DISPATCHES FROM THE WEATHER FRONT
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
November 1, 2004

"We sometimes get the feeling they are going to let us die," said Enele Soponga the other year. Soponga is the ambassador to the UN of Tuvalu, an island nation with a population of 12,000 that is projected to be the first island state to go under water. Tuvalu's main island has already been inundated three times in 2003; vegetable plots were washed away along with the island's drinking water.[i]

Soponga, who is also the chairperson of the Association of Small Island States, is not alone in his sentiment.

Climate change is not a smart bomb. Like weapons of mass destruction, human-induced climate change will hit the environment and smash people's lives indiscriminately, punishing the vulnerable and the weak the hardest. The warning signs are everywhere.

The three hottest years in recorded history - 1998, 2002 and 2003 - all occurred in the last six years. The 1990s remain the warmest decade on record.[ii]

Weeks ago Japan suffered from its fourth major storm since late August. It was reportedly "the most powerful to hit Okinawa since 1972."

In March, a hurricane hit the Brazilian coast - the first ever recorded in the South Atlantic. The Brazilian weather service, with no established naming sequence, had no idea what to call it. The agency eventually settled on Catarina, after the state where the hurricane made landfall.

According to a recent scientific study, because of increasing global temperatures, "hurricanes will grow stronger and wetter as a result of global warming."[iii] The study, said Dr. Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "is by far and away the most comprehensive effort" to assess the problem. The study "clinches the issue," Emanuel said, concerning the link between the warming of tropical oceans and storm intensity.[iv]

Other scientists agree. According to Tom Knutson and Bob Tuleya, tropical climate modelers at the Princeton, New Jersey-based Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, large parts of the world "can expect a 20 percent increase in rainfall, and damage due to increased wind speeds might rise as much as 10 percent. That 10 or 20 percent may not sound like much, but add it to a top-ranked Category 5 monster headed for Mobile, Alabama and you've got a major disaster in the making . . . [In addition,] a greenhouse gas-induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly-destructive Category 5 storms."[v]

Warming temperatures have resulted in massive ice loss. On the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory floats the 3,000-year old tens of meters thick Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.[vi] The reporter Jane George recounted last year that "when the British Arctic Expedition traveled there in 1875 and Robert E. Peary explored the area in 1907, the shelf of land-fast ice was still intact, but, by 1982, 90 per cent of the shelf had been lost." Changes in the ice shelf have also drained the 30-km-by-5-km Lake Disraeli of its fresh water.[vii]

In the Pyrenees, glacier surface has decreased from 1779 hectares in 1894 to 290 hectares in 2001. Glacial mass in the region shrunk by 52 percent from 1980-2001.[viii] The European Environment Agency has recently issued a report estimating that three-quarters of glaciers in the Swiss Alps are likely to disappear by 2050.

According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the rapid melting of the world's highest ice fields is "driving up sea levels, increasing floods and turning verdant mountain slopes into deserts." The Chinese scientists recently published the most detailed study ever undertaken of China's glaciers, which are said to account for 15 percent of the planet's ice. The study, the Glacier Inventory, was approved for publication last week after a quarter of a century of exploration in China and Tibet.

In the past 24 years, the Chinese scientists have measured glacier loss "equivalent to more than 3,000 sq km." Among the most marked changes has been the 500metre retreat of the glacier at the source of the Yangtze on the Tibet-Qinghai plateau. If the climate continued to change at the current pace, scientists predict that two-thirds of China's glaciers would disappear by the end of the 2050s

The consequences for ecosystems and humans are nothing short of ominous.

"In the short term," said Yao Tandong, who led 50 scientists in studying the decline of the Himalayan glaciers, "the water from the ice would fill reservoirs and lead to more flooding - as was already the case in Nepal and downstream areas of China." Yao predicted that in the future, "the end of the glaciers would deprive the mountain ecology of its main life source and hasten the desertification that threatens western China, particularly in Gansu and Xinjiang provinces." Once the mountain ice disappears, "rivers would start to dry up and ocean levels would rise, threatening coastal cities."

The Chinese study confirmed earlier studies of Everest, "which showed the world's tallest peak more than 1.3 meters shorter than in 1953, when it was first scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay."[ix]

Climate change, said the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is "a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it radically alters human existence."

It's time for the world to wean itself away from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, the burning of which releases massive amounts of C02, the greenhouse gas mainly responsible for global warming. It's high time that we embrace the solution to the problem - a solution that is by no means difficult to embrace.

The European Renewable Energy Council has shown that with the right support policies from government, renewable energy from wind, geothermal, small hydro, modern biomass and solar power can provide 50 percent of global energy supply by 2040.

Traditional energy economists say that renewable energy is too expensive and that we can't afford to develop it. The truth is, wrote a young environmentalist in the South China Morning Post recently, "we cannot afford not to.[x]

NOTES:

[i] "Sinking islands battle for climate aid cash," The Sun-Herald, December 14, 2003.
[ii] "Global warnings," Greenpeace International, September 17, 2004.
[iii] The study was published online on Tuesday by The Journal of Climate and can be found at www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2004/tk0401.pdf
[iv] "Global Warming Is Expected to Raise Hurricane Intensity," Andrew Revkin, The New York Times, September 30, 2004.
[v] "Warning in the Winds," Mark Lynas, The Washington Post, September 19, 2004
[vi] "Arctic ice shelf splits," BBC News World Edition, September 23, 2003.
[vii] Ellesmere Island's ice shelf broken into pieces: Changes may mark rapid global warming," Jane George, Nunatsiaq News, July 30, 2004.
[viii] More interesting multimedia information in the climate pages of Greenpeace International
[ix] Highest icefields will not last 100 years, study finds; China's glacier research warns of deserts and floods due to warming," Jonathan Watts, The Guardian-UK, September 24, 2004.
[x] "How to blow away China's pollution," Gloria Chang, South China Morning Post, September 18, 2004.

THE TWENTY FIFTH OF OCTOBER
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
October 25, 2004

Twenty four hours of forever just for today: let us confer immortality on the twenty fifth of October.

On this day in 1881, Pablo Ruiz came into the world. An obstinate man of many temperaments, he chose many names for himself as he cascaded through his conjured worlds. Once he called himself 'P.R.'; another time he named himself 'Pau.' In the end he settled for Picasso.

In the Polish city of Wroclaw at a world congress of intellectuals for peace in 1948, for the first and only time in his life, Pablo Picasso makes a speech: "I have a friend who ought to be here." He is "the greatest poet of the Spanish language and one of the greatest poets on earth, who has always taken the side of the unfortunate: Pablo Neruda, persecuted by the police in Chile, cornered like a dog," the famed painter declaims as the thunder of verse and canvas intersect.[i]

On this day in 1898 in Malolos, Philippines, the Filipino Military Academy was established. The school was set up to train officers in the revolutionary army of the Filipino Republic but it does not prosper: America invades the first republic in Asia three months later. It takes America over a decade before it finally crushes armed Filipino resistance. At least 250,000 Filipinos perish in the war between the US and the Philippines.[ii]

The regiment of Marvin B. Russell arrived in Manila Bay on October 25, 1900. Russell was a veteran of the Spanish-American War who rejoined the US army to take part in America's occupation of the nascent Philippine Republic. "[A]s we struggled through the jungles pursuing our elusive foe," wrote Russell in a letter to his homeland, "we grew to hate everyone, and sometimes we took our frustrations out by abusing hapless civilians who got in the Army's way."[iii]

On this day in 1929, American newspapers, bankers and businessmen spend the day and the entire weekend trying to assure the public that the US financial industry is stable and secure. On the same day the US stock market was lurching terminally, The Casa Loma Orchestra conducted by Glen Gray records "Happy Days Are Here Again."[iv]

From October 25 to October 26 in 1944, "the greatest naval battle in history" blazed and boomed across Surigao Strait in the Philippines.[v] Across the roiling waters the fleets of America and Japan lock horns. America emerges victorious and humbles the imperial Japanese forces. Years later, after extorting economic and military basing concessions from the Philippines in exchange for Philippine independence, the US rehabilitates the economy of Japan.[vi]

The child Sadako Sasaki, died on this day in 1955 at the age of twelve. Sadako was two when the atom bomb was dropped on her hometown of Hiroshima. She was 11 when she was diagnosed with what her city called "the atom bomb disease" - leukemia.

