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I AM WRETCHED

February 9, 2010 – 4:18 am

There’s too much Hollywood and too little soul in the Spierig Brothers’ Daybreakers and for the horror to work, says Critic After Dark Noel Vera, vampires should be allowed to creep up and play on viewers’ terror of the undead.

The Spierig Brothers’ Daybreakers might be considered the sequel to I Am Legend - I mean Richard Matherson’s short novel, not the terrible Will Smith ego trip directed by Francis Lawrence. In Matheson’s vampire classic, everyman Robert Neville finds himself confronting a fully armed and organized vampire civilization - a touch too fascistic, perhaps, with little regard for judicial process or civil rights, but that’s the flaw of all new societies (in Lawrence’s dumbed-down version the best the digitized vampires can do by way of self-expression is a murderous glare and a guttural burp).

The Spierigs’ movie might have taken place some twenty years after the events in Matheson’s novel. They propose a fully working civilization arising from a humanity turned vampiric, one where the bloodsuckers outnumber the bloodsuckees at an increasingly unsustainable rate (political parallels to endangered tribes, shrinking rain forests, and dwindling supplies of oil are, I assume, intentional).

Eventually blood stocks will run out, and civilized vampires will lose their human intelligence to turn into ’subsiders’ - monstrously feral vampires with no reason or self-restraint (an effect unique to the Spierigs - can’t recall any other work of vampire fiction, print or big screen, that mentions this).

No one wants that, least of all Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), chief executive of Bromley Marks, a Big Pharma company that acts as both developer of possible blood substitutes and main world supplier of the genuine article (just imagine - a supersized combination of GlaxoSmithKline and McDonald’s!). Bromley needs a blood substitute and/or a new source of human blood ASAP - his ears are already stretching into distinctly batlike points.

Perhaps the movie’s best scenes are those that flesh out this topsy-turvy world. A vampire bum holds up a sign saying: “WILL WORK FOR BLOOD;” when he snaps and attacks an innocent bystander, police rush forward with long-poled clamps that close in on the neck and deliver vicious electric shocks. An all-night diner serves blooded coffee; when the staff admits that by law they can’t sell coffee containing more than 5 per cent blood, the customers leap over the counter and snatch at the blood bags hanging overhead. Loudspeakers mounted above streets and underpasses chime out the warning “one hour till sunrise;” cars shift to daytime driving mode, with blacked-out windows and exterior videocams that provide all-around visibility.

The Spierigs do their best to imagine what it would be like to live in a vampire society, but even this seemingly esoteric concept isn’t all that original - Larry Cohen’s “Return to Salem’s Lot” (1987) presented a similar notion on a smaller scale, a community of vampires hiding out in New England.

They sustain themselves by draining cattle, marrying off their immortal vampire children to each other, and teaching their young their version of American history (vampires came with the pilgrims on the Mayflower, and only want to lead a quietly prosperous and orderly life).

Cohen’s film is underfunded and haphazardly directed, but it did have a sharp sense of humor and an even sharper sense of satire (the vampires resemble small-town Republicans - miniature fascists). The Spierigs take their material very seriously - too seriously - and have little sense of fun about the whole enterprise: the vampire police are your standard-issue stormtroopers, the subsiders your standard-issue men in monster suits. Instead of peppering their work with ideas, the Spierigs pepper it with loud and elaborate action sequences, at one point tossing in a chase involving the vampire car in Daytime Driving Mode (how to incapacitate such a car? Shoot the cameras).

That’s basically what’s wrong with the picture - too much action, not enough explanation to flesh out its society. I don’t mean a lecture; as Cohen demonstrates, one can take a largely expository tour and still enjoy the deadpan jokes along the way.

Certainly an amount of implausibility is par for these pictures, but ask a few simple questions and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down - Bromley Mark’s system of harvesting blood for example: humans are kept in gigantic warehouses, in a state of sleeping stasis, blood coursing from pipes in their necks. You’d think a huge corporation like that would be familiar with the idea of sustainable harvesting - breeding the humans and then just harvesting enough to meet demand, but no; we want to act like oil companies, and keep on pumping with little thought of the future.

Worst of all, the filmmaking is decidedly on the Michael Bay side: instead of allowing the vampires to creep up and play on our terror of the undead, the Spierigs fling them on us in giant fanged close-ups (some of them look like they badly need a scaling session).

I’ll say this much: the picture is superior to Chris Weitz’s New Moon, the latest installment in the Twilight Saga where vampire males are pretty, sparkly beings that don’t wash their hair for six weeks or more, and werewolves are basically Native American males with serious anger management issues - but that’s not saying much.

Neither come close to the two finest vampire flicks of recent years: Tomas Alfredson’s bleak Let The Right One In (2008), about the friendship and tentative romance that blossoms between a 12-year-old boy and a 200-year-old vampire, and Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009), a far bloodier depiction of a relationship cursed with vampirism.

Weitz and the Spierigs operate on large Hollywood budgets, employing the latest in digital technology, and the result basically resembles something a werewolf might leave steaming on someone’s doorstep; when filmmakers like Park and Alfredson have at it, the results are often more toothsome (if decidedly less family-friendly - the amount of red sprayed about in Park’s movie would go a long way towards satisfying a global blood crisis). The difference, one might say, is instructive.

Note: First published in Businessworld, January 14, 2010. You can also email Noel Vera at noelbotevera@hotmail.com.

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THE CRISIS IS NOT OVER

February 4, 2010 – 12:08 pm

The initial financial crisis of the past two years has planted seeds for two new crises: rising government debt and inflation. A third crisis will occur when confidence is lost in the US dollar as world reserve currency. And as former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts points out, the real American crisis is the offshoring of US manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs.

Is the financial crisis over? Is the recovery for real and, if not, what are Americans’ prospects? The short answer is that the financial crisis is not over, the recovery is not real, and the U.S. faces a far worse crisis than the financial one. Here is the situation as I understand it:

The global crisis is understood as a banking crisis brought on by mindless deregulation of the U.S. financial arena. Investment banks leveraged assets to highly irresponsible levels, issued questionable financial instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings, and issued the instruments through direct sales to customers rather than through markets.

The crisis was initiated when the U.S. allowed Lehman Brothers to fail, thus threatening money market funds everywhere. The crisis was used by the investment banks, which controlled U.S. economic policy, to secure massive subsidies to their profits from a taxpayer bailout and from the Federal Reserve. How much of the crisis was real and how much was hype is not known at this time.

As most of the derivative instruments had never been priced in the market, and as their exact composition between good and bad loans was unknown (the instruments are based on packages of securitized loans), the mark-to-market rule drove the values very low, thus threatening the solvency of many financial institutions. Also, the rule prohibiting continuous shorting had been removed, making it possible for hedge funds and speculators to destroy the market capitalization of targeted firms by driving down their share prices.

The obvious solution was to suspend the mark-to-market rule until some better idea of the values of the derivative instruments could be established and to prevent the abuse of shorting that was destroying market capitalization. Instead, the Goldman Sachs people in charge of the U.S. Treasury and, perhaps, the Federal Reserve as well, used the crisis to secure subsidies for the banks from U.S. taxpayers and from the Federal Reserve. It looks like a manipulated crisis as well as a real one due to greed unleashed by financial deregulation.

The crisis will not be over until financial regulation is restored, but Wall Street has been able to block re-regulation. Moreover, the response to the crisis has planted seeds for new crises.

Government budget deficits have exploded. In the U.S. the fiscal year 2009 federal budget deficit was US$1.4 trillion, three times higher than the 2008 deficit. President Obama’s budget deficits for 2010 and 2011, according to the latest report, will total $2.9 trillion, and this estimate is based on the assumption that the Great Recession is over. Where is the U.S. Treasury to borrow $4.3 trillion in three years?

This sum greatly exceeds the combined trade surpluses of America’s trading partners, the recycling of which has financed past U.S. budget deficits, and perhaps exceeds total world savings.

It is unclear how the 2009 budget deficit was financed. A likely source was the bank reserves created for financial institutions by the Federal Reserve when it purchased their toxic financial instruments. These reserves were then used to purchase the new Treasury debt. In other words, the budget deficit was financed by deterioration in the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve. How long can such an exchange of assets continue before the Federal Reserve has to finance the government’s deficit by creating new money?

Similar deficits and financing problems have affected the EU, particularly its financially weaker members. To conclude: the initial crisis has planted seeds for two new crises: rising government debt and inflation.

A third crisis is also in place. This crisis will occur when confidence is lost in the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. This crisis will disrupt the international payments mechanism. It will be especially difficult for the U.S. as the country will lose the ability to pay for its imports with its own currency. U.S. living standards will decline as the ability to import declines.

The financial crisis is essentially a U.S. crisis, spread abroad by the sale of toxic financial instruments. The rest of the world got into trouble by trusting Wall Street. The real American crisis is much worse than the financial crisis. The real American crisis is the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs such as software engineering and information technology.

Jobs offshoring was initiated by Wall Street pressures on corporations for higher earnings and by performance-related bonuses becoming the main form of managerial compensation. Corporate executives increased profits and obtained bonuses by substituting cheaper foreign labor for U.S. labor in the production of goods and services marketed in the U.S.

Jobs offshoring is destroying the ladders of upward mobility that made the U.S. an opportunity society and eroding the value of a university education. For the first decade of the 21st century, the U.S. economy has been able to create net new jobs only in domestic nontradable services, such as waitresses, bartenders, sales, health and social assistance and, prior to the real estate collapse, construction. These jobs are lower paid than the jobs were that have been offshored, and these jobs do not produce goods and services for export.

Jobs offshoring has increased the U.S. trade deficit, putting more pressure on the dollar’s role as reserve currency. When offshored goods and services return to the U.S., they add to imports, thus worsening the trade imbalance.

