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.

THE SUN RISES OVER BLAIR'S 'CHALABI'
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY, abs-cbnnews.com
June 30, 2004

Ahead of schedule, the U.S.-governed Coalition Provisional Authority has handed over power to the U.S.-installed Interim Iraqi Government. We are best advised to remember the name Iyad Allawi. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. It's his turn now.

Among all the arguments available to those who label as grotesque the "sovereignty" that the American empire has bequeathed to Iraq, the name Iyad Allawi should be the most cogent one. The U.S.-governed Coalition Provisional Authority has long desired an acceptable Iraqi face to put over the ugly visage of the U.S. occupation, and Iyad Allawi has long volunteered his. And so we have an excellent fit.

His influence in Washington was surpassed only by the sway once wielded by the rapacious embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, the ex-Pentagon darling who has since fallen from the good graces of Washington. And so Allawi - America's choice - is now prime rib.

Allawi is Tony Blair's Chalabi - the very person "through whom the controversial claim was channeled that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be operational in 45 minutes."

Allawi helped found the Iraqi National Accord (al-Wifaq) after the 1991 Gulf War, which became one of the leading formations of "the Iraqi opposition in exile," much the same way, apparently, that Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress served as a magnet for decent crooks. So great was Allawi's popular support in the new Iraq of American proconsul L. Paul Bremer that, during "an uprising in the town of Baiji, north of Baghdad, last year, crowds immediately set fire to the INA office."

Getting the empire's nod wasn't a cakewalk for Allawi, but he got the coveted crown in the end. "No other governing council member has reported spending nearly as much over the last year," said the Associated Press of the huge amounts of money that Allawi had funneled since January to Washington lobbyists and New York publicists. It took hard work and oodles of money, and in the end he deserved the crown.

Here then is the new leader of the new Iraq, a leader whose proximity to the hearts of those he is supposed to govern is as accessible as his press conferences are to the Iraqi people. Anyone attending Allawi's media engagements "must enter the Green Zone, the American civil headquarters in Iraq, and pass through four checkpoints manned by US soldiers."

The world can assume that Allawi will allow himself the occasional whining regarding the machinations of his US patron. But Allawi has an understanding heart and he knows deep inside that the Americans just can't help themselves and he will quickly forgive trespasses and return to his place in the colonial order of things. "I am an instrument of British policy," said Emir Feisal bluntly when he was cast in 1919 by the British as the king of the newly created throne of the newly created country of Iraq. Traditions die hard.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz describes Allawi, an ex-member of the eunuch Iraqi Governing Council and possessing long ties to the US Central Intelligence Agency, as "a physician and a distinguished opponent of Saddam Hussein for many years."

The qualities that bring decent men close to America's bosom are truly remarkable.

Early this year, reports the celebrated journalist Seymour Hersh, one of Allawi's former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising questions about Allawi's character and medical bonafides. Azawi depicted Allawi as a "big husky man ... who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students." Allawi's medical degree, Azawi wrote, "was conferred upon him by the Baath party."

According to Hersh, a "Cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi's personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat 'hit team' that sought out and killed Baath party dissenters throughout Europe." Then at some point Allawi fell out of favor with Saddam, just like Saddam fell out of favor with the U.S.

According to Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer who served in the Middle East, "Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he's a thug."

"If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does," said Vincent Cannistraro, another ex-CIA officer. Allawi "was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff."

But he is America's acolyte now and that makes a world of a difference.

The empire had employed more subtle methods in the past. The U.S. would have the world believe that America was responsible for bringing democracy to Asia via the Philippines - through the landmark election in 1907 which established what many still refer to as the country's first democratic institution: the Philippine Assembly.

In fairness to the empire, the U.S. did provide for the mechanics of democracy in the elections of 1907. Such as limiting the exercise to male Filipinos above 21, who had held office under the hated Spaniards, who owned real property of significant value, and who could read, write or speak Spanish or English.

Mechanics which ensured that only 1.41 percent of the population would vote and that the victors would come from the elite class that the Americans were grooming for leadership. The first taste of "democracy" under America.

By such facts is the legacy of the US-sponsored 1907 elections measured. An election held a mere month after the U.S. hanged the great Filipino hero Macario Sakay; just two months after the U.S. colonial army banned the Filipino flag, and only six years after 600,000 Filipinos in the island of Luzon alone had been killed or had died of disease as a result of the US occupation.

