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.
Recent political and travel essays by Renato Redentor Constantino. Email Red at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Sunday, June 27, 2004
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.
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.
Saturday, June 19, 2004
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.
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.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
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."
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."
Friday, June 04, 2004
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.
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.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
EL DIA ES HOY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
May 31, 2004
Climate change.
Suddenly, because of a movie, so many are now talking about the greatest threat that the planet has ever faced.
The Day after Tomorrow is science fiction but global warming is real. Will the movie end up trivializing the impacts 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.
In China, up to 64 percent of glaciers are projected to disappear by 2050, putting at risk up to a quarter of China's population who are dependent on the water released from the glaciers.
Today in the Arctic, ice thickness has declined by over 40 percent 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 1900s "were 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 from 1995 to 1998, and 32 times faster than the averae 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 the region of Patagonia, icefields have lost 42 cubic kilometers of ice every year for the last seven years - the equivalent to the volume of ten thousand large football stadiums the size of Wembley stadium.
The scientific journal Nature published this year the findings of 19 eminent biological scientists - climate change will "commit to extinction" between 18 to 35 percent of all land-based animal and plant species.
According to leading reinsurance companies such as Munich Re and Swiss Re, climate change related damages will 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.
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.
The incidence of diseases such as malaria and dengue borne by insects that thrive in warm temperatures are anticipated to register manifold increases in a number of years.
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 percent of its large cities, where nearly 60 percent 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 serious will the effect be on archipelagic countries such as the Philippines?
"Climate change," said Sir David King, Chief Scientific Adviser to UK 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 is, what is 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 deadly and unpredictable course. Solutions that are not only immediately beneficial to the environment but immensely economically advantageous as well. The global wind industry alone, for instance, has been enjoying growth rates of over 30 percent per year for the last five years.
We all know what the problem is - burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil. And we know what we have to do - generate our energy from clean, safe renewable energy.
The time for indifference is over.
We should no longer tolerate the lie that the Philippine government is doing its part in fighting climate change because, it says, compared to other countries, the Philippines today supposedly has one of the highest shares of renewable energy in its total energy mix. Our government will not volunteer the fact that this is so only because the Department of Energy continues to count twigs and charcoal as "new and renewable energy."
We must demand real change, beginning with the displacement of polluting coal with clean energy.
Measurable, time-bound development of renewable energy with real and ambitious targets are needed today if we are to contribute to saving the global commons and if we wish to avoid the devastating impacts of climate change. 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.
NOTES:
1. "Scientists probe fall of Yulong glacier," Tang Min, China Daily, May 13, 2004. According to the report, the Chinese Academy of Sciences "concluded in a research report that the [glacial] shrinkage is a direct result of global warming ... There are 8,600-odd glaciers of various scales in the country's temperate zones, of which the one on the Yulong Snow Mountain is of the smallest scale and the lowest latitude, and therefore, should be the most sensitive to temperature changes. If the shrinkage of the Yulong glacier speeds up, so will a number of Chinese glaciers in the near future."
2. "Rising Sea Level Threatens Pearl River Delta," Shenzhen Daily, July 29, 2003.
3. "Global Warming Accelerates China's Sea Level Rise," Xinhua News Agency, April 12, 2002.
4. For a good introduction to glacier-related impacts, go to the impacts page of the Greenpeace climate campaign at the Greenpeace International website. Click on Svalbard and Patagonia URLs concerning recent Greenpeace expeditions.
5. For references to the Philippine Department of Energy's (DOE) laughable "renewable energy" twigs and charcoal, see the Philippine Energy Plans issued by the DOE in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. A minor Philippine irony is that Vince Perez, the man sitting today at the helm of the DOE and who is at present the most aggressive coal peddler in the country, once upon a time fashioned himself as an environmental supporter. On the other hand, beneath Perez is DOE Undersecretary Ed Manalac, a former oilman who worked as an executive of the U.S. oil industry for a number of years and who is now the biggest supporter of renewable energy in the Philippine government.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
May 31, 2004
Climate change.
Suddenly, because of a movie, so many are now talking about the greatest threat that the planet has ever faced.
The Day after Tomorrow is science fiction but global warming is real. Will the movie end up trivializing the impacts 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.
In China, up to 64 percent of glaciers are projected to disappear by 2050, putting at risk up to a quarter of China's population who are dependent on the water released from the glaciers.
Today in the Arctic, ice thickness has declined by over 40 percent 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 1900s "were 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 from 1995 to 1998, and 32 times faster than the averae 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 the region of Patagonia, icefields have lost 42 cubic kilometers of ice every year for the last seven years - the equivalent to the volume of ten thousand large football stadiums the size of Wembley stadium.
The scientific journal Nature published this year the findings of 19 eminent biological scientists - climate change will "commit to extinction" between 18 to 35 percent of all land-based animal and plant species.
According to leading reinsurance companies such as Munich Re and Swiss Re, climate change related damages will 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.