The policy of jobs offshoring is insane. It is shifting U.S. GDP growth to the offshored locations, such as China, thus halting growth in U.S. consumer incomes. For the past decade, U.S. households substituted an increase in indebtedness for the lack of growth in income in order to continue increasing their consumption. With their home equity refinanced and spent, real estate values down, and credit card debt at unsustainable levels, it is no longer possible for the U.S. economy to base its growth on a rise in consumer debt. This fact is a brake on U.S. economic recovery.

Stimulus packages cannot substitute for the growth in real income. As so many high value-added, high productivity U.S. jobs have been offshored, there is no way to achieve real growth in U.S. personal incomes. Stimulus spending simply adds to government debt and pressure on the dollar, and sows seeds for high inflation.

The U.S. dollar survives as reserve currency because there is no apparent substitute. The euro has its own problems. Moreover, the euro is the currency of a non-existent political entity. National sovereignty continues despite the existence of a common currency on the continent (but not in Great Britain).

If the dollar is abandoned, then the result is likely to be bilateral settlements in countries’ own currencies, as Brazil and China now are doing. Alternatively, John Maynard Keynes’ bancor scheme could be implemented, as it does not require a reserve currency country.

Keynes’ plan is designed to maintain a country’s trade balance. Only a reserve currency country can get its trade and budget deficits so out of balance as the U.S. has done. The prospect of U.S. default and/or inflation and decline in the dollar’s exchange value is a threat to the reserve system.

The threats to the U.S. economy are extreme. Yet, neither the Obama administration, the Republican opposition, economists, Wall Street, nor the media show any awareness. Instead, the public is provided with spin about recovery and with higher spending on pointless wars that are hastening America’s economic and financial ruin.

Note: Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Reagan administration. His latest book, How The Economy Was Lost, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com.

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POETRY IN MOTION: WHY NEIL YOUNG’S LincVolt MATTERS

February 3, 2010 – 4:04 am

In 2009, Neil Young released Fork In The Road, an album which is dedicated to the Lincvolt project that transformed his classic Lincoln Continental into a hot zero emissions vehicle that gets 100 mpg. In this paean to the LincVolt project, Karen Barry also asks, if a 1959 vehicle can be green, what is stopping all current vehicles from achieving the same goal?

Crossing The Continent In The Heavy Metal Continental - So I’m writing to you from behind the wheel of a car I’ve never seen. In person, anyway. But this car, she’s beautiful. And smart. And completely irresistible. I’ve kind of fallen in love with her. I’m sitting here behind the wheel of Neil Young’s LincVolt (in my mind), just drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, and thinking. I’m trying to figure out why she matters so much to me.

LincVolt is a 1959 Lincoln Continental Mark IV currently being converted to an eco-friendly vehicle that will achieve more than 100MPG with zero emissions. She is the most unlikely eco-friendly vehicle you will ever see. At more than 2 tons and 19 feet long, she has been lovingly referred to by her owner as “The Flying Brick,” an apt moniker.

The ‘59 Lincoln, designed at a time when American cars were at the height of tailfin and heft absurdity, was chosen by Neil for that very reason: If this car can be earth-friendly, then surely yours can be too. That’s cool, right? Move on. Right? I can’t! I keep thinking about her. I’m in love! I had to find out why.

Maybe LV (that’s what I call her) matters so much to me because I love Neil Young so much. Well, yeah, sure, that’s part of it. Anyone who knows me would tell you I’m the Number One Fan of The Man From Tennessee Omemee. I’m pretty sure there’s a Wanted Poster with my picture on it in his manager’s mailroom. But it’s more than that, somehow. Maybe it’s Kevin’s fault.

Kevin, my older brother and only sibling, had one passion and one passion only: Cars. I spent my childhood playing with not dolls but Matchbox cars, whiling away the warm September evenings not hand-in-hand with a boyfriend but trailing after my brother and best friend, trolling the lots of every car dealer in town, inspecting the new models the day they rolled off the trailer.

Family road trips meant, for my brother and me, one of our two favorite games: Name That Car! The year, make and model of the other cars on the road shot out of our mouths as if our lives depended on it; if I could beat my brother to the punch on even one I had won. The latest fashions in tail lights, tail fins and bumpers were as familiar to me as the painter’s pants, Earth shoes and maxi skirts I tried to keep up with in the hallways of our big public school. (The other favorite game of ours, well, uh, his, was Car & Squirrel. You can imagine how that one went down. You know. Who played the car and who played the squirrel? Ugh. Sometimes it’s hard to be the youngest.)

But I’m going off the road here. Maybe, maybe LV matters so much to me simply because I’m such a fan of The Earth and this is the world’s coolest green vehicle? No, no, no. It’s more. So much more. If I am ever to get to the bottom of this, I need to go back to the beginning, when Art and Science first shook hands, and became friends: The Age of Romanticism. Come with me.

During The Age of Romanticism, Wordsworth suggested that imagination was the faculty that not only allowed us to truly perceive the world around us, but also, to create it. To create it. Coleridge took it even farther, calling the imagination “intellecutal intuition,” with the unique power to join reason and feeling. (1) The Age of Romanticism was, of course, imagination’s golden age.

And LincVolt is, of course, its modern day, heavy metal embodiment, representing the most graceful intersection of art and science, where imagination invites reason to dance. Ah. And here is where I begin to unravel the mystery of LincVolt’s place in my heart, I think; why this old-new car is more important to me, and to the world, than a passing fancy.

By way of its very existence, LincVolt defies conventional wisdom, and leaps the guardrail of mainstream thinking. LincVolt’s engagement of our imagination, with its unique alchemy of past, present and future, moves us beyond thinking, all the way to feeling. Beyond understanding to knowing. To the place where all great scientific discovery, all revolution, really begins: The heart.

Who knows what kind of idea and change LincVolt out there on the road may spark? LincVolt rolling across America with Neil Young behind the wheel is the practical application of the Romantic ideal: By connecting science and ideas to the world around us, and to popular culture, the marriage of imagination and reason is tantiilizingly tangible, and suddenly even greater than the sum of its parts.

According to Gerald Holton, a Professor of Physics and Professor of The History of Science Emeritus at Harvard University, Albert Einstein believed wholeheartedly in the power of the imagination, and “intellectual intuition.” In a famous speech of 1918, Einstein suggested that “the elusive, additional element needed for high achievement in science is a ’state of feeling’ in the researcher, which he called ‘akin to that of… one who is in love.’ ” (2)

Hmm. I know that feeling. Leave it to Einstein to hit the nail on the head. This is exactly what I am trying to get at with LincVolt. I’m drawn to her. I feel that something is very right here, but I am no scientist. I would be hard pressed to tell you exactly what. But the very sight of her fills me with wonder. Excitement! Hope. I can feel it.

Holton has well explored the art of the scientific imagination, and in fact talks much about how scientists “feel” something before they can prove it. How they just “know.” About the scientist’s “willing suspension of disbelief, analogous to that which Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified as the task of the poet, and not far from what John Keats referred to as the ‘Negative Capability’ of great authors (their ability of ‘remaining content with half-knowledge.’)” (3) In other words, just as poets feel something before they ever put pen to paper, so do scientists have a powerful feeling before they ever set out on their path of great discovery.

Remember that Einstein’s theory of the expanding universe - something that Einstein knew but could not prove more than 90 years ago -  was proven just three years ago, with Einstein long dead. In 2007, Gravity Probe B, one of Nasa’s most complicated satellites, confirmed to a precision of better than 1 per cent that an object such as the Earth does indeed distort the fabric of space and time, (4) the newly identified “dark energy,” eerily resembling the “cosmological constant” which Einstein felt, but could not prove, existed.

In conversation Einstein often referred to his inner voice, and indeed seemed to rely more heavily on it than any facts that did or did not present themselves. Albert Einstein had a passionate belief in his own intellectual intuition.

Perhaps the same might be said of us all. That sometimes, important times, we just know something before we can explain or articulate it. This could be, should be one of those important times. Change is afoot. So far traditional methods to change the behaviors of the people and policy makers to bring about significant and necessary change to save our planet from imminent disaster haven’t been working, last December’s Copenhagen climate talks the most recent, most expansive, most disappointingly horrifying case in point. Things have to be done differently. We need more power. It’s time for imagination and reason to start dancing again.

Scientist-philosophers are useful at a time like this, and scientist-philosopher Hans Christian Oersted has become a sort of hero of mine vis a vis this car, not only because of his unique relationship with electricity which laid the groundwork for the discovery of a useable electric current (LincVolt is currently part electric, and may wind up all electric before she’s done), but also because in his time he was, to quote Gerald Holton, “a striking example of the fruitful interaction of science and the greater culture, which nowadays is rarely attended to but which is all around us.” (5)

When science interacts with the greater culture (LincVolt), big things can happen (in Oersted’s case, a useable electric current!); one thing leads to another. But unless science is interacting with the greater culture, as it did during the Age of Romanticism, The Age of Wonder, no such connections can be made, everyone is essentially working in a vacuum. Who knows what kind of idea and change LincVolt out there on the road may spark?

It could, quite literally, ignite the fire that will change the world. LincVolt rolling across America with Neil Young behind the wheel is the practical application of the Romantic ideal: By connecting science and ideas to the world around us, and to popular culture, the marriage of imagination and reason is tantiilizingly tangible, and suddenly even greater than the sum of its parts.

I know I’m biased, being in love and all, but LincVolt is greater than the sum of her parts; she is no artist’s folly. From the beginning, her development team has been focused on tackling two of the biggest challenges electric cars face, limited range and eventual battery replacement.

Currently configured with powerful lithium ion iron phospate batteries and an efficient 75KW generator system to recharge those batteries while underway means that LincVolt is ready for the real world, able to take people on their daily commute or across the continent. As new technologies have become available and discoveries made, LincVolt has evolved, but her original design concept, the electric hybrid, has stood the test of time.

But now, after more than two years of development and many iterations (90 per cent of her systems have been completely overhauled since the original proof of concept stage), it seems that LV is at a turning point; her team now weighs the pros and cons of her current configuration against other possibilities, and their impact on the environment, one last time.

