Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The Case for Japanese Constitutional Revision Assessed

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By Koseki Shoichi

Translated by Richard H. Minear

There’s been much discussion of constitutional revision in Japan. In November 2005, celebrating the 50th anniversary of its formation, the Liberal-Democratic Party published its “Draft of a New Constitution.” In this rapidly changing world, it’s quite risky for a developed country to make a constitution with an eye to the 21st century. Why? Because this is an age in which the nation-states that shape the modern era are changing dramatically, and because we still can’t see what lies ahead.

The debate over constitutional revision originates in the incompatibility between the Japanese constitution’s renunciation of armaments and the right to make war now asserted by the Abe administration, on the one hand, and the primacy of the US-Japan security system on the other. No matter how you look at it, it’s risky to dream up a constitution for the 21st century without addressing—above and beyond US security demands—the changing character of the modern nation-state. In order to see the future, we must first examine the past. The current constitution of Japan has a history of nearly 60 years, and one might think it would be necessary to begin by assessing that history. But the constitutional research committees of the two houses of the Diet that might be expected to take that as their highest duty have failed to do so.

A Failure to Examine History

As an example, consider how lawmakers have failed to research the case law of the Supreme Court. One might think it necessary to assess whether the judgments in the numerous cases of the past sixty years are constitutional, and to ask whether it’s necessary for the legislature to revise the constitution’s provisions in light of the Court’s judgments. But the Diet’s constitutional research committee has merely listened to the argument of the chief of the Supreme Court’s administrative office that decisions have been unconstitutional.

We can surmise that the LDP government has failed to exert the energy required to produce a new awareness by examining the facts. Indeed, how little intent there has been to assess history is all too clear in the LDP draft. In constitutional revision, preambles generally allude to the current document’s relationship to the previous constitution. To give a classic example, the preface to the constitution of the 4th French Republic (1946) states that the French people “solemnly reaffirm the rights and freedoms of man and the citizen enshrined in the Declaration of Rights of 1789 and the fundamental principles acknowledged in the laws of the Republic.” Its successor, the constitution of the 5th republic (1958), states: “The French people hereby solemnly proclaim their dedication to the Rights of Man and the principle of national sovereignty as defined by the Declaration of 1789, reaffirmed and complemented by the Preamble to the 1946 Constitution.”

The preamble of the LDP draft for Japan contains no reference to the current constitution and no evaluation thereof. That too is to be expected. The organization that proposed this draft is called the “Main Office to Foster the Establishment (seitei) of a New Constitution,” and the title of its proposal is “Draft of a New Constitution.” Seitei differs from “revision”; it means that a revolution or complete break with the former constitution is to take place. The LDP likely would strongly prefer not to refer to the present constitution, to ignore it. But as the ruling party under the existing constitution, it can’t make “revolution”; hence it has to rely on the process of revising the current constitution—how ironic.

A Failure to Address Globalization

The fact that the LDP didn’t investigate and assess the current constitution means that it has neither responded to Japan’s present situation nor addressed the issues that face countries with modern constitutions. The nation-states that are premised on modern constitutions now are experiencing great changes. Globalization exacerbates those changes.

Article 10 of the Constitution of Japan establishes the definition of a Japanese national and guarantees basic human rights to all Japanese nationals (kokumin). Foreigners living in Japan, however, are not guaranteed the same human rights as Japanese nationals. On this point, the current constitution is no different from the Meiji Constitution (Article 18). In advanced countries the nation-state is undergoing changes. Japan, too, continues to see lawsuits concerning the right of resident aliens to take part in local government and to hold public office. The Supreme Court has ruled that “the Constitution of Japan that establishes local self-government does not ban permanent-resident aliens” from participation in local government. Given Japan’s status as an economic power, its 21st-century constitution must address the protection of the human rights of foreigners amid the onrush of the global economy. However, the constitutional research committee that takes “new human rights” as its motto has conducted no research on treatment of non-Japanese nationals, and no reference to the issue is to be found in the LDP draft.

In advanced countries the 21st century is an age in which increasing numbers of individuals act across national borders; the peaceful coexistence of diverse cultures and the prohibition of racial discrimination simply must be guaranteed. In the meantime, democracy advances in the form of participation in local government. Thus, the nation-state is called upon to seek a new identity through the extension of rights.

Against this backdrop, forces supporting the reinforcement of traditional ideas about the nation-state will inevitably push forward, appealing to concepts of nationalism rooted in traditional ideas of religion and culture as a basis for hierarchical rule.

Accordingly, in the discussion of Japan’s constitution, one can imagine repeated demands that the preamble stress “Japan’s fine traditions,” “the spirit of harmony,” and “patriotism,” and in fact, the preamble of the LDP draft states that “the Japanese people together have the responsibility to defend their country and society with love, responsibility, and courage.” But there is no mention whatsoever of the kinds of ties to be constructed to international society, in particular to the countries and peoples of East Asia.

Post-World War II constitutions have anticipated recent changes in the nation-state to varying degrees. For example, the German constitution (1949, the basic law of West Germany) refers to the subjects of human rights as “all people” or “any person,” in a departure from the Weimar Constitution, which used “Germans” and the “German people.” And importantly, the 1949 German constitution has an article (Article 24) limiting sovereignty as follows: the state “may by law transfer sovereign powers to international organizations… [I]n doing so it shall consent to such limitations upon its sovereign powers as will bring about and secure a lasting peace in Europe and among the nations of the world.” Based on these limitations of sovereignty, Germany has pursued unity with Europe through the European Economic Community, the European Community, and finally the European Union.

By contrast, Japan’s constitutional discussions—beginning with the assertion that the present constitution was imposed on Japan—have appealed repeatedly to nationalism. Far from envisaging the limitation of state sovereignty, the LDP draft emphasizes the “restoration of sovereignty” and “patriotism.” “It is natural for an independent state to have a military,” “a normal country”—these are its characteristic expressions.

Ambiguity about War

The LDP draft changes the current constitution’s “renunciation of war” in Chapter II to “guarantee of security.” It leaves untouched Article 9 Paragraph 1, which renounces war, but excises completely the text of Article 9 Paragraph 2, which prohibits maintenance of the military and renounces the right to engage in belligerency. Article 9 Paragraph 2 of the LDP draft states, “To insure the peace and independence of our country, along with the safety of the country and of the nation, it [Japan] maintains a self-defense army with the prime minister as its supreme leader.”

It certainly appears that the proposed constitution establishes state sovereignty as absolute—as the definition, in short, of a “normal country.” But if you have a military and recognize the right of belligerency, it means that you prepare to go to war; so it would be appropriate that the right to declare war be established. For the Meiji Constitution, of course, that was the prerogative of the emperor. In the LDP draft, one might think it was the prerogative of the prime minister, but Article 73, which establishes the prerogatives of the cabinet [which the prime minister leads], leaves this unclear.

The Hague treaty on the declaration of war (1907) says, “The Contracting Powers recognize that hostilities between themselves must not commence without previous and explicit warning, in the form either of a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war.” This point is important for deciphering the nature of the LDP draft. We must keep in view that a joint US-Japan declaration after the end of the Cold War (1996) revised the guidelines of their security relationship, and on that basis, the law of armed attack (buryoku kogeki jitaiho, 2003) was subsequently established as a pillar of the Japanese legal system’s crisis law (yujihosei).

In its Article 1, the law pertaining to regional incidents (shuhen jitaiho) defines a “regional incident” as “a situation having important influence on our country’s peace and security in our region insofar as there is concern that left alone, it might develop into a direct military attack on our country.” Notably, in consultations with the US, the government has emphasized that “regional” here is not a geographic concept, i.e. it is not limited to Japan’s vicinity. Moreover, according to Article 3 of the law, if the US intervenes militarily, Japan will offer rear-echelon support (provide materiel for the US military, labor, and the like). Hence, as in the case of the Iraq war, Japan’s support is not necessarily limited to its immediate vicinity. In addition it is certain that there will emerge “important influence on the peace and security” of Japan, which provides home ports for US aircraft carriers and has other important US bases. In such events, according to Article 3, Japan will provide rear-echelon support for the US military in the region.