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.
The incidence of diseases such as malaria and dengue borne by insects that thrive in warm temperatures are anticipated to register manifold increases in a number of years.
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 percent of its large cities, where nearly 60 percent 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 serious will the effect be on archipelagic countries such as the Philippines?
"Climate change," said Sir David King, Chief Scientific Adviser to UK 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 is, what is 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 deadly and unpredictable course. Solutions that are not only immediately beneficial to the environment but immensely economically advantageous as well. The global wind industry alone, for instance, has been enjoying growth rates of over 30 percent per year for the last five years.
We all know what the problem is - burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil. And we know what we have to do - generate our energy from clean, safe renewable energy.
The time for indifference is over.
We should no longer tolerate the lie that the Philippine government is doing its part in fighting climate change because, it says, compared to other countries, the Philippines today supposedly has one of the highest shares of renewable energy in its total energy mix. Our government will not volunteer the fact that this is so only because the Department of Energy continues to count twigs and charcoal as "new and renewable energy."
We must demand real change, beginning with the displacement of polluting coal with clean energy.
Measurable, time-bound development of renewable energy with real and ambitious targets are needed today if we are to contribute to saving the global commons and if we wish to avoid the devastating impacts of climate change. 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.
NOTES:
1. "Scientists probe fall of Yulong glacier," Tang Min, China Daily, May 13, 2004. According to the report, the Chinese Academy of Sciences "concluded in a research report that the [glacial] shrinkage is a direct result of global warming ... There are 8,600-odd glaciers of various scales in the country's temperate zones, of which the one on the Yulong Snow Mountain is of the smallest scale and the lowest latitude, and therefore, should be the most sensitive to temperature changes. If the shrinkage of the Yulong glacier speeds up, so will a number of Chinese glaciers in the near future."
2. "Rising Sea Level Threatens Pearl River Delta," Shenzhen Daily, July 29, 2003.
3. "Global Warming Accelerates China's Sea Level Rise," Xinhua News Agency, April 12, 2002.
4. For a good introduction to glacier-related impacts, go to the impacts page of the Greenpeace climate campaign at the Greenpeace International website. Click on Svalbard and Patagonia URLs concerning recent Greenpeace expeditions.
5. For references to the Philippine Department of Energy's (DOE) laughable "renewable energy" twigs and charcoal, see the Philippine Energy Plans issued by the DOE in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. A minor Philippine irony is that Vince Perez, the man sitting today at the helm of the DOE and who is at present the most aggressive coal peddler in the country, once upon a time fashioned himself as an environmental supporter. On the other hand, beneath Perez is DOE Undersecretary Ed Manalac, a former oilman who worked as an executive of the U.S. oil industry for a number of years and who is now the biggest supporter of renewable energy in the Philippine government.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
THE TWENTY FOURTH OF MAY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
May 24, 2004
Competing legacies of a single day. Infamous and immaculate: the bequests of the twenty fourth of May.
On the 24th of May 2004 issue of The Weekly Standard, the neocon wellspring of imperial wet dreams, chicken hawk editor general William Kristol asks a Bush administration reeling from the Abu Ghraib Prison body blow: "Are you a man or a mouse? Squeak up." At the White House, officials tuned in to Kristol's crystal clear prose stiffen their spines and respond: "We will not be cowed. We're staying the course!" Along with Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush administration stalwarts, Kristol was a signatory to the Project New American Century document issued in 1998 calling for America to invade Iraq.
"[S]end 50,000 more troops to Iraq to win the war," huffs Kristol. Declare that "any site where Americans are attacked will be regarded as a combat zone, and anyone who chooses to go there to celebrate will be subject to attack." Vrrrrmmm! said the toy tanks in the White House sandbox.
On May 24 many years ago, the death of Shoichi James Okamoto was recorded. Okamoto was "driving Truck #100-41 at the order of the construction supervisor ... to get lumber piled across the highway from the old main gate, which is called Gate #4." At the gate, Okamoto was refused permission to pass by Private Bernard Goe, who did not like Asians. Goe takes a few steps back, lifts his shotgun and, "at approximately 2:20 p.m.," fires it at Okamoto, who died at the age of 30 years old. Goe is charged and fined a dollar for "unauthorized use of government property" - a bullet. The year is 1944, and the site is Tule Lake, America's concentration camp for Japanese-Americans. Okamoto is one of the camp's 'prisoners.' Okamoto was born in Garden Grove, California and had never been abroad.
In 1968, on May 24, while American-made gunships were vigorously spilling blood in Southeast Asia, four American protesters, including peace icon Philip Berrigan, were jailed six years each "for pouring blood on draft cards" in Baltimore, Maryland.
At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on May 24, 1971, an antiwar newspaper advertisement signed by 29 US soldiers supporting the Concerned Officers Movement is published. The movement had been formed in 1970 in Washington, D.C. by a group of naval officers opposed to the war.
Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater proposed the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam in an interview on May 24, 1964. According to The Daily Bleed, Goldwater "sees a brighter light at the end of the tunnel." Lyndon Johnson destroys Goldwater at the polls thanks largely, according to some pundits, to Goldwater's publicly professed nukie solution. After his win, Johnson goes ahead and destroys Vietnam conventionally.
In his 1964 interview, Goldwater discusses "the use of low-yield atomic bombs in North Vietnam to defoliate forests and destroy bridges, roads, and railroad lines." Four decades later, the US Congress ends restrictions on programs which will likely lead to the production of new "low-yield" nuclear weapons - mini-nukes. The lifting of the restrictions is tantamount to an order to weapons labs to proceed with dispatch in nuclear weapons research that include enhanced "agent defeat" capacity (killing soldiers) and "reduced collateral damage" (not killing too many civilians). In fact, the Bush administration plans to hold this year a "subcritical nuclear experiment" which US officials acknowledge will be a "full-blown nuclear explosion." This, despite a global treaty which commits nations of the world to forego nuclear weapons test explosions and despite the 1992 US moratorium on nuclear weapons testing. Poor Barry Goldwater, he lived ahead of his time.
The United Kingdom celebrated its first Empire Day on May 24, 1902. Years later, on May 24, 1959, Empire Day is renamed Commonwealth Day. On May 24, 2004, a Filipino proposes to rename July 4 as Empire Day.
May 24: a day of distinction. On this day in 1980, hundreds are arrested as protesters occupy a nuclear power plant construction site in Seabrook, New Hampshire. On the same day, in 1981, the First International Women's Day for Disarmament is launched. A year later, in 1982, over 200,000 people participate in a massive anti-nuclear demonstration in Tokyo.
May 24, a day of infamy. On this day in 1951: the US performs an atmospheric nuclear test at Enwetak. On the same day in 1972: the US performs a nuclear test at a Nevada Test Site. On May 24, 1979: the USSR performs a nuclear test at Eastern Kazakh/Semipalitinsk.
On May 24, 2003, CommonDreams.org, an online news center, reported the eagerness of the Bush administration to expand America's nuclear arsenal even as it orders other nations to disarm. The same article reported US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's moving defense of the Bush administration's pristine intentions to develop new nuclear weapons: "It's not 'pursuing.' And it's not 'developing,'" said Rumsfeld. "It is not 'building.' It is not 'manufacturing.' And it's not 'deploying.' And it is not 'using,.'" Yup. We believe you Donald.
On May 24 in 1844, the first Morse Code message inaugurating America's telegraph industry was transmitted by Samuel F.B. Morse from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland. Curiously, the message was the Biblical quotation "What hath God wrought?"
Not God but man. Mini-nukes, more war, increasing imperial ambitions. The world today asks the same question asked by the first telegraph message. And sends its response through the most famous Morse Code signal of all time.
... --- ...
SOS.
World in distress. Save our world.
NOTES:
1. "Of Mice and Men," William Kristol, Volume 009, Issue 35, The Weekly Standard, May 24, 2004.
2. See http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/shootings.html
3. From chronologist Robert Braunwart, in The Daily Bleed, http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/. See also http://www.safran-arts.com/42day/history/h4may/h4may24.html
4. "Remembering Barry Goldwater," Howard Gleckman Business Week Online, June 1, 1998. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/june1998/nf80601d.htm
5. "U.S. rearms while telling others to disarm," Helen Thomas, May 24, 2004. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0524-04.htm.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
May 24, 2004
Competing legacies of a single day. Infamous and immaculate: the bequests of the twenty fourth of May.
On the 24th of May 2004 issue of The Weekly Standard, the neocon wellspring of imperial wet dreams, chicken hawk editor general William Kristol asks a Bush administration reeling from the Abu Ghraib Prison body blow: "Are you a man or a mouse? Squeak up." At the White House, officials tuned in to Kristol's crystal clear prose stiffen their spines and respond: "We will not be cowed. We're staying the course!" Along with Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush administration stalwarts, Kristol was a signatory to the Project New American Century document issued in 1998 calling for America to invade Iraq.
"[S]end 50,000 more troops to Iraq to win the war," huffs Kristol. Declare that "any site where Americans are attacked will be regarded as a combat zone, and anyone who chooses to go there to celebrate will be subject to attack." Vrrrrmmm! said the toy tanks in the White House sandbox.
On May 24 many years ago, the death of Shoichi James Okamoto was recorded. Okamoto was "driving Truck #100-41 at the order of the construction supervisor ... to get lumber piled across the highway from the old main gate, which is called Gate #4." At the gate, Okamoto was refused permission to pass by Private Bernard Goe, who did not like Asians. Goe takes a few steps back, lifts his shotgun and, "at approximately 2:20 p.m.," fires it at Okamoto, who died at the age of 30 years old. Goe is charged and fined a dollar for "unauthorized use of government property" - a bullet. The year is 1944, and the site is Tule Lake, America's concentration camp for Japanese-Americans. Okamoto is one of the camp's 'prisoners.' Okamoto was born in Garden Grove, California and had never been abroad.