Should she be all electric, with a range of 150 miles or so, or an electric hybrid with a back up generator enabling longer trips? There are advantages and disadvantages to both. But it’s not only LincVolt that’s at a turning point. The whole world is at a turning point, the environmental outlook is bleak; we’re in dire need of change. This is the point of no return for us all; it’s time for the world, too, to step back, and weigh the pros and cons of its possibilities one last time, and then, to act. It’s time to do things differently, and we need more people who think differently in order to do it.

We need people like Neil Young, and projects like LincVolt, things that are going to make people feel something, to push our environmental agenda forward. Things that are going to force people to think differently, things that are going to give people permission to abandon their safe haven of reason and rational thought and step into the unknown…

I know that Bill McKibben, American Environmentalist and Scholar-in-Residence at Middlebury College, shares this view of the world; he frequently writes about global warming and alternative energies, and has authored several books on the subject of the environment, including The End of Nature, published in 1989 and widely regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has worked tirelessly for years to impress upon us that “already we’ve passed the point where we can avoid serious change, and with it the need for a real re-thinking of how we’re going to live on this planet.” (6)

So I decided to ask him what he thought of all this. Did he think, as I do, that LincVolt, and projects like her, projects that represent the intersection of art and science, are criticial to the revolutionary kind of behavioral change our planet needs if it is going to surivive ecologically? It’s inspirational, sure (Hey Neil Young’s eco-friendly car is so cool! I want one!), but it’s more somehow, I tried to explain. It speaks to me, I said. It creates in me something I can feel, rather than think. It speaks to my heart, as well as my brain, and therein lies its magic. All revolution begins in the heart, doesn’t it?

Bill McKibben was familiar with LincVolt, and he was intrigued (”What a good article to be writing!”), agreeing that indeed LincVolt matters: “I think in a celebrity culture it’s important for celebrities to try and lend their particular talents to things that are already going on, as well as dream up their own things, like the LincVolt.” Indeed.

LincVolt might well consider becoming part of things that are already going on, like 350 dot org, the international climate campaign Bill McKibben founded, by, say, driving 350 miles on three gallons of natural fuel, or three charges, or somesuch, as a part of that organization’s 2010 initiatives. Or, LincVolt might consider doing her own thing, perhaps an old-fashioned/new-fangled road trip, a Crossing The Continent in The Heavy Metal Continental Tour.

After all, the nation’s very first transcontinental highway, and very first named highway, was called The Lincoln Highway. Did Neil Young know that when he chose the Lincoln for this project? Maybe he felt it.

Bill McKibben went on to say that although generally he might worry about celebrity involvement in these issues because it runs the risk of trivializing everything, he didn’t have that concern here: “Neil Young doesn’t trivialize much!,” he said. “He’s the real deal. I’m glad he’s hooked in.” High praise for Neil Young and LincVolt from one of the world’s leading minds on how we are going to save the planet for another day.

Neil Young is indeed “the real deal,” no argument here. And he is perhaps uniquely well qualified for this particular project, there is a bit of the mad scientist in him. If you’ve ever seen him play the electric guitar live on a stage you will know what I mean; I don’t think I am overstating it when I say that the man has a unique and intimate relationship with electricity, the likes of which you are not likely to experience anywhere else, ever.

We need people like Neil Young, and projects like LincVolt, things that are going to make people feel something, to push our environmental agenda forward. Things that are going to force people to think differently, things that are going to give people permission to abandon their safe haven of reason and rational thought and step into the unknown, to light a candle inside themselves and wander into the dark corners of their imaginations and their hearts. It’s time to do things differently.

As author Richard Holmes puts it in his elegant new book Age of Wonder, “The old rigid debates and boundaries - science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics - are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.” (7)

To me, this is what LincVolt (and Neil Young) represent: Wonder. Hope. A questing belief in a future for the globe, and us all. It doesn’t matter if the car gets 100 miles to the gallon or 150,  if the car is all electric or a hybrid, if it crosses the continent on that old Lincoln Highway or just drives Neil Young to his next gig. What matters is that the car IS. An old car that can do new things. Whatever the limits of its abilities and technology in the end, it remains a wonder. A spark.

Artists have the spark that lights the fire that lights the world. LincVolt is a spark. You know, Camus said that a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. Maybe LincVolt is one of those rediscoveries, for me. When I look at her beautiful, ridiculous, two-and-a-half ton, 19-foot long, heavy-metal body, it tugs at my heart. When I look at her, I know that here, Neil Young’s imagination asked reason to dance. And when I look under the hood, it’s a comfort, somehow, such a comfort, to know that sometimes reason says yes.

Note: Karen Barry writes to you from the middle of a laundry pile and a sink full of dirty dishes somewhere in Connecticut. Right now she is probably letting the dogs out. Or in. She loves writing more than housecleaning, and music more than anything. Except her family, whom she drags with her now and then to concerts, mostly for the company, but also to keep them from changing the locks while she is gone.

References:

(1) ”A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Landmarks of Literature,” Brooklyn College
(2) and (3) ”The Art of The Scientific Imagination,” Gerald Holton, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, PhD 1948, Harvard University
(4) “Einstein was right: space and time bend,” Anushka Asthana and David Smith, The Observer, 15 April 2007
(5) “Oersted and the Romantic influences on scientific achievement: Scientist-’Romantic’ sparks interest,” Alvin Powell, Harvard University Gazette, 2 May 2002
(6) Bill McKibben, http://www.billmckibben.com
(7) The Age of Wonder, How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Richard Holmes

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SEEN THE LIGHT

February 2, 2010 – 4:07 am

When a priest is infected with vampiric blood, the first vow to go out the window is the vow of chastity. Stephen Tan reviews Thirst, where Korean Park Chan-wook stands some vampire movie conventions on their head.

There was a time when the Japanese were seen as innovators and trendsetters in the cinema. Nowadays, it is the Koreans who are making an equally indelible mark on screen. Their TV serials are as popular as the ones from Hong Kong; their action movies such as Volcano High and Arahan are among the best in the genre; and they’ve even gone into special effects with Natural City, The Host and Haeundae (Tsunami). And trust director Park Chan-wook, of the Vengeance trilogy fame, to mesh up the cliches and conventions of the vampire movies with Thirst (2009).

While Thirst might have been part of the current vampire wave that includes Let The Right One In and the Twilight movies, it also gained prominence as the first mainstream Korean film to feature full-frontal adult male nudity.

Priest Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), like many cinematic priests, doubts his faith and volunteers to join an experiment in Africa to find a cure for the deadly Emmanuel Virus. The experiment seems to fail, Sang-hyun becomes infected and even dies but a blood transfusion revives him, thus making him the first person out of 500 to survive.

Sang-hyun returns to Korea and his parishioners treat him as a great or miraculous healer. Lady Ra approaches Sang-hyun to pray for her son, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun), who is suffering from cancer. Having recovered, Kang-woo, who is a childhood friend of Sang-hyun, invites the priest to his home for weekly mahjong games. Sang-hyun also finds himself drawn to Kang-woo’s wife, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin).

In the meantime, Sang-hyun finds himself aversed to sunlight, develops super powers and hungers for human blood, which invigorates him. Sang-hyun and Tae-ju start an affair but Tae-ju becomes fearful when Sang-hyun tells her of his condition.

Sang-hyun’s blind superior wants a taste of Sang-hyun’s blood so that he can see again before he dies but Sang-hyun turns him down and leaves the order. He moves into Lady Ra’s house and continues his affair with Tae-ju. Finding bruising and wounds on Tae-ju, Sang-hyun thinks it is Kang-woo who is abusing his wife. During a fishing trip, Sang-hyun drowns Kang-woo.

Kang-woo’s death shocks Lady Ra into a paralysed state. However, Kang-woo appears to Tae-ju, even when she’s having sex with Sang-hyun and, in her depressed and frightened state, lets out that Kang-woo never abused her and that she wanted to die. Sang-hyun breaks her neck but decides to bring her back when he feeds her with his own blood.

Rejuvenated, Tae-ju actively seeks out fresh blood while Sang-hyun is more discriminate as to who he kills to draw the blood. During a mahjong game with friends, though she cannot speak, Lady Ra alerts her friends that it is Sang-hyun and Tae-ju who killed her son. The two have no choice but kill the rest. Disgusted with Tae-ju’s wanton killing, Sang-hyun decides to put a stop to their killings. He tells Tae-ju they had to leave as the police will soon be investigating the missing people.

As they are driving off, Sang-hyun makes a stop at the camp of his followers. He appears to rape one of the girls when he is found out and chased out of the camp. Sang-hyun leaves with a smile on his face, knowing that his flock will no longer worship him. He then drives to a deserted cliff above the sea and awaits the rising sun with Lady Ra witnessing their deaths from the car’s backseat.

By having a Catholic priest turning into a vampire, director Park Chan-wook already signals that he is taking a drastic look at the genre. Leaving only the danger posed by sunlight, Park’s vampires have no fear of holy water, consecrated wine, the crucifix, the spoken word/power of god (as depicted in The Exorcist) and certainly have no problems casting a reflection in the mirror.

The biggest break from the vampiric tradition is that Park based his film on Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin (right down to an old lady’s locked-in syndrome; the revelation of the killing and the tragic ending) instead of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This interestingly situates the film in George Romero’s Living Dead territory where, without the the Dracula figure, it no longer becomes a question of good vs evil. Instead, the film becomes a look at alienation, insiders and outsiders and even the migration experience - after all, Sang-hyun contracted the virus when he was in a foreign land.

Or as Park explains in an interview: “[Vampirism] is a curse, or a disease. But there’s certainly a flipside to this. Saying that by becoming a vampire he has come to thirst after all sinful pleasures, Sang-hyun is able to rationalise his affair with Tae-ju as a symptom of his infection. But his transformation into a vampire takes place the day after his first visit to Tae-ju’s place, after months of latency. Could his sexual desire towards her be the cause, and his transformation into a vampire the effect?”