The possibility of course exists that a country experiencing US military intervention will mount a retaliatory attack against Japan, which is co-operating with and supporting the US. So the law of armed attack (2003), which already exists as a pillar of the legal system in this era of crisis, can already kick in. The law of armed attack stipulates not merely the “event of military attack,” a situation defined in the UN Constitution (Article 51) as conditions for invoking self-defense, but also the anticipation of military attack (Article 2 paragraph 4), “a condition that has not developed to military attack but where a military attack is anticipated.”

What this means, according to the response in the Diet by Director Ishiba of the Defense Agency during deliberations on the law, is that “should the enemy begin to shift missiles to launch sites, we will attack the enemy.” This is none other than President Bush’s “preemptive attack,” codified into Japan’s crisis legal system. At such a time, according to the same law, the government draws up the “basic policy in response to military attack, and the prime minister orders the Self-Defense Forces to take defensive action.” It is de facto war.

But there is still no provision for a declaration of war. That is, Japan has created a system for use in case of US military intervention, and the LDP draft envisages Japan’s participation in wars of precisely this kind. In this sense, indeed, it is a post-Cold War constitution.

A Failure to Limit State Sovereignty, Uphold Rights

One can’t help feeling that this approach to the constitution fails to recognize the character of the era in which we live—especially since it establishes a “Self-Defense Force with the prime minister as supreme leader.” This is an age in which the maintenance of peace requires limiting state sovereignty. It is an age in which it is essential to restrict through treaty the right to go to war against neighboring states, a right that is the highest exercise of absolute state sovereignty, and to work for the maturation of trust. The LDP failure to envisage common action with neighboring states is indicative of the failure of this draft to qualify as a 21st-century constitution.

Is there any nation that can deploy its army regardless of the views of other nations? Only the US. According to current guidelines, the Self-Defense Forces are in fact under the command of the US. At the time of the Iraq war, the former chief of the Self-Defense Agency stated, “Japan is the 51st state.” Given the fact that his statement precipitated no political controversy, it has become common sense that Japan’s prime minister does not control the Self-Defense Forces. This is another example of the LDP’s twisted sense of nationalism that sits uneasily with its subservience to the US.

In order to become a “country that can make war,” it is necessary to have national emergency authority—that is, the right in time of “war or national crisis” to issue extraordinary proclamations. But the article of the LDP draft that addresses the cabinet (Article 73) specifies no such right. Actually, it appears only where one would least expect to find it: among the general provisions on human rights. This is the shocking text:

Article 12. The freedom and rights which this constitution guarantees the people must be maintained by constant effort of the people. The people must not misuse them, and, aware that duties and obligations accompany freedom and rights, they have a duty to enjoy liberty and exercise rights always so as not to infringe upon the public good and public order.

In other words, liberty and rights must be exercised insofar as “the public good and public order” are not infringed upon. Even in times of peace it becomes possible to restrict human rights for the sake of “public good and public order.”

The LDP draft not only opens the way to remilitarization but sports a blatantly nationalistic character. To seek identity in minzoku (the Japanese people, emperor), patriotism (the flag, kimigayo), and religion (Yasukuni) has long been advocated by the ruling party. The final goal is minzoku purity, equating the rights of citizenship with a conception of a pure Japanese race.

A Lack of Ideals

According to opinion polls since 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, over half of the Japanese people have supported the revision of the present Constitution. This LDP draft, however, is supported by only 17%, according to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper of March 5, 2006. Despite such a miserable public response, the LDP has shown no sign of abandoning its policy. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, in his inaugural address in September, stated that he plans to complete revision of the Constitution within six years.

What is demanded now from the constitution is political ideals. This is an age that calls for projecting new political ideals. The grim reality is that this hasn’t happened; hence it is necessary to chant “Defend the Constitution!” in the face of regressive challenges to it.

Statist and vertical constitutional ideas show up also in the LDP draft’s excision of the special legal provisions for local self-government, which appear in Article 95 of the present constitution. Since ours is an age calling for local self-government, sovereignty can’t function effectively unless constitutional principles are horizontal. The same is true of the need to restrict state sovereignty in the interest of achieving regional ideals. Shouldn’t 21st-century constitutions be designed on these premises?

This is an abbreviated and updated version of an article that appeared in the March 2006 issue of Rekishi Hyoron (Historical Review).

Koseki Shoichi is Professor in the law faculty of Dokkyo University and the author, with Ray Moore, of The Birth of Japan’s Postwar Constitution. Richard Minear is Professor of History at University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and a Japan Focus associate. His book, The Scars of War: The Japanese Home Front in World War II, will be published in 2007. He translated this article for Japan Focus. Posted on December 12, 2006.

Please see also “Japan’s Political and Constitutional Crossroads,” a Japan Focus roundtable on constitutional revision.

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Becoming an Ugly and Dangerous Nation!

By Nikkan Gendai

Translated by Nobuko Adachi
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[The following article presents a critical responses to the proposed changes in national educational policy by Japan’s new prime minister, Abe Shinzo. It is one of many appearing in Japanese newspapers and magazines in the past six weeks. The centerpiece of the Abe administration’s domestic strategy is revision of the Fundamental Law of Education (also known as the “Charter of Education” (Kyoiku Kensho) or the “Education Constitution” (Kyoiku Kempo)—the basis of post-war Japanese education. This law, passed in 1947 and intact subsequently, mandated the current national educational standards, and was the centerpiece of efforts to eliminate pre-war nationalism and militarism from the curriculum. At a time of mounting discontent with Japanese education, and with a neonationalist drive to revise the Constitution to weaken or eliminate the pacifist provisions of Article 9, the Abe administration has made the Fundamental Law of Education its first target in an effort to exorcise the ghosts of Japan’s World War II defeat.

Abe has called for a “recovery of Japanese independence” (dokuritsu no kaifuku) so as to create a stronger country, militarily and politically. But what the Abe administration touts as patriotism is viewed by many Japanese, and Japan’s neighbors, as nationalism or chauvinism with echoes of the era of colonialism and war that ended in 1945. Despite the popular outcry over the proposed changes to the Fundamental Law, the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito Party steamrollered passage in the Lower House of the Diet with little debate on November 16, 2006. The bill was approved by the Upper House on December 15th, the same day that the Defense Agency was upgraded to become a Ministry of Defense. The two measures signal a major break with the postwar consensus.

One of the most contentious changes is the addition of a phrase saying that schools should take an active part in “… cultivating an attitude which respects tradition and culture and love of the nation and homeland …” The problem is that the Japanese word for nation can also be interpreted as “governing system,” and hearkens back to phrasings of pre-war nationalist slogans. Some say that passage of this bill will radically affect the nature of education in Japan. The Asahi Shimbun warns of a shift in emphasis from the individual to the public sphere and “community spirit” in ways that hark back to the prewar order. Likewise, there are questions about how the new law will affect teachers in the classroom, and there have been protests from Nikkyoso, the left-leaning teachers’ union. Nobuko Adachi.]

From Dailymail Business:
* The rejection of the Liberal Democratic Party is the correct choice.
* Why did the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito strong-arm such a bad law through the Diet?
* Is there no one who opposes this law in the government?
* We may need to see the resignation of the whole Diet to save the Fundamental Law of Education.
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Does the government realize what is going to happen in our country with this new education law?

The following are the voices of those protecting the democracy of our nation by demanding the general resignation of the Abe Diet. The Abe regime has totally ignored the will of the people, who demand action from the government to improve the economy and the unemployment situation. Instead, the government has focused on modifying the Fundamental Law of Education which does not need changing, especially in ways which will weaken it.
-----------------------------------------------

This nation has taken a dangerous first step toward social catastrophe through the action of Prime Minister Abe. Yesterday, November 15, 2006, the Prime Minister pushed through a new education law at a meeting of a special committee of the Lower House of the Diet. Chief Cabinet Secretary Shiozaki Yasuhisa explained that the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito “ passed this law after full deliberation.” However, members of the non-ruling parties including the Democrats (Minshuto) who were not present at the meeting yesterday, claimed that they would keep opposing the bill in the Upper House.

Machimura Nobutaka, chief director of the special committee and a previous Foreign Minister, chided journalists saying, “We gave ample thought to the claims of the opposition, so don’t go printing a headline like ‘A Ramrod Vote.’ ” Perhaps he was feeling guilty about the decision. In any case, we know clearly which side is right.

At the main public hearing, three of the five educators present objected to the new law. Nishimura Hiroshi, Professor of Constitutional Law at Waseda University plainly stated that “This law would instill in children the social value of patriotism while rejecting other social values. This is anti-democractic.”