While hospitalized, Sadako's closest friend told her of a Japanese legend - if she folded a thousand paper cranes, the gods might grant her wish to be well again. Sadako folded medicine paper, newspapers, magazines and other scraps of paper her family and friends brought her. She folded and folded hundreds of cranes even as she watched friends and other people die in the hospital alongside her. One day Sadako realized her wish had changed. She no longer wished for her own health. "I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world," Sadako whispered to her cranes as she wished for a world without bombs and wars.

Sadako manages to fold only 644 cranes before she dies, but friends, classmates, and family fold for her the remaining 356 cranes. The message of Sadako is lifted by other cranes: a statue of Sadako is unveiled at Hiroshima Peace Park; another is erected in Seattle. Thousands upon thousands of paper cranes fly over from all over the world, the manifold wishes of children and adults soaring across borders and time.[vii]

On October 25, 1960, Lady Liberty pays a visit to Decatur, Georgia, USA. Martin Luther King, Jr. is held over on old traffic ticket charges and jailed. He is denied bail and sentenced to four months of hard labor the next day.

American author John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature on this day in 1962. "Literature," said Steinbeck in his acceptance speech, "was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tin-horn mendicants of low calorie despair . . . Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed . . . The ancient commission of the writer has not changed."[viii]

On this day in 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded. America is shaken. At a massive anti-war demonstration in Manhattan six months after it's founding, prominent Black Panther member Stokely Carmichael denounces the Vietnam war draft as "white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend land they stole from red people."[ix]

On October 25, 1981 150,000 participate in an anti-nuke protest in London. Across borders and time Sadako's paper cranes continue to fly.

On this day in 1983, America - the protector of the weak and foe of oppression - invades Grenada, a country whose population numbered only around 100,000.

"There is something of mortality about the smell of musty books," said Pablo Neruda. "It assaults the nostrils and strikes the rugged terrain of the soul, because it is the odor of oblivion, or buried memory."[x]

To live is to remember. To keep away the mildew from memory's manuscripts - this is the urgent task at hand.


NOTES:

[i] Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Century of the Wind, W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
[ii] "Keeping the Spirit of 1896 Alive," Onofre D. Corpuz, in Hector Santos, ed., Philippine Centennial Series, October 10, 1996. Adapted for the internet from a speech delivered by Corpuz on June 14, 1996 to the U.P. Alumni Council.
[iii] Letter of Marvin B. Russell Late member of Co. I, Thirty fourth, United States Volunteers. See The Arkansas News
[iv] From The Daily Bleed - a website that is often, as it self-description states, "a wake-up call that is better than boiled coffee." The site is managed by Bleedmeister David Brown and is freely produced by Recollection Used Books.
[v] From the Depart of Tourism website of the government of the Philippines.
[vi] "The narratives of friendship," Renato Redentor Constantino, Today, October 18, 2004.
[vii] Visit these two valuable sites for more information and for new ways to contribute world disarmament and peace: http://www.sadako.org/ and http://www.sadako.com/.
[viii] The Portable Steinbeck (Revised and Enlarged Edition), ed. Pascal Covici, Jr., Penguin Books, 1985.
[ix] Quoted by Arundhati Roy, in "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free," transcript of audio address in New York, May 13, 2003.
[x] "Odors of Homecoming," Pablo Neruda, Novedades, 1952, in Pablo Neruda, Passions and Impressions, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984.

THE MERCIES OF CHOICE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
October 11, 2004

"We know," wrote George Steiner in 1963, "that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." And what if history turned out differently and someone - or many - managed to hide the horror of the Holocaust? Who would have been the greater criminal? The perpetrators or those who covered up the deed? Good question.

America already had in its possession all the proof it needed to convict Japanese war criminals of waging biological warfare in the tribunals held in Tokyo just after the Second World War. Yet not one individual was charged in the trials with biological warfare crimes. [1]

It was called Japan's "Secret of Secrets" - a nightmare program of human experimentation that known to some as Unit 731, the name of the program's central headquarters near the city of Harbin in China.

From 1932 to 1945, Unit 731 carried out its ghastly work - mostly on Chinese peoples but also on Russians, Mongolians, Koreans, and prisoners of war from Britain, Australia and the US. Fortunately, Japan's inhuman warfare program was brought to a close when Japan was defeated. Sort of.

Led by the head of the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself, the American military gathered after the war a grisly river of evidence that showed in detail the work of Unit 731. After America's officials - led by MacArthur - promised the veterans of Unit 731 immunity from the Tokyo war crimes trial, an ocean of evidence flowed.

America acquired documents. US military personnel interviewing and interrogating Unit 731 members "received a flood of information," wrote the scholar Daniel Barenblatt. The information included "autopsy reports of Chinese and Russian vivisection victims, and thousands of slide samples of human tissues and germ warfare pathogens." Said Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, a microbiologist working for the US army and a member of MacArthur's Unit 731 investigative team, "The data came in waves. We could hardly keep up with it."[2]

America received testimonies. An April 29, 1946 affidavit submitted to American lawyers of the IPS titled "Certificate of Crimes of the Japanese Army" written by Hasane Hari, a Unit 731 program veteran: "the epidemic prevention unit outwardly maintained the health of soldiers as its mission, but actually manufactured germs of cholera, typhoid, bubonic plague [and] dysentery to be used to attack Chinese soldiers and civilians."

America received more and covered up more. Why? As MacArthur advised Washington: "Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful."

Inside Unit 731 laboratories, Japanese doctors prepared plague-infected people to be cut up alive "so that the unit could study the progress and potency of their biological weapons. Samples removed from the prisoners were used to produce more bacteria."

"The first time, my legs were shaking so badly I could hardly stand up," recounted Yoshio Shinozuka of his first live vivisection. Shinozuka knew the person on the operating table. "I'd seen him a few times," he said. "He seemed like an intellectual. He wasn't even 30. But by the time he was brought in to the dissection room, he was so black with the plague that he looked like a different person. He was clearly on the verge of death."[3]

Another man used a stethoscope to make sure the victim was still alive and then assisted a third man, who quickly but methodically cut the victim open and removed his organs.

"We were told, said Shinozuka, "that it was crucial to extract the specimens before putrefaction had time to set in and contaminate our research . . . We called [our] victims 'logs.' We didn't want to think of them as people. We didn't want to admit that we were taking lives. So we convinced ourselves that what we were doing was like cutting down a tree.

The consequences of America's choice of silence of course meant a different fate for many. "In a just and rational world," Barenblatt tells us in his book, The Plague of Humanity - a work of immense pain and impeccable scholarship - "one would expect the physicians of Unit 731 to serve prison terms or be executed for their genocidal atrocities, as were many of the Nazi criminals. Yet in the years after 1945, they headed not for a courtroom dock to face their victims, or a jail cell, but instead for plush, influential positions in the dean's offices of major universities or the corporate boardrooms of pharmaceutical companies."[4]

But not all Unit 731 veterans chose the nourishments of delusion and forgetting. Some preferred the oblivion of suicide. A few, like Yoshio Shinozuka, chose to devote the remainder of their days to making amends, despite knowing that he "will never be forgiven."

Shinozuka has testified on behalf of his Chinese victims and has written a book for schoolchildren. In 1998, he tried to speak at peace conferences in the United States and Canada - but immigration inspectors turned him away as a war criminal. It is a label he accepts.

"It took me a long time to get beyond the excuse that I was just following orders," Shinozuka tells those who wish to listen. "I was doing what I was told. And I might very well have been killed had I disobeyed. But what we did was so terrible that I should have refused, even if that meant my own death. But I didn't do that."

Shinozuka has visited China often in recent years and has been back to Unit 731's former headquarters, which is now a museum. "The Chinese have been very generous with me," said Shinozuka. "They tell me that I, too, am a victim."

Shinozuka has not granted himself the clemency of forgetfulness. And perhaps because of this his fate is no longer indentured to the evil he once nurtured in his heart. An evil he now feeds daily with two poison pills called memory and conscience.


