a long break

I haven't posted anything on this site for quite some time, but I do hope to get back to it some time in the near future, as soon as I finish my damn thesis.
Slan go Fóil!!

On Boris Johnson celebrating the victory of Conservatism

An interesting article by Boris Johnson in today's Telegraph, sent around my class mailing list by a fellow student, and in the interest of avoiding any real work, I feel like making a few comments on it here(I'll try to keep the rant short!). In the article Boris celebrates what he percieves as the victory of Conservatism and the almost complete vanquishing of the left.

To begin with, I wouldn't rely on the word of the ludicrous Boris Johnson to describe the 'extinction' of the left. After all, what he describes in the article is the politics of Blair,(PR people, social conservatism etc.) Cameron was complaining only a couple of weeks ago about how hard it was to come up with policy that differs strongly from the government line. After all, with Blair in power, who needs a conservative opposition? I think most people would agree that the Prime Minister is hardly a representative voice for 'lefties', as Boris calls them.

Left wing politics is alive and well, but it is true to say that to a certain degree it has lost some of its voice in Britain. This doesn't mean that it's not there, just that it is not represented in Blair's administration. I think if Boris travelled a little further afield beyond the small naval gazing island he inhabits he might find a different picture in other parts of Europe, not to talk about the left wing movements sweeping other continents. For anybody comfortable with being on the left, its actually quite funny to have somebody tell you, "you no longer exist", with the assumption that you'll take their word for it and disappear. Imagine that kind of power, eh? It certainly is a wet dream worthy of any public schoolboy. Is that what happened to the dinosuars? Did Boris Johnson explain to them that they were extinct?

Who really imagines we are travelling along a linear path towards some kind of capitalist paradise anyway? Conservatism and unbridled capitalism may work for Boris but it certainly isn't working for the majority of the world. Is this the best kind of society we can hope to achieve? Of course not. But it is always useful for certain interested parties to have people believe that change is impossible, that history has come to an end, or as the Borg put it in Star Trek (who knows why I'm referring to them), 'resistence is futile'.

The left is not dead and Boris' vision of a homogenous political outlook will be a long time in coming, if it ever does. We have arrived at one small moment in a constantly changing political climate, and while I don't have a clue which direction the world is heading in (its getting crazier by the minute), it would be naieve to imagine that its going to achieve the kind of political stagnation that Boris and co. dream of wallowing in anytime soon.

Underestimating civilan deaths in Iraq

An interesting article on the Z-Mag web-site talks about the 'cluster sample survey' conducted by a group of epistimologists to estimate the true extent of civilian casualties in Iraq, and the attempts by the the British and US governments to dicredit their findings after they were published in the Lancet journal.

"Over a year ago an international team of epidemiologists, headed by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, completed a “cluster sample survey” of civilian casualties in Iraq. Its findings contradicted central elements of what politicians and journalists had presented to the U.S. public and the world. After excluding any possible statistical anomalies, they estimated that at least 98,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the previous 18 months as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of their country. They also found that violence had become the leading cause of death in Iraq during that period. Their most significant finding was that the vast majority (79 percent) of violent deaths were caused by “coalition” forces using “helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry,” and that almost half (48 percent) of these were children, with a median age of 8."

Yet these deaths go almost completely unreported by the media, a nod to the success of the British and US administrations in undermining their research, and the article goes on to explain how even the sections of the media which have positioned themselves against the war continuosly underestimate the number of civilian casualties and ignore the primary source of their deaths, a bombing campaign hidden from the public that continues right up to the present unabated.

On my humiliating defeat by a glass bottle....

This evening, feeling a little hungry, I went to the Dunnes Stores down the road from here on Georges street and bought myself something to eat and what looked like a delicious cranberry and orange fruit drink.

I arrived back at my desk, and started munching into a rather bland chicken salad sandwich. I tried to open my tasty looking fruit drink to wash it down, but the lid wouldn't budge. Oh, it must be on a little tight, I naively thought to myself. I twisted a little harder, and still it didn't move a millimetre. I got a cloth, thinking that would give me a better grip, and twisted till the sinews of my forearm burnt and felt like they were going to rip apart, but NO NO NO NOTHING!

Just a sore wrist and a red face. I could see the juice inside, laughing at my feeble efforts to liberate it. I could practically taste it, but not being possessed of Herculean strength, I would never know how sweet it was. Humiliated, with an aching arm and a parched throat, I resigned myself to defeat, but left the bottle in the class, as a lesson for others, so that they too may learn humility at the hands of the evil 'Feel Good Juice Co.'

I suspect they have employed the services of either Mr. T or the Devil in their factory, cos I pity the fool who tries to get the damn thing open.

Amnesty report on Guantánamo Bay

"I have written the story of my suffering and sorrows, this story which has not ended and which I am still living through. I have written these lines from behind the walls of the dreadful detention camps. I have written about my pain and my sadness. I do not know what will happen in the future and what fate has hidden for me, when the end will come or how it will be."

These are the words of Jumah al-Dossari, a Guantánamo detainee who has been illegally held prisoner, without being charged for any crime, for more than four years by US forces. Amnesty International released a report today entitled, "Guantánamo: Lives torn apart – The impact of indefinite detention on detainees and their families". It reports on the ongoing hunger strike and force-feeding of the prisoners, the physical and psychological abuse which they suffer at the hands of their guards and the devastating effect which indefinate detention has had on their families. Jumah al-Dossari's story is just one of several accounts of abuse mentioned in the report.