NARRATIVES OF CONQUEST
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
June 28, 2004

"This question I put to the defenders of this war," said George Boutwell, the first president of the Anti-Imperialist League of the US, in response to America's annexation of the Philippines over a century ago.

"What is the end that you seek?" asked Boutwell. "Is it the vassalage of these people? If so, then you are the enemies of the republic and the betrayers of the principles upon which the republic thus far has been made to rest."

Boutwell's premise is elementary. You cannot build your happiness on the unhappiness of others. But imperial ambitions die hard. Literally.

"Empires do not last, and their ends are usually unpleasant," Chalmers Johnson reminds us. Johnson, the eminent scholar who, having been born before World War II, had personal knowledge, "in some cases, personal experience - of the collapse of at least six empires: those of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union."

Including the rest of the twentieth century, Johnson adds three more that met not too long ago their demise - the Chinese, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. Including the twenty-first century, will the empire called America be affixed to this growing list? Who's to know?

Plenty of benevolent intentions to study, plenty of ghastly means and consequences to learn from and confront. If we want to.

In 1971, Sergeant Scott Camile of the 11th Marine Regiment in Vietnam testified: "The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC [Vietcong], VC had weapons and civilians didn't and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, 'How do you know he's a VC?' and the general reply would be, 'He's dead,' and that was sufficient."

Sounds familiar.

"There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger," said Specialist Corporal Michael Richardson in Iraq last year.

Richardson admitted shooting injured soldiers during combat and leaving them to die. "I didn't help any of them. I wouldn't help the fuckers," said Richardson. "There were some you let die. And there were some you double-tapped . . . You didn't want any prisoners of war. You hate them so bad while you're fighting, and you're so terrified, you can't really convey the feeling, but you don't want them to live . . . If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were; some weren't."

"You can't distinguish between who's trying to kill you and who's not," said US Sergeant First Class John Meadows last year in Iraq. "[T]he only way to get through shit like that was to concentrate on getting through it by killing as many people as you can, people you know are trying to kill you. Killing them first and getting home."

Getting home. Such an honorable excuse.

According to Dr. Henry C. Howland, a former US Army Surgeon during America's brutal seizure of the Philippines, the violent dementia that causes the American soldier to commit atrocities is due to "chronic homesickness." Along with the treacherous nature of Filipinos resisting the US occupation. "After so many betrayals," rationalized Dr. Howland, "the men decide that the only chance of pacification lies in a wholesale cataclysm; an inundation of human blood that will purge the islands of treachery."

Early 1900; Sergeant Howard McFarlane of the US 43rd Infantry in the Philippines: "On Thursday, March 29, eighteen of my company killed seventy five nigger bolomen and ten of the nigger gunners ... When we find one that is not dead, we have bayonets."

Captain Elliot, of the Kansas Regiment: "[The Philippine town of] Caloocan was supposed to contain seventeen thousand inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native. Of the buildings, the battered walls of the great church and dismal prison alone remain."

October 1901, Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith, commander of the US Sixth Separate Brigade in the Philippines: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn: the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in hostilities against the United States." Asked by an officer about the age limit of the "enemy combatants" he considered "capable of bearing arms," Smith replied, "ten years."

The American empire. It has many names. Champion of human rights. Benevolent superpower. Leader of the free world. Liberator. Friend.

An Indian saying: "The cobra will bite you whether you call it cobra or Mr. Cobra."


References:
1. "The President's Policy: War and Conquest Abroad, Degradation of Labor at Home," George S. Boutwell, Address at Masonic Hall, Washington, D.C., January 11, 1900, Libery Tracts No. 7 (Chicago: American Anti-Imperialist League, 1900).
2. The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson, Metropolitan Books.
3. Winter soldier investigation, The Sixties Project, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, 1st Marine Division Part II, Testimony given in Detroit, Michigan, January 31, 1971 to February 1 and 2, 1971.
4. "US troops admit shooting Iraqi civilians," Naveed Raj, The Mirror-UK, June 19, 2003.
5. The Ordeal of Samar, Joseph L. Schott, Bobbs-Merrill Company.
6. Republic or Empire, Daniel Boone Schirmer, Schenkman Publishing Company.
7. Little Brown Brother, Leon Wolff, Oxford University Press.

GOD BLESS AMERICA
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
June 21, 2004

Coincidence, pattern and memory. Tricky things these three.