And for the priest, the first vow to go out the window is the vow of chastity. While actor Song Kang-ho looks suitably depressed throughout the film - after all he is in a moral dilemma trying to reconcile his new identity with his old faith - it is actress Kim Ok-bin who takes the spotlight. Appearing first as a waif of a child bride (she looks more like a schoolgirl than a married woman), she turns into a woman yearning for intimacy and then into someone who not only knows what she wants but has the means to take it.

While Thirst lacks the visceral impact of Park’s Old Boy and the Vengeance movies, it works best on a meditative level (but for poignancy, the children-in-peril theme of Let The Right One In is sure hard to beat).

Luxuriantly photographed, with more sex and nudity than expected, even some action sequences, grotesquely dark humour (a priest asking for a taste of vampiric blood in order to see the light) and confounding surrealism (Kang-woo appearing between Sang-hyun and Tae-ju as they are having sex), the film may take its time getting there but, as Tae-ju says, it’s a fun ride.

Note: The Thirst DVD (Universal) is banned in $ingapore.

Click here for more reviews.

Posted in stephen tan | 1 Comment »

A BOUNTY FOR BLAIR’S ARREST

February 1, 2010 – 4:15 am

Writer and Guardian columnist George Monbiot is so incensed by Tony Blair’s efforts to wage war on Iraq that he has launched a new fund - www.arrestblair.org – to reward those who attempt to arrest the former British prime minister.

The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry won’t address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime”(1): the crime of aggression.

But there’s a problem with official inquiries in the United Kingdom: the government appoints their members and sets their terms of reference. It’s the equivalent of a criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be, who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury.

As a senior judge told the Guardian in November, “Looking into the legality of the war is the last thing the government wants. And actually, it’s the last thing the opposition wants either because they voted for the war. There simply is not the political pressure to explore the question of legality – they have not asked because they don’t want the answer.”(2)

Others have explored it, however. Two weeks ago a Dutch inquiry, led by a former supreme court judge, found that the invasion had “no sound mandate in international law”(3). Last month the former law lord, Lord Steyn, said that “in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal.”(4) In November Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, stated that, without the blessing of the UN, the Iraq war was “a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.”(5)

Under the UN Charter, two conditions must be met before a war can legally be waged(6). The parties to a dispute must first “seek a solution by negotiation” (Article 33). They can take up arms without an explicit mandate from the UN Security Council only “if an armed attack occurs against [them]” (Article 51). Neither of these conditions applied.

The US and UK governments rejected Iraq’s attempts to negotiate(7). At one point the US State Department even announced that it would “go into thwart mode” to prevent the Iraqis from resuming talks on weapons inspection(8). Iraq had launched no armed attack against either nation.

We also know that the UK government was aware that the war it intended to launch was illegal. In March 2002, the Cabinet Office explained that “a legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers’ advice, none currently exists.”(9) In July 2002, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, told the prime minister that there were only “three possible legal bases” for launching a war: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [Security Council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.”(10) Bush and Blair later failed to obtain Security Council authorisation.

As the resignation letter on the eve of the war from Elizabeth Wilmshurst, then deputy legal advisor to the Foreign Office, revealed, her office had “consistently” advised that an invasion would be unlawful without a new UN resolution. She explained that “an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression”(11). Both Wilmshurst and her former boss, Sir Michael Wood, will testify before the Chilcot Inquiry today (January 26, 2010). Expect fireworks.

We must show that we have not, as Blair requested, “moved on” from Iraq, that we are not prepared to allow his crime to remain unpunished, or to allow future leaders to believe that they can safely repeat it.

Without legal justification, the war with Iraq was an act of mass murder: those who died were unlawfully killed by the people who commissioned it. Crimes of aggression (also known as crimes against peace) are defined by the Nuremberg Principles as “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties”(12).

They have been recognised in international law since 1945. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and which was ratified by Blair’s government in 2001(13), provides for the Court to “exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression”, once it has decided how the crime should be defined and prosecuted(14).

There are two problems. The first is that neither the government nor the opposition has any interest in pursuing these crimes, for the obvious reason that in doing so they would expose themselves to prosecution. The second is that the required legal mechanisms don’t yet exist. The governments which ratified the Rome Statute have been filibustering furiously to delay the point at which the crime can be prosecuted by the ICC: after eight years of discussions, the necessary provision still hasn’t been adopted.

Some countries, mostly in eastern Europe and central Asia, have incorporated the crime of aggression into their own laws(15), though it is not yet clear which of them would be willing to try a foreign national for acts committed abroad. In the UK, where it remains illegal to wear an offensive T-shirt, you cannot yet be prosecuted for mass murder commissioned overseas.

All those who believe in justice should campaign for their governments to stop messing about and allow the International Criminal Court to start prosecuting the crime of aggression. We should also press for its adoption into national law. But I believe that the people of this nation, who re-elected a government which had launched an illegal war, have a duty to do more than that.

We must show that we have not, as Blair requested, “moved on” from Iraq, that we are not prepared to allow his crime to remain unpunished, or to allow future leaders to believe that they can safely repeat it.

But how? As I found when I tried to apprehend John Bolton, one of the architects of the war in George Bush’s government, at the Hay festival in 2008(16), and as Peter Tatchell found when he tried to detain Robert Mugabe(17), nothing focuses attention on these issues more than an attempted citizen’s arrest. In October I mooted the idea of a bounty to which the public could contribute, payable to anyone who tried to arrest Tony Blair if he became president of the EU(18). He didn’t of course, but I asked those who had pledged money whether we should go ahead anyway. The response was overwhelmingly positive.

So today I am launching a website, www.arrestblair.org, whose purpose is to raise money as a reward for people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former prime minister. I have put up the first £100, and I encourage you to match it. Anyone meeting the rules I’ve laid down will be entitled to one quarter of the total pot: the bounties will remain available for as long as Blair lives. The higher the reward, the greater the number of people who are likely to try.

At this stage the arrests will be largely symbolic, though they are likely to have great political resonance. But I hope that as pressure builds up and the crime of aggression is adopted by the courts, these attempts will help to press governments to prosecute. There must be no hiding place for those who have committed crimes against peace. No civilised country can allow mass murderers to move on.

Note: George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books Heat: how to stop the planet burning; The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain; as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. The above article was posted at his website, www.monbiot.com.

References:
1. http://tinyurl.com/yekzhjo
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/nov/23/chilcot-inquiry-iraq-war
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/12/iraq-invasion-violated-interational-law-dutch-inquiry-finds
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/dec/01/iraq-inquiry-interim-finding-illegal-law-lord
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/18/iraq-us-foreign-policy
6. http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/index.shtml
7. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/11/11/dreamers-and-idiots/
8. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/10/08/thwart-mode/
9. http://downingstreetmemo.com/iraqoptions.html
10. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article387374.ece
11. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4377605.stm
12. http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/390
13. http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XVIII-10&chapter=18〈=en
14. Article 5.2, http://www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/EA9AEFF7-5752-4F84-BE94-0A655EB30E16/0/Rome_Statute_English.pdf
15. Astrid Reisinger Coracini, 2010. National Legislation on Individual Responsibility for Conduct Amounting to Aggression, in: Roberto Bellelli (ed.), International Criminal Justice. Lessons Learned and the Challenges Ahead (forthcoming).
16. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/06/03/justice-undone/
17. http://www.petertatchell.net/direct%20action/mugabe.htm
18. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/10/26/arresting-blair/

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Posted in george monbiot | 2 Comments »

THE LIMITS OF MULTICULTURALSIM: HOW TO GET ALONG

January 31, 2010 – 4:22 am

Former Talking Head David Byrne has long championed multiculturalism, in the form of World Music. Taking a look at a New York rabbi who objected to bike lanes in the neighbourhood, Byrne looks at how, in the modern world or cosmopolitan city, different cultures live side by side and asks that basic but still problematic question, why can’t we just get along?

I was told that a powerful rabbi based in Williamsburg objected strongly to the bike lanes that run alongside their ghetto on Bedford Ave. We were informed that the sight of hipster girls, their heads uncovered and sometimes their lower legs as well, is just too much to bear - though it’s winter now, and surely the gals are bundled up this time of year? Well, that was what, we were told, was the problem initially.

So, the powerful rabbi insisted to the DOT that the lanes had to go - and shortly thereafter they did.Sure enough, some (Jewish) hipsters repainted the lane by hand, and the rabbi’s wrath was aroused once again - his neighborhood watch (vigilante) group detained the hipsters until the cops came. After no subsequent action against the perps was taken by the city, he demanded that the kids be re-apprehended, which they were - they voluntarily turned themselves in.

OK, on the face of it this is all pretty silly if you live in NY. Hasidic men are not supposed to see scantily clad women. (The man in the photo above has turned his head, but the gal is having a good long look.) In the past they’ve also complained about sexy billboards (ads for Sex and the City) on the BQE and elsewhere. How do they manage when they travel to Manhattan to deal diamonds and cameras? Are they blindfolded until they enter B&H?

In addition, that corridor alongside the Hasidic ghetto is just about the only way to cycle from Williamsburg to Dumbo, Vinegar Hill or Brooklyn Heights. The stream of sexy cyclists will therefore continue, though at greater risk to their own safety. Maybe there could be a service offering wigs and wraps for cyclists passing through the No Skin zone.

Some on the blogosphere claim it’s actually not about immodest dress at all - that it’s a ruse, and the real idea is to keep the number of car lanes in the ghetto intact, and to reinstate parking spaces that were cannibalized for the bike lane. The need for plenty of parking is due to the fact that the Hasidim often don’t travel with the rest of us on subways and buses, but in their own vans and bus services - and local transport (food shopping, etc.) is mostly done by private car as well.