NOTES:

[1] "The past as prologue," Renato Redentor Constantino, Today, October 4, 2004. Can be considered the first part of this article but was really written separately. Both delve on different themes.
[2] A plague upon humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ warfare Operation, Daniel Barenblatt, 2004, HarperCollins. Really as I described the book - a painful read, tremendously interesting, written with impeccable scholarship.
[3] "Horrors of war haunt old soldier," China Daily, September 18, 2004.
[4] There was another more public trial, Barenblatt tells us, held in 1949 in the Soviet city of Khabarovsk - one which actually bore results. According to Barenblatt, "twelve Japanese bio-war complicit officials were convicted" in proceedings that could not be considered mere show trials. In the same year, when the Soviet newspaper Izvestia reported the guilty verdicts of the Khabarovsk tribunal and called for the leader of Unit 731, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, "to be apprehended and tried by US occupation forces in Japan as the ringleader of the secret Japanese program," Gen. MacArthur's office in Tokyo "denounced both the Khabarovsk trial and Izvestia's charges of Japanese biological warfare and a U.S. cover-up as false communist propaganda."

THE PAST AS PROLOGUE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnnews.com
October 4, 2004

So many good wars launched. So many wars-to-end-all-wars concluded. And yet.

When will respite come? Where will it come from? Difficult to say.

Dr. Shiro Ishii was born in 1892 to a wealthy family of landed aristocrats in Chiyoda Mura, a farming village near Tokyo. Charismatic and driven, Dr. Ishii towered over most people. He was five feet, ten inches tall, had a booming voice and possessed "soaring intelligence."

Ishii was the architect and leader of Imperial Japan's biological and germ warfare program. A program known to a few today as Unit 731 - the name of the nightmare's central headquarters near the city of Harbin in Manchuria.

Unit 731 was his government's "Secret of Secrets," as Ishii himself described the program - one under which many of the best and brightest doctors of Japan's medical and biological research community applied their considerable talents. Talents employed in running an assembly line of human experimentation "in the pursuit of scientific goals completely untethered to morality."

From 1932 to 1945, Japan carried out its biological warfare program with the same horrific efficiency that marked the work of German Nazi doctors. Unit 731 sought to determine the efficacy of the germ and biological arsenal that Japan was developing, using humans as lab rats.

Ishii and his doctors administered tainted vaccine injections to children in selected villages; poisoned food was handed out to hungry people by smiling Japanese soldiers and physicians. Different strains of pathogenic germs such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid were bred and tested on humans alongside the development of tools with which the disease microbes could be let loose.

Virulent strains of malaria "were injected into [captured] Americans suffering from beri-beri and tuberculosis patients were injected with strange concoctions of acid mixed with dextrose, ether, or blood plasma." The objective, recounts the scholar Daniel Barenblatt, in his soul-searing work, The Plague of Humanity, "was to develop medicinal treatments, using Americans as expendable guinea pigs." Australian and British prisoners of war were also subjected to unspeakable pain. Of course, many did not make it.

While Unit 731's ghastly experimentation smote as well the peoples of Russia, Mongolia and Korea, it was the Chinese who suffered the brunt of the madness. Millions of bubonic plague-infected fleas were raised and released aerially on unsuspecting Chinese villages. Feathers contaminated with anthrax were released over population centers by Japanese air squadrons while on the ground, disease-carrying horses, dogs, rats and birds were dispersed and made to mingle with livestock and humans.

And on the doctors of Unit 731 diligently worked, tallying the effects of their creations by performing vivisections on prisoners, recording deformities, and putting together a macabre roster of distress, torment and death.

Non-germ warfare tests were also performed on Unit 731's prisoners: animal-to-human blood transfusions, for instance. And frostbite experiments where limbs of live humans were exposed to extreme frost, struck with a stick and broken off and reattached to places where they were originally attached - and other places.

It is estimated by scholars that at least 20,000 people were killed inside Unit 731's human experiment prisons in China. And outside, well, it was the same hell.

May 1942: a cholera epidemic created by Unit 731 in Yunnan province kills over 200,000 people. Three months later, another 200,000 die in Shandong province as a result of Unit 731's germ warfare. In the Zhekiang province city of Quzhou alone, over 50,000 perish from bubonic plague and cholera. And so on and so on and so on.

How did it all end? As typical stories go, the good side eventually prevails over the butchers and the malevolent: Japan's imperial drive is defeated and Unit 731's designs are discovered and trounced - its army of ghoulish doctors and the infamous Shiro Ishii captured, tried and executed. That should be a nice story but reality is not typical and the story of Unit 731 is not a typical story. "Few," said Goethe, "have the imagination for reality."

Within months after World War II ended US army officials - acting upon the instructions of the very head of the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur - were already in Japan meeting - over dinner - with Shiro Ishii and other veterans of Unit 731. The Americans desired the knowledge possessed by Ishii and his colleagues. Ishii promised the Americans the full set of keys to his secret kingdom if ...

In return for immunity "for myself, my superiors, and subordinates," Ishii replied explicitly in one of the meetings, "I would like to be hired by the U.S. as a biological warfare expert. In the preparation for the war with Russia, I can give [America] the advantage of my 20 years research and experience."

In a radio message to Washington on May 6, 1947, MacArthur urged the combined US military and State Department group which supervised occupation policy in Japan to give - in writing - immunity to Ishii and all others involved the Japanese military's germ warfare and human experiments program.

"Additional data possibly including some statements from Ishii," said MacArthur, "probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'war crimes evidence' ... complete story to include plans and theories of Ishii and superiors, probably can be obtained by documentary immunity to Ishii and associate."

MacArthur advised Washington: "Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful."

On December 27, 1949 - against the mountain of evidence that American forces had gathered since the surrender of Japan - evidence in the form of reports, documents, photographs and testimonies from victims who lived through the ordeal and confessions of captured Japanese soldiers and physicians - MacArthur's headquarters announced to the world "that the Japanese had done some experimentation with animals but that there was no evidence they ever had used human beings."[1]

At the Tokyo war crimes trial, which the press had dubbed "the Nuremberg Trial of the East," the Americans suppressed evidence concerning the atrocities of Unit 731 and "not one individual was charged in the Japan hearings with biological or chemical warfare crimes." Thus did thousands of Unit 731 doctors enjoy the rest of their lives - some more prosperous than others, some heading Japan's leading universities; others leading Japanese conglomerates.

Crimes against humanity on top of genocidal deeds. Crimes that allowed the US government to use Ishii's secrets against its enemies, such as the "systematic spreading of smallpox, cholera and plague germs over North Korea" which, during the period in which it was unleashed, "shocked and horrified the entire world."[2]

Where else has the American government used Ishii's secrets? And who else has had access? Fifty years is a long time. Did not America invade Iraq to protect the world "from the potential horror of Saddam Hussein's supposed germ warfare capability?"[3] Stuff happens, said Donald Rumsfeld. Will Ishii's weapons ever be used again? Where? By who?

Hard to answer these things. Painful to contemplate. Yesterday may have already brought whatever it is that tomorrow was never meant to bring.


NOTES:
[1] A plague upon humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ warfare Operation, Daniel Barenblatt, 2004, HarperCollins.
[2] The quote is from US journalist John W. Powell who covered the Korean War and who was later charged with thirteen counts of sedition by the US government for publishing his reports of the American military's germ warfare us in Korea. In Barenblatt's Plague Upon Humanity.
[3] "Japan's Genocide: Review of Daniel Barenblatt's A Plague Upon Humanity," Richard Garrett, Asian Review of Books, March 3, 2004.

HARVEST TIME AGAIN FOR RC
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
September 15, 2004

He retired first in his mid-thirties - a successful businessman whose goal was to achieve financial independence early so he could serve his country and family and live the way he wanted to.

The next retirement came when he already had three grandchildren, a quadruple bypass, and the kind of public prominence that could only be bestowed by the singularly belligerent, mordant, street-smart brand of activism he wielded against the Philippine government.

Twice he has retired and both instances he met on his own terms: he desired it, he looked forward to it, he willed it; and one day it was in place. He lived the words of the English novelist John Galsworthy, who said that "if you do not think about the future, you cannot have one."

For friend and foe alike, his surliness was legendary. On the occasion of the State of the Nation presidential address almost a decade ago and marching towards the Batasang Pambansa at the helm of a demonstration numbering a hundred thousand, he was warned by the Secretary of Justice in a live radio news program that though they were free to march, freedom of expression and assembly had limits. The warning he took as an incentive.