"Throughout his detention in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guantánamo, he claims to have been subjected to torture and ill-treatment, including beatings, rape and death threats, prolonged isolation, exposure to extreme cold, sexual assaults and having his body smeared with menstrual blood during the course of an interrogation. He is believed to have attempted suicide at least nine times. On 15 October 2005, he attempted to hang himself after going into the toilet during an interview with his lawyer. In declassified notes from a meeting with the lawyer in November, Jumah al-Dossari talked about this suicide attempt, explaining that he had wanted to kill himself so that he could send a message to the world that the conditions at Guantánamo are intolerable. He added that he tried to do it in a public way so that the military could not cover it up and his death would not be anonymous. This suicide attempt left him with a broken vertebra and fourteen stitches in his right arm."

His harrowing account of torture and abuse at the hands of the American military can be read in full HERE.

Negroponte, Rumsfeld and the Defenders of Democracy

Before the celebrations of Evo Morales' inaugaration as President in Bolivia have even died down, the US has already begun the propaganda process of labeling him, along with other left wing leaders in Latin America, as threats to democracy. Meanwhile, US moves to claw back some of the control it has lost in the region are already under way, and as always, their methods are anti-democratic and subversive.

In June 2004, 10 South American nations had $330 million in economic and military aid from the US canceled as punishment for refusing to sign bi-lateral agreements granting immunity from prosecution to American soldiers. On May 6th of 2005 however, Paraguay agreed to US demands and signed a deal to allow American military personel and civilian employees an 18 month stay in the country. On May 26, another agreement was signed, granting immuunity from prosecution to US military forces for crimes committed within the country's borders and from prosecution by the international criminal court.

"This agreement grants U.S. soldiers complete legal immunity from some of their actions while they are in the country, affording them the same privileges as diplomats as well as leaving them free from prosecution for any damages inflicted on the public health, the environment or the country’s resources. According to Servicio Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ) Paraguay, the Paraguayan National Congress passed this resolution allowing for the entry of U.S. forces with no debate, behind closed doors and with the public largely unaware of the entire transaction."

On July 1st, 500 fully equipped American troops landed in Paraguay and took up station at a base near Mariscal Estigarribia, a small city 200 kilometers from the Bolivian border. According to the council of hemispheric affairs (coha), the group was the first of at least 13 which will visit the base (which can house up to 16,000 troops) until the agreement runs out in December 2006.

"Jose Ruiz, Public Affairs officer for the U.S. Armed Forces Southern Command office, told COHA that “some military training will be operational in nature,” and the goal is to better equip Paraguayans to deal with the threats of narcotrafficking, terrorism, government corruption and poverty. "

These claims have been greeted with scepticism, and the move has alarmed Paraguay's neighbours in the region, particularly Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina, who claim that the agreements are paving the way for the US to set up a permanent military base there. (The FBI has also announced that it will be setting up an office in Paraguay later this year.)

There is an excellent article by W.T. Whitney jnr. to be found HERE, which outlines the political context and the implications of the agreement between the US and Paraguay, and the causes for alarm.

As Argentine Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquibel remarked: "Once the United States arrives, it takes a long time to leave ... and that really frightens me."

Yesterday, according to an article on venezuelaanalysis.com, Donald Rumsfeld compared Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez with Adolf Hitler, while John Negroponte, the head of American intelligence operations, alleged that Chavez was deepening ties with North Korea and Iran.

According to Rumsfeld,
“We've got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money. He's a person who was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally, and then consolidated power, and now is of course working closely with [Cuban leader] Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales [Bolivian President Evo Morales] and others. It concerns me."

Negroponte stated before an intelligence comittee,
“In Venezuela, President Chavez, if he wins reelection later this year, appears ready to use his control of the legislature and other institutions to continue to stifle the opposition, reduce press freedom, and entrench himself through measures that are technically legal, but which nonetheless constrict democracy. We expect Chavez to deepen his relationship with Castro (Venezuela provides roughly two-thirds of that island's oil needs on preferential credit terms). He also is seeking closer economic, military, and diplomatic ties with Iran and North Korea. Chavez has scaled back counter-narcotics cooperation with the US. Increased oil revenues have allowed Chavez to embark on an activist foreign policy in Latin America that includes providing oil at favorable repayment rates to gain allies, using newly created media outlets to generate support for his Bolivarian goals, and meddling in the internal affairs of his neighbors by backing particular candidates for elective office.”

A very useful association for Negroponte to make, because as the article notes,
"As the U.S. prepares to take actions against Iran in the very near future, publicly declaring a link between Venezuela and Iran, as well as North Korea, provides justification for an inclusion of Venezuela on the list of nations targeted by the Bush Administration for military intervention."

The irony is that the misleading language employed is clearly intended to paint the Venezuelan President (who enjoys a 77% approval rating) in the light of a dictator, but comes from two of the representatives of an administration that supported the failed coup against the democratically elected Chavez, and one of whom, Negroponte, ran South America's largest CIA station in the 80s in Honduras, directly responisible for countless atrocities through its role in supporting the contras in Nicaragua. Chavez and his left-wing allies, supposedly represent a threat to democracy, but as the article goes on to note, the real danger lies in the fact that,

"Rumsfeld and Negroponte represent the two entities in the United States that wage war: Defense and Intelligence. "

With this in mind, their comments have a certain ominous edge to them.

The Narrative Arts Club is back once again

Just a little note.
The organizor of the Narrative Arts Club here in Dublin has just left some comments on an earlier review I did of the storytelling club when it was just starting off, so here are the details and it should be well worth checking out if any of you are around Dublin (and feel like avoiding the normal Valentine's Day shmooze) on February 14th.

