EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
January 24, 2005.
"[H]istory repeats itself with horrifying predictability," wrote Greg Palast last year. "First as farce and then as Presidency."
In the face of an impending conflagration, its feet firmly planted on rapidly disappearing sand, the US colossus gazes at Iraq - at the theater that has largely defined its apocalyptic vision for the world - and releases unintentionally from its eyes an astonishing lightning bolt of truth: "the survival of liberty in [America] increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."
The empire tells us that the land it continues to occupy is on the verge of its "first free and democratic elections." Come January 30, we are told, a new Iraqi dawn will be at hand - the dawn of US-imposed democracy.
Glory be and all that; paradise is just around the corner. Democracy is struggling but will soon thrive in the occupied land. Over 15 million Iraqis are said to be eligible to vote. Of Iraq's 18 provinces, only four, we are told, will be unable to join the elections. All is well, until you realize that these four provinces contain more than half the population of Iraq.
America trumpets the fact that the party names of 111 slates of Iraqi candidates are already known. Good news, until one comes across a pallid fact: "the names of 19,000 individual candidates for seats in the National Assembly and for provincial councils are being withheld" - hehe, no one knows who they are, in short - "to prevent them being targeted by the insurgency."[1]
Paradise indeed. Ignorance is bliss.
"It is the policy of the United States," huffed George W. Bush in his second inaugural address, "to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture."
Nice policy. Bush is merely following a long American tradition.
Who remembers the first ever memorandum issued by America's National Security Council?
In 1948, fearing that popular democratic forces in Italy were on the verge of coming to power through legitimate democratic means, the US issued National Security Council Memorandum 1 which stipulated that if the Italian Left won the elections, the US "must declare a national emergency: the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean should be put on alert, the United States should start subversive activities in Italy to overthrow the Italian government and . . . begin contingency plans for direct military intervention."
Intervention if America's opponents won - this was the view held at the time by 'moderates' in the US government. Others, such as the alleged humanist George Kennan, a leading architect of US strategy during the Truman administration, advocated the outright invasion of Italy even before the elections were held.[2]
Under conditions of occupation and war, how legitimate would a national election in Iraq be? Good question.
Some in the UN claim that there are precedents to the January 30 Iraqi vote - the UN-run election in East Timor, for instance. Not true said Phyllis Bennis, a tribune of the global anti-war movement. "The 1999 vote was not to select a puppet 'government' to administer East Timor under continuing Indonesian occupation." It was, Bennis said, "a direct referendum on whether or not to end the occupation - a choice never offered to Iraqis."[3]
Should Britain "have supplied election monitors to Vichy France?" a letter-writer from The Hague asked the International Herald Tribune last December.[4] Another good question. And a rather irrelevant one: reporting from Iraq, the chief correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald Paul McGeough writes that not a single international observer dares to cross the border from Jordan to monitor Iraq's famed first free democratic exercise.
Journalism yields a world of cliches, says the distinguished war correspondent Robert Fisk from Baghdad. "But here, for once, the first cliche that comes to mind is true. Baghdad is a city of fear. Fearful Iraqis, fearful militiamen, fearful American soldiers, fearful journalists."[5]
Iyad Allawi and the rest of the US-appointed entourage, said Fisk in a recent interview, "behave like statesmen when they tour the world or turn up in Washington, but in Baghdad they're not even safe inside their little Green Zone. They're not even the Mayor of Baghdad."[6]
Why is not such a smart question.
Fisk has a morbid calculator - a highly accurate device that can only be acquired by a reporter who has covered the ghastly wars in Lebanon, the Gulf, Kosovo and Algeria.
"My own calculations - probably conservative, because there are many violent acts that we are never told about," wrote Fisk last January 3, "suggest that in the past 12 months, at least 190 suicide bombers have blown themselves up, sometimes at the rate of two a day . . . Time was, in Lebanon, when a suicide bombing was a once-a-month event. Or in Palestine/Israel a once-a-week event. Now, in Iraq, it is daily or twice daily."
"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient that the public knows... We are today not far from a disaster."[7]
So wrote TE Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - in The Sunday Times in August 1920. And he could just as well have been referring to America.
NOTES:
[1] "Voter turnout won't be enough to legitimize the election," Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald, January 21, 2005.