School kids are dropped off in buses that park in what were, until recently, the bike lanes. This lifestyle requires plenty of parking - more than most other folks need. And I suspect that yes, at times some hipsters probably zoom a bit too carelessly and too close to the school kids. Well, bike lanes or no bike lanes, parking is scarce and getting scarcer in NY, so there may have to be some adjustments eventually. In Antwerp, the European center for Hasidic diamond dealing, the Hasidic kids ride bikes around town.

Although I might be expected to champion anything bike related, I think my problem with this situation is more general - how much do we allow ethnic and religious groups to not blend in and to not become part of the general social fabric, especially in a major metropolis? (We’re not talking about rural communes, where folks can wear what they like and be as freaky as they like on their own.)

In Holland, the most tolerant place on the planet, it is becoming accepted that tolerance has to go both ways. In other words, the Muslim immigrants are increasingly expected, even by fellow Muslims in Amsterdam, to become “Dutch” in some respects.

Multiculturalism, I gather, is the idea that we shouldn’t force outside cultures and immigrants to conform to the culture of the dominant ethnic group - we should respect the integrity of their beliefs and customs. More than just allowing halal or kosher butchers to move in, this idea implies that we might start to see things from the other’s point of view - and sometimes accommodate their wishes, even if they don’t conform to those of the majority.

This idea has met its match since 9/11 - Europe, previously a bastion of Muslim enclaves and ghettos of various types and ethnicities, has in recent years pushed back against multiculturalism, and a more nuanced idea is taking hold - sometimes. Other times intolerance rears its ugly head.

Likewise, cyclists, thus far a minority, might be seen in the same light - as a fringe culture that mainstream culture accommodates and tolerates as long as the cyclists don’t insist that the dominant culture bend to their specific wishes. This, in a nutshell, is the argument that some NY communities have made when Janette Sadik-Kahn throws a bike lane in their hood.

The argument might be valid, though often the local businesses discover that, for example, bike parking by their shop fronts brings in more customers, and there’s less of a chance that a van or truck will block the view of their windows. And in many cases, the complainers were outvoted by the rest of their own community.

Plus, in NYC, drivers and car owners might be in the minority - most of my friends who live here don’t own cars.

In Holland, the most tolerant place on the planet, it is becoming accepted that tolerance has to go both ways. In other words, the Muslim immigrants are increasingly expected, even by fellow Muslims in Amsterdam, to become “Dutch” in some respects. Which means they must accept that there is a long tradition of tolerance in Holland, especially in Amsterdam, and if one is to move to Holland one should expect to accept this typically Dutch way of thinking.

The Muslim community, for example, has to get used to the fact that there is a district with sex shops and scantily dressed women in the windows, same-sex couples might kiss in public, and coffee shops selling hash are a common sight. The implicit agreement is that living in Holland means you accept such things, as tasteless as you may find them. The Dutch, of course, allow the local Muslim population to maintain their own customs as well - as long as they fit in and don’t make lots of demands.

This is a change from a provocative attitude that, a few years ago, resulted in the death of Theo van Gogh. He had made a film, one that deliberately goaded and incited the Dutch Muslim population, in collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who received death threats and is now protected by the government - and is involved with the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing US think tank. Their 10-minute film features a naked woman in a see-through chador, with Koranic verses justifying the submission of women written on her body. Like the Danish cartoons, this was viewed by Muslims as a deliberate provocation… and a crude one at that. One might view it as liberal fascism.

An image from the film - and van Gogh dead on the street.

Not that van Gogh deserved to die. The Dutch rallied and demonstrated after his death, and saw the killing as an attempt to stifle free speech - to imply that public expression and criticism has limits. Some free speech advocates insist that one be allowed to say and express anything, barring the encouragement of violence. Others saw the film as being offensively provocative - in a way, they viewed the incident as if the filmmakers were asking for it. Free speech advocates feel that it’s an absolute, and that people should be allowed to say anything, as it’s “only words.”

Ian Buruma, a writer of Dutch background, has written about this incident and the issues that arise from it. He argues that freedom of speech should not be considered absolute - and that thinking in absolutes always leads to disaster. He says we limit our own freedom of speech all the time - around family and relatives over the holidays, I am reminded - and we do it to get along, to allow society to function, for our own happiness and the happiness of others.

It’s not necessarily a lie to not blurt out the ugly truth whenever you think it. During the holidays we don’t tease Uncle Harry about his comb-over because we know it would just make the get together more tense than it already is - and who would gain from such insensitive honesty? Stifling free speech just a little, with some subtle self-censorship, makes life pleasanter for everyone.

A few years ago, Mamie Manneh, a Staten Island woman, was arrested for importing 720 pounds of monkey meat, including limbs, skulls and torsos, from baboons and green monkeys in boxes labeled “African dresses and smoked fish” [Link]. She argued it was her Constitutional right to bring monkey meat into the United States. Her lawyers claimed she needed to eat monkey during certain religious ceremonies for her syncretic faith, which merges Christian and African traditions [Source].

In my opinion, besides being disgusting, eating bush meat isn’t actually linked to deep traditions - it emerged as a food source fairly recently, out of hunger and dire necessity. And yes, it crossed the line among some people and was considered an element of ritual. I would argue that it’s not actually a healthy or acceptable food source in Africa, and if you immigrate to Staten Island that might be one of the things you compromise in the move.

Then, on the other side, there’s the recent Swiss minaret ban. Unbelievable! Zurich has decided to ban new construction of minarets. I foresee other countries banning steeples typical of Christian churches in retaliation. Tit for tat. The Swiss right wing reasoning, if you can call it reasoning, is that mosques are not Swiss, and when in Switzerland one must be Swiss.

McDonald’s isn’t Swiss either, and neither are a lot of other easily recognizable branded forms of architecture and décor. Who knows, maybe they even have a panel of guys in funny alpine clothes who decide if contemporary buildings are “Swiss” or not. Presumably, all banks are Swiss - except the ones with Arabic decoration.

Historically, erasing the culture of immigrants or ethnic groups within one’s borders has been attempted over and over. The Soviet Union tried to make all the groups within its massive borders Russian. Stalin shipped ethnic groups from one side of the continent to the other, to thwart any future ethnic unity and uprising. I’ve seen pockets of distinctly Asian-looking Kazakhs in the part of Russia that borders Finland!

“I don’t want to compromise my own activities, safety and way of life more than is reasonably necessary - but I can still accommodate somewhat. Where the line is might shift from time to time - it’s not fixed, or unchangeable forever. Adaptability and accommodation make us human. Absolutes are for machines and vengeful Gods.”

In Tajikistan they banned the Persian alphabet, erasing Tajiks’ literary history, and outlawed Islam. This intolerance often only partly succeeds - in many of those former republics, now no longer part of Russia, Islam and local pride have reasserted themselves with a vengeance. Ripping out people’s identities has frightening consequences. When Tajikistan became independent in 1991, the country soon became immersed in a bloody civil war.

One wishes for some kind of common sense to prevail. What harm does a minaret do to the neighborhood? Well, I guess some have a sense of Swiss purity - and purity seeking of any kind always raises a red flag. Some small Italian towns have banned new kebab shops - again, claiming they are not Italian. Hello? Neither were tomatoes! To me, this is all just as silly as the rabbi in Brooklyn claiming that the hipster babes must be discouraged from passing through his neighborhood. Prohibition would probably be preferable - though he doesn’t want to build a wall just yet…

When foreigners visit religious shrines, temples, mosques and churches in other lands, we - if we’re at all sensitive - abide by the local customs. And people from those lands can be expected to reciprocate when they are within our borders.

From a New York Times advice column:

“My husband was at Starbucks enjoying a coffee and reading the paper when about eight people sat down, opened their Bibles and held a group prayer. Then one of them began a loud sermon that my husband found offensive for its content as well as its sheer volume. I say the group was within its rights. My husband says they made inappropriate use of the location. What do you say?”

(The advice columnist said the evangelicals were within their legal rights, but their lack of social empathy was disgusting.)

Like Rodney King said - Can we all just get along? Can we tolerate difference, without taking toleration to the extreme, where everyone is expected to accept insults and provocations? Tolerance shouldn’t mean we have to let anyone with a different lifestyle boss the rest of us around. It seems maybe there’s no absolute dividing line between what we tolerate and what we insist is unacceptable.

The measure of how much we should tolerate is: does it help us get along? If it divides us further, then maybe it’s not a good idea. Granted we don’t want to have to compromise our own beliefs or ways of life - resentment will lie buried, festering, and will reassert itself in some form, later, maybe somewhere else seemingly completely unrelated.

I don’t want to compromise my own activities, safety and way of life more than is reasonably necessary - but I can still accommodate somewhat. Where the line is might shift from time to time - it’s not fixed, or unchangeable forever. Adaptability and accommodation make us human. Absolutes are for machines and vengeful Gods.

What we sometimes call common sense - not going by the book, whether that be the law or the Bible - might be how we survive. But being an ever-changing thing, it’s hard to define. It is learnt, I imagine, by living together, improvising, and innovating, not from a rulebook.

Note: David Byrne is a singer-songwriter and a former Talking Head. Visit his site at http://journal.davidbyrne.com/.

Posted in david byrne | 2 Comments »

GREAT TELEVISION/BAD JOURNALISM: MEDIA FAILURES IN HAITI COVERAGE

January 29, 2010 – 12:06 pm

While the world’s media jumped to highlight the plight of the Haitians in the face of a devastating earthquake, very few journalists cared to explain, if at all, what made Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. As journalism professor Robert Jensen says, the news media, of course, have a right to make their own choices about what to cover. But we citizens have a right to expect more.

CNN’s star anchor Anderson Cooper narrates a chaotic street scene in Port-au-Prince. A boy is struck in the head by a rock thrown by a looter from a roof. Cooper helps him to the side of the road, and then realizes the boy is disoriented and unable to get away. Laying down his digital camera (but still being filmed by another CNN camera), Cooper picks up the boy and lifts him over a barricade to safety, we hope.

“We don’t know what happened to that little boy,” Cooper says in his report. “All we know now is, there’s blood in the streets.” (Click here to view the CNN story.)