He thanked the secretary rather politely on the air and once off the air he proceeded to march with his group through five menacing police barricades each manned by water cannons and fully armored, truncheon-wielding crowd dispersal police units. At the last barricade, bruised and bloodied, he went straight to the line of shields, thrust his head right in front of the helmeted police and pulled the truncheon of a policeman and dared the policeman to hit him on the head as other policemen had done in the barricades they had just passed. The policeman stared at him, completely befuddled by the activist's impudence, and refused to use his truncheon. No other truncheon was used again that day.

Another time, just days after his heart surgery and still weak and recovering in his hospital room, he asked to be transferred to another area after the cooling system in the intensive care ward conked out.

Over an hour later and after many unheeded requests, still in the same room and already sweating and worried he may develop pneumonia - but actually more infuriated that his requests had been ignored - the patient whose chest was cut open just days ago goes up a flight of stairs, walks straight to the admitting section in his hospital gown, lifts and hurls a couple of computers to the floor and tells the shocked personnel politely "Do I have your attention? I need a place where the aircon works otherwise my health may deteriorate." He refuses to leave the room, which he found quite cool. Orderlies swiftly bring in a hospital bed and he tucks himself in and in a minute is snoring in the admitting section.

Of the many vital moments in his life, the battles with the powers that be he enjoyed the most; the higher they were, the more he relished the political skirmishes. He always said this to his only son - always respect your opponents - a stance he combined with trademark savvy, contagious optimism, maddening meticulousness, moral purpose and epic stubbornness.

National Security Adviser Joe Almonte and President Fidel Ramos disrespected him once by underestimating him and they paid dearly for it when they attempted to ban the Asia Pacific Conference on East Timor (APCET) he had led in organizing in 1994 - a watershed assembly, it would later turn out, which amplified the plight and cause of East Timor globally and helped accelerate the independence of the newest country in Asia today.

He was alone mostly in his doggedness - more so when signals from the Philippine government that they disapproved of APCET and did not wish to upset Jakarta and the despotic ASEAN consensus of silence became more ominous and increasingly threatening - signals which finally led to the Ramos administration announcing their intention to ban the East Timor conference. "Well, we will defy the ban," the activist replied publicly.

When sections of the Philippine media came out in support of the Ramos ban and condemned the activist's hard-headedness, the activist became even more determined to hold the conference. And thus earned the respect of some in the media, including a national daily by the name of TODAY, which had just begun to publish that year.

That Filipino journalists "should join the jubilation over the . . . ban on the APCET conference only shows we do not deserve the freedom and rights that groups like APCET helped to give us," wrote TODAY in its May 14, 2004 editorial titled "Constantino correct".

"What RC Constantino and the other APCET organizers put together was the sort of conference that all decent and intelligent men and women, and all honest writers, should support," the editorial continued. "The obligation of every journalist is to stand alongside RC Constantino in exposing and denouncing a brutality that cannot - unless you are an animal - find any justification or mitigation in reasons of state . . . the moral rationale for the conference is unimpeachable."

But the ban remained. And so did RC Constantino's defiance of the ban. As the East Timor meet neared its end and it was clear they had been outflanked, Ramos administration officials threw in the towel. By June 5, on the front page of the Manila Times - similar to the front pages of other newspapers - a photo above the front page story reporting the successful conclusion of the APCET meet showed a beaming RC carrying his first grandchild, Ia, on his left arm and holding in his right hand the gavel that would end the conference.

RC Constantino turns 60 today - a warrior in retirement (try as he might, he cannot shed his warrior ways) and an accomplished full-time lolo (grandfather), the chairman of the board of a prestigious language school and a generous adviser to the many who continue to seek his counsel - through text messages, phone calls, lunches and dinners and, as before, through visits to Panay Avenue.

"Old age, to the unlearned, is winter," a Yiddish proverb goes, and "to the learned, it is harvest time." RC continues to harvest what life has to offer, at 60 years of age, even as he continues to play Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo each noon on his Mac with his six-year old grandson Rio Renato, merienda frenzies with his other grandchildren, the rambunctious affections of his children, the unfettered love of his mother, the graceful Letizia, and the extraordinary love of Dudi - nurturing mother, woman, wife, nationalist and writer, whose dreams RC passionately shares.

Happy birthday, Pa, from a grateful son. An American, President Theodore Roosevelt, captured best the example you have so generously shared to so many:

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again because there is no effort without error and shortcomings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who, at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with the timid and cold souls who know neither victory or defeat."[i]

NOTES:
[i] Isyu, August 14, 1996.

NARRATIVES OF FOLLY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
September 13, 2004

We continue to live in interesting times where "the young," wrote Decoly, "delude themselves about their future; the old folks about their past."

Last May 6, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution "which, in effect, authorized a 'pre-emptive' attack on Iran. The vote was 376-3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one commentator, 'once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of American power.'"[1]

It is unthinkable for the superpower - and its believers - to leave Iranians to decide their own fate. The ignorant are taken in by tacitly racist reasoning: an oppressed people cannot liberate themselves without the help of the empire's humanitarian weapons of mass destruction. The learned espouse imperial intervention for convictions they secretly harbor. Convictions nakedly expressed by one of the greatest tribunes of Western civilization.

Referring to Palestinians before the Peel Commission of Inquiry in 1937 - at the height of the British colonial offensive which eventually crushed the first Palestinian intifada - Winston Churchill declared: "I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right, I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."[2]

Iran wasn't always ruled by an anti-American, virulently fundamentalist theocracy. Once upon a time, Iran had a parliament - and a real prime minister who was actually chosen and embraced by his people. Physically frail due to his advanced age, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was nonetheless a giant of a man who insisted to Iranians - and the world - that democracy can and should serve, feed, educate and clothe one's people.

He was a charismatic and driven man. At the pinnacle of his popularity, the name Mossadegh stood for moral purpose, independence and Iranian dignity. But dignity, moral purpose and independence are words that imperial powers do not always look upon with favor. Especially when the leader who lives the words leads a country overflowing with oil. And so the dignified man had to go.

"Neither by trusteeship nor by contract will we turn over to foreigners the right to exploit our natural oil resources," Mossadegh once wrote in a speech delivered to the UN Security Council in 1951, the year he was chosen by Time magazine - over Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower - as its Man of the Year. A full year almost to the day before Mossadegh expelled the last citizens of Britain - the erstwhile colonial tormentor of Iran - and less than two years before Mossadegh himself was ousted by a coup d'état sponsored by the US government, which despised Mossadegh's independence and craved Iran's oil, a coup supported by a humiliated British government, the erstwhile colonial tormentor of Iran.

Days after Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated in January 1953, the American ambassador to Tehran, Loy Henderson, "began contacting Iranians he thought might be interested in working to overthrow Mossadegh." The goal: to foment unrest in the streets of Tehran, destabilize the Mossadegh government and establish the pretext for a coup, which came close to exactly what took place in Iran.

The mob that "was decisive in the overthrow [of Mossadegh] was a mercenary mob," said Richard Cottam, who was on the Operation Ajax staff in Washington. "It had no ideology, and that mob was paid with American dollars."[3] Dollars that totaled, depending on which expenses are counted, "anywhere between $100,000 to $20 million."

After the coup, an international oil consortium was set up to ransack Iran's main resource. Five American companies took up 40 percent of the consortium, with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which would later change its name to British Petroleum, or BP) - the company with which Britain previously plundered Iran's wealth - comprising another 40 percent. Lesser vultures Royal Dutch/Shell and Compagnie Française de Petroles formed the remainder of the consortium, which "agreed to share its profits with Iran on a fifty-fifty basis but not to open its books to Iranian auditors or to allow Iranians onto its board of directors."

Operation Ajax bought the American government 25 years of stable relations - with the Iranian potentate of Mohammad Reza Shah. On the 25th year of the Shah's brutal reign, outrage spilled over and forced the despised Iranian monarch to flee. Straight into the waiting arms of the United States government.

No one else then thought this conclusion possible - except, of course, the people of Iran.

In 1977, two years before the Shah was overthrown, the celebrated war reporter Robert Fisk and Ed Cody of the Associated Press had driven into a Shia village in war-torn Lebanon "to find the usual tea-drinking Palestinians sitting in a field beside the main road, their officer lecturing them about the need to move their mortar positions every 24 hours." Lebanon was then the prime battleground between the Israeli army and Palestinian fighters.