[2] Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002.
[3] "Iraqi elections, Phyllis Bennis, ZNet, December 20, 2004.
[4] "Stop pointing fingers," Letter to the Editor by John Simpson-The Hague, the International Herald Tribune, December 16, 2004.
[5] "Fear and voting in Baghdad," Robert Fisk, The Seattle Post Intelligencer, January 14, 2005.
[6] Transcript of radio interview of Robert Fisk by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, January 3, 2005.
[7] "A mire of death, lies and atrocities," Robert Fisk, The Independent-UK, January 3, 2005.
Recent political and travel essays by Renato Redentor Constantino. Email Red at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
THE TEACHINGS OF OUR TIMES
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
January 17, 2005
"It was most diverting to watch a group of Galli [Ethiopian tribesmen] bursting out like a rose after I landed a bomb in the middle of them," said the Italian bomber pilot Vittorio Mussolini after his plane swooped down on Ethiopia.
Sounds like a Kodak moment.
War, said the son of Il Duce, is "the most beautiful and complete of sports."
It's all about perspective.
Tom Brokaw bubbled with enthusiasm at "the threatening beauty" of American bombs exploding in Iraq during America's first Gulf War while a CNN correspondent in Saudi Arabia described US bombers taking off on their missions of glory as "the most beautiful sight."
For Brent Sadler of ITN, the nocturnal heavens of Iraq during that deadly time was not a source of things that maimed and killed but a "night sky filled with the star-spangled display of threatening force."
And threatening force it was. Eventually, said the distinguished scholar Edward S. Herman, it was revealed that the smart bombs used in Gulf War I were missing their targets 40 percent of the time, and that only some five percent of the bombs dropped were smart.[1]
Reality, according to Herman's Doublespeak Dictionary: "A nightmare, unbelievable during waking hours."
"I feel sorry for the people that my colleagues and I killed. But we are innocent people and not as cruel as they accuse us," said Suy Vith, a Cambodian who had killed truckloads of men, women and children with a weapon the murderous Khmer Rouge had placed in his hands.
In fairness to Vith, he said the choice given him by Pol Pot's murderous band was to kill or be killed. Fair enough. Curiously, the word remorse does not seem to be part of his regular vocabulary.
"I go to the pagoda sometimes," Vith says. "I give food for my dead mother and father. I pray for good things for them, but I never pray for those I killed or ask for pardon. This is life. I killed people and I feel that I will be killed by people when I am reborn in my next life. This is karma."[2]
If he were reborn in Falluja this very minute, would Suy Vith welcome it?
The Khmer Rouge carried out four years of genocide in Cambodia. Who disputes this? None.
Who wants to know the reasons why? Even fewer.
Trouble-free answer as to why: the wicked Khmer Rouge was headed by madman called Pol Pot, who was a communist fanatic indoctrinated and trained in the evil ways of Paris.
Painful part of the answer: just before Pol Pot came to power, from 1969 to 1975 - the first half of what a Finnish government study called a "decade" of genocide - America dropped over half a million tons of bombs on rural Cambodia and was the genocidist.[3]
In 1973 alone, for 160 consecutive days, the US dropped over 240,000 "short tons of bombs on rice fields, water buffalo and villages," a tonnage that "represents 50 percent more than the conventional explosives dropped on Japan during World War II," against a peasant society with no air force or ground defenses.
How many were killed by the years of US bombing? Perhaps as many Cambodians as were executed by the Khmer Rouge.
"The United States has much to answer for here, not only in terms of human lives and massive material destruction," wrote Jon Swain of the British Sunday Times on May 11, 1975. The wickedness of the Khmer Rouge, wrote the British correspondent on the first year of Pol Pot's bloody reign, "who run this country now, or what is left of it, are as much a product of this wholesale American bombing which has hardened and honed their minds."[4]
"A teacher," said Henry Adams, "affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
NOTES:
[1] Edward S. Herman, Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, South End Press, 1992.
[2] "Former Khmer Rouge recounts dark past," Thet Sambath, The Cambodia Daily, January 7, 2005.
[3] "Pol Pot's death in the propaganda system, Edward S. Herman, Z Magazine, June 1998.