One ghastly day in May, at close to three in the morning, a US helicopter fires its missiles at the village of Mukaradeeb in western Iraq. "[C]oalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided," the Pentagon explains later. The target was "a suspected foreign fighter safe house," the deputy director of US military operations in Iraq, Gen. Mark Kimmitt, adds.

Once the smoke peels away from Mukaradeeb, the counting begins. Over 40 people are dead, most of them women and children. It was a wedding party.

Almost a year earlier, in the early hours of one morning in July, the US air force pounds the Afghan village of Kararak with bombs. "Close air support from US Air Force B-52 and AC-130 aircraft struck several ground targets, including anti-aircraft artillery sites that were engaging the aircraft," explained the US Central Command in Tampa, Florida. By the end of the attack, over 40 people are dead - all of them civilians, many of them children. Another wedding party.

In Southeast Asia over a hundred years ago, the US annexation of the Philippines has just commenced and the crescendo of carnage is nearing its state of continuous climax. In a humid theater somewhere in the ex-future first republic of Asia, the 11th US Cavalry encounters a festive gathering - another wedding party, of course. The soldiers fire into the throng, kill the bride and two men and wound another woman and two children.

The cursory statement in response to the atrocity from the US Army, which explains that "the American troops ran into a beehive of insurgents and responded valiantly with covering fire," has yet to be discovered. We are certain, however, that it's just tucked in somewhere in the growing scrapbook of imperial nuptials, the remedy to insatiable greed.

Till death do us part?

The exchange of vows under the American boot has been going on for some time now. Everyone is invited, depending on the matrimonial gift one brings. The wedding of avarice with gluttony: imperial groom - ugly muscular festering wound of a suitor - seeks and swallows lonely girl, professing love, the good life and liberty. We don't do torture, we don't occupy, we don't do massacres; we reject Satan and all other evildoers.

"Those are my principles," said Groucho Marx. "If you don't like them, I have others."

What a curious thing, today's trends. The rage is Abu Ghraib. The shame of the few "bad apples" that have sullied the good name of the US. The Rumsfeld memorandum. The August 2002 memo on "standards of conduct for interrogation" prepared by the misnamed US Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The isolated incidents.

Yes. The isolated incidents.

In 1901, in the course of interrogating "treacherous" Filipinos who did not have the good sense to accept America's seizure of the Philippines, Lieutenant Frederick Arnold and one Sergeant Edwards were accused of torturing Filipino prisoners. Their acts of "prisoner abuse?" Stripping a young man naked, then subjecting him to the water cure (the essential memory recovery medication of the US occupation army's battle kit and the predecessor of today's "water-boarding"): the prisoner's mouth is forced open to respectfully facilitate down his throat five to ten gallons of water (or whatever the limits his bloated stomach could endure). Once filled up, the interrogators politely step on the prisoner's tummy until the prisoner blurts out the desired information.

For data validation purposes, the same prisoner is put to question once more by his American liberators and "whipped and beaten unmercifully with rattan rods" and "then strung up by his thumbs." Efficiency is everything.

Another feat of the imagination - before questioning, a strip of skin is cut from a Filipino prisoner's ankle and attached to a piece of wood and then "the flesh" is coiled "with the wood." Think can-opener.

"When I give a man to [my troops]," said Lt. Arnold, "I want information. I do not know how [they] get it, but [they] get it anyway." Filipinos "had no feelings other than physical, and should not be treated as human beings."

In 1900, a captain and lieutenant of the 27th US Regiment were tried for hanging six Filipinos by their necks for ten seconds, "causing them," it was charged, "to suffer great bodily pain." The words in the charge sheet were later changed to "mental anguish" and the officers were found guilty and sentenced to reprimands.

Unlucky chaps these US officers; they lived way too ahead of their time. By the standards of America's government today, they wouldn't have been charged at all. According to the Acceptable Torture Handbook prepared by the Bush administration, if someone "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent." A "defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control."

Thus, if your professed intention is to extract information, you can't be accused of torture.

God bless America.


References:
"Wedding party massacre," Rory McCarthy, The Guardian-UK, May 204 2004.
"Waterboarding at the Whitehouse," Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, June 16, 2004.
"Euphimisms for torture," Adam Hochschild, TODAY, May 26, 2004.
"Bad Apples at the Top," Editorial, The Daily Camera-Boulder, Colorado, June 17, 2004
"This Won't Hurt Much," Terry Jones, The Guardian-UK, June 16, 2004
Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War, Daniel Boone Schirmer, Schenkman Publishing.
The ordeal of Samar, Joseph L. Schott, Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippines, Leon Wolff, Oxford University Press.