In 1968, on May 24, while American-made gunships were vigorously spilling blood in Southeast Asia, four American protesters, including peace icon Philip Berrigan, were jailed six years each "for pouring blood on draft cards" in Baltimore, Maryland.
At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on May 24, 1971, an antiwar newspaper advertisement signed by 29 US soldiers supporting the Concerned Officers Movement is published. The movement had been formed in 1970 in Washington, D.C. by a group of naval officers opposed to the war.
Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater proposed the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam in an interview on May 24, 1964. According to The Daily Bleed, Goldwater "sees a brighter light at the end of the tunnel." Lyndon Johnson destroys Goldwater at the polls thanks largely, according to some pundits, to Goldwater's publicly professed nukie solution. After his win, Johnson goes ahead and destroys Vietnam conventionally.
In his 1964 interview, Goldwater discusses "the use of low-yield atomic bombs in North Vietnam to defoliate forests and destroy bridges, roads, and railroad lines." Four decades later, the US Congress ends restrictions on programs which will likely lead to the production of new "low-yield" nuclear weapons - mini-nukes. The lifting of the restrictions is tantamount to an order to weapons labs to proceed with dispatch in nuclear weapons research that include enhanced "agent defeat" capacity (killing soldiers) and "reduced collateral damage" (not killing too many civilians). In fact, the Bush administration plans to hold this year a "subcritical nuclear experiment" which US officials acknowledge will be a "full-blown nuclear explosion." This, despite a global treaty which commits nations of the world to forego nuclear weapons test explosions and despite the 1992 US moratorium on nuclear weapons testing. Poor Barry Goldwater, he lived ahead of his time.
The United Kingdom celebrated its first Empire Day on May 24, 1902. Years later, on May 24, 1959, Empire Day is renamed Commonwealth Day. On May 24, 2004, a Filipino proposes to rename July 4 as Empire Day.
May 24: a day of distinction. On this day in 1980, hundreds are arrested as protesters occupy a nuclear power plant construction site in Seabrook, New Hampshire. On the same day, in 1981, the First International Women's Day for Disarmament is launched. A year later, in 1982, over 200,000 people participate in a massive anti-nuclear demonstration in Tokyo.
May 24, a day of infamy. On this day in 1951: the US performs an atmospheric nuclear test at Enwetak. On the same day in 1972: the US performs a nuclear test at a Nevada Test Site. On May 24, 1979: the USSR performs a nuclear test at Eastern Kazakh/Semipalitinsk.
On May 24, 2003, CommonDreams.org, an online news center, reported the eagerness of the Bush administration to expand America's nuclear arsenal even as it orders other nations to disarm. The same article reported US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's moving defense of the Bush administration's pristine intentions to develop new nuclear weapons: "It's not 'pursuing.' And it's not 'developing,'" said Rumsfeld. "It is not 'building.' It is not 'manufacturing.' And it's not 'deploying.' And it is not 'using,.'" Yup. We believe you Donald.
On May 24 in 1844, the first Morse Code message inaugurating America's telegraph industry was transmitted by Samuel F.B. Morse from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland. Curiously, the message was the Biblical quotation "What hath God wrought?"
Not God but man. Mini-nukes, more war, increasing imperial ambitions. The world today asks the same question asked by the first telegraph message. And sends its response through the most famous Morse Code signal of all time.
... --- ...
SOS.
World in distress. Save our world.
NOTES:
1. "Of Mice and Men," William Kristol, Volume 009, Issue 35, The Weekly Standard, May 24, 2004.
2. See http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/shootings.html
3. From chronologist Robert Braunwart, in The Daily Bleed, http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/. See also http://www.safran-arts.com/42day/history/h4may/h4may24.html
4. "Remembering Barry Goldwater," Howard Gleckman Business Week Online, June 1, 1998. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/june1998/nf80601d.htm
5. "U.S. rearms while telling others to disarm," Helen Thomas, May 24, 2004. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0524-04.htm.
Monday, May 03, 2004
THE POVERTY OF MEMORY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
May 3, 2004
The poverty of memory - this is our collective quagmire, its alleviation our common hope.
In a photograph taken "for historical purposes," ten US soldiers dressed in camouflage are handling coffins covered with the American flag. The coffins are in the Dover airbase in Delaware. They contain the remains of US soldiers - new casualties of America's occupation of Iraq.
The photo - along with 300 others - was released in April after a website called the Memory Hole filed a Freedom of Information Act request for pictures of coffins arriving from Iraq at the Dover base. A small veil is lifted and Americans react with shock, anger and sadness.