This is great television, but it’s not great journalism. In fact, it’s irresponsible journalism.

Cooper goes on to point out there is no widespread looting in the city and that the violence in the scene that viewers have just witnessed appears to be idiosyncratic. The obvious question: If it’s not representative of what’s happening, why did CNN put it on the air? Given that Haitians generally have been organizing themselves into neighborhood committees to take care of each other in the absence a functioning central government, isn’t that violent scene an isolated incident that distorts the larger reality?

Cooper tries to rescue the piece by pointing out that while such violence is not common, if it were to become common, well, that would be bad - “it is a fear of what might come.” But people are more likely to remember the dramatic images than his fumbling attempt to put the images in context.

Unfortunately, CNN and Cooper’s combination of great TV and bad journalism are not idiosyncratic; television news routinely falls into the trap of emphasizing visually compelling and dramatic stories at the expense of important information that is crucial but more complex.

The immediate suffering in Haiti is the result of a natural disaster, but that suffering is compounded by political disasters of the past two centuries, and considerable responsibility for those disasters lies not only with Haitian elites but also with U.S. policymakers.

The absence of crucial historical and political context describes the print coverage as well; the facts, analysis, and opinion that U.S. citizens need to understand these events are rarely provided. For example, in the past week we’ve heard journalists repeat endlessly the observation that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Did it ever occur to editors to assign reporters to ask why?

The immediate suffering in Haiti is the result of a natural disaster, but that suffering is compounded by political disasters of the past two centuries, and considerable responsibility for those disasters lies not only with Haitian elites but also with U.S. policymakers.

Journalists have noted that a slave revolt led to the founding of an independent Haiti in 1804 and have made passing reference to how France’s subsequent demand for “reparations” (to compensate the French for their lost property, the slaves) crippled Haiti economically for more than a century. Some journalists have even pointed out that while it was a slave society, the United States backed France in that cruel policy and didn’t recognize Haitian independence until the Civil War.

Occasional references also have been made to the 1915 U.S. invasion under the “liberal” Woodrow Wilson and an occupation that lasted until 1934, and to the support the U.S. government gave to the two brutal Duvalier dictatorships (the infamous “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc”) that ravaged the country from 1957-86. But there’s little discussion of how the problems of contemporary Haiti can be traced to those policies.

Even more glaring is the absence of discussion of more recent Haiti-U.S. relations, especially U.S. support for the two coups (1991 and 2004) against a democratically elected president. Jean-Bertrand Aristide won a stunning victory in 1990 by articulating the aspirations of Haiti’s poorest citizens, and his populist economic program irritated both Haitian elites and U.S. policy-makers.

The first Bush administration nominally condemned the 1991 military coup but gave tacit support to the generals. President Clinton eventually helped Artistide return to power Haiti in 1994, but not until the Haitian leader had been forced to capitulate to business-friendly economic policies demanded by the United States. When Aristide won another election in 2000 and continued to advocate for ordinary Haitians, the second Bush administration blocked crucial loans to his government and supported the violent reactionary forces attacking Aristide’s party.

As politicians express concern about Haitian poverty and bemoan the lack of a competent Haitian government to mobilize during the disaster, shouldn’t journalists ask why they have not supported the Haitian people in the past?

The sad conclusion to that policy came in 2004, when the U.S. military effectively kidnapped Aristide and flew him out of the country. Aristide today lives in South Africa, blocked by the United States from returning to his country, where he still has many supporters and could help with relief efforts.

How many people watching Cooper’s mass-mediated heroism on CNN know that U.S. policy makers have actively undermined Haitian democracy and opposed that country’s most successful grassroots political movement? During the first days of coverage of the earthquake, it’s understandable that news organizations focused on the immediate crisis. But more than a week later, what excuse do journalists have?

Shouldn’t TV pundits demand that the United States accept responsibility for our contribution to this state of affairs? As politicians express concern about Haitian poverty and bemoan the lack of a competent Haitian government to mobilize during the disaster, shouldn’t journalists ask why they have not supported the Haitian people in the past? When Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are appointed to head up the humanitarian effort, should not journalists ask the obvious, if impolite, questions about those former presidents’ contributions to Haitian suffering?

When mainstream journalists dare to mention this political history, they tend to scrub clean the uglier aspects of U.S. policy, absolving U.S. policymakers of responsibility in “the star-crossed relationship” between the two nations, as a Washington Post reporter put it. When news reporters explain away Haiti’s problems as a result of some kind of intrinsic “political dysfunction,” as the Post reporter termed it, then readers are more likely to accept the overtly reactionary arguments of op/ed writers who blame Haiti’s problems of its “poverty culture” (Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times) or “progress-resistant cultural influences” rooted in voodoo (David Brooks, New York Times).

One can learn more by monitoring the independent media in the United States (”Democracy Now,” for example, has done extensive reporting, http://www.democracynow.org/) or reading the foreign press (such as this political analysis by Peter Hallward in the British daily “The Guardian,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight). When will journalists in the U.S. corporate commercial media provide the same kind of honest accounting?

The news media, of course, have a right to make their own choices about what to cover. But we citizens have a right to expect more.

Note: Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.

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THE BEST OF LIVE! MUSIC REVIEW: RIAA - ARTIST FRIEND OR ARTIST FOE? (PART 2)

January 28, 2010 – 2:10 pm

After Live! Music Review closed, editor Bill Glahn wrote a series of articles for Counterpunch called RIAA Watch. Bill notes: “For purposes of relevance, I’ll defer to one of those articles for this edition of The Best of Live! Music Review. Many updates follow which should be of interest to any in the p2p community who value fair use and developing artists who value the freedom to establish their audience without industry interference.”

RIAA Watch [July 1, 2003]

No, No Bono

When Hilary Rosen announced in January that she would be stepping down as head honcho of the RIAA at the end of the year, the spin was that she wanted to spend more time with her children. Since then she has announced a new career with CNBC in which she will appear on no less than three political talk shows and provide coverage of the 2004 elections. That’s a taxing schedule by any measure. So much for the kids.

Ah, but let’s be fair. Rosen’s recent profile has been low key by her normal standards, leaving a bevy of underlings to handle the press’ questions regarding the RIAA’s recent announcements that they intend to alienate music fans on a massive scale. Maybe she is easing into the role of proud papa, at least until she gets her TV gig going.

The speculation over Rosen’s replacement at the RIAA got a fresh injection recently when a spokeswoman for Republican Congresswoman Mary Bono told the Associated Press that the CEO job at the RIAA would be the “perfect job” for Bono. No doubt. A couple of years ago the Human Rights Campaign gave Bono a dismal nine percent positive vote rating. Nothing about her voting record has changed since. Rosen’s assessment of Bono? “I think she’s great.”

Judging by Rosen’s attempts to stifle culture, not only in the U.S. arena, but throughout the globe, that assessment is not surprising. On another level, however, it is. Part of Mary Bono’s voting record includes a vote against same sex partnerships and a vote against gay adoptions. Rosen’s family incorporates both. Rosen has earned a reputation as a team player, but apparently that doesn’t include the “home” team.

Bono has since denied any serious pursuit of the RIAA job. Not that they would hire her anyway. She’s too valuable to them right where she is. She’s already bought. The entertainment industry is her single largest campaign contributor. It’s already paying dividends.

Bono has a reputation as being a follower, not a leader. While she frequently votes as a staunch conservative, she rarely initiates legislation. That could be changing. She has recently formed a Congressional caucus on intellectual property rights which, considering her close ties to the industry (her personal income is largely dependent on royalties from late husband Sonny Bono’s compositions and recordings) will probably end up introducing legislation giving the death penalty for unauthorized downloads. Or maybe extending copyrights to 5 millenniums before they enter the public domain.

Considering the RIAA’s top priority, Internet “piracy”, a more logical candidate for the job of CEO might be Frank Creighton, the head of the organization’s anti-piracy division and a loyal policeman for that organization since 1985. But Creighton has shown little in the way of political savvy and mainly serves as the organization’s media face (a handsome and accomplished speaker when the cameras are on).

My money is on lobbyist Mitch Glazier, who has experience at getting the RIAA’s agenda turned into law under cover of darkness. He comes from the same cesspool that launched Rosen’s career. He’s an accomplished bagman. But for now, the RIAA aren’t giving any clues.

[2010 update]

Mitch Glazier did, in fact, inherit Hilary Rosen’s seat at the RIAA where he remains to this day and oversaw the disastrous “sue ‘em all” campaign. Mary Bono has headed the Congressional Caucus on Intellectual Property for the last six-plus years and a supporter of far right conservative policies. Hilary Rosen is currently an editor at The Huffington Post and a CNN commentator and a supporter of status quo liberal politics. On issues like intellectual property, they march in lockstep.

When the Whip Comes Down

With CEO Glazier and RIAA president Cary “Sue” Sherman’s alienation of music fans proving to be something far less than a productive strategy, they came up with another one. If the whip isn’t working, get a bigger whip.

In 2007, under lobbying from the RIAA and the MPAA, Mary Bono announced negotiations for a new trade agreement called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). From a Bono press release; “…”I am encouraged by this agreement because it indicates the countries involved in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement acknowledge the importance of strong intellectual property rights protections.

“Hopefully the days of turning a blind eye to the criminal interests involved in piracy and counterfeiting are becoming less acceptable. If this agreement is able to strengthen property rights, it will be seen as an important turning point in the global struggle for stronger intellectual property rights protections.”

President Bush kept the negotiations secret under the cloak of “national security.” President Obama has chosen to follow Bush’s lead.

So now we have the head of the Congressional Caucus on Intellectual Property, a person who refers to the Fair Use Doctrine as “unfair takings,” a person who also benefits economically from extended copyright, steering an international agreement that for all intents and purposes is self-serving.

Bono uses the same “protect the creator” strategies as the RIAA in her quest to protect her largest contributors and an important income source.