THE REENGINEERING OF DELIA PUCAY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
June 7, 2004

She is Delia Pucay, a licensed chemical engineer, a Filipina gifted with four children, an innate intelligence and a natural grace.

Delia has been dreaming every night for one year. Dreaming the same dream and waking up with the same pillows of dissonance and dejection. Asleep, Delia's heart conspires with her mind; she is in her home in Benguet having a languid chat with her sons and her daughter. Awake, just before the sun rises, Delia recognizes the suffocating silence of her cramped room - in Hong Kong where she has been working since 1998 as a domestic help.

In 1997, Delia's only daughter Marie Lou was diagnosed with rheumatic heart disease. Malou, as her mother called her, was only eight years old at the time. Delia died a hundred deaths that year as her daughter's physical condition deteriorated and her vital organs came close to collapsing.

For months, the medical specialists that Delia consulted in Manila and Baguio City were unable to identify what was causing Malou to progressively limp and to cry out increasingly in pain and fear; unable to determine what had caused Malou's body to swell in a week's time and to shrink almost as rapidly as her appetite vanished. Mercifully, a hospital in Baguio City was able to identify just in time what was wrong with Malou. The young girl's condition stabilized and in time the hospital managed to nurse her back to her former vigor.

Less than a year later, with the family coffers emptied by the medical bills and with Malou still needing expensive maintenance medication, Delia makes up her mind and goes to Hong Kong to work as a domestic help.

"My first job was difficult," said Delia as she recounted her first contract. "I'd wake up at 5:30 in the morning every day and go to sleep at one AM. The day began with cleaning the toilet and then making meals. The family of my first employer had their breakfast separately. First the kids, then the mother, and then the father. In between the parents' breakfast I had to do the laundry and clean the kitchen. In the middle of all this I had to clean their two cars. Only then would the first half of the morning conclude. And the rest of the day was just as grueling."

Delia was unable to send right away the money needed to buy the medicine for Malou. The family had to borrow from different sources as the money Delia earned in her first five months in Hong Kong was used to pay back the foreign employment-related placement expenses she had incurred in the Philippines. Eventually, after a few years, Delia managed to earn enough and to send enough. Enough to pay for the education of her children. Enough to maintain the good health of Malou. But not enough to provide for other essentials.

Malou turned fifteen the other month, said Delia. She brought out her wallet and proudly showed to me her daughter's picture. "She's lovely," I gushed unexpectedly. "A gap has grown between us," said Delia as regret and sadness wash over her equanimity. Her voice is steady but her eyes begin to water. But no tears ever fall. "Malou's schooling is coming apart. I'm worried. Suddenly there is this big distance between us. I miss her. I miss my sons."

Delia Pucay, licensed chemical engineer, another desaparecido of the Philippine economy.

Such is the fate of millions of Filipinos today who can't afford healthcare and who can't find the jobs at home necessary to sustain the wellbeing of their families. But what does that make of successive Philippine governments whose economic programs have stood on two horrible pillars. The export of Filipinos and the re-export of what they have earned through the blind, immoral automatic annual payment of millions of dollars of ill-gotten national debts incurred in the past by crooked officials, robber banks and criminal corporations.

Delia Pucay. Her life reads like a painful novel. She hails from a village in Benguet called Bulalakaw which, in Filipino, means shooting star. Today, far away from her family and her roots, Delia lives in her employer's apartment in a district called Happy Valley and spends her Sundays at the Hong Kong public library reading self-help books.

"I give massages to my 75-year old employer, who rarely smiles and whom I know looks down on me," said Delia. "I prepare his golf bag. I make breakfast the way he likes it, a strange way. I have to serve it in small separate batches. First the orange juice, then eggs, then soup, then fruits, then toast. I clean his house. You know the rest." said Delia. Mind-numbing, repetitive, back-breaking work. "If he is mildly displeased at me," Delia adds, "I don't get my salary on time. He just gives it when he feels like it."

Does your employer know you're an engineer, I asked. "No. I hide it," Delia answered gently. "If my employer finds out, I can get fired. They don't like domestic helpers with high learning. I also won't likely be hired if an employment agency finds out about this. It sounds bad but because there are too many Filipino teachers working as domestic help in Hong Kong today, I also just say I'm a teacher and then somehow for the employer and the agency it's ok." And there you stay.