Even the committee’s own invited specialists opposed the law. In testimony before the special committee held on November 9th, Fujita Hidenori, Professor of Sociology of Education at International Christian University, said:

Do we really need to change the Fundamental Law of Education? I think it is not necessary at all. The various problems currently facing schools—such as too many suicides being caused by bullying, or required classes being left untaught—are not due to the current education law. Even if we modified the law, the social and educational problems would still remain.

Professor Fujita points to three problems with the new education law:

(1) The law will force children to become a certain type of citizen.
(2) Politics and the government would control education.
(3) The law would justify social differentiation and discrimination based on differences in education.

Buying the Anti-Democratic Education Law with Hard Cash

It is criminal what the government and their supporters are doing to force this bill into law.

At a government-sponsored town meeting where testimony and comments were taken from the local populace, it turns out that the government paid ¥ 5,000 to some 65 people to ask softball questions, thus giving the appearance of a real discussion. Such a use of our taxes is criminal. They are no better than those contractors who say their buildings are earthquake-proof, but are found to be otherwise once the earth starts shaking.

In desperation, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shiozaki gave an excuse for this distribution of money saying that, “Since we asked them to attend the meeting, we paid them an ‘honorarium for lecturing’.” An honorarium for lecturing, indeed! They just tried to buy a law with cash.

Not only that …

It is not good for our children’s educational policy to be controlled by a politician whose view of the world is that it is all right for the strong to the weak to do something against their will.

According to one member of the Liberal Democratic Party, even some members of the administration think “This is too much.” However, such an opinion can never be publicly stated under the dictatorship of the Prime Minster.

We can hear the marching of militarism behind this deterioration of the Fundamental Law of Education.

Members of the Parties Not in Power Should Stand Up and Stop the Deterioration of the Education Law

Before this country begins marching irrevocably in the wrong direction, we hope that members of the parties not in power will try to stop these changes with their all strength. Motozawa Jiro, a political critic, suggests:

The majority of Japanese do not realize that the new Education bill is very dangerous. In order for the people to understand this, every single member of the non-ruling parties should act responsibly, rejecting all further deliberations on the bill, and return to their electorates and explain to them what is going on through public meetings, or through correspondence. It is not enough to just speak at a Diet meeting. Members of the non-ruling parties have to get all citizens involved. If they say they are just the minority in the Diet, then they should all resign. Let the Diet then face dissolution, and there will be a call for a general reelection.

When these minority members offer a differing viewpoint, and risk losing their jobs by offering to resign, the people of the country will notice. As these members are quitting their jobs, they do not need to worry about being criticized for their performance. In order to prevent going back to the dark period [before World War II], I really wish they would confront the government on this issue. If we do not confront them strongly, this country will really become an ‘ugly and dangerous nation.’

There are 129 members of the Democratic and Socialist parties in the Upper House.

If all of them work together, even at the risk of losing their jobs, even sheep like the Japanese people will not stay silent.

We don’t want to live in times when we have no freedom, like the way things were before the Second World War.

This is an abbreviated version of an article that appeared in Nikkan Gendai (Daily Gendai) on November 16, 2006. Posted at Japan Focus on December 18, 2006.

The translation is by Nobuko Adachi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Illinois State University and editor of Japanese Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents and Uncertain Futures.

Dec 19 2006 Comment on the Electronic Intifada articles (see Dec archives)

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Challenging the Democractic Hawks on Israel

by Stephen Zunes

The election of a Democratic majority in the House and Senate is unlikely to result in any serious challenge to the Bush administration’s support for Israeli attacks against the civilian populations of its Arab neighbors and the Israeli government’s ongoing violations of international humanitarian law.

The principal Democratic Party spokesmen on foreign policy will likely be Tom Lantos in the House of Representatives and Joe Biden in the Senate, both of whom have been longstanding and outspoken supporters of a series of right-wing Israeli governments and opponents of the Israeli peace movement. And, despite claims—even within the progressive press—that future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a “consistent supporter of human rights,” such humanitarian concerns have never applied to Arabs, since she is a staunch defender of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his predecessor Ariel Sharon.

For example, when President George W. Bush defended Israel’s assaults on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure this summer and defied the international community by initially blocking United Nations efforts to impose a cease-fire, the Democrats rushed to pass a resolution commending him for “fully supporting Israel.” The resolution, co-authored by Rep. Lantos, claimed that Israel’s actions were legitimate self-defense under the U.N. Charter and challenged the credibility of reputable human rights groups. Although groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch groups documented widespread attacks by Israeli forces against civilians in areas far from any Hezbollah military activity, the resolution praised “Israel’s longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcom[ed] Israel’s continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties.” All but 15 of the House’s 201 Democrats voted in support.

Similarly, the Democrats echoed President Bush’s support for Israel’s 2002 offensive in the West Bank in another resolution co-authored by Lantos. In response to Amnesty International’s observation that the massive assault appeared to be aimed at the Palestinian population as a whole, all but two dozen Democrats went on record supporting the devastating Israeli offensive and claiming that it was “aimed solely at the terrorist infrastructure.”

In March 2003, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders signed a letter to President Bush opposing the White House-endorsed Middle East “Road Map” for peace, which they perceived as being too lenient on the Palestinians. The authors insisted that the peace process must be based “above all” on the end of Palestinian violence and the establishment of a new Palestinian leadership, not an end to Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestinian land seized in the 1967 war. Indeed, there was no mention of any of the reciprocal actions called for in the Road Map—not ending Israel’s sieges and military assaults on Palestinian population centers and not halting the construction of additional illegal settlements.. The letter also voiced opposition to the U. N. or any government other than the U.S. monitoring progress on the ground.

The Democrats have attacked the International Court of Justice for its landmark 2004 ruling calling for the enforcement of the Fourth Geneva Convention in Israeli-occupied territories. In a resolution that summer, the Democratic leadership and the overwhelming majority of Democrats in both houses also condemned the World Court’s near-unanimous advisory opinion that Israel’s separation barrier could not be built beyond Israel’s internationally-recognized border into the occupied West Bank in order to incorporate illegal settlements into Israel.

More recently, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have condemned former President Jimmy Carter’s newly-released book criticizing Israeli violations of international humanitarian law in the West Bank. Carter’s use of the word “apartheid” in reference to Israeli policies of building Jewish-only settlements and highways on confiscated Palestinian land and allowing Palestinians to enter only as laborers with special passbooks proved particularly inflammatory to Pelosi and her colleagues. Meanwhile, they have refused to criticize this policy by any name and insist that the Israeli colonial outposts in the occupied territories—constructed in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions—are legitimate.

Ongoing talks between Fatah and Hamas for a coalition government have raised the hope that the Palestinian Authority will soon have a non-Hamas prime minister and a largely non-partisan, technocratic cabinet. However, the Democrats support Bush’s policy of refusing to resume normal relations with the PA unless the cabinet excludes members of Hamas or any party that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. By contrast, no prominent Democrat has raised any concerns over Olmert’s recent appointment of Avignor Lieberman, who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel and much of the West Bank, as a cabinet minister and his new deputy prime minister.

The Democrats have also pushed for increasing U.S. military aid to Israel and have rejected calls to condition the aid on an improvement in Israel’s human rights record. The Democrats have also pushed for an increase in economic assistance to Israel’s rightist government, already the recipient of nearly one-third of all U.S. foreign aid, despite the country’s relative affluence and the fact that Israelis represent only one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population.

The decision by Democratic members of Congress to take such hard-line positions against international law and human rights does not stem from the fear that it would jeopardize their re-election. Polls show that a sizable majority of Americans believe U.S. foreign policy should support these principles. More specifically, regarding Israel and Palestine, majorities support a more even-handed U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and oppose the blank check given by the United States to Israel.

Nor is it a matter of Democratic lawmakers somehow being forced against their will to back Bush’s policy by Jewish voters and campaign contributors. In reality, Jewish public opinion is divided over the wisdom and morality of many Israeli policies endorsed by the Democrats, recognizing that such policies actually harm Israel’s legitimate long-term security interests. Furthermore, the vast majority of Democrats who support Bush’s Middle East policies come from very safe districts where a reduction in campaign contributions would not have a negative impact on Democratic re-election. Contrary to the belief that it is political suicide to condemn the policies of the Israeli government, every single Democrat who opposed this summer’s resolution in support of the Israeli assault on Lebanon was re-elected by a larger margin than in 2004.