"Next time is Valentine's night, when the club will be holding a swamp party with the gorgeous, the courageous, the outrageous Angela Davis, who is coming all the way from New Orleans to entertain us with her unique participative take on storytelling, as she takes us on a virtual canoe trip through Cajun territory.
Also starring Tiny James, from Nigeria.
MC the aforementioned Ciarán MacMathúna - a well known figure from Dublin's comedy and improv scene. So please come along, and invite all your friends to the swamp party at the Central Hotel on 14 February.
Doors 7.30 pm for 8 pm start. EUR 5. "

On Morales' Choice of Cabinet

Bolivian President Evo Morales has announced his new cabinet. The choices the indigenous leader of the Socialist Movement party has made are a good indication of the direction in which he hopes to take the country, away from a neo-liberal economy which has done nothing to alleviate the poverty of South America's poorest nation, and towards an economic model which prioritises the needs of the Bolivian poor and the disenfranchised indigenous majority.

"At his inauguration on Sunday, Mr Morales vowed to end what he called the humiliation of the majority Bolivian Indian community. "We have been condemned, humiliated ... and never recognised as human beings," he said. "500 years of campaigning and popular resistance by indigenous people have not been in vain. We are here and we say that we have achieved power to end the injustice, the inequality and oppression that we have lived under."

Here are a few of his appointments:

David Choquehuanca, an Aymara Indian intellectual, as Foriegn Minister.
Walter Villarroel, who comes from a mining cooperative (and wore his hard hat at the ceremony) as mining minister.
Abel Mamani will be in charge of water after he organized protests against the French water company Suez for poor service.
Andres Soliz Rada, an energy analyst and journalist, as Hydrocarbons Minister, who will oversee an increase in state control over Bolivia's vast natural gas fields.

A couple of other Irish Blogs

Over the last couple of days I spotted a couple of other blogs from Ireland which I liked.
I put a couple of them up under the links section on this page (under the 'escape routes' heading). Anyhow, here's a couple for starters:

Urban Ramblings
Toir Tap

More Floundering in the Myers' Column

The 'Irishman's Diary' column of the Irish Times featured another wonderful performance from Kevin Myers today. Once again he displayed his mastery over the art of the incoherent diatribe. Today the object of his ire was Noam Chomsky, and Islamic culture in general, a favourite theme of his (for more on Chomsky’s lecture see the previous post).

Chomsky had some difficulties with his passport when entering Ireland. Minister Dermot Ahern waived the normal procedures and allowed him to enter the country.

Myers begins his attack by asking would the same exception have been made if it had been 'the great' Mark Steyn who had been due to speak in Ireland. For anyone familiar with journalist Mark Steyn’s contribution to the debate on American foriegn policy, the answer seems pretty obvious. A definate no. Myers seems to have chosen Steyn as an example of a polar opposite to Chomsky, as though he were in some way an intellectual of the right, a man who could bring intelligent argument to a debate on the war on terror (the subject of Chomsky's lecture), but from the neo-conservative perspective.

Steyn has described himself as an “armchair war-monger”, and this is perhaps the best way to sum up his controversial but ultimately vacuous tirades. There are similarites between both the style of journalism employed by Myers and Steyn and their politics. It may be unfair of me to speculate that in choosing Steyn as an example Myers is grasping for some kind of intellectual approval for his own reactionary ideas, but perhaps not. Whatever about his motives, eliciting Steyn as some kind of counter balance to Chomsky (in the second paragraph) is a sure way for Myers to lose his argument before he has even started.

The next paragraph begins by comparing Chomsky to an autistic child genius inhabiting a fantasy world.

“Chomsky is a chump - a brilliant and dysfunctional genius, like the autistic child who knows the day of every date in 2001 BC, but can't explain why we have a calendar. He inhabits a fantastic world, in which cabbalistic covens in Washington ruthlessly control the world, conducting genocides here and massacres there, diverting rivers to cause drought, felling rain forests and driving entire species into extinction.”

Surely it would be better for Myers to provide some kind of argument based on reason or facts rather than this kind of childish name calling. While there are many who may disagree with Chomsky, it can’t be denied that he is very careful to provide a sound factual backing for his arguments, something that Myers cannot claim for his own assertions. He selects facts at random, as though he just plucked them out of some internet search engine, and then uses them as a basis for sweeping generalizations which teeter uneasily on their feeble foundations.

Ill give just one example, from the same article. After his initial ham-fisted mockery of Chomsky’s grasp of reality, he goes on to claim that ‘we’ (the West) are engaged in the sixth world war, a war which he implies has been waged against the Islamic world since 1979. I won't bore you with the ridiculous summary of world history he uses to arrive at the number six (Myers often throws in a bit of historical revisionism to back up his arguments-it would be giving him the benefit of the doubt to describe his outlook on history as blinkered.)

“This sixth world war is moreover made infinitely more trying by the backward nature of Arab culture. Spain translates more foreign books into Spanish every year than the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic over the past thousand years. There are millions of pious Arabs who know nothing whatever about the non-Arab world, and for whom the intellectual processes of enquiry, analysis, scepticism and logic are utterly alien.

To such people, education consists of the endless repetition of sacred scripts, Shariah law and recitations of the jihadist loathing of the infidel enemy. Their brains are thus shaped and warped by the blunt instruments of rote and hate. And far from this backwardness being enlightened by the far more sophisticated Islamic countries of Asia, the reverse is happening.

Pakistani, Afghan, Bangladeshi and Indonesian Islam are being Arabised, though two agencies. One is the madrasahs, the Saudi-backed religious schools which are effectively embassies promoting the foreign policy of the fundamentalist Salafiyya/Wabbahi movements.

The other is Al Jazeera, the satellite network which promotes jihad and "martyrdom operations" and whose viewers mostly live within a medieval religious culture which has experienced the equivalent of neither the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter Reformation nor the Enlightenment.”

To begin with, the overwhelming majority of the books translated into Spanish are written in other European languages. The Spanish speaking population of the US alone is topping 35 million, never mind the huge Latin American market. And it is misleading to take this as a clear indication of cultural sophistication. The marketing power of popular bestsellers in English, for example the Harry Potter series and the Da Vinci Code, mean that sales of these imported bestsellers dwarf those of far better written books by Spanish authors. Myer’s argument would perhaps ring truer if there were a massive translation of Asian, African and Arabian literature into Spanish, which I seriously doubt.