The journalists noticed a gunman in the group who seemed different from the others. The gunman "wore a coal-black scarf - not a kuffiah - around his neck. And he appeared to speak no Arabic. His English, however, was almost perfect. The gunman asked Fisk and Cody to translate what his officer was saying to him. Cody, Fisk recounted, asked the gunman why he spoke no Arabic. "Because I am not an Arab. I am from Iran," said the gunman, who grinned at Fisk and Cody. "I am from the opposition in Iran. I have come to learn here how to fight. We understand a common cause with our Palestinian brothers. With their help, we can learn to destroy the Shah." Fisk and Cody held back their laughter. An Iranian training in Lebanon to overthrow (what was then) the most formidable dictatorship in the Middle East? Yeah right, thought the journalists. "And, of course," Fisk would later recount in his soul-searing book, Pity the Nation, "we were wrong."[4]

But no one, not even Iranians, would be able to predict the events set in motion by the overthrow of the Shah. Such as the 1979 hostage-taking of Americans at the US embassy by panic-stricken Iranians who feared the Shah would be re-installed by the US government; the takeover by fundamentalist Islamic clerics of the Iranian revolution; Iraq's invasion of Iran; the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan; and "the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

All arguably connected and traceable, according to Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men, the gripping account of the US-engineered overthrow of Mossadegh, to Operation Ajax.

The blood of hundreds of thousands spilled; an immeasurable number of lives lost - and for what? So that a has-been empire and a hyper-empire could slake its thirst for power and oil?


NOTES:
[1] "The warlords of America," John Pilger, The New Statesman, September 8, 2004.
[2] The clash of fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, Tariq Ali, 2002, Verso.
[3] All the Shah's men: An American coup and the roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
[4] Pity the Nation: the abduction of Lebanon, Robert Fisk, 2002, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books.

NOTHING NEW IN THE WORLD
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY, abs/cbnNEWS.com
September 6, 2004

"Memory says, 'I did that,'" Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote. "Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields."

Three years ago in America, on September 11, airplanes fell from the sky and thousands died. Countless numbers mourned the mass murder. Countless mourn still. On the same day 31 years ago, the sky fell in Chile when the democratically-elected Allende government was overthrown in a bloody coup staged by the American government. Who mourns the Chilean sky?

Remembering is a political act, wrote Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. "Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny."[1]

In 1953, the United States engineered a coup in Iran which ousted the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh - an Iranian colossus who happened to live in a frail old man's body.

The Iranian giant's commitment to social reform was unrivaled in his country's history while his towering presence in the international arena as a voice of poor countries presaged the era of giants such as Kwame Nkrumah, Sukarno and Patrice Lumumba.

During Mossadegh's time, Iranian peasants were freed from forced labor in their landlords' estates, factory owners were ordered to pay benefits to sick and injured workers, and unemployment compensation was established. The giant caused twenty percent of the money landlords received in rent to be placed in a fund to pay for development projects like pest control, rural housing, and public baths.

The giant supported women's rights and defended religious freedom and allowed courts and universities to function freely. In addition, the colossus was known even by his enemies, as "scrupulously honest and impervious to the corruption that pervaded Iranian politics."

But above all, the giant was independent. Too independent. Mossadegh had thrown out the British, nationalized the Iranian oil industry in order that Iranians may benefit first from their own resources, and was intent on implementing further sweeping social reforms. And so one day in 1953 - when America still enjoyed the affections of the Iranian people - the US government decided that Mossadegh should not rule for long. And it schemed and schemed and schemed.

Code-named Operation Ajax and designed, hatched and led by Kermit Roosevelt, a key CIA operative and a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, the American-orchestrated coup toppled Mossadegh and forever "reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East and the world. [The coup] restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne," allowing the monarch to impose a murderous 25-year tyranny which claimed the lives of thousands of Iranians.

The US agents who had assembled in the American embassy compound in Tehran as soon as the success of the coup was ensured were "full of jubilation, celebration, and occasional whacks on the back as one or the other of us was suddenly overcome with enthusiasm," recalled Kermit Roosevelt in his book Countercoup: The struggle for the control of Iran - a book which came out ironically in 1979, the year of the American hostage crisis in Iran.

Jubilation and celebration. Maybe it's all about perspective. Maybe not.

Where the US government "saw a glorious day," exiled Iranian intellectual Sasan Fayazmanesh would write 50 years later, "we saw a day of infamy." Where American officials "wished the day had never ended, we wished it had never begun." Where the United States "saw a dazzling picture of his majesty's restoration to power, we saw grotesque pictures of a brutal dictatorship, informants, dungeons, torture, executions."[2]

"My only crime," Mossadegh would recall after his ouster, "is that I nationalized the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth" - referring to Iran's former tormentor, Britain. But Mossadegh had also committed another 'crime' - one with far more grave consequences: he took no notice of the fact that America had already overtaken Britain in the global imperial race - an America ruled by a government that despised his independence even as it coveted his country's oil.[3]

But what goes around comes around. There is always a day of reckoning.

"It is a reasonable argument," argued an American foreign policy journal, "that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup's legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the U.S. embassy." Hostages were taken by panic-stricken Iranians who feared the Shah would be re-installed by the US.

"In the back of everybody's mind hung the suspicion that, with the admission of the Shah to the United States, the countdown for another coup d'etat had begun," one of the hostage-takers would recall years after the incident. "Such was to be our fate again, we were convinced, and it would be irreversible. We now had to reverse the irreversible."

The hostage crisis, asserts New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer in his book All the Shah's Men - a brilliant reconstruction of the American coup - precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran and helped consolidate the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein "while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran . . . Can anybody say the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was inevitable? Or did it only become so once the aspirations of the Iranian people were temporarily expunged in 1953?"

"It is not far-fetched," states Kinzer, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's oppressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

Outrageous? Not entirely, so long as pride yields to memory.

"There is nothing new in the world," said Harry Truman, "except the history you do not know."


NOTES:

[1] "The Bush Crusade," James Carroll, tomdispatch.com, September 3, 2004.
[2] "The coup, 50 years after: what Kermit didn't say: in memory of August 19, 1953," Sasan Fayazmanesh, Counterpunch, August 15, 2003.
[3] All the Shah's men: An American coup and the roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003.
[4] The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity, Tariq Ali, Verso, 2002.

LESSONS FROM VENEZUELA
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
August 23, 2004

The result of the August 15 referendum, said Jose Clavijo, the affable and articulate Charge de Affaires of the Venezuelan Embassy in the Philippines, "was not totally unexpected, even though the margin of victory was larger than what many predicted." [1]

The question posed by the Venezuelan referendum was simple enough and answerable either by a 'yes' or a 'no': should the mandate of the Chavez administration be revoked? Of the 14 million registered voters, 8.6 million turned out to cast their vote. The final tally: a 59-percent embrace of the Chavez government and its radical social program.

There can be no doubt, asserted Clavijo, a furtive smile forming on his face. "The mandate of President Hugo Chavez has been unequivocally affirmed." Likewise, the Venezuelan brand of participatory democracy, where the ballot seems only to be a first step.

Elected in 1998 and re-elected under the new constitution in 2000 to serve till 2007, Chavez knew that the referendum was but the latest in a long list of schemes hatched by the alliance between the Venezuelan oligarchy and the U.S. government to overthrow him. According to the new Venezuelan Constitution that was re-written in 1999 at the behest of Chavez, and which created the possibility of activating a recall referendum for elected officials, if 'yes' had prevailed elections would have been held 30 days after the referendum.

But Chavez had abundant confidence in direct democracy: he put his trust in the people by empowering them. "And they responded generously."

"I am pleased to be the first president to submit himself to the people's judgment halfway through his term and to be ratified" in office," said a triumphant President Chavez after the result was announced. Taunting the Bush administration, which had openly backed a failed coup against him in 2002, and using terminology from baseball, his country's national sport, Chavez likened his win to a homerun. "[T]he ball must have fallen right in the middle of the White House," said Chavez. "It's a present for Bush." [2]

Rather than unseat or weaken Chavez, which was the intention of the opposition parties driven by the Venezuelan elite - which enjoys a near monopoly ownership of the country's media, the referendum fortified the standing of Chavez and the possibilities of sweeping social change that his government signifies within and far beyond the Bolivarian Republic.