Releasing the photos is wrong, the Bush administration huffs, even as it tries to stamp out sparks of public reaction. "We must pay attention," hectors the White House spokesman, "to the privacy and to the sensitivity of the families of the fallen." A ban on the coverage of the arrival of remains at Dover, an airbase which houses the US military's largest mortuary, has been in force since 1991.
And yet ironically, as recent as last November, the US Defense Department itself released a photo of a casket containing an American casualty of the Korean War being carried off an aircraft by an honor guard at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, "an image almost identical to what takes place at Dover."
The difference? Slight but terribly significant.
Past American presidents "have never attended memorial services for US troops killed during a war and the ban on pictures from Dover and other military facilities does not extend to recovering the remains of troops killed in previous wars."
"Photographs and film footage of coffins coming home from battlefields have been a stark reminder for Americans of the toll of war," wrote Gregg Zoroya of USA Today. "During the Vietnam War, the image of caskets arriving at Dover became a staple of the nightly news."
"They don't want the public to see what the great difficulties are," said Robert Dallek, a historian of Boston University. "They're fearful that the public [may turn] against the war because it's frustrated by the losses of blood and treasure, in this case Iraq and earlier in Vietnam."
This should all sound familiar to Americans as well as Filipinos. Unfortunately, it is not and therein lies the problem.
We have forgotten so much.
"Why is it that the American outlook is blacker now than it has been since the beginning of the war?," wrote John Bass of Harper's Weekly in June 1899 regarding America's annexation of the Philippines. "First the whole population of the islands sympathizes with the insurgents; only those natives whose immediate self-interest requires it are friendly to us ... The sooner the people of the United States find out that the people of the Philippines do not wish to be governed by us the better."
John Bass' dispatch almost doesn't make it to the US. There is an active US military censorship in place in the Philippines to prevent all too accurate coverage concerning US atrocities and Filipino resistance from reaching America's shores.
"We all know that we are in a terrible mess out here, but we don't want the people to get excited about it. If you fellows will only keep quiet now we will pull through in time without any fuss at home ... My instructions are to shut off everything that could hurt McKinley's administration," said the censorship regime presided over by the over-all military commander of the US invasion army in the Philippines, Gen. Elwell Otis, who did not deny suppressing facts in his meeting with members of the media.
A joint letter of protest led by Robert Collins of the Associated Press is drawn up by American reporters concerning US military censorship of the US invasion: "We believe that, owing to official dispatches from Manila made public in Washington, the people of the United States have not received a correct impression of the situation in the Philippines, but that these dispatches have presented an ultra-optimistic view that is not shared by the general officers in the field ... We believe the dispatches err in the declaration that 'the situation is well in hand,' and in the assumption that the insurrection can be speedily ended without a greatly increased force. We think the tenacity of the Filipino purpose has been under-estimated."
A tenacity to resist the invasion that snuffed out the nascent Philippine republic, the product of a national revolution that had just thrown off the yoke of Spanish colonial rule. An invasion that met with such fierce Filipino resistance that, by the time the last armed group opposing US rule had been put down, the war had already claimed the lives of at least 250,000 Filipinos. So brutal was America's annexation of the Philippines that, according to a US War Department official, just around the first year after the US invasion, "14,643 Filipinos had been killed and 3,297 wounded." Meaning, for every five Filipinos killed, one was wounded.
The reporters led by Collins delivered their letter in person to Gen. Otis and explained to him that it was their intention to publish their protest in the US. Gen. Otis lashed out at the reporters: "You have served a paper on me-a most extraordinary document. Are you aware that this constitutes a conspiracy against the government?" I should have you all summoned to "a general court martial and have you tried for conspiracy."
Fall in line. Toe the line. Ten-hut!
"The US record is not one of imperialism," said US Secretary of State Colin Powell in February last year. "It is one of doing the job, bringing the peace, restoring order and helping a responsible government take its place in leading the country ... We are going to Iraq not to destroy the place but to make it better."
US record? Before Afghanistan, before Nicaragua, Indonesia, and Vietnam; before all these and much more - it was the Philippines. And what a start it was.
"We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under God, of the civilization of the world," said US Senator Albert Beveridge, an articulate luminary of America's imperial ambitions who called for the annexation of the Philippines over a hundred years ago. "God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns."
Our collective deliverance we will find in our common past. And the task to begin this search must begin today. "To look always for an answer," said Stuart T. Hess, "a solution to the ever-puzzling riddles that confront us: that is our responsibility, our curse and our blessing."
NOTES:
1. AP photo, TODAY, April 25, 2004.
2. "Bush criticizes release of photos of soldier coffins," Thom Shanker and Bill Carter, TODAY, April 25, 2004.
3. "Return of U.S. war dead kept solemn, secret," Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY, December 31, 2003.
4. Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: How the United States purchased and pacified the Philippines, Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York, 1961.
5. "Powell: We'll make Iraq a good neighbour," Bangkok Post, February 22, 2003.