In the passage I quoted above, he refers to Al-Jazeera as a “satellite network which promotes jihad and "martyrdom operations" and whose viewers mostly live within a medieval religious culture which has experienced the equivalent of neither the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter Reformation nor the Enlightenment.”

Yet the first paragraph of his piece runs like this,

“This is a free country, and Kevin Myers is glad to see that thousands of people were able to listen to Noam Chomsky denouncing our Government's policies on American flights through Shannon as possible war crimes.”

If this is his view, then it stands to reason that he believes that while a ‘chump’ like Chomsky (Meyers’ words, not mine) has the right to freedom of expression and to debate issues surrounding American foreign policy in the middle-east, news organizations like Al-Jazeera within the Arab world should not be trusted with the same opportunity, because its viewers are too ignorant, too ‘backward’, to think rationally about these subjects. Once again, Myers acts as a standard bearer for the old imperialistic notion that the Arab world is incapable of handling the kind of freedoms he takes for granted as a journalist in the West, a stance made all the more hypocritical when we look back at how he applauds western freedom of expression in the first paragraph.

On a lecture given by Noam Chomsky on the subject of the 'War on Terror'

On Wednesday evening, Noam Chomsky gave a lecture on the subject of the 'War on Terror' (full text available here). The setting was the RDS here in Dublin, a venue normally used for large concerts, but appropriate for holding Chomsky's talk because of the size of the audience and the incredible interest generated by the visit of the American scholar. Over 2000 people gathered to hear Chomsky speak, and the waiting list was reported to be around the 4000 mark. Chomsky also spoke on other occassions during the week, on a range of different subjects.

The talk was organized jointly by Trinity college and the Irish branch of Amensty International, so we had to listen to a shakey and quite drab introduction by somebody from the college (when introducing someone who has lived such a full and interesting life, why is the first thing she tells us the number of times their name appears when googled, as though it were Chomsky's most outstanding achievement?). With that over, Chomksy walked out on stage, and began his lecture, in a style which I found a little surprising, having never heard the man speak in public before.

As Harry Browne noted in his article in the Village magazine on Chomsky's talk from the night before in UCD (on 'Democracy Promotion'), Chomsky's lectures are delivered in a very flat, unsensationalist style. His background is, after all, not that of a politician, or even a political activist, though he has been at the forefront of many political struggles in the past, but of an academic. It was the content of the lecture, and not its delivery, which made certain moments of his speech seem sensational, ironic, even humorous.

Chomsky is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This background in linguistics makes itself felt throughout his writing, and even when his attention is turned toward political matters, the way language is used to hide, alter, define or misrepresent political realities is often given importance. He began his talk on Wednesday by establishing three guidelines from which to proceed.

"(1) Facts matter, even if we do not like them.

(2) Elementary moral principles matter, even if they have consequences that we would prefer not to face.

(3) Relative clarity matters. It is pointless to seek a truly precise definition of “terror,” or of any other concept outside of the hard sciences and mathematics, often even there. But we should seek enough clarity at least to distinguish terror from two notions that lie uneasily at its borders: aggression and legitimate resistance.”

Having stated these guidelines, Chomsky went on to elaborate on each of the three points. To illustrate the first, that facts matter, he explained how the concept of the war on terror began with the Reagan administration 20 years earlier. He gave certain indisputable facts. This first war on terror, "was declared and implemented by pretty much the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism". The geographical focus of the Reagan administration's war was a little different to Bush II's, but many of the same people are behind it. John Negroponte, who now supervises US counter-terrorism operations, was Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980's, and head of the largest CIA operation in the world at the time, in charge of organizing and supporting much of the contra war against Nicaragua, and therefore somewhat responsible for the widespread murder and torture carried out by the CIA backed contras. Back then, Donald Rumsfeld, now leading the military wing of the re-declared war, was the US special representative in the Middle East.

"There, his main task was to establish close relations with Saddam Hussein so that the US could provide him with large-scale aid, including means to develop WMD, continuing long after the huge atrocities against the Kurds and the end of the war with Iran".

Saddam Hussein is now being tried for some of his brutal crimes against the Iraqi people, and the first of these trials is for crimes committed in 1982. Chomsky noted that it was also in this year that Iraq was removed from the list of states supporting terror, in order to facilitate US funding and military support for their Iraqi ally, while leaving a space on the list to be neatly filled by Cuba, at a time when American activity against Cuba had just peaked.
According to Chomsky,

"The first War on Terror quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war, in every corner of the world where it reached, leaving traumatized societies that may never recover."

Yet despite all the debate surrounding the current phase of the war on terror, the subject of how the original war on terror was carried out in the 1980's and its consequences is something of a taboo, and rarely comes up in discussion.

The second guideline, that of elementary moral principles, refers chiefly to the concept of universality, that "decent people apply to themselves the same standards that they apply to others, if not more stringent ones."
According to Chomsky, the war on terror has seen this principle rejected, both explicitly and tacitly. He refered to the Nuremburg trials, and the concept of universality outlined there when prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Crimes were defined as such only if they had not been carried out by the allies (so there were no prosecutions for the carpet bombing of civilian populations for example). Chomsky brings up the subject to draw attention to the 'self-exemption' of the powerful from elementary moral principles and international law when it is in their interest (for example, the US accepted World court juristiction in 1946 only if it were excluded from prosecution under all multi-lateral treaties, including UN charters), a 'moral flaw' that Chomsky feels pervades every aspect of both phases of the war on terror.

The third guideline relates to the difficulty in defining terrorism itself, and the related concepts of aggression and legitimate resistance.
Chomsky gave a couple of sample definitions. The British one is,

“Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause.”

