show that for the widening of the M1 alone the government will pay £3.6 billion - more than it is spending on its entire climate change programme(14). Instead of attempting to reduce demand, it is trying to alter supply. It is prepared to sacrifice the South East Asian rainforests in order to be seen to do something, and to allow motorists to feel better about themselves.

All this illustrates the futility of the technofixes now being pursued in Montreal. Trying to meet a rising demand for fuel is madness, wherever the fuel might come from. The hard decisions have been avoided, and another portion of the biosphere is going up in smoke.

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Jeffrey S. Dukes, 2003. Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption Of

Ancient Solar Energy. Climatic Change 61: 31-44.

2. The British Association for Biofuels and Oils estimates the volume at 100,000 tonnes a year. BABFO, no date. Memorandum to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. http://www.biodiesel.co.uk/press_release/
royal_commission_on_environmenta.htm

3. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

4. Tamimi Omar, 1st December 2005. Felda to set up largest biodiesel plant. The Edge Daily.

http://www.theedgedaily.com/cms/content.jsp?id=com.tms.cms.article.Article_e5d7c0d9-cb73c03a-df4bfc00-d453633e

5. See e.g. Zaidi Isham Ismail, 7th November 2005. IOI to go it alone on first biodiesel plant.

http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BT/
Monday/Frontpage/20051107000223/Article/; No author, 25th November 2005. GHope nine-month profit hits RM841mil. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/11/25/business/12693859&sec=business; No author, 26th November 2005. GHope to invest RM40mil for biodiesel plant in Netherlands. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/11/26/business/12704187&sec=business; No author, 23rd November 2005. Malaysia IOI Eyes Green Energy Expansion in Europe. http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/33622/story.htm

6. Loh Kim Chin, 26th October 2005. Singapore to host two biodiesel plants, investments total over S$80m. Channel NewsAsia.

7. C.S. Tan, 6th October 2005. All Plantation Stocks Rally. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/10/6/business/12243819&sec=business

8. Friends of the Earth et al, September 2005. The Oil for Ape Scandal: how palm oil is threatening orang-utan survival. Research report. http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/oil_for_ape_full.pdf

9. ibid.

10. Department for Transport, November 2005. Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) feasibility report.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_roads/
documents/page/dft_roads_610329-01.hcsp#P18_263

11. E4Tech, ECCM and Imperial College, London, June 2005. Feasibility Study on Certification for a Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation. Final Report.

12. Department for Transport, ibid.

13. ibid.

Printable Version

Robert Fisk on journalism, war, terror, good/evil and “democracy.. delivered by tanks & helicopters”

Robert Fisk is one of the world’s best known journalists. He has been based in the Middle East as the UK Independent’s Middle East correspondent for nearly 30 years, during which he has reported on two U.S. wars in Iraq, two Afghan wars, the Israel/Palestine conflict, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

His new book, The Great War for Civilization (HarperCollins 2005), collects his reporting in a single, 1300-page source. A previous book, the 700 page Pity the Nation (4th edition Nation Books 2002) covered the Lebanese civil war.

Fisk is widely respected as a tireless reporter who strives to get firsthand information and who brings a sense of fairness, knowledge and history to his reporting. His work is based on a moral framework that views war as the “total failure of the human spirit” and journalists as having a duty to report from the perspective of the victims. I caught up with him in Toronto on November 24 to discuss his book and his views on journalism, war and even Canada.

Journalism and audiences

Podur: What accounts for the widespread readership you have achieved?

Fisk: The mainstream press — I hate that phrase, by the way — but the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post version of events doesn’t satisfy millions of people. So more and more people are trying to find a different and more accurate narrative of events in the Middle East. It is a tribute to their intelligence that instead of searching for blog-o-bots or whatever, they are looking to the European “mainstream” newspapers like The Independent, the Guardian, The Financial Times.