6. Joseph L. Schott, The ordeal of Samar, Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
May 3, 2004
The poverty of memory - this is our collective quagmire, its alleviation our common hope.
In a photograph taken "for historical purposes," ten US soldiers dressed in camouflage are handling coffins covered with the American flag. The coffins are in the Dover airbase in Delaware. They contain the remains of US soldiers - new casualties of America's occupation of Iraq.
The photo - along with 300 others - was released in April after a website called the Memory Hole filed a Freedom of Information Act request for pictures of coffins arriving from Iraq at the Dover base. A small veil is lifted and Americans react with shock, anger and sadness.
Releasing the photos is wrong, the Bush administration huffs, even as it tries to stamp out sparks of public reaction. "We must pay attention," hectors the White House spokesman, "to the privacy and to the sensitivity of the families of the fallen." A ban on the coverage of the arrival of remains at Dover, an airbase which houses the US military's largest mortuary, has been in force since 1991.
And yet ironically, as recent as last November, the US Defense Department itself released a photo of a casket containing an American casualty of the Korean War being carried off an aircraft by an honor guard at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, "an image almost identical to what takes place at Dover."
The difference? Slight but terribly significant.
Past American presidents "have never attended memorial services for US troops killed during a war and the ban on pictures from Dover and other military facilities does not extend to recovering the remains of troops killed in previous wars."
"Photographs and film footage of coffins coming home from battlefields have been a stark reminder for Americans of the toll of war," wrote Gregg Zoroya of USA Today. "During the Vietnam War, the image of caskets arriving at Dover became a staple of the nightly news."
"They don't want the public to see what the great difficulties are," said Robert Dallek, a historian of Boston University. "They're fearful that the public [may turn] against the war because it's frustrated by the losses of blood and treasure, in this case Iraq and earlier in Vietnam."
This should all sound familiar to Americans as well as Filipinos. Unfortunately, it is not and therein lies the problem.
We have forgotten so much.
"Why is it that the American outlook is blacker now than it has been since the beginning of the war?," wrote John Bass of Harper's Weekly in June 1899 regarding America's annexation of the Philippines. "First the whole population of the islands sympathizes with the insurgents; only those natives whose immediate self-interest requires it are friendly to us ... The sooner the people of the United States find out that the people of the Philippines do not wish to be governed by us the better."
John Bass' dispatch almost doesn't make it to the US. There is an active US military censorship in place in the Philippines to prevent all too accurate coverage concerning US atrocities and Filipino resistance from reaching America's shores.
"We all know that we are in a terrible mess out here, but we don't want the people to get excited about it. If you fellows will only keep quiet now we will pull through in time without any fuss at home ... My instructions are to shut off everything that could hurt McKinley's administration," said the censorship regime presided over by the over-all military commander of the US invasion army in the Philippines, Gen. Elwell Otis, who did not deny suppressing facts in his meeting with members of the media.
A joint letter of protest led by Robert Collins of the Associated Press is drawn up by American reporters concerning US military censorship of the US invasion: "We believe that, owing to official dispatches from Manila made public in Washington, the people of the United States have not received a correct impression of the situation in the Philippines, but that these dispatches have presented an ultra-optimistic view that is not shared by the general officers in the field ... We believe the dispatches err in the declaration that 'the situation is well in hand,' and in the assumption that the insurrection can be speedily ended without a greatly increased force. We think the tenacity of the Filipino purpose has been under-estimated."
A tenacity to resist the invasion that snuffed out the nascent Philippine republic, the product of a national revolution that had just thrown off the yoke of Spanish colonial rule. An invasion that met with such fierce Filipino resistance that, by the time the last armed group opposing US rule had been put down, the war had already claimed the lives of at least 250,000 Filipinos. So brutal was America's annexation of the Philippines that, according to a US War Department official, just around the first year after the US invasion, "14,643 Filipinos had been killed and 3,297 wounded." Meaning, for every five Filipinos killed, one was wounded.
The reporters led by Collins delivered their letter in person to Gen. Otis and explained to him that it was their intention to publish their protest in the US. Gen. Otis lashed out at the reporters: "You have served a paper on me-a most extraordinary document. Are you aware that this constitutes a conspiracy against the government?" I should have you all summoned to "a general court martial and have you tried for conspiracy."
Fall in line. Toe the line. Ten-hut!
"The US record is not one of imperialism," said US Secretary of State Colin Powell in February last year. "It is one of doing the job, bringing the peace, restoring order and helping a responsible government take its place in leading the country ... We are going to Iraq not to destroy the place but to make it better."
US record? Before Afghanistan, before Nicaragua, Indonesia, and Vietnam; before all these and much more - it was the Philippines. And what a start it was.
"We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under God, of the civilization of the world," said US Senator Albert Beveridge, an articulate luminary of America's imperial ambitions who called for the annexation of the Philippines over a hundred years ago. "God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns."