The problem according to Chomsky is that while these definitions serve British and US government interests when used to define their enemies, if the same definitions are applied to their own governments the US would appear to be a "leading terrorist state". He gave the clear example of the Reagan administration's campaign against Nicaragua, and posed the question
of whether this kind of state interfernece would be better classified as 'aggression'.
At Nuremberg and afterwards more or less restated in a Gerneral Assembly resolution, 'aggression' was defined in this way:

"An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as 'Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State,' or 'Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection.'"

Using this definition, Chomsky provided several examples, including the afore-mentioned sponsoring of contras in Nicaragua, the present US and British led war in Iraq and the bombing by CIA drone of an innocent village inside Pakistan last week where Al-Qaeda members where thought to be hiding. He points out that,

"aggression was defined at Nuremberg as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.

In Nicaragua,

"the terrorist war left the country in ruins, with a death toll equivalent to 2.25 million in US per capita terms, more than the total of all wartime casualties in US history combined. After the shattered country fell back under US control, it declined to further misery. It is now the second poorest country in Latin America after Haiti – and by accident, also second after Haiti in intensity of US intervention in the past century...Guatemala ranks third in both misery and intervention."

Another question Chomsky posed was over the boundary between terror and resistance, and the legitimcay of fighting to protect “the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations."

Chomsky went on to make a couple of interesting points regarding the US veto at the UN.
Firstly, that,

"technically, there are no vetoes at the General Assembly. In the real world, a negative US vote is a veto, in fact a double veto: the resolution is not implemented, and is vetoed from reporting and history."

and secondly that,

"a majority of the American public favors abandonment of the veto, and following the will of the majority even if Washington disapproves, facts virtually unknown in the US, or I suppose elsewhere."

He went on to give further examples of US involvement in what should technically be considered terrorist activites, and ridiculed Bush II's doctrine that, "those who harbour terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves", pointing out Venezuela's difficulties in extraditing Luis Posada Carriles from the US for the crime of blowing up a Cuban airplane in which 73 people died, a notorious terrorist who was later hired by the CIA to work with the contras. Bush's statement was made just two days after Venezuela's extradition request was refused.

With regard to the present war on terror, Chomsky highlighted the general consensus amongst those who work in the intelligence services that the invasion of Iraq has had a negative impact on defeating the threat of terrorism and has helped to strengthen the position of extremists like Osama Bin Laden. Much of the rest of the lecture was devoted to this topic, with specific detailed examples given, mainly taken from US intelligence sources themselves.

"Washington planners had been advised, even by their own intelligence agencies, that the invasion was likely to increase the risk of terror......Last May the CIA reported that “Iraq has become a magnet for Islamic militants similar to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and Bosnia in the 1990s......The CIA concluded that “Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.” Shortly after the London bombing last July, Chatham House released a study concluding that “there is `no doubt’ that the invasion of Iraq has `given a boost to the al-Qaida network’ in propaganda, recruitment and fundraising,` while providing an ideal training area for terrorists”.

Chomsky's point was simple: the best way to combat terrorism would be to stop acting in ways which are likely to enhance the threat, and to look at its origins. Neither in politics nor in the media is there much space permitted for possible responses to the threat of 'terrorism' beyond the simple military reactions and moral posturing of the US and its allies. In drawing attention to the inadequacies and failures of the first phase of the war on terror, and the suffering which continues to this day as a result of the measures taken in its name, Chomsky reminds us that when the most powerful nations are allowed to exempt themselves from moral principles and international law to fight the second phase of an unending war on terror, an exacerbation of the political crisis in which the world now finds itself is inevitable, and it is ultimately an approach which is counter-productive. Chomsky went on a little later in the lecture to say that,

"A serious counter-terror campaign would...begin by considering the grievances , and where appropriate, addressing them, as should be done with or without the threat of terror."

The unilateral approach of the US and its allies is counter-productive if what they truly seek are the spread of ideas such as democracy, justice and sovergnity, concepts which have been continuosly used, abused and ultimately corrupted by their own actions. He ended the lecture by saying that,

"there are ways to deal constructively with the threat of terror, though not those preferred by “bin Laden’s indispensable ally [the US],” or those who try to avoid the real world by striking heroic poses about Islamo-fascism, or who simply claim that no proposals are made when there are quite straightforward proposals that they do not like. The constructive ways have to begin with an honest look in the mirror,
never an easy task, always a necessary one."

Chuck Norris

If you ever met someone who told you they were tough, send them HERE to meet Chuck Norris, the toughest man alive.

Rendition

Steve Bell's cartoons in the Guardian are great. Here is today's on the subject of rendition. You could easily replace Blair with Bertie in this case.

It's easy to get names mixed up

A couple of days ago I was talking to a friend and she told me a little story.
Last weekend she was out with some of her friends having a few pints in one of the pubs in town. She needed to go to the toilet, and while she was sitting in one of the cubicles in the bathroom of the bar she overheard a conversation. Two girls were chatting away over by the mirrors while they put on some make up.
One of them asked the other how her 3 year old was getting on.
Oh, he's great, she replied.
He must get on really well with your mum?
Oh, well he does, she said, but she keeps calling him Mickey instead of Willy.
My friend didn't think anything of it for a minute or two, but she got a fit of the giggles when she realized that the reason the grandmother kept getting them mixed up was because they are both names used for penises.
She may as well have called him John Thomas.

I'm sorry if this post lowered the tone a little, but when she told me I thought it was kinda funny. You can see just how much of a sheltered life I lead... While I'm here I may as well keep going. I tried to google other people names which can also be used for penises and I found none (if you know any, please do let me know) but I did find this interesting fact: A whale's penis is called a dork.
You learn something new every day.
I promise never to talk about this subject again.