One of the reasons they read The Independent is that they can hear things they suspected to be the case, but published by a major paper. I’m not just running some internet site. This is a big operation with foreign correspondents. We are the British equivalent of what the Washington Post should be.

More than half my mail comes from the U.S. That doesn’t mean we don’t have British readers, it means we have an awful lot of American ones. So does the Guardian. So people in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, South Africa, the United States, Canada and many other places, are finding that a British journalist can write things they can’t read elsewhere but which must have considerable basis in truth because otherwise it wouldn’t appear in a major British paper.

I’m not some cranky left wing or right wing nut. We are a newspaper, that’s the point. That gives us an authority — most people are used to growing up with newspapers. The internet is a new thing, and it’s also unreliable.

Podur: Can you elaborate on why you hate the word phrase “mainstream media”?

Fisk: The phrase itself has become a cliché. But also in the university, especially in the U.S., you have a lot of people who call themselves “activists.” I’m not sure what that means, we’re all “activist” if we get up in the morning, I don’t know. We’re activists when we drink coffee. And “activists” spend hours and hours emailing each other to no purpose it seems to me, other than to say, “we’re losing.”

And they keep saying “mainstream” and “alternative.” The problem with that is that if I’m an ordinary person not in the university élite and I have the choice of a “mainstream” or an “alternative” newspaper, I’ll choose the “mainstream” one, won’t I, because it sounds better? Why not call your papers mainstream and the New York Times alternative?

Podur: You talk about journalism itself in your book. What do you think about words like objectivity, fairness, balance and neutrality in journalism?

Fisk: Look across daily newspapers in the United States and the coverage of the Middle East is lamentable and incomprehensible. There are semantics introduced to avoid controversy, mostly controversy from Israeli supporters. Colonies become “neighbourhoods,” occupied becomes “disputed,” a wall turns into a “fence” magically — I mean I hope my house isn’t made of fences.

For years now journalism has been cabined, cribbed, confined into a straightjacket of rules made in the 1940s in the original journalism schools in the U.S. These schools were introduced to train reporters for local newspapers. And if you’re dealing with a dispute about a highway, public or private property for an airport, it is essential to give protesters equal time with those who want to open a new airport. In a court case, it’s essential to give equal time to the defense and the prosecution.

If you’re dealing with local journalism of this kind — a public inquiry, a legal case, a battle over a new hospital — both sides have the right because this is not a moral issue. It is a moral issue insofar as the community deserves a good hospital and private homeowners deserve privacy without having to worry about government projects, but there isn’t a great burning passionate moral issue of human life, the taking of life, war.

In these circumstances it is correct to make sure everyone is equally represented. But in foreign affairs, in a part of the world that is cloaked in injustice, where thousands are torn apart and shredded by weapons every year, you’re entering a new kind of world. One in which the standards of neutrality used in a small-town court case fall by the wayside because they are no longer relevant.

When you see child victims piled up at the site of a massacre it’s not the time to give equal time to the murderers. If you were covering the slave trade in the 19th century, you wouldn’t give 50 per cent to the slave ship captain; you would focus on the slaves who died and on the survivors. If you are present at the liberation of an extermination camp in Nazi Germany, you don’t search out the SS for 50 per cent of the comment.

When I was close to a pizzeria bombing in Israeli West Jerusalem in 2001, in which 20 were killed, more than half children, I didn’t give half the time to Hamas. In 1982, in Sabra and Shatila, I wrote about the victims, the dead who I physically climbed over and the survivors. I did not give 50 per cent to the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia who massacred them nor to the Israeli army who watched the murders and did nothing.

In the realm of warfare, which represents the total failure of the human spirit, you are morally bound as a journalist to show eloquent compassion to the victims, to be unafraid to name the murderers, and you’re allowed to be angry. The waitress who’s serving us coffee, the taxi driver who brought me here, they have feelings about atrocities. Why shouldn’t we?