[4] Footnotes to Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002. See http://www.understandingpower.com/ for the notes.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
January 17, 2005
"It was most diverting to watch a group of Galli [Ethiopian tribesmen] bursting out like a rose after I landed a bomb in the middle of them," said the Italian bomber pilot Vittorio Mussolini after his plane swooped down on Ethiopia.
Sounds like a Kodak moment.
War, said the son of Il Duce, is "the most beautiful and complete of sports."
It's all about perspective.
Tom Brokaw bubbled with enthusiasm at "the threatening beauty" of American bombs exploding in Iraq during America's first Gulf War while a CNN correspondent in Saudi Arabia described US bombers taking off on their missions of glory as "the most beautiful sight."
For Brent Sadler of ITN, the nocturnal heavens of Iraq during that deadly time was not a source of things that maimed and killed but a "night sky filled with the star-spangled display of threatening force."
And threatening force it was. Eventually, said the distinguished scholar Edward S. Herman, it was revealed that the smart bombs used in Gulf War I were missing their targets 40 percent of the time, and that only some five percent of the bombs dropped were smart.[1]
Reality, according to Herman's Doublespeak Dictionary: "A nightmare, unbelievable during waking hours."
"I feel sorry for the people that my colleagues and I killed. But we are innocent people and not as cruel as they accuse us," said Suy Vith, a Cambodian who had killed truckloads of men, women and children with a weapon the murderous Khmer Rouge had placed in his hands.
In fairness to Vith, he said the choice given him by Pol Pot's murderous band was to kill or be killed. Fair enough. Curiously, the word remorse does not seem to be part of his regular vocabulary.
"I go to the pagoda sometimes," Vith says. "I give food for my dead mother and father. I pray for good things for them, but I never pray for those I killed or ask for pardon. This is life. I killed people and I feel that I will be killed by people when I am reborn in my next life. This is karma."[2]
If he were reborn in Falluja this very minute, would Suy Vith welcome it?
The Khmer Rouge carried out four years of genocide in Cambodia. Who disputes this? None.
Who wants to know the reasons why? Even fewer.
Trouble-free answer as to why: the wicked Khmer Rouge was headed by madman called Pol Pot, who was a communist fanatic indoctrinated and trained in the evil ways of Paris.
Painful part of the answer: just before Pol Pot came to power, from 1969 to 1975 - the first half of what a Finnish government study called a "decade" of genocide - America dropped over half a million tons of bombs on rural Cambodia and was the genocidist.[3]
In 1973 alone, for 160 consecutive days, the US dropped over 240,000 "short tons of bombs on rice fields, water buffalo and villages," a tonnage that "represents 50 percent more than the conventional explosives dropped on Japan during World War II," against a peasant society with no air force or ground defenses.
How many were killed by the years of US bombing? Perhaps as many Cambodians as were executed by the Khmer Rouge.
"The United States has much to answer for here, not only in terms of human lives and massive material destruction," wrote Jon Swain of the British Sunday Times on May 11, 1975. The wickedness of the Khmer Rouge, wrote the British correspondent on the first year of Pol Pot's bloody reign, "who run this country now, or what is left of it, are as much a product of this wholesale American bombing which has hardened and honed their minds."[4]
"A teacher," said Henry Adams, "affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
NOTES:
[1] Edward S. Herman, Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, South End Press, 1992.
[2] "Former Khmer Rouge recounts dark past," Thet Sambath, The Cambodia Daily, January 7, 2005.
[3] "Pol Pot's death in the propaganda system, Edward S. Herman, Z Magazine, June 1998.
[4] Footnotes to Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002. See http://www.understandingpower.com/ for the notes.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
AS WE GRIEVE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnnews.com
January 10, 2005
There is no space wider than that of grief, wrote the poet Pablo Neruda. "There is no universe like that which bleeds." In the planet of sorrow, "there is no street, no one has a door. The sand opens up only to a tremor. And the whole sea opens the whole of silence." [1]
Poetry, said Italo Calvino, is the art of putting the ocean into a glass. Imperial truth: pretending the glass of water is an ocean.
Imperial love: America's first offer of aid to tsunami victims: $15 million. Cost of one F-22 Raptor jet: $225 million. Cost of Kerry and Bush campaigns: $400 million. Cost of America's occupation of Iraq per day: $280 million. [2]
Relief from empire arithmetic: subtract US from Iraq entirely and throw entirety of sum to reconstruction needs of South Asia and the Middle East. Imperial relief: tsunami = opportunity to buzz around scene of disaster, put on shock-and-awe screen-saver face and save face.