"Once you are employed in Hong Kong as a domestic help," a Filipina once told me in Kowloon, "your future employment is restricted to domestic work, whether you finished community development, engineering, education, or business administration. That's just the way it is."

Not always. One mother is determined to write another ending for herself.

"I want to go home soon you know," Delia said as we got up and walked across Chater Garden in the Central District of Hong Kong. She is wearing a faint smile.

"Malou's ordeal seems to be over," said Delia, "I have put away a little, not much but something useful I think. I can't rely on my husband, who keeps rewarding the sacrifices I've made with increasing indolence and God knows what. I may have wasted my years away by being here but I can still try to teach math and chemistry back home to earn something. Maybe I'll go into buy and sell. It will not pay much but I will be with my kids."

Because no matter how hard you hug your money, said H. Jackson Brown, Jr., it never hugs back.

"I think this is why I have been dreaming the same dreams over and over again," said Delia. "I just want to be close to my kids again. But not with dollars. This time I really want to be there for them."

TOMGRAM: CONSTANTINO, WITH NATURE THERE ARE NO SPECIAL EFFECTS
An introduction to the tomdispatch.com article of Constantino by Tom Engelhardt, consulting editor of Metropolitan Books, author of The End of Victory Culture: a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era and publisher of tomdispatch.com.
June 3, 2004

Over Memorial Day weekend, with my family elsewhere, I drove to a multiplex to catch Roland Emmerich's global warming disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow. This was the film for which Bush administration officials briefly forbid NASA scientists to field press queries, lest perhaps the administration find itself in cold storage. It's kind of touching, really, that the Bush folks retain such faith in the power of Hollywood to perturb. Emmerich, you may remember, was the director who made Independence Day, released back in the summer of 1996. In it, space aliens, who couldn't even take a punch, nonetheless managed to zap into oblivion much of New York and Los Angeles as well as all of the White House before being defeated and driven out of the solar system. Eight years later -- enough time by Emmerich's cinematic calendar for the Northern Hemisphere to have been frozen solid several hundred times over - he's produced a new summer film in which New York, Los Angeles, and the White House are obliterated by something you can't punch at all.

I happen to remember Independence Day quite vividly because I took my son and daughter to see it and, driving elsewhere afterwards, launched into one of those long-winded critiques (the WASP runs the show in the film, the Jew is brainy, the black is physical, and the women... well, the women... ) that can drive a kid, out for a little entertainment, bonkers. I was nattering on about the underlying structure of the movie when my son, then eleven, turned on me and said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "Oh yeh, Dad, and the rest of the movie was really realistic, too! Aliens arrive in spaceships and destroy the Earth."

Of course he was right. You can't spend too much time analyzing films like these, even ones about something that might actually arrive. The Day After Tomorrow, which grabbed a cool $86 million over the four-day weekend, skating in just behind Shrek 2, combines ridiculous science, dead-on-arrival acting, and lame writing into a tsunami of fatuousness. For those of you who managed to leave Planet Earth for the weekend, the best summary of the movie I've found was written by David Edelstein (The Ice Age Cometh) for Slate:

"The Day After Tomorrow has one of the most absurd and implausible plot turns I've seen in a movie, ever. Global warming melts the polar ice caps, which makes the oceans rise and disrupts the Gulf Stream. There are lethal hailstones in Tokyo and ravaging tornadoes in L.A.; and after New York City is flooded by seawater, the temperature plunges at a rate of 10 degrees per second, so that people are transformed into ice statues where they stand. Tens of millions are dead and the upper United States has become uninhabitable. Now here's the implausible part. The vice president -- closely modeled on Dick Cheney -- who has pooh-poohed all evidence of global warming, goes on TV and says, 'I was wrong.'"

I won't destroy a second of suspense if I tell you that the Northern Hemisphere is turned into a snowball within a few cataclysmic Hollywood days, and an ice chunk by movie's end -- but couldn't Emmerich have left the ice-cubed Statue of Liberty to Planet of the Apes where it should remain forever a symbol of a previous notion of man-made Armageddon? (Oh, and speaking of Lady Liberty, in a pure Gulf-Stream-of-consciousness aside, let me quote a Tomdispatch reader from Quebec: "I couldn't help but be knocked over by the irony of Bush's promised bigger and better, state-of-the-art prison to be built in Iraq. How is the average Iraqi expected to react to this news? The French gave America the Statue of Liberty to celebrate America's freedom. And America is giving Iraq a new jail to celebrate its liberation?")