For many, the nature of the change that Chavez is driving has become the central reason behind the sustained attempts to undermine the Chavez government. The disparity of agendas is glaring. The opposition continues to promise, for instance, a return to free market economic policies, a platform welcomed by international financial leaders and institutions like the International Monetary Fund; Chavez is opposed to it.[3]

"We are building an economy at the service of human beings," said Nora Castaneda, the president of Banca Mujer (Women's Development Bank), of the Chavez administration's goals, "not human beings at the service of the economy."

For the first time in Venezuela's history, government authority has been established decisively over how the Venezuelan oil industry - the fifth largest exporter in the world - is to be run and for whose benefit. Oil money is now re-channeled towards financing immeasurable employment, health, education and literacy missions throughout the country for the destitute of Venezuela, specifically for women.

At least 65 percent of Venezuelan households are headed by women and the Chavez government during the drafting of the 2000 constitution ensured that this fact was reflected in Venezuela's framing document. Among it's progressive provisions, the constitution recognizes women's unwaged caring work as economically productive, entitling housewives to social security.

It was no surprise, Selma James noted, that in 2002 women of African and indigenous descent led the masses who descended from the hills to reverse the elite-sponsored and U.S.-backed putsch which briefly ousted Chavez, "thereby saving their constitution, their president, their democracy, their revolution."[4]

Over 250,000 children now have access to secondary education - children "whose social status excluded them from this privilege during the ancien regime." In poor districts, 11,000 neighborhood clinics have been established, the health budget has tripled and 10,000 Cuban doctors have been fielded to boost health care services in impoverished areas. There is also an ongoing campaign to provide citizenship to thousands of long-term immigrants.

"Chavez has based himself on the pueblo protagonico - the grassroots as protagonists," James adds. The iconoclastic Chavez "knows that the changes he was elected to make can only be achieved with, and protected by, popular participation."

And yet, despite his belligerent attitude towards the Bush administration, despite his glaring differences with the U.S. government concerning Latin American hemispheric economic integration, despite his government's openly expressed dissenting position on geopolitical issues such as the war on Iraq, the U.S. government continues to do business with the Chavez government and import 14 percent of its oil - equivalent to 1.5 million barrels per day, which was the average even before the election of Chavez - from Venezuela.

Once perceived by his neighbors as "a bit of an oddball," Chavez "now appears more like a Latin American statesman. Up and down the continent he has become the man to watch."[5]

"I don't believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don't accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that must be revised. Reality is telling us that everyday," said Pres. Chavez in an interview with the eminent intellectual Tariq Ali.[6]

"Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless society?" Chavez continued. "I don't think so. But if I'm told that because of that reality you can't do anything to help the poor . . . then I say 'We part company'. I will never accept that there can be no redistribution of wealth in society. Our upper classes don't even like paying taxes. That's one reason why they hate me. We said 'You must pay your taxes'. I believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing . . . That position often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse . . . Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only a millimeter, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias."

That is why he won, Tariq Ali concludes.

Obviously so.


NOTES:
[1] Interview by the author with Jose Clavijo, Charge de Affaires, Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Makati City, Philippines, August 19, 2004.
[2] "International observers ratify Chavez's triumph in referendum," Humberto Marquez, IPS, August 16, 2004.
[3] "Opposition unveils 'free market' program," Roberto Jorquera, Green Left Weekly, July 21, 2004.
[4] "An antidote to apathy," Selma James, The Guardian, August 13, 2004.
[5] "Why Hugo Chavez is heading for a stunning victory," Richard Gott, The Guardian-UK, August 7, 2004.
[6] "The importance of Hugo Chavez: why he crushed the oligarchs," Tariq Ali, Counterpunch.org, August 16, 2004.

ANTIDOTE TO DESPAIR
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
August 2, 2004

Individually embattled, they swayed and danced together and celebrated.

In truth, the July 26 gathering was a menagerie of disquiet. Each Filipino who arrived that fine evening at the Quezon City watering hole called Conspiracy carried a roster of personal concerns in their hearts. But as is often the case, when called upon, the heart finds a way to expand beyond breaking point in order to embrace a few more causes.

Answering the call that night were businesspeople alarmed at the steep decline of the country's economy and workers facing mass lay-offs; feminists outraged over the assault of the Arroyo administration on the reproductive rights of women and couples, and artists, intellectuals and activists threatened by hectares of social ills.

In reality, the occasion chosen for the activity that night was for most Filipinos an arcane event, esoteric even for many of those who attended the activity: the 51st anniversary of the attack on the Moncada Barracks - an armed push by a determined band of Cubans that launched the six year struggle which overthrew the US-backed government of Fulgencio Batista, the dictator of Cuba.

But those who showed up did not exactly join the event to commemorate the Moncada Barracks assault and some did not exactly go there to register their agreement with Cuba's efforts to construct socialism.

The only thing on display that evening was the mambo of camaraderie - the extension of support by crisis-ridden Filipinos to Cuba - a small sister nation reeling from the hooliganism of imperial America. An extension of moral and financial sustenance by citizens of an economically distraught country to the people of Cuba who have accomplished much despite the inhuman 45-year economic blockade which the US government continues to impose. Illiteracy was eradicated a long time ago in Cuba, where the net primary school enrollment for girls and boys reached 100 percent in 1997, where the ratio of primary school pupils for every Cuban teacher ranks as high as Sweden, where the ratio of 5.3 doctors per 1,000 people ranks the highest in the world, where enough anti-retroviral medicines are produced, according to the BBC, to supply the country's AIDS patients, and where infant mortality rates are lower than US rates.[1] To cite a few trifling examples.

On through the night they swayed and danced in a celebration of defiance, with male democrats and activists doing most of the swaying, perhaps intimidated by the graceful feminist souls dancing to the fever-inducing music of Bo Razon's band. So much is freely offered, a saying goes, to anyone with eyes to see.

Zelda Zablan, spry icon of the University of the Philippines Population Institute and the spirited Mercy Fabros of Woman Health Philippines were on the dance floor the longest, followed by the graceful poet Mara Llanot, dance instructor and part-time Philippine history luminary Maris Diokno, and Princess Nemenzo, who danced a bit but applauded the loudest and smiled the widest. Young souls all.

The garden place Conspiracy was a jam-packed house and its main serving never came close to running out: solidarity, the antidote to adversity and despair.

The same spirit of generosity that drove a hundred animated citizens of East Timor - the world's newest nation, one still reeling from the genocidal Suharto-instigated occupation - to take part in the international day of protest against the war on Iraq on February 15, 2003.[2]

"There is no moral principle in [the] current desire to overthrow Saddam Hussein when [the governments of the US, the UK and Australia] felt no compulsion to overthrow Suharto, who was at least as bloody and brutal as Hussein," said the statement read in Tetum and English at the embassies of the US, the UK and Australia by East Timorese demonstrators marching with drums and music peacefully through the capital Dili.

"Suharto's dictatorship was eventually ousted by the Indonesian people, who accomplished 'regime change' through largely peaceful means. The people of East Timor made our own 'regime change' through the Popular Consultation," the East Timorese protesters implored. "The Indonesian invasion of this country resulted in massive civilian casualties and destruction. Yet, during 24 years of illegal occupation, neither East Timor's resistance nor any foreign government advocated invading Indonesia or attacking Indonesian civilians. The Indonesian people, like the East Timorese, were victims of Suharto, not to be punished for his crimes."

"After 25 years of war, the people of East Timor want peace not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. East Timor is a small and new nation, but we know quite a lot about the death and destruction that come with war, and we don't want to see similar destruction anywhere . . . Human life is too precious to be wasted for political or economic profit."[3]

"No War, No Racism!", "Keta Ataka Iraq" (Don't attack Iraq), "No blood for oil!" said their placards. For the survivors of genocide, the blows to Iraq were blows to East Timor as well. And so they swayed and danced as they marched through Dili and distributed solidarity, the antidote to war.

We must begin to live together as brothers and sisters, Martin Luther King, Jr. once said. Or we can perish together as fools.