Perhaps more damaging than pressure from right-wing PACs has been the absence of pressure from progressive groups that oppose Israeli policies. Indeed, some of the most hard-line Democratic opponents of Israeli peace and human rights groups were endorsed by leading U.S. peace and human rights groups.

Until the progressive community seriously challenges Democratic hawks, there is little hope that the new Democratic majority can be expected to contribute anything to the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East.

Anti-Semitism Label Confines Open Debate

by Jay Bookman

Jimmy Carter may be right or he may be wrong; in fact, like the rest of us, he’s almost certainly some of both.

But Carter is not by any stretch of the imagination anti-Semitic. In fact, merely by making that ridiculous accusation, people such as Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, have proved Carter right about some of the central observations in his controversial new book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

In that book, and in the debate it has inspired, Carter has noted the very narrow range of acceptable opinion in this country regarding Israel and Palestine, and believes that silenced debate has hurt U.S. both the United States and Israel.

“When I go to Jerusalem or to Tel Aviv or Nazareth or anywhere in Israel, the discussions and debates are intense and constant about Israeli policies in the West Bank and whether they are advisable or not,” Carter has said. “ ... but in this country, zero.”

He’s absolutely right: The debate about Israeli policies is far more heated and frank within Israel than here in the United States. As one telling example, consider this paragraph by Israeli columnist Larry Derfner, writing recently in the Jerusalem Post:

“Nobody and nothing in the world has an army of advocates, defenders, PR people, marketers, spin-meisters and image-polishers like Israel has. This army isn’t made up just of the government but of Jews and Judeophiles all over the world, especially in the U.S. It includes the entire alphabet soup of American Jewish organizations, right-wing ‘media watchdogs’ like CAMERA and Honest Reporting, hundreds of Jewish newspapers and Web sites, Alan Dershowitz, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Republican Party, the Christian Right, FOX News and an assortment of other forces.”

In Israel, apparently, nobody thought twice about such a statement. But those same words written here in the United States would be prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism.

Even the comparison of the situation in the Palestinian territories to South African apartheid isn’t unsayable within Israel. To the contrary, it has been an undercurrent of debate there for years.

“I’m terribly sorry, while there are important differences between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the former apartheid regime of South Africa, after 39 years of occupation the similarities have come to outweigh the differences,” Derfner wrote recently in another column in The Jerusalem Post.

Top Israeli political figures have made the comparison as well.

“The things a Palestinian has to endure, simply coming to work in the morning, is a long and continuous nightmare that includes humiliation bordering on despair,” said Ami Ayalon, the former head of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency. “Is the option of Jewish democracy with apartheid acceptable? I think not.”

And Yossi Alpher, a former senior adviser in the Israeli government, once warned that with their unwavering support for Israel’s approach to Palestine, neoconservatives in the Bush administration have encouraged Israel to create “an apartheid reality that is the very antithesis of the democratization that they preach for the region.”

Foxman professes to be most outraged by Carter’s assertion that pro-Israeli groups have helped squelch open debate about the Middle East, accusing Carter of peddling “this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media.’’

There is indeed a shameless, shameful canard to that effect, and it is classic anti-Semitism, attributing to Jews some secret conspiratorial control of world affairs. But that is not the argument that Carter is making. Carter’s point — and Foxman proves it — is that it has become impossible to express sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians in this country without fear of being shouted down as anti-Semitic.

There is no question that anti-Semitism is alive and virulent. It is undeniable fact that Israel is unfairly targeted in the United Nations and other forums, in part because of anti-Semitism and in part because Israel is hated as a creation of the West imposed on the Arab world, a living and enduring symbol of Arab weakness.

However, Israelis also bridle when they believe their country is being held to a higher standard than other nations, and they insist that it be treated like any other normal country.

Normal countries, however, are subject to normal criticism among the community of nations. In Israel’s case, there will always be a danger that such criticism will slide into anti-Semitism, but people of good faith can surely distinguish one from the other.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor.

© 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Sober Racism of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto

Published on Sunday, December 17, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
The Sober Racism of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto
by Liza Grandia

Film critics appear split on how to handle Mel Gibson’s newest production, Apocalypto. A few refuse to patronize the film in symbolic protest of Gibson’s drunken rants over the summer. Others suggest we should temporarily suspend judgment about Gibson’s anti-Semitism and judge this action film on its own merits.

Remarkably, none of the critics seem to be asking whether Mel Gibson has produced a film any less racist than his summer tirades about Jews. Hollywood seems willing to admonish Gibson for certain kinds of bigotry, while oddly excusing other kinds of racism - especially if targeted at poor, brown, and indigenous peoples.

As a cultural anthropologist who has worked for thirteen years among different Maya peoples of Mesoamerica and who speaks the Q’eqchi’ Maya language fluently, I found Apocalypto to be deeply racist. The Maya in the film bore no resemblance to the hardworking farmers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, businessmen and women of Maya descent that I know personally and consider among my closest friends.

I fear the repercussions Apocalypto will have on contemporary Maya people who continue to struggle for survival and political governments under discriminatory governments that consider them stupid, backward, and uncivilized for wanting to maintain their customs and language. Gibson’s slanderous film reinforces the same stereotypes that have facilitated the genocide of Maya peoples and the plunder of their lands starting with the Spanish invasion of 1492 and continuing through the Guatemalan civil war to the present.

Rather than quibble about Apocalypto’s many historical and archaeological inaccuracies as other academic critics have done, I focus here on four racist messages the film sends to audiences:

1. Native Americans are all interchangeable. Many critics have offered facile praise to Gibson for having filmed his bloody epic in a contemporary Maya language and employed various Native American actors. Gibson has boasted to the press how relatively cheap it was to make the film because he had pay so little to these actors and his Mexican crew. To me, these actors didn’t look or sound Maya at all. Their Yucatec diction was terrible and lacked the real lyric cadence of Maya languages. If someone exploited local labor to make a cheap film about gang-violence in Brooklyn and employed heavily-accented Australian and British actors, would critics still praise it as “authentic” simply because the actors are speaking English?

2. Mesoamerican cultures are all the same. While keeping some of the archaeological details accurate for “authenticity,” Gibson then jumbles together mass Aztec sacrifices with Maya rituals, as if they were the same. Certainly at the height of classic Maya civilization, the ruling classes made occasional human sacrifices to their gods, but nothing on the Holocaust-level scale that Gibson portrays in Apocalypto with fields of rotting, decapitated corpses that his hero, Jaguar Paw stumbles across as he attempts to escape his own execution in the city. With the advice of archaeologist Richard Hansen, Gibson seems to have researched anything the Maya might have done badly over a thousand year history and crammed it all into a few horrific days. How would the gringos look if we made a film that lumped together within one week the torture at the Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo prisons, the Tuskegee experiments, KKK lynchings, the battle at Wounded Knee, Japanese internment camps, the Trail of Tears, the Salem witch hunts, Texas death row executions, the Rodney King police beatings, the slaughter upon the Gettysburg battlefield, and the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and made this look like a definitive statement on U.S. culture?

3. Indigenous people should remain noble savages, since attempts to build cities and more complex political organization will bring their inevitable demise. Gibson purportedly wanted to make a statement about the decay of empires in this film. However, the only clear message I could take away was that indigenous people should have remained friendly forest hunter-gatherers and never have attempted to build their own civilization. Ignoring the fact by the time of the Spanish invasion, all Maya peoples had been either urbanized or sedentary agriculturalists for hundreds of years and maintained complex trade networks, Gibson nevertheless depicts his hero’s tribe as crude but happy rainforest peoples living in isolation, blissfully ignorant of the corrupt cities neighboring them. He contrasts these noble forest savages with evil city dwellers such as slave traders, despotic politicians, psychotic priests, and sadistic head-hunters all living amidst rotting sewage, filth, disease, and general misery. Real Maya cities were places with sophisticated water and sanitation systems, great libraries, and extraordinary artwork and architecture. If Gibson wanted to make a statement about the consequences of environmental destruction, as he has claimed to the press, why not produce a film about corporate excesses at Love Canal or Three Mile Island instead of mucking up the historical reputation of the ancient Maya?