The Church and Latin America

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has demanded an apology after Cardinal Rosalio Castillo Lara used the attendance of hundreds of thousands of people at a religious event in the city of Barquisimeto last weekend as an opportunity to stoke up opposition to the government. The Cardinal compared the democratically elected government to a dictatorship.
According to the Guardian, he said that, "almost all the branches [of government] are in the hands of just one person,".
On his weekly television show Chavez described the comments as, "Insults, hate, it was shameful for the Catholic church. It was undoubtedly a provocation."

Venezuela is a predominantly catholic country, and relations between Chavez and the church have been difficult in the past, particularly over the countries alliance with Cuba and other left wing governments.

I won't delve very deeply into the complicated question of the Church's role in Latin American politics here, but it is worth considering the power that the cardinals and bishops of the region hold, power which has mostly, though not exclusively, been used to support right wing governments and try to undermine popular support for left wing politics.

Before Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, he was instrumental (as leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) in the excommunication, ostracisation and in many ways the persecution of followers of Liberation Theology, accusing them of Marxist tendencies. Liberation theologians such as the Brazilian Leonardo Boff and the Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez believe that the primary focus of the church should be to liberate the world's people from poverty and oppression. As Pope John Paul II's enforcer, Ratzinger made sure that independent voices in the church were silenced whenever possible and forward- thinking Bishops were replaced.

After Ratzinger became pope, Chilean Cardinal Angello Sodano succeeded him to become Dean of the College of Cardinals, and he holds this post simultaneously with the post of Vatican Secretary of State, which Ratzinger reappointed him to, making him the Pope's right hand man.

Sodano is an extraordinarily controversial figure. He is at the extreme right of the church, and was a close ally of the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet. When Pinochet was in power he held the position of Papal Nuncio (Vatican's Ambassador) to Chile, and devoloped a close friendship and working relationship with the dictator, endevouring on his behalf with great success to secure Vatican support for the regime, even managing to arrange a Papal visit to Chile. When Pope John Paul II visited the country, he and the 'exemplary christian' Pinochet stood on a balcony together to recieve the cheers of the crowds.

In Novemeber 1998 he interceded on the General's behalf to try to prevent him from being extradited from England to Spain to face trial for some of the numerous crimes committed by his regime (incidently, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who considered Pinochet "a friend of Britain", was among his most vocal supporters at the time-she entertained the dictator at her home a couple of days berfore the arrest).

Other friends to have benifited from Sodano's friendship include the founder of the Legion of Christ order in Mexico, Marcial Marciel, who met Sodano in the 1970's when Marciel was helping to drum up support for the dictator. The Los Angeles Times recently reported on a major cover-up by Ratzinger and Sodano of several sex abuse allegations levied against Marciel.

On the other hand, the President of Brazil's Roman Catholic Bishop's Conference recently attacked the government of Lula De Silva for not doing enough to help the millions of Brazilians who live in poverty, and for seeking to pay off its debt to foreign creditors before addressing the needs of the poor.

"Cardinal Geraldo Majella Agnelo of Sao Salvador da Bahia said that 2005 was "wasted" by President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, whose government promised to help the poor but has been mired in scandal.

"I sincerely hope that 2006 will be the year of redemption for the government and programs that directly benefit the extremely poor," Agnelo said."

Whether opposing or supporting governments in Latin America, the church is a hugely influential force, and it will be interesting to see how the church adapts itself to the new left-wing movements sweeping the region.

Bricks and Mortars

Yesterday, January 17th, was the 15th anniversary of the start of the Gulf War. There is a link on this Blog(under the 'escape routes' heading) which will bring you to the excellent 'Baghdad Burning', Blog from Iraq. Go have a look, it's very interesting. Here is an excerpt from today:

"For 42 days, Baghdad and other cities and towns were bombarded with nearly 140,000 tons of explosives, by international estimates. The bombing was relentless- schools, housing complexes, factories, bridges, electric power stations, ministries, sewage facilities, oil refineries, operators, and even bomb shelters (including the only baby formula factory in Iraq and the infamous Amirya Shelter bombing where almost 400 civilians were killed).

According to reports and statistics made by the “Iraqi Reconstruction Bureau” and the ministries involved in reconstruction, prior to the 2003 war/occupation, the following damage was done through 42 days of continuous bombing, and various acts of vandalism:

Schools and scholastic facilities – 3960
Universities, labs, dormitories – 40
Health facilities (including hospitals, clinics, medical warehouses) – 421
Telephone operators, communication towers, etc. – 475
Bridges, buildings, housing complexes – 260
Warehouses, shopping centers, grain silos – 251
Churches and mosques – 159
Dams, water pumping stations, agricultural facilities – 200
Petroleum facilities (including refineries) – 145
General services (shelters, sewage treatment plants, municipalities) - 830
Factories, mines, industrial facilities - 120 "

The figures speak for themselves

Bell Ringing and a Boring Blog

As I write there is constant bell ringing going on outside. My classmate Emma tells me that where she lives, here in Dublin, Sundays are a nightmare, with both St. Patrick's and Christchurch engaging in furious campanological battles. I know this fancy word because in the course of our conversation someone remarked that there was a fancy name for bell-ringers, and I tried to find the answer on the internet. I searched through a number of amazingly dull web-sites about bell ringing, but for some reason, I couldn't find that elusive fancy term.

Then, seemingly divinely inspired by the bells outside, Tony went over to the phone and made a call. Tony often indulges in mindless chatter, so I wasn't paying much attention, but sure enough, when he'd finished the call, he had the word. Campanologist. Fantastic.

But who did Tony ring to get the information? Or rather, why did he have to pretend to make a phone call to an outside source in the first place? Why not come clean about his interest in bell-ringing, surely a fine wholesome pastime for any young man? Apparently the church has decided to increase the length and frequency of their bell ringing to try and draw people back into the church. Perhaps when we complained about the incessant chimes, Tony's fear of a backlash led him to perform this embarrasing charade.