NOTES:
[1] "Learn from Cuba, says World Bank," Jim Lobe, IPS, Washington, April 30, 2001. "Cuba leads the way in HIV fight," BBC News Online, February 17, 2003. "Vaccine May Open Window in US Blockade," 29 Jul 1999, IGC News Desk, Patricia Grogg, IPS, July 28, 1999.
[2] "East Timorese People Demonstrate Against Impending War in Iraq; World’s newest nation participates in global protest for peace," February 15, 2003.
[3] Statement by East Timorese and Indonesia citizens organizations presented to the embassies of the United States, United Kingdom and Australian in Dili, East Timor, on the occasion of the International Day Against the War in Iraq, February 15, 2003.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF FORGETTING
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
July 26, 2004 

"We love your adherence to democratic principle and to the democratic processes," said George H.W. Bush to Ferdinand Marcos as he raised his glass in a toast to the Philippine dictator during his visit to Manila in 1981.[1]  From the beginning of the Marcos dictatorship until its end, the US government persisted in fondling the Filipino tyrant (who fondled America back).

But we are of course expected to pretend that this never happened.

We are not supposed to remember that the American Chamber of Commerce described the imposition of martial rule in the Philippines in 1972 as a "heaven-sent relief" and we are expected to forget that, after martial law was declared, the same august Chamber wished Marcos "every success in your endeavor to restore peace and order, business confidence, economic growth and the well-being of the Filipino people."[2]

We are not supposed to remember that, two years before Marcos inflicted martial law on Filipinos, US investments in the Philippines stood at $16.3 million; and that by 1981, the year of the Bush toast to the Filipino tyrant, US investments stood at $920 million.[3]

We are expected to forget the 1965 -1966 Indonesian bloodbath - the slaughter of a million Indonesians perpetrated by a vile gang of Indonesian generals backed by America.  A culling that overthrew a government that the US government disliked.  A slaughter that midwifed the three-decade dictatorship of the Indonesian despot Suharto.

We are not supposed to remember that during the carnage, the US government had supplied Suharto and his generals lists containing the names of those America wanted slaughtered.  "It was a big help to the army," said Robert J. Martens, a political officer of the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, of the 1965-1966 butchery.  Suharto and his thugs "probably killed a lot of people and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands but that's not all bad.  There's a time when you have to strike hard at the decisive moment."

"We were getting a good account in Jakarta of who was being picked up," said Joseph Lazarsky, deputy CIA station chief in Jakarta.  "The army had a 'shooting list' of about 4,000 or 5,000 people.  They didn't have enough goon squads to zap them all, and some individuals were valuable for interrogation . . . We knew what they were doing . . . Suharto and his advisers said, if you keep them alive, you have to feed them."

"The US is generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the [Indonesian] army is doing," said the American Ambassador in Jakarta, Marshall Green, of the killings.[4]  But we are not supposed to remember these things.

We are expected to forget about the Iraqi coup of 1963.  A coup that took place four years after a massive public demonstration attended by half a million Iraqis had demanded working class leadership in Iraq.  A coup that took place two years after the government of Abdul Karim-Qasim attempted to implement socio-economic reforms that included increasing taxes on the rich, the introduction of inheritance taxes, rent controls, price controls, the regulation of working hours and the provision of compulsory systems of social insurance.

We are not supposed to remember the 1963 coup.  A US-engineered coup that eventually catapulted a certain Saddam Hussein to the highest echelons of leadership in Iraq.  We are not supposed to remember that the Ba'ath Party came to power, in the words of a Ba'athist president, "using an American locomotive."

"I know for a certainty that what happened in Iraq on February 8 [1963] had the support of American intelligence," said King Hussein of Jordan, in a meeting in Paris with the editor of Egypt's most influential daily, al-Ahram.  "Numerous meetings were held between the Ba'ath Party and American intelligence, the more important in Kuwait.  Do you know that on February 8 a secret radio beamed to Iraq was supplying the men who pulled the coup with the names and addresses of Communists there so that they could be arrested and executed?" said the King of Jordan.[5]

We are expected to forget all these things lest we ask some interesting questions.  Without America's support, would the Marcos regime have lasted as long as it did?  Without America's instigation, would Suharto have been able to slaughter so many and rule Indonesia for so long and with such barbarity?  Without the American locomotive of 1963, where would Iraq be today?

"If we have to use force," said Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State during the Clinton administration, "it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation."[6]

Indispensable, yes, until we really choose to remember.  "The past is never dead," said William Faulkner.  "It's not even past."

 
NOTES:
[1] "What We Say Goes: The Middle East in the New World Order," Noam Chomsky, Z Magazine, May 1991.
[2] "Memory as a Means of Empowerment," Maria Serena I. Diokno, August 23, 2001, Paper presented at the Conference on Memory, Truth-Telling and the Pursuit of Justice. The Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship, September 20-22, 1999, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines.
[3] A Fateful September, Letizia R. Constantino, Issues without Tears Vol. 5, Karrel Inc., 1986.
[4] The new rulers of the world, John Pilger, Verso, 2002.
[5] Bush in Babylon:  The recolonisation of Iraq, Tariq Ali, Verso, 2003.
[6] Quoted in "Blowback: A Review Essay on an Academic Defector's Guide to America's Asia Policy," Walden Bello, March 12, 2000.

THE NINETEENTH OF JULY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
July 19, 2004
 
The memories of another day - missing ruminations of generations.  Will we ever remember?  Will we ever learn?  Who's to say?
 
Elvis Presley's first single was released on this day in 1954.  It was "That's all right" with "Blue Moon Kentucky."  The single was a minor hit and one and a half years later, Presley would explode to superstardom with "Heartbreak Hotel."
 
One and a half years later, on July 19, 1957, the first rocket with a nuclear warhead is launched at Yucca Flat, Nevada.  That's all right, said the smiling rocket engineers.  What heartbreak.
 
Five Massachusetts women were hanged on July 19, 1692 - for witchcraft.  Hundreds of years later, on July 19, 1948, a similar witch-hunt opens its first inquiry at the University of Washington in Seattle under the banner of the Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Rep. Albert Canwell.  The purpose of the Canwell Committee: to weed-out witches - local Communist subversives - and to hang their souls.
 
On July 19, 1979, massive celebrations take place in the streets of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua.  Anastacio Somoza Debayle - the last Somoza of the 46-year US puppet dynasty - is overthrown.  Four years earlier, on July 19, 1975, the psychologist Carl Jung wrote in the London Observer, "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."  Maybe Don Anastacio should have met Carl earlier?
 
On July 19, 1998, the General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation issued the Fifth declaration of the Lacandon Jungle:  "Brothers and sisters, it is the time for the silent weapons which we have carried for centuries to flourish in words again.  It is time for peace to speak; it is time for the word of life.  It is our time."
 
Ninety year earlier, on July 19, 1908, eminent revolutionary Emma Goldman shook her fist at militarists and wrote in the New York World:  "Go and do your own killing.  We have sacrificed ourselves and our loved ones long enough fighting your battles.  In return, you have made parasites and criminals of us in times of peace and brutalized us in times of war.  You have separated us from our brothers and have made of the world a human slaughterhouse.  No, we will not do your killing or fight for the country that you have stolen from us."
 
How poorly the world remembers your words dear Emma.
 
On July 19, 1971, William Colby testified before the US Senate subcommittee how the CIA operation Phoenix killed 21,587 Vietnamese citizens between 1968 and 1971.  On the same day in 1985, Brooke Kroeger of Newsday wrote:  "The U.S. Seventh Fleet, Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Base saturate the Philippines with servicemen who constitute the highest percentage of customers seeking prostitution in the country."
 
The Entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition opened in Munich on July 19, 1937.  "A culmination of Hitler and Goebbels' purge of all remaining modern art held in both public and private collections in the Reich, the exhibit was designed to ridicule and denigrate creative works not upholding 'correct' Nazi virtues."  On the same day in the same year, Joris Ivens' "The Spanish Earth" premiered in Hollywood - "the film that set the standard for the cinema of international solidarity."
 
According to Peter Steven of the New Internationalist, "Ernest Hemingway's script and his dramatic yet measured voice added its own poetry and partisan anger" to the powerful imagery of the Spanish Civil War - the doomed cause that ushered in the brutal 40-year fascist regime of Franco and, more importantly, "formed the ominous prelude to Hitler's full-scale onslaught."
 
Ominous prelude.  If the fascist monstrosity was slain there and then in Spain, would the course of history have been any different?  Who's to know?
 