Our collective deliverance we will find in our common past. And the task to begin this search must begin today. "To look always for an answer," said Stuart T. Hess, "a solution to the ever-puzzling riddles that confront us: that is our responsibility, our curse and our blessing."
NOTES:
1. AP photo, TODAY, April 25, 2004.
2. "Bush criticizes release of photos of soldier coffins," Thom Shanker and Bill Carter, TODAY, April 25, 2004.
3. "Return of U.S. war dead kept solemn, secret," Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY, December 31, 2003.
4. Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: How the United States purchased and pacified the Philippines, Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York, 1961.
5. "Powell: We'll make Iraq a good neighbour," Bangkok Post, February 22, 2003.
6. Joseph L. Schott, The ordeal of Samar, Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
WHAT IS REQUIRED OF ISRAEL
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY, abs-cbnnews.com
April 26, 2004
After spending 18 years in prison - 12 in solitary confinement - Mordechai Vanunu walked out a free man. He is warned by those who imprisoned him that he has been given his freedom and that he must be thankful he has been freed. That even though he has been freed he is not allowed to leave Israel. That he is forbidden to talk to any foreigners, is not allowed to talk to the press, is not allowed to talk about his past work in Dimona, a deadly nuclear facility that his conscience caused him 18 years ago to expose as Israel's dirty deadly secret.
Vanunu's first act - after he takes his first step out of prison - causes people the world over to cry. Vanunu is a new man. The same new man who decided to follow his conscience 18 years ago. Vanunu approaches the local press; he approaches the foreign press. He makes the victory sign with his fingers and speaks directly to microphones and cameras. "You have not broken me," Vanunu tells the Israeli government. Call me a traitor, he taunts his abductors; "I have a greater responsibility."
"I am proud, I am happy, you have not made me crazy. I still believe Israel is wrong to develop nuclear weapons, and I still believe the abolition of nuclear weapons is possible in our lifetime," Vanunu tells the media. "I call on Mohammed ElBaradei, on the international nuclear inspectors of the UN. Come to Israel. Inspect Dimona. Dimona must be shut down."
Outside, a gang of Israelis chant "Kill Vanunu!" Israeli Justice minister - a misplaced term - Joseph Lapid advises the media: "Since Vanunu is surrounded by a throng of activists who worship him, they can very well take care of him. We are not providing him security." Israeli newspapers publish with malice Vanunu's home address. Another paper called Maariv International publishes a poll where readers are asked to choose whether Vanunu should be kept in jail or allowed to leave Israel. Or killed. A day later, after receiving howls of protest, Maariv backs down, takes out its poll, and explains the word kill was improper and should have been replaced instead with the more "appropriate" word "executed."
Israeli officials take turns lambasting Vanunu, accusing Vanunu that he is a traitor, that he wants Israel defenseless. Noone is supposed to question Israel's intentions, duty and obligation to "protect" Israel.
"I visited Auschwitz this morning!" Lapid hectors the host of BBC's program Hard Talk, Tim Sebastian, who merely asked the Israeli minister (who kept insisting that Vanunu caused serious damage to Israel) to give examples of the damage Israel suffered because of Vanunu's revelations. Lapid wields the horror suffered by the Jewish peoples like a bludgeon: anytime the Israeli government is pressed to account for its duplicity, for its malevolent intentions, for its singular racism, the Holocaust is waved around to shut up its critics; Israel has suffered; Israel can do no wrong. Sebastian does the right thing. He tells Lapid to his face: "Excuse me, how can Auschwitz be relevant? I am asking about Vanunu."
Maybe Sebastian should have also asked whether Israel's nuclear weapons are supposed to stop suicide bombers.
"What exactly is a country surrounded by hundreds of millions of people each one of whom have sworn to destroy her supposed to do?" some Israelis ask, as if the mere question is supposed to still the opposition demanding the dismantling of Israel's nuclear facilities.
The question ignores the fact that Arab governments have recognized Israel's right to exist for over 20 years. That polls taken among Arab nations confirms what most people already know - the outrage over the brutal treatment of Palestinians under Israel's occupation is increasing not diminishing - and yet at the same time acknowledges what is all too often ignored - the continued legitimacy among most Arabs of a solution to the Middle East peace problem that includes Israel.
Those who bring up the matter of Israel's supposed "impending annihilation" by its "sworn enemies" do not always realize that the reasoning used to justify Israel's possession of nuclear weapons is in reality a way of thinking framed by a familiar narrative - the small civilized community in a wasteland versus the hundreds of millions of murderous savages intent on annihilating their way of life. Racist.
To prevent "another Holocaust" from being inflicted on them, Israel threatens everyone - in particular the non-Jew - that it will unleash its own Holocaust on them, for reasons that are not entirely as benign as "defending Israel."