Did he think we would make fun of him for not being 'hip'?

Who knows? Poor Tony.

Anyhow, in the course of my internet search of bell-ringing I came across the dullest blog in the world (nothing related to campanology). It really is dull. Amusingly so. I've also posted a link to another blog by the same author which I found quite funny.

On Bachelet's Win in Chile

The socialist Michelle Bachelet has been elected as the new president of Chile and her supporters have taken to the streets all over the country to celebrate the election of Chile's first female leader. The country's newspapers have been almost unanimous in celebrating the historic event, in what is generally a very conservative country. Her defeated opponent, the right wing Sebastian Pinera, congratulated her and noted that it was a great day for the hard working women of Chile. She takes over from the socialist Ricardo Lagos, who has been president since 2000 and who retires from the post with a very high approval rating and has left one of the regions most stable economies in Ms. Bachelet's hands. Yet some have criticised Lagos for being too cautious and for not doing enough "to fundamentally alter or reform the “savage capitalist” economic system imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship." Earlier this year, Ms. bachelet called for even greater equality in the distribution of the countries wealth, but major reforms will need to be implemented by Ms. Bachelet if the huge gap between the rich and poor of the country is to be narrowed significantly.

One of her first challenges will be to sort out territorial disputes with her neighbours, and she has insisted that she wants to avoid 'cold war' style politics with their leaders, including newly elected Bolivian president Evo Morales. Bolivia lost it's only connection with the sea in the Pacific War of the late 19th century, and the two countries have had difficult relations ever since. It will be interesting to see what kind of alliances she forms with other left wing Latin Ameican leaders over the coming months.

Bachelet is the daughter of air force general Alberto Bachelet, who was tortured and died in jail because of his support for the socialist Salvador Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile. Allende died during the violent coup which brought General Augusto Pinochet to power on the 11th of September 1973. In 1975 Michelle herself was beaten and tortured. She and her family fled to Australia, and then Germany, before returning in 1979 to continue her studies and her political work against the Pinochet regime. With Bachelet now in power, the day when Pinochet will be tried in court for at least some of the horrible crimes committed by his regime seems to be drawing closer.

Blair's Brand Spanking New Policies

I feel like ranting a little about the measures currently being introduced by Tony Blair across the water in England, only because it only seems a matter of time before our own home grown authoritarian Michael McDowell introduces them over here. McDowell wants to introduce Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), and good behaviour contracts for 12 to 18 year olds. What do these measures say to the children of this country?
That they are going to grow up with less freedom than their parents generation had.
That their behaviour will be supervised, scrutinised and judged.
And, that if they misbehave, it is not their parents that will punish them, but the state.

The drive by people like Blair and MCDowell to force youth into conforming is worrying for anyone who believes in the freedom of the individual to grow up and become a responsible adult in a natural way, with plenty of mistakes along the path if necessary, rather than out of fear of punishment should they ignore authority. Even Blair's approach to education stinks of the same authoritarian streak. What's wrong with challenging authority from time to time? Surely that is part of living in a democracy.

All children know that rules are sometimes unfair, and sometimes have to be ignored because they are ineffective or just plain stupid. When I was growing up, my friends and I used to get up to mischief all the time, and when we occasionaly got into trouble, our parents decided how we should be punished. It didn't lead to any of us pursuing criminal lifestyles after we grew up, and if any of us dabble in anything illegal at this stage, it isn't out of nostalgia for our childhoods.

The point I am trying to make is that the natural inquisitiveness, creative energy and mischevious qualities of children should be encouraged as much as is reasonably possible, with strict limitations of course, and certainly not discouraged through fear or violence. How else will children ever grow up to respect society? And what a boring world we would live in if children only ever behaved the way parents wanted them to.

Somebody told me a story about McDowell's attempts to drum up support for the anti-social measures. One of his cronies was down in Galway last year, trying to rally support for ASBOs and spoke in the community hall of the Shantalla area of the city. The guy started the meeting by talking about the fear he could sense in the community as he made his way there. He noted how there had been small groups of youngsters 'lurking' around various street corners, and how intimidating and threatening their presence was. I presume his intention had been to start by playing on the fear of youth and crime that he presumed the community all felt, and then introduce the concept of ASBOs as a solution to this problem. The meeting was mainly attended by middle-aged and elderly women. While the speaker had obviously expected people to start talking about how they were too afraid to leave their homes after dark and so on, the reaction he got was one of anger, not fear. One of the women started by pointing out that she lived on the corner, and a couple of those kids that he had seen 'lurking' on the street corners were probably her own or the children of other people in the room. The cheek of him to come down to Galway and describe her children as if they were criminals. Another asked if he was honestly suggesting that they get ASBOs preventing their children from hanging around their own community.

Before I begin ranting about spanking, here is a poem on the subject I had up in an earlier post by the poet Robert Hayden.

The Whipping

The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighbourhood
her goodness and his wrongs

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:

My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful

Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved . . .
Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged-
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.

Last week, Tony Blair went on BBC 2's Newsnight to be interviewed about his new 'Respect' action plan to deal with anti-social behaviour. He talked to several angry Swindon residents, many of whom made comments along the lines of,

"It's all gone wrong since we got rid of corporal punishment!The kids were better behaved in previous generations, when the local bobby or the teacher could give them a clip if they were acting up"

"My kid would never have needed an ASBO if I had been allowed to discipline him properly"

And so on.

The following exchange took place when the PM was asked if he had smacked his own kids.