Says Bono, “Everyone who knows me understands that I am a strong supporter of technological innovation, but I believe that the only way an electronic marketplace can continue to sustain growth is if copyrights are protected. After all, the latest and greatest High-Definition television sets and endless amounts of bandwidth are useless if no one is creating content.”

This begs a couple of questions. “Were there no creators before copyright existed?” And “How many songs has Mary Bono been induced to write as a result of her IP holdings?”

But it’s not only Fair Use that Bono is willing to sacrifice in her quest to protect the money streams for her corporate clients. Next up? Due process.

The Whipping Post

Despite the secret nature of the ACTA negotiations, there have been leaks. On November 30, 2009, Dr. Michael Geist posted the following on his blog. “The European Commission analysis of ACTA’s Internet chapter has leaked, indicating that the U.S. is seeking to push laws that extend beyond the WIPO [the United Nation’s World Intellectual Property Organization] Internet treaties and beyond current European Union law.

“The document contains detailed comments on the U.S. proposal, confirming the U.S. desire to promote a three-strikes and you’re out policy, a Global DMCA [the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act which went a long way in stripping Fair Use Doctrine], harmonized contributory copyright infringement rules, and the establishment of an international notice-and-takedown policy.”

Dr. Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. Speaking in this capacity, he goes on…

“ACTA would render current Canadian copyright law virtually unrecognizable as the required changes go far beyond our current rules (and even those contemplated in prior reform bills).”

Under Big Music pressure the governments of Great Britain and France (so far) have proposed three-strikes legislation… Say good-bye to YouTube as we now know it. Watch out for the disappearing blog. Don’t dare e-mail that song lyric to your sweetie that best exemplifies your affection for her/him. Say hello to mandated snooping by your ISP…

It is not only in ACTA negotiations where the MAFIAA, in its various international configurations, is actively pursuing three-strikes legislation - the removal of Internet service to anyone deemed guilty of transporting, uploading, or downloading copyrighted content. Under Big Music pressure the governments of Great Britain and France (so far) have proposed three-strikes legislation.

Say good-bye to YouTube as we now know it. Watch out for the disappearing blog. Don’t dare e-mail that song lyric to your sweetie that best exemplifies your affection for her/him. Say hello to mandated snooping by your ISP - the proposed policeman in this draconian scheme. Say good-bye to privacy. Say good-bye to due process. And don’t think for a minute that because you have already been handed down a punishment (loss of Internet service), that you cannot be sued in civil court or criminally charged. Say hello to double jeopardy.

Tell It to the Judge on Sunday

“How could such a plan pass Constitutional muster?” an American basking in the notion of guaranteed liberties might ask. Well it could if there was a Supreme Court that is stacked with judges pre-disposed to protecting corporate interests rather than individual liberties. The 1985 version of the Supremes clearly stated that copyright infringement is not theft. The 2010 version, however, seems more sided with Mary Bono’s interpretation. And then here’s the Department of Justice.

As reported by p2pnet…

Thomas Perrelli, nominated as Associate Attorney General on January 5, confirmed March 12. Perrelli’s position is second-in-command in the DoJ, behind Attorney General Eric Holder. He was one of the leading RIAA lawyers on file-sharing DMCA cases. In one case, he argued for the release of ISP customer information without a subpoena.

Donald Verrilli, nominated as Associated Deputy Attorney General on Feburary 4. Verrilli’s position is third-in-command in the DoJ, behind Perrelli. He was the chief RIAA attorney in Jammie Thomas case of last year, which was won by the RIAA before being declared a mistrial.

Brian Hauck, appointed as Counsel to the AAG in February 4. Hauck’s position is to serve as Perrelli’s lawyer. He represented the RIAA in the historic Supreme Court case MGM Studios v. Grokster in 2005, won by the industry. He also donated a combined US$1,500 to the Obama campaign in 2007 and 2008.

Ginger Anders, appointed as Assistant to Solicitor General Elena Kagan in March. The Solicitor General represents the government in Supreme Court cases. Anders was one of the litigators in last year’s Cablevision case, which the content industry intended to block the cable company from allowing it to store customers’ recorded programs on its servers.

Ian Gershengorn, appointed Deputy Assistant Attorney of the Civil Division of the DoJ on April 13. Gershengorn’s position entails overseeing the Federal Programs Branch, which recently announced support for $150,000 monetary damages for pirated files during a copyright case. He also represented the RIAA in the MGM Studios v. Grokster case.

The Public Knowledge website states “Either Jenner and Block lawyers are looking for something to do in this economic downturn, or the RIAA has a direct pipeline to the Justice Department” when reporting the Gershengorn hiring.

The New York Law Journal adds another Jenner and Block name to the mix, Samual Hirsh, “who joined as deputy associate attorney general.”

Don’t be looking for the Department of Justice to pursue price-fixing charges against the MAFIAA with any type of vigor. Do look for them to go after file-sharers and ISPs.

Joseph Goebbels, Step Forward

Any campaign designed to take away human rights needs a clever minister of propaganda. Big Music has apparently found one in a Bono of a different gender. Paul O’Neil’s buddy, in a Jan. 2, 2010 guest editorial column for the New York Times, claims, “A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators.” [U2’s] Bono uses a false premise to criminalize vast segments of the population. And to give the green light for snooping… “it’s perfectly possible to track content.”

OK - so it’s possible. But is it moral? Perhaps Bono is looking to keep the music industry as “sexy” as he finds Africa - where intellectual property agreements continue to keep the price of AIDS medicine artificially high and the people dependent on the mercy of Bono and his IP cronies.

Apparently, the man who believes Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in the morning has as little grasp on Irish history as he does on American history. From wikipedia’s biography on Turlough Carolan - “the last great Irish harper-composer and is considered by many to be Ireland’s national composer”:

“At the age of twenty-one, being given a horse and a guide, he set out to travel Ireland and compose songs for patrons. For almost fifty years, Carolan journeyed from one end of the country to the other, composing and performing his tunes.” Imagine that - a fifty-year career pre-copyright.

But Jesus Bono isn’t the only label-affiliated musician looking to preserve copyright privilege. In Great Britain, FAC (Featured Artists Coalition) was formed in March 2009 stating a desire to “give artists a collective voice to campaign for effective laws and regulations, as well as transparent and equitable business practices.” That is label-affiliated artists.

In this Billboard magazine article they also stated “concern about any legal body taking action against fans who were involved in file-sharing and preventing them getting broadband access to be informed about the activities of their favorite acts.” Then FAC did a turnaround and overwhelmingly supported measures in Britain’s proposed Digital Economy bill to include three-strikes measures and a 20-year copyright extension. P2p proponents felt betrayed.

P2pnet’s Jon Newton summarizes the situation in an open letter to FAC board member Ed O’Brien (of Radiohead). States Newton, “Well, Ed, it’s not only the recording industry that’s dragging its feet. You and your fellow FAC board members are doing the same thing and while you prevaricate, the corporate music industry is driving its wedge ever more deeply between you and the fans you admit you can’t do without. You, (Billy) Bragg, (Blur drummer Dave) Rowntree, (Pink Floyd’s Nick) Mason, and anyone else on the FAC board (Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B, Kate Nash, Marillion’s Mark Kelly and rapper Master Shortie) MUST convince it and other members to revert to the coalition’s original position.”

In October 2009, Billy Bragg, a member of FAC’s board of directors, and Newton initiated a2f2a.com, a website intended to connect artists with fans. In his initial posting to artists Bragg stated “My participation in this initiative is based on my understanding of two principles that are central to the beliefs of the p2p community. Firstly, that there is no technological solution to the problems that artists face as a result of the digitisation of music and, secondly, that p2p users are willing to pay for music if they can be sure that the money is going to the artists whose work they enjoy.”

In Newton’s initial posting referring to fans: “On a2f2a, they’ll be able to do something that’s never been possible before, on- or offline. They’ll talk directly with artists to cut through the lies and disinformation perpetuated by the corporate music industry.”

While encouraging, things didn’t work out as originally envisioned. Bragg stood steadfastly that a 20-year copyright extension (beyond the 50 years past death privilege now granted in British law) was needed. FAC continues to support three-strikes. Bragg has disappeared from the discussion after issuing an “either or” ultimatum.

Indiana Gregg, an artist without label affiliation, has been the most active artist participant in recent months. Gregg seems to have shifting and seemingly contradictory alliances. Gregg initiated Kerchoonz in 2008, a social networking site that shares advertising revenue with artists that contribute free downloads. Probably the most beneficial aspect of a2f2a has been the highlighting of new artists who’s careers have been advanced by exploring new business models not dependent on copyright or for-pay downloads.

It is these artists that consistently disprove the dire predictions of Mary Bono, the other Bono, the RIAA, the MPAA, and Billy Bragg. Creators will continue to create. Fans will continue to support them. Three-strikes will fail when the results become apparent to those even outside of the artist and fan contingencies. The only question is how much damage will be done to both emerging artists and their fans before that failure is complete.

+ + + + +

Download of the Week
Free - compliments of the Drive-by Truckers: This Fucking Job
Official release date for their new album, The Big To-Do, is March 16, 2010.

+ + + + +

Note: Bill Glahn wrote, edited and published Live! Music Review, a magazine devoted to bootleg recordings when bootlegs were not so common. And they are still not so common today.

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YEMEN - THE RETURN OF OLD GHOSTS

January 28, 2010 – 12:58 pm

Deja vu… that’s what Yemenis old enough to remember will realise. Forty years ago in Yemen, Britain and the United States helped to crush an insurgency and back a despostic regime. Now, the “Free World” is preparing to send arms and “intelligence advisers” to help prop up yet another corrupt regime in Yemen. Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis explains.

What I find so fascinating about the reporting of the War on Terror is the way almost all of it ignores history - as if it is a conflict happening outside time. The Yemen is a case in point. In the wake of the underpants bomber we have been deluged by a wave of terror journalism about this dark medieval country that harbors incomprehensible fanatics who want to destroy the west. None of it has explained that only 40 years ago the British government fought a vicious secret war in the Yemen against republican revolutionaries who used terror, including bombing airliners.