4. The Spanish arrive as if to save the Maya from themselves. After enduring two hours of horrific violence, in the last minutes of the film, we witness the miraculous rescue of the film’s hero Jaguar Paw from his stalkers by the appearance of Spanish galleons off the coast. This short, final scene shows dour Spaniards approaching the mainland in boats bearing Christian crosses across still water. After forcing his audience to endure two hours of horrific violence, Gibson uses this placid scene allow the movie-goer a sigh of relief in the hopes that these European Civilizers have arrived to make order out of the Maya mayhem. By ending his film there, Gibson ignores the far greater genocide to befall the Maya. In fact, within a hundred years of conquest, the Spanish were responsible for killing between 90 and 95 percent of the Maya population through disease, warfare, starvation, and enslavement.

To stereotype and slander ancient Maya civilization and to imply that the impending holocaust of Maya peoples by the Spanish is a “new beginning” shows how truly racist Gibson really is-whether drunk or sober.

Liza Grandia is a cultural anthropologist who has worked with Maya peoples in Guatemala and Belize since 1993 and who speaks Q’eqchi’ Maya fluently. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, writing a book called “Unsettling” about the repeated land dispossessions and enclosures of the Q’eqchi’. 

ISRAEL: Woman CO Hadas Amit sentenced to 14 days imprisonment

Hadis AmitIsraeli conscientious objector Hadis Amit (ISR14913), a 19 year old woman CO, was today sentenced to 14 days in prison for refusing to serve. In a letter to the military authorities, announcing her refusal to perform military service, Hadas wrote:

“If I were to be recruited into the army, this would absolutely and in all respects contradict my convictions and my way in life, since violence, killing, nationalism and vandalism are not part of them. I am not willing to wear the uniform of an organisation responsible for killing and destruction, acting in a way detrimental to its environment. Every State, the State of Israel included, should act by peaceful means alone, and even if attached, not to respond with fire. In any situation, Israel’s case included, it is wrong to sustain a military force trained for war and killing - this is altogether contrary to the pursuit of peace and coexistence with our neighbours in the Middle East.”

Hadas appeared before the military Conscience Committee in November, but was rejected. Hadas reported that during her hearing she was constantly interrupted and had to suffer degrading and disrespectful comments. A member of the committee demonstratively left the room, and two other members were exchanging notes, with her sitting between them, while she was trying to answer questions directed to her.

In a statement made on the eve of imprisonment Hadas wrote:

“I refuse to enlist in the IDF [Israel Defence Forces], as the D of “IDF” symbolises nothing but killing to me. Who is it that decided that I am not seeking peace, and put me with my back to the wall? I could either lie or pay the price of my principles. It is for morality and justice and the love of humankind that I shall be sitting in prison.”

Since early 2005, women COs in Israel are referred to the same internal military Conscience Committee as male COs (despite official legal recognition of women’s right to CO), and there is no right of appeal on the Committee’s decisions. Accumulating evidence strongly suggests that the military Conscience Committee is fundamentally biased against women. It seems difficult for the members of this committee (4 men and one woman; all but one of the men are military career officers) to perceive a woman as a person with principles, with a conscientious stance, and with commitment to this stance. As a result (although official figures are not released), the committee rejects a far higher percentage of applications by women than by men, and many of the women applicants describe their committee hearings as a degrading experience.

Hadas is due to be released from prison on Friday, 29 December 2006.

War Resisters’ International calls for letters of support to Hadas Amit.

Hadas Amit
Military ID 6175691
Military Prison No. 400
Military Postal Code 02447, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-9579348

War Resisters’ International calls for letters of protest to the Israeli authorities, and Israeli embassies abroad. An email letter can be sent at http://www.wri-irg.org/co/alerts/20061218a.html.

War Resisters’ International calls for the immediate release of conscientious objector Hadas Amit and all other imprisoned conscientious objectors.

Andreas Speck
War Resisters’ International

Addresses

Mr Amir Peretz
Minister of Defence,
Ministry of Defence,
37 Kaplan st.,
Tel-Aviv 61909,
Israel
e-mail: or
Fax: +972-3-696-27-57 / +972-3-691-69-40 / +972-3-691-79-15

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Military Prison No 4
Military Postal Code 02507
IDF, Israel
Fax: +972-3-957-52-76

Commander of Military Prison No 6
Military Prison No 6
Military postal number 01860,
IDF, Israel.
Fax: +972-4-869-28-84

Commander of Military Prison No 400
Military Prison No 400
Military postal number 02447
IDF, Israel
Fax: +972-3-9579389

Addresses of Israeli embassies can be found at http://www.embassyworld.com/embassy/israel1.htm
Addresses of Israeli media:

Ma’ariv:
2 Karlibach st.
Tel-Aviv 67132
Israel
Fax: +972-3-561-06-14
e-mail:

Yedioth Aharonoth:
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Israel
Fax: +972-3-608-25-46

Ha’aretz (Hebrew):
21 Schocken st.
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Israel
Fax: +972-3-681-00-12

Ha’aretz (English edition):
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Tel-Aviv, 61001
Israel
Fax: +972-3-512-11-56
e-mail:

Jerusalem Post:
P.O. Box 81
Jerusalem 91000
Israel
Fax: +972-2-538-95-27
e-mail: or

Jerusalem Report:
Fax: +972-2-537-94-89

Radio (fax numbers):
Kol-Israel +972-2-531-33-15 and +972-3-694-47-09
Galei Tzahal +972-3-512-67-20

Television (fax numbers):
Channel 1 +972-2-530-15-36
Channel 2 +972-2-533-98-09

Archives of co-alert can be found at http://wri-irg.org/news/alerts
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Snapshots from School

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ZNet Commentary
Snapshots from School December 12, 2006
By Cynthia Peters

“Don?t go to the Parent-Teacher Council meeting,” advised my daughter, who is a 9th-grader at a large urban high school. “They’ll only try to scare you.”

I shouldn’t have been too surprised at how accurately she summed up at least one salient aspect of the culture at her school. After two days at the orientation for new students, she commented on the school’s basic M.O., “I’ve figured out that they use fear a lot.”

We wondered what she meant. Wasn’t the school using the orientation as an opportunity to help the kids get to know each other, get acquainted with the school, and gain a measure of comfort before entering the big, scary secondary grades? No, apparently not. What were they doing?

“Well, they explained how we would get an F. And that if we got an F, we would get expelled. But if we got an F+, we could go to summer school to make it up.”

The next day, they handed out candies to kids (keep in mind that these are 9th graders) who finished their math worksheets. And so the flip side of punishment made itself apparent, that is, reward.

I suppose it should not be too surprising that a traditional, inner-city school operating on low resources would have too much in its motivator tool box beyond the usual carrot and stick. The accepted mentality about learning, working, or doing just about anything besides watching TV is that it’s a bitter pill that must be swallowed. The idea that kids (and adults) might find joy in learning or feel inherent gratification in their work seems to have been beaten out of us by a society that holds out consumption as the main source of satisfaction. A popular radio station in Boston plays music “to help your work day fly by.” And that about sums it up. The workday and the school day are something that have to be tolerated, gotten through, survived.

My family has taken an unusual approach to schooling in the past (both of our kids have homeschooled for most of their lives), and so we are naïve in this new environment. This commentary is personal and anecdotal—a reflection on schooling from a family that is new at it.

At back-to-school night, held soon after classes started, we learned something about the way fear and stress operate in schools. Not only were mundane stress-causing devices in place (the mis-firing bell ringing at arbitrary times, which teachers simply talk over; the public broadcasting system mistakenly airing some angry conversation; the limited time between classes—three minutes in a school that is the size of a very large city block), but the teachers and administrators took every opportunity to raise the specter of failure.

The range of ways you could fail was enormous—from failing to fill out the proper paperwork to failing to secure a scholarship. Inducing anxiety about the mundane along with the potentially life-changing results in pure anxiety about everything. It’s hard to keep perspective about what matters and what doesn’t. The school uses back-to-school night to ask parents to ally themselves with teachers against the child.

One guidance counselor, who acted like she was reporting from a subdivision of the police force, held up a piece of paper. “Do you see this?” she asked all the now (and formerly) petrified parents. “This is your paycheck.” We stared back blankly. “This is the report card schedule. It will tell you how much you’re getting paid. Your child’s report card, you see, is the return you’ll be getting on your investment. You’ve invested a lot in your children, and now it’s pay-back time!”