Why is it an American journalist in Beirut or Cairo or Damascus who knows what’s going on and has feelings about it, instead of saying what he thinks — and after all, the readers want to know what he thinks, they’re paying for the newspaper which is paying him — he rings up some idiot in the Brookings Institute, some “tink-thank” as I call them, some “tink-thank” in Washington who maybe has never even been to the city, to get a quote?

The National Post this morning (November 24/05) had an example of this. In a story on Iraq, the reporter quoted Lee Edwards, an “expert on the U.S. presidency,” at the Heritage Foundation! Doesn’t the reporter know something about the U.S. presidency?

Here is a story I have been using at lectures. It is from the Los Angeles Times, November 16. It is a story on Zarqawi, if indeed he exists, and how he is “masterminding” the insurgency. The sourcing for the story? Unnamed “U.S. officials,” with the phrase “U.S. officials” coming up 21 times, in a story of two and a half columns. I just picked this up in a café in LA. You don’t have to look for examples like this to find them.

War

Podur: If war is the total failure of the human spirit, if it is not about victory and defeat but about suffering and death, why do so many people do it?

Fisk: Because they don’t know what it’s like. Most soldiers in the Iraq war haven’t been to war before. They’ve been totally changed in their personalities by it. They weren’t prepared for it at all, they just have Hollywood. I mean, Saving Private Ryan is pretty close to what I see, but it’s only imaginatively that you can see it, you can’t see it on TV, they won’t show it to you, because to do so would be real, pornographic, obscene, you couldn’t take that with breakfast, could you?

I have to take it with breakfast, lunch and tea, but not you, you’re protected by these nice guys in London and New York and Washington, these editors. They don’t want to dishonour the dead. It seems as if it is okay to kill Iraqis, just not to show them afterwards, at which point we’re so worried about their honour. We have so much compassion when they’re dead that we can’t show the picture. When they’re alive, though, let’s go! “WAR IN IRAQ, EPISODE FIVE”… so you can cash in and have a war movie, but after you kill people they get compassion and honour.

But of course there are also conniving politicians who want to present war as a bloodless sandpit in which people, if they die — you know you can show a picture of a dead Iraqi soldier if he’s been obliging enough to die in one piece against the horizon — “The price of war, a dead Iraqi soldier lies in the desert south of Basra.” But you won’t see the guy with his eyes blasted out or flies crawling over him.

There isn’t a single member of the present Bush administration that has ever been in a war. [Colin] Powell was in Vietnam, but he isn’t in the administration any more. There is not a single member of the Blair administration that has been to war. A few Labour Members of Parliament have been to Northern Ireland as soldiers but that’s not the same. The politicians who run the countries have no experience of war.

Podur: If you believe, as you do, that war is a total failure of the human spirit, does that not make it harder to explain why it happens, which you also think reporters should do?

Fisk: Is there such a thing as a just war? When the Archibishop of Canterbury claimed that the U.S. liberation of Kuwait was a just war (something he didn’t say about Bosnia, maybe because there was no oil there, I don’t know), I thought I would be sick. I mean, are we still going to have religious divines telling us about just wars? Give me a break.

War is an immoral act. I open chapter 15 of my book with a quote from Tolstoy’s War and Peace:

“… war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, incendiarisms, and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.”

What more can I add?

The Great War for Civilization

Podur: What do you hope to accomplish with the book?

Fisk: I didn’t know the answer to that when I was writing it, but now I do. I want readers to reject the narrative of history laid down by their presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists. Challenging the narrative of history, or monitoring the centres of power, to use Amira Hass’s phrase, means we have to reshape our own view of the world unencumbered by clichés and dead words like “war on terror,” “terrorist,” “Islamic terror,” surgical strike, good and evil, them and us, “they hate our freedom,” “democracy” — “democracy” delivered by Abrams tanks and swords and Apache helicopters.

We are always threatening the Middle East with democracy. And Arab Muslims would rather some of the democracy, human rights, and freedom, off of our western supermarket shelf. But there is another kind of freedom they would like, and that is freedom from us. They’d also like justice and no one ever talks about that.