The Day After Tomorrow is one of those lame movies where, when zoo keepers, knee deep in water, notice that the wolves are missing from their cages, you don't doubt for a second they'll later appear to menace our young heroes. (Given the film's subject, the villains had to have fur coats.) As it turns out, this latest cinematic Armageddon ends on a bizarrely happy, not to say triumphant note. Perhaps the alien currents were driven back to outer space and I didn't even notice.

But here was the thing -- call it the miracle of the movies, which sometimes have a way of smash-mouthing through every sophisticated defense you've built up over a long life: The very fatuousness of the film set against a final vision of our planet from space locked in a new ice-age, gave me the total creeps. I drove off into a foggy night in an old clunker of a stick-shift car with lousy lights, all alone, and just a little unsure of my way through the ill-lit haze. I didn't think then about Al Gore's Moveon.org send-off for the film, or about the hyped-up dispute over its scientific accuracy, or about its inability to offer even the simplest explanation of global warming itself, or about the endless media babble over whether this film would fill the sails of the environmental movement or sink it beneath the waves; I just felt a chill. The pure willies. For that uncertain drive home in a car burning gas, and so sending carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to join the thickening blanket of pollution circling and warming our planet, I was haunted by a sense of the fragility of Earth and of human life itself.

Unfortunately, a few chills isn't nearly enough when it comes to even the ice-age version of global warming. As a start, the very phrase "global warming" is so harmless sounding, like a nice electric blanket on a cold night. Maybe a little of Emmerich's Hollywood should be dumped into the language immediately -- something like, say, "global inferno." As Bill McKibben, writing for Grist magazine commented recently (The Big Picture):

"It's always been hard to get people to take global warming seriously because it happens too slowly. Not slowly in geological terms -- by century's end, according to the consensus scientific prediction, we'll have made the planet warmer than it's been in tens of millions of years. But slowly in NBC Nightly News terms. From day to day, it's hard to discern the catastrophe, so we don't get around to really worrying."

I've written about global warming on and off for the last two years and always I end up quoting pieces about the peripheries of our world where the day after tomorrow is already today. Here are a couple of headlines just like others of recent years but from the latest batch of pieces: "Rising Seas Are Giving Pacific Islanders a Sinking Feeling" ("'Nobody remembers such tides before. The sea is actually moving inland,' said Simpson Abraham, head of Kosrae's Resources Development Authority. Some offshore islets have vanished, he said."); "Fast Arctic thaw portends global warming" ("The icy Hudson Bay in Canada could be uninhabitable for polar bears within just 20 years.") And I've cited many, increasingly alarming sentences that tend to read like this: "Concentrations of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of fossil fuels burned in everything from automobiles to electricity plants, reached record levels in the atmosphere last winter, a Hawaii observatory reported in March."

But if you really want to get the chills, or break into a sweat, check this out from a piece by William Kowinski (Getting Warmer... ) in the Sunday Insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle. "While 72 percent of Americans said they were concerned about it in 2000, only 58 percent say so now, and only 15 percent believe it has anything to do with fossil fuel consumption." Since no specific poll is cited, I have no idea how accurate this is, but on this subject I do sense denial so strong that it might be easier if global warming were a set of Hollywood special effects bearing down on us. Otherwise, it's hard to get your brain around the time-scale of the phenomenon -- or perhaps the problem is that when you do, what sets in, along with those chills, is a sense of complete impotence, especially in an era in which futurelessness envelops us like a straitjacket.

Since the arrival of the first nuclear bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, it's become ever harder, I suspect, to imagine building a future for one's children and grandchildren -- and it's harder yet for young people in a new century whose distant reaches are already filled with the gloomiest of prognostications. When I was a boy, nuclear weapons were the only human-made danger that threatened to make us extinct or annihilate our planet -- and that was plenty. Now, nuclear weapons have to queue up somewhere at the rear of a jostling menagerie of apocalyptic candidates. They have, in fact, more or less disappeared into the ominous catch-all phrase "weapons of mass destruction."