"It turns out that the majority of those nations affected were Muslim nations," said US Secretary of State Colin Powell after touring earthquake and tsunami-stricken Banda Aceh, Indonesia from the air. "We'd be doing it regardless of religion," said Mr. Powell, referring to the US government's niggling aid contribution. "But I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world ... an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action." [3]
The world shamed the US government to increase its tsunami assistance from the initially indifferent $15 million to the wholly inadequate $350 million. The White House insists no, no, there's more. Whatever. Just give; it's horribly needed. But please stop the preening.
"I cannot begin to imagine the horror that went through the families and all of the people who heard this noise coming and had their lives snuffed out by this wave," sniffed Mr. Powell as he surveyed the devastation in Aceh. "The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy everything in its path is amazing."
Very observant, Mr. Powell. But some tides have yet to recede from the region.
"The damage done by the deluge far exceeded the hopes of everyone," reported the US Fifth Air Force gleefully in May 1953 after wave upon wave of American fighter-bombers destroyed and emptied the 2,300-foot Toksan dam, an earth-and-stone reservoir in North Korea. Floodwaters from the dam surged and washed out bridges and roads and swept away railway lines. The massive flashflood destroyed hundreds of buildings and devastated rice field after rice field.
"Go massive. Sweep it all up, things related or not," snorted Donald Rumsfeld on September 11, 2001 as he ordered his aides to come up with a plan to attack Iraq a mere five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon. Yes sir! Back to the future! [3]
In 1953, a US commanding general in Korea described the annihilation of the Toksan dam as "perhaps the most spectacular [strike] of the war" and "immediately scheduled two more dams for destruction." Five more dams lay in ruins when the work was done. Five dams which together "supplied water for the irrigation system of an area that produced three-quarters of North Korea's rice."
US Air Force accounts joyously described the intended consequences of their campaign. "To the average Oriental," wrote one report "... an empty rice bowl symbolizes starvation."
The Oriental "could stand the loss of industry" stated another. He "could sustain great loss of human life, for life is plentiful and apparently cheap in the Orient." But not rice. "The Westerner," the report declared, "can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of this stable food commodity has for the Asian - starvation and slow death ... Attacks on the precious water supply had struck where it hurts most."
"The last time an act of this kind had been carried out, which was by the Nazis in Holland in 1944," said Korea historians Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings,"it had been deemed a war crime at Nuremberg." [4]
"I hope that as a result of our efforts, as a result of our helicopter pilots being seen . . . [America's] value system will be reinforced," Powell said after stepping out of a helicopter.
No need for reinforcement. It was never in doubt.
Soon after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge, which had inundated Cambodia with four years of slaughter, America the generous extended its generous hand and provided, among other forms of assistance, $85 million in direct support to a red-crossed group headed by someone named ... Pol Pot. [5]
NOTES:
[1] Luis Poirot, Pablo Neruda: Absence and Presence, W.W. Norton and Company, 1990.
[2] "US stingy? It's all relative," David Lindorff, counterpunch.org, December 29, 2004. Different comparative figures and incisive commentary from "The other tsunami" by John Pilger in the New Statesman, January 6, 2005. See also George Monbiot's "Killing vs. helping," in The Guardian-UK, January 4, 2005.
[3] "Powell views devastation in Indonesia," ABC News International, January 5, 2005.
[4] "Plans for Iraq attack began on 9/11," CBS News.com, September 5, 2002.
[5] Footnotes to Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, an electronic companion piece to the book that is just as valuable as the main book. Go to www.understandingpower.com to access the notes. See also the excellent North Korea by Bruce Cumings, The New Press, 2004.
[6] "Pol Pot and Kissinger: On War and Criminality," Edward S. Herman, Z Magazine, September 1997.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnnews.com
January 10, 2005
There is no space wider than that of grief, wrote the poet Pablo Neruda. "There is no universe like that which bleeds." In the planet of sorrow, "there is no street, no one has a door. The sand opens up only to a tremor. And the whole sea opens the whole of silence." [1]
Poetry, said Italo Calvino, is the art of putting the ocean into a glass. Imperial truth: pretending the glass of water is an ocean.