She waved the report card schedule with a flourish while the parents waited obediently to try to make sense of what she was saying. I, for one, kept trying to reconcile everything-my-daughter-means-to-me with the idea that the flimsy letter grades that will some day be coming home on a flimsy piece of paper are somehow a form of compensation—something she owes me.

Years ago, Paulo Freire criticized the banking model of education, whereby teachers treat students like a passive vault that holds knowledge. Teachers put the knowledge in and then get it back out in the form of tests or homework. But the guidance counselor on back-to-school night brought the banking model of education to a whole new level. “You’ll be getting a good return on your investment,” she said, “if your child brings home As and Bs. But if your child is bringing home Cs,” and here, I swear, she wagged her finger at us, “you are not getting the paycheck you deserve.”

I don’t even believe in grades, and I’m not too fond of traditional schooling, but this lady was scaring me. All the ways I know my kid and feel confidence in her were getting crowded out by fear. People are judged by letter grades, after all, and what if hers aren’t good? What if she doesn’t get into college? What if she doesn’t get a scholarship? What if she fails? What if we fail her by not instilling enough fear in her about her potential failure? What will we do? What will we do? When we got home, I asked to see her notebooks. “The teachers all say we’re supposed to be checking your notebooks once a week to ensure you’re not getting behind in anything.”

She indicated her backpack loaded with binders and 10-pound textbooks. “Feel free,” she said nonchalantly, but I could tell she was surprised. We had never checked her work before. We just trusted she was doing her best and would ask if she needed help. This system was working fine. It didn’t feel good to change gears and perform this policing function. Nor did I relish the fact that in subsequent weeks, I was starting to ask, “So, how’d you do on that test? How’s your grade in biology?” No wonder she didn’t want me to go to the Parent-Teacher Council meeting. She could see I was not immune to their fear-inspiring tactics. After years of homeschooling and being outside of traditional, fear-based schooling, her armature against these tactics was perhaps in better condition than mine.

When you participate in an institution, you start traveling down the pathways that the institution offers you. You speak the language because otherwise you won’t be understood. The institution of school prepares you for the institution of work and passive citizenship—key ingredients to maintaining the current power structure. Fear limits your creativity; swinging back and forth between punishment and reward keeps you oriented toward external motivators; arbitrary authority acclimates you to subservience; severe boredom dulls your mind, lowers your expectations, and teaches you how to tolerate life rather than be an agent in it.

Many of the kids graduating from this school will end up in jobs—either white-collar or blue, where they carry out orders. Perhaps a few will be in positions of power where they make important decisions and give orders. But all will have been trained to think that there is no other way it could be. They will learn, too, that the parameters of the institution allow for occasional random acts of kindness (the next generation’s selfless teachers) at one end and extreme acts of evil at the other (the next generation’s abusive cops). Systemic evils (war, profiteering, racism, sexism, etc.) will go largely unnoticed because they are the roads we walk, the language we speak, the walls we live inside of everyday. That’s what schools teach: the parameters are set. You must operate within them. There’s no point in contesting them. Get used to it.

When my daughter failed to note her section number in the designated spot on her art project, she received an F, and the teacher threw the piece away. I emailed the teacher, expressing respect for the challenges of having so many students, but also registering our concern about how demoralizing his tactics were. He did not write back, but he told Zoe the next day that he would give her partial credit for her work. “What does partial credit mean?” I found myself asking her...as if that is what mattered. It’s not what matters, but there’s no other way to engage with her teacher, and so you use the language that is best understood—that of grades and credit, rather than what matters much more, i.e., creativity, expression, critical thinking, collective engagement, and effort.

And it’s not the teacher’s fault either. He has about 150 students—Boston public high schools having a 31-student-per-class maximum. And he functions in the same overly stressed environment with insufficient resources. On the same day he slammed my kid with the F, he had been yelling at the class for wasting paint. Maybe he had hit the wall himself, dealing with the contradictions of being an art teacher in an overcrowded school with not enough money for paint and the asinine job of assigning grades to students’ work.

Everyone, then, is required to function according to the norms of the institution. Teachers, too, deal with arbitrary authority (from administrators, state and city budget decisions, work rules, and standardized tests). Then they turn around and dish it out. More examples: Zoe’s A in Latin got significantly reduced when the teacher discovered her binder was not properly organized. She almost got a zero on an English test because she had left one question blank. Why? Because she didn’t understand the question. But then she heard the teacher announce that leaving any blanks would result in a zero, so she went back to her desk and made up something that she thought would fit. She received full credit, thus learning an important lesson in bullshitting.

Maybe it’s not so bad to learn how to bullshit. And maybe we could all use some experience dealing with arbitrary authority and rigid institutional requirements. They are key survival skills. But as parents we should watch out for the ways we help do the school’s dirty work. One parent I know got upset because her kid’s biology teacher was not keeping up with the assigned pace for moving through the textbook. How would her child do on the mandatory citywide biology test at the end of the year if the teacher didn’t keep up? What gets the parent’s attention is the teacher’s failure to stick to norms. But is anyone asking if the norms make sense?

I find myself feeling appalled at the content in her textbooks. And then I feel appalled that the schools are so underfunded that they don’t have enough of them. How contradictory is that? “These textbooks suck, and you should get more of them.”

How many other parents, are out there pushing schools to live up to their norms without questioning those norms in the first place?

How many parents are abiding by the terms set by the school system and agreeing to play enforcer at home?

The only teacher I really learned anything from in high school was my AP U.S. history teacher who never made it past the Rosenbergs. He got stuck there because it was a powerful moment in history and it really mattered. I remember how he challenged us to think and how I could tell that that mattered to him more than anything else did. Students were upset with him for failing to put them through their paces. Their AP scores would surely suffer. But I remember—even at the time—feeling grateful that he expected me to think. And to think hard.

There is pleasure in thinking hard and using your mind to solve problems you are interested in. That’s what I want for my kid—and for every kid. Not just for its liberatory aspects, but because the survival of the planet probably depends on it.

My daughter is no doubt getting something positive from her school. Many of her teachers genuinely care about the kids and their ability to learn. But the requirements of the institution include the fundamental lessons: Do what you’re told. Don’t ask why. Accept arbitrary punishment and reward. Reduce your expectations. Nobody said life was fair or fun. You can hold on until the weekend, the next holiday, graduation, a week’s vacation from your job, and finally retirement. We all know what happens after that. You die. And the best you can hope for is that it all flew by, like the radio station promises?

Monday, December 11, 2006

Post-9/11 Fiction:  Exiles in America by Christopher Bram

By Michael Bronski

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It is rare for contemporary art to grapple with the political realities of our lives. Of course, the reason for this is often that the making of a film or writing of a novel does not happen quickly and artists looking to take the longer view and make larger statements about the politics de jour may not have the same resonance two years later. However, in the past year we have seen a growing body of work that deals with the murderous excesses of the current administration’s response to 9/11 and the conflicts in the Middle East. These have been mostly documentaries—such as Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room and Danny Schechter’s WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception—but there have also been terrific fictional attempts to portray life in post-9/11 America. For instance, Danny Leiner’s feature film The Great New Wonderful looks at the complicated lives of some New Yorkers in September 2002 and manages to explicate the effects of physical and political trauma on everyday life.

But Exiles in America by Christopher Bram (William Morrow) sets a new standard for the political novel, not just because the author deals with sex, desire, and art in relation to international politics, but because he does so with a perception and a psychological nuance that is rare.

Bram is one of today’s most exciting and challenging novelists who consistently writes on gay themes. Sure, he is usually listed as a “gay writer.” While that is accurate enough, it is a shame that we live in a culture in which this term doesn’t illuminate an author’s work, but rather immediately limits it. Since 1987, with the publication of Surprising Myself, Bram has published 9 major novels in 19 years—a great run for any novelist. Bram’s record is particularly amazing when you realize that each of his novels has been very different from those before and after it.

From the sophisticated coming out story of Surprising Myself, Bram produced a WWII sex thriller in Hold Tight (1989); one of the first novels about AIDS with In Memory of Angel Clare (1989); and a novel about contemporary international politics in Almost History (1992). Father of Frankenstein (1995), which became the awardwinning film Gods and Monsters, was about the life of Hollywood director James Whale; the 1997 Gossip was a murder mystery about ACT UP and secrets on the Beltway rumor mill; The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life; and Crimes was a splendid recreation of a 19th century novelized memoir that moved from the Civil War to the birth and death of vaudeville culture as seen through the intersections of race and sex, and the 2003 Lives of the Circus Animals was a novel about contemporary New York theater. All of these novels featured gay male protagonists, as well as various gay communities, and each portrayed themes that reflected the complicated, complex worlds in which they took place.