But the moment you start looking into that war you find out all sorts of extraordinary things.

First that the chaos that has engulfed the Yemen today and is breeding new terrorist threats against the west is a direct result of that conflict of 40 years ago.

Secondly it also had a powerful and corrupting effect on Britain itself. To fight the war both Conservative and Labour governments in the ’60s set up international arms deals with the Saudis. These involved bribery on a huge scale which led to the Al Yamamah scandal that still festers today.

To fight the war in secret, the British government also allowed the creation of a private mercenary force. Out of it would come today’s privatized military industry that fights wars for dictators throughout Africa and is deeply involved in fighting against the insurgency in Iraq.

As the insurgency continued both sides turned to terror. An Amnesty report in 1966 alleged that the British were torturing prisoners including beating them and burning them with cigarettes. The British soldiers were also stripping the Arab prisoners naked to humiliate them.

The key figure behind Britain’s involvement was called Colonel David Stirling. He brought Britain into the war, created the mercenary army, and set up the Saudi Arms deal. Stirling was one of the main characters in a documentary series I made called The Mayfair Set, and a large part of the first episode tells the inside story of Britain’s role in the Yemen war in the ’60s. I thought I would put up that section plus a brief background to our whole involvement in Yemen.

Here is a map of Aden in the 1960s:

And here is one of Yemen:

Aden had been a crucial part of the British Empire since 1839. In 1963 a rebellion began. A nationalist group called the National Liberation Front (NLF) started an armed revolt against the British army. The NLF were followers of Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser who was the president of Egypt. Nasser was an extraordinary figure who inspired the whole of the Arab world. He wanted to unite all the Arab countries and use that power to force the western colonial powers out of the Middle East.

By the mid ’60s the revolt had developed into a bitter and vicious insurgency as the NLF used terror against British civilians as well as attacking the soldiers. Here is some footage shot by the BBC Panorama programme of the aftermath of the killing of a British Civil Servant on a dusty road just outside the Crater district of Aden. As well as showing the details it also conveys the mood of a once confident imperial power caught up in something it doesn’t fully understand and feeling its power slipping away.

It is also interesting how back then Panorama broadcast shots that lingered far longer on the dead body than we would be allowed to today.

[Click here if the video clip does not play.]

As the insurgency continued both sides turned to terror. An Amnesty report in 1966 alleged that the British were torturing prisoners including beating them and burning them with cigarettes. The British soldiers were also stripping the Arab prisoners naked to humiliate them.

Here is a short piece of film that was grabbed by a Reuters cameraman in 1967. It graphically shows the hatred of the local people that had built up in the British troops.

The terrorists meanwhile had resorted to throwing grenades into childrens’ parties and had blown up a DC3 civilian airliner over the Yemen killing everyone on board. Here is a news item where a BBC journalist shows some of the Improvised Explosive Devices that were being used against civilians.

 

At the same time as the insurgency began in the south, in Aden, another revolution happened in the North Yemen. A group of republicans who were also followers of President Nasser overthrew the ruling royal family. Nasser then sent Egyptian troops to support the republicans.

Many in the British government wanted to recognise the new regime, but a small group in the security services, led by David Stirling, persuaded the Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, to let them organise a covert war in the deserts and mountains of Yemen in support of the royal family.

These men had a romantic and simplified view of the world. They did not see this war as a nationalist struggle but as part of a much wider fight against a communist takeover of the world. Engaging in this global conflict would be a way of recapturing Britain’s power and greatness.

The regimes that Britain, and America, would support for the next 40 years were mostly corrupt and despotic. The Islamism that we face today rose up in the ’70s precisely as a reaction to those corrupt regimes and their western backers. It too is an anti-colonial project that is very similar to Nasser’s vision of a united Arab world free of western influence - but with religion bolted on.

Stirling also believed that selling arms and planes to the Saudis would not only help fight the war, but would also re-establish Britain’s influence in the Middle East in a new way - through the arms trade.

And he was right. Although the mercenaries failed to restore the royalists in Yemen, they did help defeat Nasser and destroy his anti-colonial project. But more than that, their secret war also helped re-establish western influence in the Arab world in a new way. In a post-imperial age the British returned to the Middle East by supporting and propping up regimes through selling arms and through mercenary armies. Just as Stirling had intended.

But it had a terrible price.

The regimes that Britain, and America, would support for the next 40 years were mostly corrupt and despotic. The very regimes that Nasser had told the Arab world were a part of the past which the modern world would sweep away. The man who foresaw this was the British Prime Minister - Harold MacMillan. In 1963 he wrote privately:

“It is repugnant to political equity and prudence alike that we should so often appear to be supporting out-of-date and despotic regimes and to be opposing the growth of modern and more democratic forms of government.”

The Islamism that we face today rose up in the ’70s precisely as a reaction to those corrupt regimes and their western backers. It too is an anti-colonial project that is very similar to Nasser’s vision of a united Arab world free of western influence - but with religion bolted on. And now, to fight it, we are preparing to send arms and “intelligence advisers” to help prop up a corrupt regime in Yemen.

To the Arabs in Yemen it must seem like deja vu. We are the old ghosts who have returned.

Here is the section from The Mayfair Set. It begins with the owner of the Clermont Club in Mayfair, John Aspinall, musing on the group of entrepreneurs and adventurers who spent their time gambling in his club. Men like David Stirling.

 

Note: Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora’s Box, The Trap and The Living Dead. The above article was posted at Information Clearing House.

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INSOUCIANT AMERICANS

January 27, 2010 – 4:10 am

There is little doubt that those interested in leading the U.S. deeper into a police state and deeper into a “war on terror” are active in adding orchestrated events to whatever real ones real terrorists manage to accomplish. As former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts points out, to keep the peril alive for Americans, we have the Underwear Bomb Plot.

The Underwear Bomber case indicates that whoever is behind these bomb scares is laughing at our gullibility.

How realistic is it that al-Qaida, an organization that allegedly pulled off the most fantastic terror attack in world history, would in these days of heightened security choose for an attack on an airliner a person who is the most conspicuous of all?

Umar Farouk Mutallab had a one-way ticket, no luggage, no passport, and his father, reportedly a CIA and Mossad asset, had reported him to the CIA and Mossad. Does anyone really believe that al-Qaida would choose as an airliner bomber a person waving every red flag imaginable?

This obvious question has escaped the US media, a collection of salespersons marketing full body scanning machines for airports. Would al-Qaida, with its extensive knowledge of explosives, have armed Umar with a “bomb” that experts say couldn’t have blown up his own seat?

It is difficult to imagine a more gullible population than America’s, but do even Americans believe this story?

How realistic is it that al-Qaida, an organization that allegedly pulled off the most fantastic terror attack in world history, would in these days of heightened security choose for an attack on an airliner a person who is the most conspicuous of all? Umar Farouk Mutallab had a one-way ticket, no luggage, no passport, and his father, reportedly a CIA and Mossad asset, had reported him to the CIA and Mossad.

Since 9/11 the F.B.I. has been busy enticing people, who lack organizational skills, into “terrorist plots” that consists of F.B.I. initiated hot air talk. These ridiculous stings are then taken to trial, and the media fans the flames of fear of “home-grown terrorist plots against Americans.”

There is little doubt that those interested in leading the U.S. deeper into a police state and deeper into a “war on terror” are active in adding orchestrated events to whatever real ones real terrorists manage to accomplish. The paucity of real terrorists has caused the U.S. government and its Ministry of Truth to promote the Taliban to terrorist rank.

The problem is that these “terrorist acts” are taking place thousands of miles away in lands that the average American cannot find on a map and, thus, lack scare value. To keep the peril alive for Americans, we have the Underwear Bomb Plot.

What will be next? An elaborate head of hair laced with nano-thermite?

The “war on terror” is a far greater threat to Americans than all the terrorists in the world combined. This is so because the “war on terror” has destroyed the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. American citizens are now helpless in the event someone in government decides that some constitutionally protected behavior, such as free speech, or a contribution to a children’s hospital in Gaza, where Hamas, a U.S.-declared “terrorist organization,” happens to be the elected government, constitutes aiding and abetting terrorism.

On January 5 a ruling by the Federal Appeals Court in the District of Columbia gave away the most essential protection of liberty by declaring that the U.S. government is not bound by law during war. The ruling absolves Washington from complying with America’s own laws and from complying with international laws, such as the Geneva Conventions. It makes a mockery of all war crime trials everywhere. By elevating the executive branch above the law, the court gave the government carte blanche.

On January 5 a ruling by the Federal Appeals Court in the District of Columbia gave away the most essential protection of liberty by declaring that the U.S. government is not bound by law during war.

The rationale offered by the court for refusing to uphold the law came from Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who said that America had been pushed by war past “the leading edge of a new and frightening paradigm, one that demands new rules be written. War is a challenge to law, and the law must adjust.” By “adjust” she means ” be set aside” or “be thrown out.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to defend both the Constitution and the principle that government is not above the law. Last December 14, the Supreme Court refused to review a ruling by the Federal Appeals Court in the District of Columbia, which dismissed a torture case with the argument that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” In other words, neither U.S. nor international laws against torture can be enforced in U.S. courts. The opinion was written by Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson.

The “war on terror,” which is enriching Halliburton, Blackwater (now operating under an alias), and the military/security complex, while denying Americans health care, is running up debt that is a threat to Americans’ purchasing power and living standards. The contrast between America’s sanctimonious rhetoric and the murder of civilians and torture of prisoners has destroyed America’s reputation and caused Europeans as well as Muslims to despise the United States.

The sacrifice of the Constitution and rule of law to a hyped “terrorist threat” has destroyed the heart and soul of America herself.

As a poet wrote, “our world in stupor lies.”

Note: Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. His new book, How the Economy was Lost, will be published next month by AK Press/CounterPunch. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com. The above article was posted at Information Clearing House.

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