A year before the premier of Ivens' film, on July 19, 1936, fascists under the leadership of Franco trigger the Spanish Civil War when they attempt to overthrow the elected Popular Front government in Spain and take the garrisons in Barcelona.  Workers, soldiers, civil guards and policemen faithful to the Spanish republic fight back and attack the barracks and successfully drive out the fascists.  Many celebrate but the celebrations do not last.  Franco's marauders are already pressing their assault on the Republic from other fronts and they have been lent the iron helping hand of Germany and Italy.
 
Free people all over the world take up Spain's cause and many arrive to fight for Spain as members of the International Brigades.  Leaders of the so-called free world, on the other hand, stand by and watch as fascist forces literally slaughter the Spanish Republic.
 
On July 19, 1937, in a speech delivered at the House of Commons, Winston Churchill virtually absolves the fascist elements and outrageously blames instead "the swift, stealthy and deadly advance of the extreme communist or anarchist factions" for the outbreak of violence in Spain.
 
"I hope if Franco wins, he will establish a liberal regime," said US President Franklin Roosevelt in the summer of 1936.  Ahem.  The Roosevelt administration would enforce soon thereafter an arms embargo against the beleaguered Spanish republic - an embargo "prohibiting even private shipments in support of the republic."  The US government even looked the other way when "the devoutly pro-fascist" Thorkild Rieber, the head of the American oil giant Texaco, "supplied - on unsecured credit - 1,866,000 tons of oil" to Franco and his war machine.
 
The nineteenth day of the seventh month - thanks for the memories.


NOTES:
1.  I drew material and much insight again from the very stimulating website The Daily Bleed.
2.  "What I believe, Emma Goldman, July 19, 1908, The New York World.
3.  For the actual speech (very interesting, in the morbid sense of course), see Entartete Kunst exhibition opening speech, Adolf Hitler, July 19, 1937.  For the statement quoted in the article, click on this link. 
4.  The Classic:  The Spanish Earth, Peter Steven, New Internationalist, Issue 281, 1996.
5.  "A new form of abolitionism:  women organize to fight 'sexual slavery' around the world," Brooke Kroeger, Newsday, July 19, 1985.
6.  "CIA and Operation Phoenix in Vietnam," Ralph McGhee, Februray 19, 1996.
7.  Picasso's War:  The destruction of Guernica, and the masterpiece that changed the world, Russell Martin, Plume, 2002.  If you can get hold of a copy, do read Martin's book.  It is a most fascinating rewarding weave.

MEDITATIONS OF A SINGLE DAY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTNO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
July 12, 2004

The beginning of the first of July was promising enough.

It was close to three in the morning in Hong Kong and everyone inside an enchanting bar in Sai Kung imaginatively called Cheers was waiting for the start of the2004 European Soccer Championship semifinal match between host nation Portugal and The Netherlands.

Portugal had never advanced beyond the semis and the Dutch, who had won the European title in 1988, was the seeded team. But never underestimate the magic that can be summoned by the home team (and likewise never overestimate it). The Czech Republic and Greece (which would eventually win the title) were to meet the day after but greater interest was generated by the match at hand. The Netherlands was the only football superpower left in the celebrated competition and perhaps this was why everyone in Cheers - mostly Asian with a few Europeans - seemed to be rooting for Portugal.

Two hours later, after Cristiano Ronaldo headed home a corner kick and Nuno Maniche drove a spectacular curving 22-meter strike into the Dutch team's goal, and after an unfortunate own-goal by Jorge Alvarade, the final whistle sounded and Lisbon's Jose Alvalade Stadium erupted with jubilation. The score was 2-1. Portugal was in the finals.

By noontime, despite temperatures reaching up to a suffocating 35 degrees Celsius, thousands upon thousands of people dressed in white turn up at the Hong Kong shopping district of Causeway Bay armed with water bottles, hand towels, digital cameras and mobile phones - along with homemade placards demanding the right of Hong Kong citizens to universal suffrage and direct elections.

The mammoth demonstration on July 1 was a show of collective force marking the seventh anniversary of the former British colony's handover to China. Hong Kong police said the rally reached a peak of 300,000; organizers estimated up to 530,000 attended the protest event. Whatever the final tally was, the sum was undoubtedly massive and festive.

Thousands kept spilling out of Wan Chai district and Tin Hau - converging first in Victoria Park to be literally counted before marching on - very well-behaved - to the main government building a few kilometers away. Young people, old couples, market vendors in white shirts, business people in white shirts, mothers and kids in white shirts, toddlers in white shirts in strollers pushed by fathers in white shirts - everyone fanning their faces, talking animatedly and squinting at the brightness of the day.

Around 650 protesters were treated for various heat-related illnesses. Every few meters you would come across medical staff administering first aid on a young or middle-aged or senior Hong Kong person sprawled on the sidewalk, face red and breathing with difficulty. And still they went on.

It was a remarkable parade of discipline, enthusiasm and determination and a very interesting display of Hong Kong-style mass protest. The colossal demonstration passed through make-shift stalls and booths and small platforms on the sidewalks where loudspeakers blared out the speeches and songs being delivered live by politicians and activists belonging to the Democratic party, to trade unions, student groups, Christian groups, religious cults and Trotskyites. It was a marketplace-like atmosphere where people from the sidewalk installations seemed to be selling their political wares with familiar marketplace loudness, doggedness and gaiety. It was very . . . Hong Kong.

"Many of the people who joined today's protest activity were apolitical. They do not normally go to protests. In fact they disdain demonstrations and they dislike activists. But July 1 has become steadily different for them. Or maybe they have become steadily different because of July 1," said Zhang, one of the founders of the Civil Human Rights Front, the group which organized the protest event, and who invited me to walk with the rally. "My mother used to comment negatively whenever I joined political rallies. But look at her now, all dressed in white like everyone else. She arrived on time and she intends to finish the rally," Zhang remarked as we strode past a stall giving away protest leaflets and selling hilarious balloons printed with the caricature of Tung Chee Hwa, the Beijing-installed chief executive of Hong Kong.

"When we first demonstrated on the same issues in 1997, colleagues said about 100 had joined us. I think it was actually closer to just 50 people. I am have not been active in the Front for some years now. The recent rallies are impressive," Zhang told me with a thoughtful wrinkle on his brow. "Ironically, while the numbers of July 1 rallies have increased dramatically, the political frame of the event has also become quite exclusionary."

We had gone over the subject previously - over home-cooked hot-pot summits, over Xinjiang-style lamb barbecue, over braised duck's tongue and more recently over Chinese beer sipped from Suzhou chicken bowls. Zhang, an intense young libertarian born and raised in Hong Kong and who now finds himself working more frequently from Beijing, is hyper-passionate and at the same time cold and calculating. His political work has been tempered forcefully by reality, which somehow has expanded his political vision exponentially. A contradiction just like his birthplace.

"The chauvinism of Beijing is obvious, but for the observant, so is the chauvinism of Hong Kong," said Zhang. I nod slowly as we near the rally's final destination and march past the imposing building of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and a curious political vista. Right beneath the Asia-Pacific headquarters of HSBC sat - as if they were the foundation of the gigantic institution of global finance - the new dispossessed of the new global economy: thousands of foreign domestic helpers seated in clusters on the concrete floor, eating from plastic bags and chatting and glancing at the rallyists chanting "Return power to the people!"

I look at the faces surrounding me; I stop walking. I step out of the column of my group and step out of the march and look at the faces of other marchers. I walk a few meters more and look back. It is all the same. It seems as if no one wants to look to their right despite the equally noisy din and the obvious panorama of the migrant workers.

"What is prosperity for if we cannot choose our leaders?" I recalled a speaker on a sidewalk in Wan Chai asking the moving crowd rhetorically. A most fundamental question. And yet I couldn't help ask myself as I walked past the HSBC scene: and what is a vote for if we cannot assure the wellbeing of all our brethren? What is the meaning of political freedom without education for the young, without sufficient food on the table and with only one half of the parents present to tend to their children because the other half is forced by economic deprivation to slave away abroad?

References:
1. "Dutch go down; host Portugal winds 2-1 to make Euro 2004 final," Sports Illustrated, July 1, 2004.
2. "Euro 2004: Portugal vs. Holland semi-final preview, Bill Hutchinson, World Soccer.
3. "Voting with their feet," Chen Wu, Business Week Online, July 7, 2004.
4. "Hong Kong's drive for democracy isn't happening in a bubble," Michael Elliott, Time Magazine, July 5, 2004.