Exiles in America is also completely different from his earlier work. Zack Knowles, a psychiatrist, and his lover Daniel Wexler, a painter, have been together for over 20 years and while deeply in love, have fallen out of sex. They live in Williamsburg where Daniel teaches art at the College of William and Mary. Their lives are suddenly unsettled by the arrival of a visiting faculty artist, Abbas Rohani, his wife Elena, and their two children. Abbas is Iranian and Elena Russian. Shortly after they become friends, Abbas and Daniel begin a casual affair that later becomes more serious, in different ways, for both of them. In reaction Zack and Elena become confidants.

Bram’s explication of this roundelay of complicated relationships is splendid. Not only does he pinpoint the breath and life of how gay male lovers relate to one another—the silences, emotional hesitations, and unsaid love and resentments—but his portrayal of Abbas and Elena’s relationship (even more complicated than Zack and Daniel’s) is credible and illuminating.

Exiles in America takes on the big questions brought on by 9/11: what does it mean to be safe? How are people defined by their religion? By their culture? How does society hold itself together? How far can society go to protect itself before it destroys itself? Who is an exile? What is the very nature of “exile” and what happens to those people who are exiled? What happens to those who exile them?

While Bram at first concerns himself with the puzzles of sex and relationships at home, Exiles in America soon explodes into international politics when Abbas’s brother, an important Iranian politician, visits his relatives, imploring them to consider their roots, especially in light of the war in Iraq and a possible war against Iran. His visit is noticed by the FBI, which has concerns, fears, prejudices, and plots of their own. Soon the question of open relationships, homosexuality, “homeland,” and safety are all played out on a dangerous international stage.

The trauma of 9/11 is ever present in Exiles in America, mentioned sometimes by Zach’s patients, more often by Abbas and Elena when trying to explain why they feel like exiles in America. But Bram is also interested in what the evolving myth of 9/11 is doing to U.S. culture—our sense of self, ideas of normalcy, sexuality, sense of personal and national isolation. Obviously, the “exiles” in the title refer not only to Abbas and Elena but also to the sexual “deviants” Zach and Daniel, as well as anyone who does not easily fit into the new post-9/11 mindset. What Bram has done is show how defensive, isolationist, nationalist thinking seeps into all parts of our lives and begins to shape people from the inside. Not only does non(hetero)normative sexuality become suspicious in this climate, the very idea of “open relationships”—so natural to gay male culture and enjoyed by both couples here—becomes a suspect category, unAmerican and untrustworthy. Bram exposes how the post-9/11 demand for a strong nation at all costs affects our humanity and how the rhetoric of safety and security shapes our lives and thoughts even as we resist them.

It is tempting to call Exiles in America Bram’s best novel. Not only is it a major “gay novel”— however you want to define that—but it is also one of the new works of contemporary fiction that grapples with the unending complexity of world politics in ways that are both empathetic, enlightening, politically savvy, and emotionally sophisticated. 

Michael Bronski teaches women and gender studies and Jewish studies at Dartmouth College. His last book was Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). 

Misogyny Marketing:  (1) Got Milk?  Got Desperation?  -and- (2) Another Wonder Drug?

By Martha Rosenberg

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If you’ve ever doubted the dictum that the ads people like best don’t sell just look at the Got Milk campaign. The longer it runs, the more people quote it, the more B-list celebrities it poses with hokey props and sight gags—the less milk actually sells. In fact, teenagers drink 50 percent less milk today than 30 years ago, according to the milk industry’s own figures.

Of course, some fault lies with the product itself. Many simply won’t drink it—kids, dieters, athletes, health food eaters, ethnic minorities, allergics, drinkers, smokers, vegans, the lactose intolerant—and that’s before we get to the product’s underside of downers, veal calves, Monsanto bovine growth hormone, and pollution so bad dairy farms are called environmental crack houses.

But the advertising itself hasn’t helped either. Because underneath the celebrity rubber necking and twee copy is sloppy marketing and sloppy science, buttressed by heath-care professionals on the dairy dole.

Remember the “does a body good”/strong bones campaign, which told young women milk prevented osteoporosis? Turned out young women didn’t care about getting osteoporosis. They cared about calories and milk has more calories than a lot of other appealing foods. And it wasn’t true. Dairy calcium doesn’t prevent bone fractures in scientific studies and was correlated with increased fractures in the definitive Nurses’ Health Studies. Oh well.

Then there was the milk-as-Midol campaign, which showed husbands rushing to the store to get a milk fix for their PMSing women. Again it wasn’t true—dairy worsens PMS— and the sight of hubby’s insipid peace offering just made women madder.

Earlier this year, there was the 24/24 milk diet—“drink 24 ounces every 24 hours as part of your reduced-calorie diet”—whose scientific claims, tautologically, derive from studies funded by the dairy industry.

Full color ads with photos of soccer star David Beckham, American Idol Carrie Underwood, skater Sasha Cohen, and New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez are appearing in Sports Illustrated for Kids, Spin, Electronic Gaming, CosmoGirl, Blender, and Seventeen. Teenagers are urged to visit bodybymilk.com where they can win prizes like Baby Phat and Adidas items—and their schools can bid on sports gear, classroom supplies, and music equipment.

Now the milk industry is taking on soft drinks. “Soft drinks and other sweetened beverages are now the leading source of calories in a teen’s diet and these nutrient-void beverages are increasingly taking the place of milk,” says the press release. “Some studies have found that teenage girls who drink adequate amounts of milk and few soft drinks tend to weigh less and have less body fat than those who don’t.”

But there are a few wrinkles in the new campaign. Like the dangers inherent in “not as bad as X” marketing. If sugary sodas are bad, does that make milk good? What about sugar free soda? What about high fat or flavored milk? What about neither one? When it comes to marketing, the enemy of your enemy isn’t your friend. 

Another Wonder Drug

The screaming woman in the ad is right out of Friday the 13th Part 2 or Halloween. Face contorted, mouth in an impossible shape, she looks like she’s being murdered—or doing the murdering.

Is it the remake of the remake of Psycho that everyone’s been waiting for? No, it’s the latest disease big pharma is trying to sell to justify a drug—a perfectly good drug that just needs people to take it. As everyone who remembers HRT marketing knows, the quickest way to sell a drug is to show out of control women (see: fear mongering; misogyny).

“Are there periods of time when you have racing thoughts? Fly off the handle at little things? Spend out of control?” asks the ad.  “Need less sleep? Feel irritable? You may need treatment for bipolar disorder.”

Of course, you may also have had too much coffee or a bad day at the office. But mental illness makes a lot more money. Especially if you decide to take AstraZeneca’s Seroquel. Created in 1988 by tweaking an existing antipsychotic compound enough to merit a patent, Seroquel (quetiapine fumarate) has the three things big pharma loves most in a drug—a short time from R&D to sales, a daily ad infinitum dosage, and a high price: $11.82 a day or $4,300 a year. It was approved in 1997 for schizophrenia.

At first it was a blockbuster, accounting for one dollar in nine of AstraZeneca revenue. But then in 2005 that cheeky New England Journal of Medicine found that Seroquel and other atypical anti-psychotics (except one) had no advantage over older anti-psychotics like Haldol and Thorazine in 2005 (except price), including the putative reduction in rigidity and tremors that was their selling point.

The finding, part of a six-year National Institutes of Health comparative drug study, provided “a comprehensive set of data that were obtained independently of the pharmaceutical industry,” commented principal investigator Jeffrey Lieberman, adding insult to injury.

Around the same time the British Medical Journal announced that Seroquel and a similar atypical antipsychotic were ineffective in reducing agitation among Alzheimer’s patients, who constitute 29 percent of Seroquel sales. In fact, Seroquel was found to make cognitive functioning worse in the elderly patients with dementia studied.

Then there was the police blotter. Violent assault reports were increasingly mentioning Seroquel. One in Yonkers, New York in 2006 began, “The city jail guard who shot his wife before killing himself had just begun taking a powerful anti-psychotic drug that listed ‘suicide attempt’ among its possible side effects”—and lawsuits began piling up, 380 according to USA Today.