The book covers ground not covered in this way before, by someone who’s been there a long time, an eyewitness. It brings together all the history, including vast, historical, epic subjects, and brings it right up to the occupation of Iraq. For 100 years we, the West, have controlled the Middle East, appointed dictators, and unless you can see what we’ve done in that region you will not understand 9/11.

Podur: Since this is a Canadian interview, let me ask you about Canada in Afghanistan and Canada’s increasing alignment with U.S. foreign policy.

Fisk: The problem with Canadians in Afghanistan is schizophrenia. ISAF, the Interim Stabilization Force, is seen by Afghans as, if not benevolent, certainly not malevolent. The attitude is that here are these Germans, Turks and Canadians, helping to keep the peace. If they weren’t there, there would be widespread robberies. I think they like that there are Germans on patrol at midnight, and so do I. And better the Canadians than the Americans.

But there is also a different side. The Canadians have attached themselves to the U.S. in the south, in Kanadahar, playing an aggressive role, and they are increasingly identified with U.S. military projects in the Middle East.

In this way Canada paints itself white in Kabul, and I believe it should be there, I’ve got nothing against ISAF, and I wish it was on a bigger scale with same mandate. But if you attach your troops to the Americans, and you have Canadian officers starting to talk like Americans, then you have gone across, and committed yourself as a belligerent in war.

Afterwards you cannot turn around and say “why did they want to hurt us?” I’m not predicting attacks on Canada, but once you engage in this way like Blair has, like Spain did under Aznar, you can denounce any crime against humanity on your soil, and you should, but you can’t be surprised.

We have had this habit after World War II of thinking that wars happen far away: in Kenya, Yemen, Malaya, Palestine — you might send soldiers there, you might even have coffins coming home, but you and the farm and the cottage, the railway tubes and planes, were safe. That’s finished now. We need to realize if we participate in wars abroad we are no longer protected from the effects of those wars. You can say “we fight by the rules of war and they don’t” but if you go to war, you can’t express surprise or vainly try to suggest there’s no connection, as Blair did between the July 7 bombings and Iraq.

Another argument relevant in Canada is that the immigrant communities — even though everyone’s an immigrant, aren’t they? — the new communities were so small in previous wars that their opinions didn’t count. I mean there were air raid wardens in the battle of Britain who were Black — but it was such a small population that it didn’t matter.

Now in Germany, you have a large Muslim community, in France, in Britain, or here in Canada, you can’t ignore that community when you decide on an intervention. Muslims in Britain are outraged by the war in Iraq. And there is a more direct connection between a British citizen of Pakistani origin who is a Muslim and the pictures of Iraqi Muslims dead or wounded that that person is watching on TV. You can’t ignore this when you go to war. Part of your community will have emotional religious connections to the region. We haven’t yet taken that into account.

Podur: Maybe that is a good thing, that will make it harder to go to war?

Fisk: Don’t cross your fingers.

Justin Podur is a Toronto based writer.

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Trying Bush and Blair for War Crimes

The governments of Tony Blair and George Bush have been charged with war crimes by a distinguished group of anti-war campaigners, who are calling for an investigation by the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, into breaches of international law.

Harold Pinter, the playwright, Tony Benn, the former Labour MP, Michael Mansfield QC and Professor Richard Dawkins were among the signatories to 28 charges against the Blair and Bush administrations, covering ministers, officials and generals who were a party to the decisions that led to war on Iraq and the chaos in its aftermath.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1208-04.htm

The Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter has called for Tony Blair to be tried for war crimes, in his acceptance speech to the Nobel committee. The 5,000-word speech excoriates the US government over Guantánamo Bay and its attempts to destabilise Nicaragua in the 1980s. But he saves his most savage comments for the UK, described as “pathetic and supine” and a “bleating little lamb” tagging along behind the US in its support for the Iraq war.