Blair replied, "No, I think actually, funnily enough, I'm probably different with my youngest than I was with my older ones."
Misunderstanding his reply, Ms Wark asked him: "What, you do smack the younger one?"
The prime minister said: "No, no. It was actually the other way round, but... I think, look, this smacking... I mean, I agree with what you just said, I think everybody actually knows the difference between smacking a kid and abusing a child."

I'm sure Mr. Blair was very gentle in the smacking of his children, but the idea that everybody knows the difference between smacking a child and abusing them is simply untrue. What exactly constitutes a smack? And he should certainly not be encouraging what children's charities and social workers fought long and hard to have abolished from the schools. I heard the same arguments for smacking kids regurgatated on News Talk radio here in Dublin a couple of afternoons ago. It seems we have learnt very little in Ireland from the child abuse scandals which shook this country not so long ago, in institutions run by the church and by the state. Many of the institutions were well known for enforcing discipline through violence. I was lucky enough to have attended school after corporal punishment was banned, but I have no doubt that the experience of violence for a young child is no doubt a traumatic one.

There are always people who say that they were smacked when they were children and it never did them any harm. Yet many of these are the same people who desire the right to hit their own children. This is only a personal opinion but as far as I'm concerned, the very fact that they want to do this as parents to their own children shows the possibility that a child can grow into an adult with the idea that violence is an acceptable way of resoving problems.

Would it be okay to give a belt to your friend, your sister, your brother, or even your pet dog, everytime they got unreasonably upset?

Jack Straw's son sold a journalist Marijuana in 1998. Straw reacted by handing his son in to the police station. He made a song and dance about doing the responsible thing, but it is far more likely that Straw was trying to avoid having the Daily Mail print his son's name or the story.

Blair's son was arrested in 2000 for being Drunk in Leicester Square.

Was the problem that he wasn't hit hard enough? I don' t think so. I think he was doing what adolescents do and always have done, experiment, rebel, and challenge the boundaries of acceptable behaviour laid down by a 'respectable' society which seems intent on criminalising all of the exhuberance and energy of youth. Perhaps an ASBO would have helped to keep these youngsters in line? Of course it wouldn't have, and Blair knows that, but it's fine to paste one on some working class kids, in run down areas with feck all for young people to do but hang around outside shops. The ineffectiveness of the measures taken by the British government is becoming clearer.

A ban on hoodies, parenting acadamies, baby ASBOs for the under 10s, evicitions for troublesome families and most incredibly, they are even trying out cctv cameras linked to residents television sets so that they can keep an eye on their neighbourhood and their neighbours. Have they gone mad? Can you imagine growing up in a situation where any of your neighbours or your parents could be watching you at any time? What about privacy? What about the dangers of paedophilia? I get the impression that commuities are becoming like low security prisons. Every response is a knee jerk reaction and does nothing to combat the root causes of these problems. They have introduced dispersal orders to stop children congregating in groups. Dispersed to where? Build some facilities for them instead! Young people are becoming increasingly alienated. Start encouraging children to be creative, to respect society not out of fear but because they want to be a part of it, and stop criminalising them!

Yet one of the most serious questions raised by Blair's approach is the change he has long campaigned for in the burden of proof. Blair would like to see people who have been given penalties for loutish behaviour to prove their innocence, rather than police or prosecutors having to prove their guilt. This is an attack on one of the fundamental ideas behind the British system of law, and has the potential for serious abuse and injustice. As the Daily telegraph noted today,
"People would, for the first time, get a criminal record (as well as a fine or community service order) without ever having their case put for them by a defence barrister in court."

There was also another interesting story in the Telegraph today about the possiblity of Blair rescinding the ban on the phone tapping of MPs. Perhaps we are only at the very begining of what will be an increasingly authoritarian time in politics.

So little time....

I'm really busy these days, so I've hardly blogged at all lately. I'll be up and running again soon, once I get a couple of things sorted out. Anyhow, I've put a link up on this blog to a film review I did on my friend Gen's radio show on Anna-Livia. It was the first time I ever did anything on radio, so I was really nervous, and I sound like a bit of an eejit. It didn't help either that I don't really know much about Japaneese animation. An interesting experience all the same, and good embarassing fun. You can find my contribution here, and more of Gen's great Viewfinder show here. The review was of Miyazaki's beautiful animated film "Howl's Moving Castle".

Hell's Angels and New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Year! A very short blog entry today, because I'm really hungry and I need to get some food in my belly. I've started reading a couple of interesting books at the moment. One of them is called "Domination and the Arts of Resistence", which has this amusing Egyptian proverb at the beginning of the book.

"When the great lord passes,
the wise peasant bows his head
and silently farts"

The other book was a present from my classmate Tony. It's by his favourite writer, Gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson. Tony had promised to get me one of Thompson's books at some stage, but after I saw the dreadful "Where the Bufallo roam" over Christmas, the gift-giving process was speeded up so that the impression left by the film could be replaced by the much improved impression left by the writer's own words. I met Tony in town yesterday, both of us looking slightly the worst for wear after our Christmas 'rest'. We consoled one another with the usual kind of clean-living leaf-turning banter that floats around at this time of year, and he presented me with the Thompson book "Hell's Angels".

As part of my brand spanking new 2006 lifestyle I'm trying to quit smoking and give up the old cigarettes. I'm getting to be a pretty experienced quitter at this stage, so I'm not finding it too difficult so far. I have lost count of the times I have tried to stop before, including one or two times when I lasted quite a long time. I don't notice any severe cravings, but I always seem to go back on them in social situations, so I'm going to have to be vigilant. Anyhow, one of the things I did notice is that I've been finding it harder to sleep. It's only been three days, but the last two nights my old insomnia has resurfaced. I think there may be other reasons behind that though, which I won't go into here, but we'll see. Anyhow, I've started reading "Hell's Angels" and it's great. In fact I like it so much that it's proving to be counter-productive in my battles with the sleepless night. Thanks a million Tony.