One young Seroquel patient told the Chicago Sun-Times, “It would take me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half to get out of bed each morning. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t be me.”

There was bad financial news too. AstraZeneca’s new blood thinner and diabetes drug were both stalled due to safety concerns, and Teva Pharmaceuticals, a generic drug maker, challenged Seroquel’s patent to the FDA.

So AstraZeneca did what drug companies that put marketing before medicine always do: came up with a new use for Seroquel (bipolar disorder) and new formulation (sustained release) and yelled breakthrough. Now all it has to do is convince millions of healthy women and men they should take a major tranquilizer, an anti-psychotic for schizophrenia, because they had a bad day. That’s before it gets to the kids.

Maybe the screaming woman in the ad has just seen the AstraZeneca marketing plan.

Ellen Jane Willis

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Ellen Willis was born in Manhattan, New York and grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. Her father was a lieutenant in the New York City Police Department. Willis attended Barnard College as an undergraduate and did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley where she received a degree in comparative literature.

In the 1960s and 1970s she was the first pop music critic for the New Yorker and subsequently wrote for the Village Voice, the Nation, Rolling Stone, Slate, and Dissent (where she was also on the editorial board). She was the author of several books including Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1982), No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992), and Don’t Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (1999).

In 1969, with Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Willis co-founded Redstockings, a radical women’s liberation group that pioneered consciousness raising (CR) and organized the first public speakouts on abortion, then illegal in the U.S.

After an infamous 1969 counter-inaugural and anti-war rally in Washington where male leftists shouted (at one of the two feminist speakers) things like “Rape her in a back alley,” Willis wrote about the need for feminists to break from SDS: “A genuine alliance with male radicals will not be possible until sexism sickens them as much as racism. This will not be accomplished through persuasion, conciliation, or love, but through independence and solidarity; radical men will stop oppressing us and make our fight their own when they can’t get us to join them on any other terms” (The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen, Viking, 2000).

The next year Willis started a women’s liberation group in Colorado, while working on an antiVietnam War project near a military base. In 1975 after most of the early CR groups, including Redstockings, had disbanded in the wake of the burnout and backlash that followed the ebbing of the 1960s radical tide, she got together with feminist friends to form a new group, which analyzed attacks on feminism as they emerged.

Willis said about the unexpected exhilaration women involved in CR groups felt: “What I was impressed with was that people were talking about substantive things; it wasn’t like the usual political meeting. And I also felt immediately accepted. If I made a comment, people listened to it, as if I were really in the group, which I wasn’t used to in New Left groups. I was used to feeling like an outsider” (The World Split Open).

In 1969 she wrote in her essay “Women and the Myth of Consumerism,” “Women are not manipulated by the media into being domestic servants and mindless sexual decorations, the better to sell soap and hair spray. Rather, the image reflects women as they are forced by men in a sexist society to behave.... The real evil of the media image of women is that it supports the sexist status quo.”

Throughout the 1970s she worked to halt the erosion of abortion rights, both through her writing and by joining with others to form several reproductive rights resistance groups.

In the 1980s Willis articulated a position that she defined as “prosex feminism” and helped found the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT) to counter the puritanism she deplored in the anti-pornography movement.

In 1995 as an NYU professor of journalism, she founded the only cultural reporting and criticism program in the U.S.

In 2000 she organized radical feminists into the online discussion group History in Action, with members on several continents. She remained an activist, demonstrating against the Bush administration’s policies with the group Take Back the Future and was part of the Feminist Futures study group.

Carol Hanisch, who had worked in the civil rights movement in the South and then become a central organizer and writer in the New York women’s liberation movement, said about Willis: “Her writing was always forthright and serious, unencumbered by pretentious cuteness or fawning. Her forte was in exploring dark corners and adding her own light so all could see more clearly. In those crucial years, we struggled to make the left more feminist and to keep the women’s liberation movement genuinely radical.”

Willis died on November 9, 2006 from lung cancer.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

HIV Information from the JAPAN AIDS PREVENTION AWARENESS NETWORK

AIDS AWARENESS LOWER
NEW INFECTIONS UP
http://www.japanetwork.org/aidsnews/news1106.html

INFO FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS
http://www.japanetwork.org/teachers/tmenu.html

INCLUDES
AIDS WORKSHEETS by Kathy Riley

Jigsaw reading passages (in Word Doc format)
Passage A
Passage B
Passage C

Also

NEW! Photocopiable HIV/AIDS Seminar Worksheets
developed by Louise Haynes, director of JAPANetwork and AIDS educator in Japan since 1995.

Pairwork Quiz

* Teaching “Could It Happen to You,” an AIDS Awareness Unit
* Photocopiable worksheets(pdf format):
o AIDS: A Common Topic
o Using Internet
o Using Your Library
o Keeping a Diary
o AIDS Scenarios: What Should They Do?

* Paper Quilt - A Lesson Plan For Teaching Aids Awareness: Lauren Scharf, Kanazawa International Design Institute
* Families, Caring & HIV/AIDS: Live, Life, Love - CD ROM Bob Gettings
* What Teachers Can Do
* Learning From Our Students: Andrew Barfield, Tsukuba

*

References

* ESL/EFL Coursebooks containing units on AIDS
* Other reference materials on HIV/AIDS
* Videos
* Basic Information on HIV/AIDS
* AIDS Medical updates
* Organizations
* And much, much more!!!

FOR STUDENTS
http://www.japanetwork.org/students/stumenu.html

Including
Reading Passages

What is AIDS?
Basic facts about HIV and AIDS (Basic Level)

What is AIDS?
Learn more detailed information about HIV and AIDS (Intermediate)

JAPANetwork’s Advanced Lesson plan
***Approach the issue from different standpoints***

World AIDS Day Index 1998
Facts and statistics about the epidemic in 1998

Short Stories
Some stories about people affected with or touched by AIDS

Discussion Topics
Society, Economy, History and the AIDS Epidemic

Dos and Don’ts
What the care giver should and shouldn’t do for an HIV+ person

Are lesbians at risk?
Safe sex hints for Japanese gay women

The Story Behind JAPANetwork
Carol Burnett: The inspiration behind JAPANetwork

Doctors in America and Japan
An American doctor’s experience with the medical community in Japan

What’s Happening in Asia?
Read about a group in Vietnam that is working to stop the spread of HIV.

Quizzes

Basic AIDS quiz!
Basic quiz to test your knowledge about HIV/AIDS

Intermediate AIDS quiz!
A more advanced quiz about HIV/AIDS

http://www.itec.sfsu.edu/aids/aids.html
San Francisco State University’s AIDS Quiz!

Projects for your classroom!

Public Service Announcements (All levels)
Make your own TV and Radio commercials.

HIV Diary (All levels)
Imagine you are hiv+. Keep a diary for a week.

Make a newspaper (Intermediate level)
In your group, make a newspaper with reports..

Make a video
(Intermediate and Advanced levels)
Ideas for video topics

Letter-writing campaign (Advanced level)
Write letters to government officals

Theater (Intermediate and Advanced levels)
Write a play with an AIDS related theme

Discussion (Intermediate and Advanced levels)
AIDS related topics for discussion

AIDS NEWSLETTER
http://www.japanetwork.org/jnnewsl/nlmenu.html

Including
Japan urged to enlighten public to check rise in HIV/AIDS cases
Japan Faces Potential AIDS-Tuberculosis Dual-Epidemic, Experts Say
Japan’s AIDS Stigma Hampers Treatment, Activists Say
Rise in Japan Teen Sex Ignites Education Debate
Japan Plans Free HIV Tests
New Statistics Raise Fears of an AIDS Explosion
Japan’s AIDS Experts Alarmed as HIV Infections Hit Record High
...and more.

日本語のリンク
http://www.japanetwork.org/nihongo/jmenu.html

Including
日本語のエイズ情報リンクは下記まで

キャンパス　エイズ　インタフェース:
http://www.cai.presen.to/

愛知県健康福祉部健康対策課感染症グループ
http://www.pref.aichi.jp/kenkotaisaku/aids/index.html

厚生労働省（統計）
http://api-net.jfap.or.jp/
http://www.mhlw.go.jp/houdou/index.html

Where to get tested in Japan
http://www.japanetwork.org/testing/tstmenu.html

HIV lesson materials Kathy Riley
http://www.japanetwork.org/seminar/teachers-seminar.html