Imperial love: America's first offer of aid to tsunami victims: $15 million. Cost of one F-22 Raptor jet: $225 million. Cost of Kerry and Bush campaigns: $400 million. Cost of America's occupation of Iraq per day: $280 million. [2]
Relief from empire arithmetic: subtract US from Iraq entirely and throw entirety of sum to reconstruction needs of South Asia and the Middle East. Imperial relief: tsunami = opportunity to buzz around scene of disaster, put on shock-and-awe screen-saver face and save face.
"It turns out that the majority of those nations affected were Muslim nations," said US Secretary of State Colin Powell after touring earthquake and tsunami-stricken Banda Aceh, Indonesia from the air. "We'd be doing it regardless of religion," said Mr. Powell, referring to the US government's niggling aid contribution. "But I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world ... an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action." [3]
The world shamed the US government to increase its tsunami assistance from the initially indifferent $15 million to the wholly inadequate $350 million. The White House insists no, no, there's more. Whatever. Just give; it's horribly needed. But please stop the preening.
"I cannot begin to imagine the horror that went through the families and all of the people who heard this noise coming and had their lives snuffed out by this wave," sniffed Mr. Powell as he surveyed the devastation in Aceh. "The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy everything in its path is amazing."
Very observant, Mr. Powell. But some tides have yet to recede from the region.
"The damage done by the deluge far exceeded the hopes of everyone," reported the US Fifth Air Force gleefully in May 1953 after wave upon wave of American fighter-bombers destroyed and emptied the 2,300-foot Toksan dam, an earth-and-stone reservoir in North Korea. Floodwaters from the dam surged and washed out bridges and roads and swept away railway lines. The massive flashflood destroyed hundreds of buildings and devastated rice field after rice field.
"Go massive. Sweep it all up, things related or not," snorted Donald Rumsfeld on September 11, 2001 as he ordered his aides to come up with a plan to attack Iraq a mere five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon. Yes sir! Back to the future! [3]
In 1953, a US commanding general in Korea described the annihilation of the Toksan dam as "perhaps the most spectacular [strike] of the war" and "immediately scheduled two more dams for destruction." Five more dams lay in ruins when the work was done. Five dams which together "supplied water for the irrigation system of an area that produced three-quarters of North Korea's rice."
US Air Force accounts joyously described the intended consequences of their campaign. "To the average Oriental," wrote one report "... an empty rice bowl symbolizes starvation."
The Oriental "could stand the loss of industry" stated another. He "could sustain great loss of human life, for life is plentiful and apparently cheap in the Orient." But not rice. "The Westerner," the report declared, "can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of this stable food commodity has for the Asian - starvation and slow death ... Attacks on the precious water supply had struck where it hurts most."
"The last time an act of this kind had been carried out, which was by the Nazis in Holland in 1944," said Korea historians Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings,"it had been deemed a war crime at Nuremberg." [4]
"I hope that as a result of our efforts, as a result of our helicopter pilots being seen . . . [America's] value system will be reinforced," Powell said after stepping out of a helicopter.
No need for reinforcement. It was never in doubt.
Soon after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge, which had inundated Cambodia with four years of slaughter, America the generous extended its generous hand and provided, among other forms of assistance, $85 million in direct support to a red-crossed group headed by someone named ... Pol Pot. [5]
NOTES:
[1] Luis Poirot, Pablo Neruda: Absence and Presence, W.W. Norton and Company, 1990.
[2] "US stingy? It's all relative," David Lindorff, counterpunch.org, December 29, 2004. Different comparative figures and incisive commentary from "The other tsunami" by John Pilger in the New Statesman, January 6, 2005. See also George Monbiot's "Killing vs. helping," in The Guardian-UK, January 4, 2005.
[3] "Powell views devastation in Indonesia," ABC News International, January 5, 2005.
[4] "Plans for Iraq attack began on 9/11," CBS News.com, September 5, 2002.
[5] Footnotes to Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, an electronic companion piece to the book that is just as valuable as the main book. Go to www.understandingpower.com to access the notes. See also the excellent North Korea by Bruce Cumings, The New Press, 2004.
[6] "Pol Pot and Kissinger: On War and Criminality," Edward S. Herman, Z Magazine, September 1997.
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