More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1661531,00.html

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Harold Pinter on U.S. Atrocities

“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” In a few sharp sentences, Pinter pinned down the willed indifference of the media to publicly recorded events.

Passionate Pinter’s Devastating Assault on US Foreign Policy

Shades of Beckett as ailing playwright delivers powerful Nobel lecture
by Michael Billington

There was something oddly Beckettian about Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture, which was broadcast yesterday by More4, and which even now is blazing its way across the world’s media. It was Beckettian in that Pinter sat in a wheelchair, with a rug over his knees and framed by an image of his younger self, delivering his sombre message: memories of Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame came to mind. But if Pinter’s frailty was occasionally visible, there was nothing ailing about his passionate and astonishing speech, which mixed moral vigour with forensic detail.

In fact, the speech was all the more powerful because it was delivered in a husky, throaty rasp. The facts are that Pinter, having recovered from cancer of the oesophagus, was earlier this year stricken by a condition in the mouth which affected his vocal chords. Then 10 days ago he was re-admitted to hospital with severe leg pains. But he briefly emerged on Sunday to record his Nobel speech, and the good news is that he should be back home early next week.

Although the speech obviously was a physical strain to deliver, it was impressively structured. It began with Pinter talking about his art - something he rarely does in public. In particular, he drew a clear distinction between the necessary ambivalence of art and the duty of the citizen to ask: “What is true? What is false?” Pinter even gave fascinating examples of the way in which his plays start with a line, a word or an image and then proceed on their journey into the unknown.

Warming to his theme, Pinter argued that while language is, for the dramatist, an ambiguous transaction, it is something that politicians distort for the sake of power. And, in making his point, Pinter deployed a variety of tactics: the charged pause, the tug at the glasses, the unremitting stare at the camera. I am told by Michael Kustow, who co-produced the lecture, that after a time he stopped giving Pinter any instructions. He simply allowed him to rely on his actor’s instinct for knowing how to reinforce a line or heighten suspense.

Although the content of the speech was highly political, especially in its clinical dissection of post-war US foreign policy, it relied on Pinter’s theatrical sense, in particular his ability to use irony, rhetoric and humour, to make its point. This was the speech of a man who knows what he wants to say but who also realises that the message is more effective if rabbinical fervour is combined with oratorical panache.

At one point, for instance, Pinter argued that “the United States supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the second world war”. He then proceeded to reel off examples. But the clincher came when Pinter, with deadpan irony, said: “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” In a few sharp sentences, Pinter pinned down the willed indifference of the media to publicly recorded events. He also showed how language is devalued by the constant appeal of US presidents to “the American people”. This was argument by devastating example. As Pinter repeated the lulling mantra, he proved his point that “The words “the American people” provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance.” Thus Pinter brilliantly used a rhetorical device to demolish political rhetoric.

But it was the black humour of the speech I liked best. At one point, Pinter offered himself as a speechwriter to President Bush - an offer unlikely, on this basis of this speech, to be quickly accepted. And Pinter proceeded to give us a parody of the Bush antithetical technique in which the good guys and the bad guys are thrown into stark contrast: “My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians.” Pinter’s poker face as he delivered this only reinforced its satirical power.

One columnist predicted, before the event, that we were due for a Pinter rant. But this was not a rant in the sense of a bombastic declaration. This was a man delivering an attack on American foreign policy, and Britain’s subscription to it, with a controlled anger and a deadly irony. And, paradoxically, it reminded us why Pinter is such a formidable dramatist. He used every weapon in his theatrical technique to reinforce his message. And, by the end, it was as if Pinter himself had been physically recharged by the moral duty to express his innermost feelings.

Michael Billington is the Guardian’s theatre critic.

Speech is here

Printable Version

Art, Truth and Politics by Harold Pinter

Published on Thursday, December 8, 2005 by the Guardian

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

‘Dark.’ A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. ‘Fat or thin?’ the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: ‘But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’

Seitz was imperturbable. ‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of othe