The Bush administration fits such a world to a tee. When you think about it, futurelessness is its MO. We've probably never had an administration more willing -- no, eager -- to mortgage the future to the present. Perhaps soaring oil prices will prove the first tsunami that breaks through the consciousness of SUV America. I don't know. What I do know is that this administration has managed to focus all our fears on "terrorism" -- a phenomenon that is scary indeed, with the potential to cause ever greater magnitudes of mayhem. But, in truth, whatever destruction small bands of terrorists can cause doesn't begin to compare with the "terrorism" global warming, that other human-made weapon of mass destruction, threatens us with. Imagine what our world might be like if the Department of Homeland Security were really intent on protecting our future safety and security from the gravest dangers on our planet.

Renato Redentor Constantino, a newspaper columnist in the Philippines, whose pieces Tomdispatch has published before, spends part of his busy, committed life working on the issue of climate change in China for the environmental group Greenpeace. A Filipino working in China for Greenpeace on global warming and writing for an American blog. Now, isn't that one of the more hopeful descriptions of "globalization" around? In a piece below he offers his vision of "the day after tomorrow," emailed in from the front lines of climate change. But most important, he reminds us that we -- as individuals, as a society, as a planet -- are capable of doing something about global warming other than wringing our hands or looking fixedly down at our feet.

I'm convinced that, though Americans are hardly likely to sacrifice lifestyle for the sake of global warming any time soon, we might still be capable of offering a great fix. Just imagine if we had sunk the money (and ingenuity) that went into our Gulf Wars into a vast R & D project focused on renewable energy sources -- as well as into the kinds of national energy conservation programs that could immediately cut down significantly on our reliance on foreign oil. Unfortunately, all we can do, until the Bush administration departs, is imagine -- and work to toss the bums out. (If, by the way, you want to read up on the "basics" of global warming or its potential consequences, or simply think a little about steps an individual might take with it in mind, check out the website of the National Resources Defense Council, an organization which does a great job of dogging the Bush assault on the environment.)

Constantino offers the following as an introduction to his life and thoughts on the subject of global warming: "Working with Greenpeace in China continues to be an immensely moving experience. Climate change impacts in China are multiplied many times over because of the size of China's population. The attempts of individuals, groups, and some officials in the Chinese government to steer China towards a more sustainable path despite the enormity of the challenge they face has been inspiring.

"The consequences of the blind pursuit of economic growth have brought China to a painful impasse. There is growing recognition within the Chinese government of this fact, echoed most acutely by Pan Yue, the deputy director of the powerful State Environmental Protection Administration, who said recently, 'If [China] continues on this path of traditional industrial civilization, then there is no chance that we will have sustainable development. Because China's populace, resources, and environment have already reached the limits of its capacity to cope, sustainable development and new sources of energy are the only road we can take.'

"I am part of a small group in China that believes that a renewable, sustainable future for China is a concrete possibility. We remain realistic; we demand the impossible."

And he adds: "The US represents only 4% of the global population and yet today it is producing a quarter of global climate-change inducing C02 emissions. The more wars it fights to slake the thirst of its petrol-addicted society, the greater the danger to everyone else on the planet. 'If China were to live like Americans,' says Liang Congjie, an environmentalist from China, 'we would need the resources of four worlds do so.'"

Tom


WITH NATURE THERE ARE NO SPECIAL EFFECTS
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
tomdispatch.com
June 3, 2004

Climate change.

Suddenly, because of a movie, so many are now talking about the greatest threat the planet has ever faced.

The Day after Tomorrow is science fiction, but global warming is real. Will the movie end up trivializing the impact of climate change and thus increase indifference? Or will it spur more people to take action? Too early to tell.

Is reality more frightening than Hollywood? With nature there are no special effects, only consequences.

Up to 64% of China's glaciers are projected to disappear by 2050, putting at risk up to a quarter of the country's population who are dependent on the water released from those glaciers.

Today in the Arctic, ice thickness has declined by over 40% and "an area larger than the Netherlands is disappearing every year." According to scientists, Arctic sea ice could melt entirely by the end of the century.

Ice cores from Svalbard glaciers in the Arctic region show that the twentieth century was "by far the warmest century" in the last 800 years.

Between 1998 and 2001, the Qori Kalis glacier in Peru has retreated an average of 155 meters annually -- a rate three times faster than the average yearly retreat for the previous three years, and thirty-two times faster than the average yearly retreat from 1963 to 1978.

Just southeast of Mount Everest in the Himalayan Khumbu Range of Eastern Nepal, the Imja Glacier has been retreating at a rate of close to 10 meters annually. It is but one among many glaciers currently in rapid retreat. According to Syed Iqbal Hasnain of the International Commission for Snow and Ice, "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world. If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high." Over two billion people depend on the glacier-fed flow of the rivers from the Himalayan mountains.

In Patagonia, ice fields have lost 42 cubic kilometers of ice every year for the last seven years, equivalent to the volume of ten thousand large football stadiums.

The scientific journal Nature published this year the findings of 19 eminent biological scientists. Climate change, they concluded, will "commit to extinction" 18% to 35% of all land-based animal and plant species.

Over 20,000 people died in Europe last year as a result of an extreme heat wave.

In Alaska, average annual temperatures have risen by 5 degrees since the 1960s.

According to leading reinsurance companies such as Munich Re and Swiss Re, climate-change related damages might cost $150 billion annually within a decade. The companies warn that unless action is taken today, the insurance industry could go bankrupt as extreme weather events such as storms and droughts increase in severity and frequency.

Vice Premier Hui Liangyu of China recently warned that his country is already facing "a grim situation" as warming temperatures inexorably give rise to increasingly unusual weather patterns. China has had 16 consecutive warmer winters since 1985 and temperatures are projected to increase in the coming decades. Last year, combined extremes of flooding and drought ravaged China's agriculture. In 2003, climate-change related damages cost an estimated $65 billion globally, including $10 billion in agricultural losses from last summer's heat wave in Europe. The impact of global warming on agriculture in the developing world, including, for instance, the salinization of irrigation systems owing to rising sea levels and depleted rivers, has been nothing short of devastating.

The incidence of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever carried by insects that thrive in warm temperatures is expected to increase dramatically in the coming years, possibly straining beyond limits the modest resources of government health systems in developing countries. Recent studies suggest that close to 300 million more people would be at risk from malaria if global temperatures continue to increase.

An eight-year study conducted by 100 scientists showed that in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, sea levels are projected to rise by 30 centimeters by 2030. According to another study, sea levels may rise by 30 to 70 centimeters by the end of this century. The long coastline of China forms the base for about 70% of its large cities, where nearly 60% of the national economy is located. Some studies suggest that a 30-centimeter rise in sea levels will typically result in a 30-meter retreat in shoreline. How deadly then will the effect of rising sea levels be on archipelagic countries such as the Philippines?

Climate change is not called "the great amplifier" for nothing. Hunger, misery, thirst, and want -- the consequences of all the flaws in our world's economic systems will be magnified, giving rise to ever more resource-related conflicts in addition to those already created by the madness of the American imperial enterprise.

"Climate change," said Sir David King, Chief Scientific Adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "is the most severe problem that we are facing today -- more serious even than the threat of terrorism."

Great as the problem of climate change may be, most often neglected is the fact that solutions are readily available -- solutions that, sadly, are just not being used; solutions that can prevent climate change from taking a more dangerous and unpredictable trajectory; solutions that are not only immediately beneficial to the environment but have immense economic potential as well. The global wind industry alone, for instance, has been enjoying a growth rate of over 30% annually for the last five years with wind-power costs dropping by 50% in the last 15 years. Resources from the sun, the tides, the waves, geothermal power -- all these are waiting to be harnessed; waiting, despite the enormity of the danger confronting us, because the resources that should be used to tap their regenerative power economically remain dedicated to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. A planetary betrayal.

We all know what the problem is: burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil along with the unsustainable and inequitable use of our planet's resources. And we know what we have to do. We must generate our energy from clean, safe, renewable resources and use our energy in a sustainable way.

Because there really is no other way.

The measurable, time-bound development of renewable energy based on real and ambitious targets, matched with deep, rapid cuts in CO2 emissions -- this is what's needed today if we are to save the global commons from devastating climate-change impacts.

Big or small, populous, powerful, or frail, each country and each individual has a central role to play in redirecting our planet away from its present deadly course. After all, as a great reminder goes, if the world were a huge airplane about to crash, would it really matter that you were seated in first class?

The task of taking back the pilot's cockpit from those who have hijacked our plane of a planet must be our number one priority.

The time for indifference is over. We must demand nothing less than an energy revolution. Taking action the day after tomorrow may well be too late. Actua ya. Act now. El dia es hoy.

The day for action is today.