Such as to increase Israel's dominance in the region. To legitimize the continuation of its inhumane occupation. To sustain the reign of a regime in the Middle East that favors Jews and Jews alone. A regime that continues to provoke a torrent of hatred - and terrorist acts - against innocent Israelis.
Anti-Semitic statements? Clumsily crafted words, probably, but anti-Semitic? Probably not:
"The wish for peace, so often assumed as the Israeli aim, is not in my view a principle of Israeli policy, while the wish to extend Israeli domination and influence is," said the late Dr. Israel Shahak, a Warsaw-born concentration camp survivor, who was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Internationally acclaimed for research that contributed to cancer treatment, Dr. Shahak had lived in Israel since its creation in 1948 till the time of his death in 2001. Shahak, who spent most of his childhood trying to stay alive in Nazi-occupied ghettos and death camps, often compared the experience of Palestinians under Israeli rule to his own experience living under the Nazis. "Israel is preparing for a war, nuclear if need be, for the sake of averting domestic change not to its liking, if it occurs in some or any Middle Eastern states ... Israel clearly prepares itself to seek overt hegemony over the entire Middle East ... without any hesitation to use for the purpose all means available, including nuclear ones."
"Israel is still a democracy for Jews alone. The problems of Israel, in every walk of life, can be traced to the all-pervasive racism, whether generalized anti-Gentile racism or particularized anti-Arab racism, both of which dominate its society," said Shahak who did not tire reminding Jews who called him "a self-hating Jew" that the slur was originally "a Nazi expression. The Nazis called Germans who defended Jewish rights self-hating Germans."
According to Amira Hass, the distinguished writer and journalist of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, "Every Jew, man or woman, citizen of any country in the world, has potential more rights in Israel than any Arab citizen in the state. The Jew will have more chances to find a job, respectable housing, financial aid for higher education, personal advancement. Every foreign Jew has, de facto, more rights in the West Bank and Gaza than Palestinians."
Israel wants to see itself as "the light unto nations." But until Israel realizes what it has become, there will only be darkness.
The truth of the matter is that, according to Yaakov Perry, former chief of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security service, "Israel is heading downhill towards near-catastrophe. If Israel goes on living by the sword, Israel will continue to wallow in the mud and destroy itself."
Listen to Avraham Burg, former chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization:
"Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.
"Israel could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below - from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption ...
"Israel cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think itself the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live in Israel, Arab as well as Jew. Israel cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state - not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish."
Here is Major Ishai Menuhin, IDF and chairman of Yesh Gvul, the soldiers movement for selective refusal: "Daily funerals and thoughts of revenge among Israelis tend to blur the fact that we, the Israelis, are the occupiers. And as much as we live in fear of terrorism and war, it is the Palestinians who suffer more deaths hourly and live with greater fear because they are the occupied. Israel's military occupation of Palestine has over the decades made Israel less secure and less humane ... I and others who serve in the [Israeli] defense forces cannot by our actions alone change government policies or make peace negotiations more likely. But we can show our fellow citizens that occupation of the territories is not just a political or strategic matter. It is also a moral matter. We can show them an alternative: they can say no to occupation."
And here is the respected writer and founding member of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) Uri Avnery, a three-term member of the Israeli Parliament: "Violence is a symptom; occupation is the disease ... Israel is in the middle of a war in which three and a half million Palestinians are oppressed by Israel's occupation. The world is shocked that yesterday's victims are today's victimizers. A higher moral standard is required from Israel than from other peoples. And rightly so."
Rightly so.
NOTES:
1. "Anniversary of a whistle blower," Renato Redentor Constantino, TODAY, October 6, 2003.
2. There have been numerous polls conducted among Arab states indicating such sentiment. In the Palestinian territories in particular, a small example among many others: the results of a recent poll released in March 28, 2004 conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between March 14 to 17, 2004 (before the Israeli assassination of Ahmad Yasin). In the poll, 84% support mutual cessation of violence and 70% support a Hudna. "After reaching a peace agreement and the establishment of a Palestinian state, 74% would support reconciliation between the two peoples."
3. "Israeli weapons of mass destruction: a threat to peace," John Steinbach, Center for Research on Globalisation (CRG), March 3, 2002.
4. "The Israeli Myth of Omniscience: Nuclear Deterrence and Intelligence," Israel Shahak, The Middle East Policy Council Journal, Spring 1991, Number 36,
5. "Breaking an iron rule," Amira Hass, Haaretz, April 21, 2004.
6. "Israel on the road to ruin warn former Shin Bet chiefs," Chris McGreal, The Guardian-UK, November 15, 2003.
7. "A failed Israeli society is collapsing," Avraham Burg, International Herald Tribune, September 6, 2003.
8. "Saying no to Israel's Occupation," Ishai Menuhin, March 9, 2002. See http://www.yesh-gvul.org
9. Quotes are from a variety of sources: "Violence is a symptom," Jon Elmer interview of Uri Avnery, September 15, 2003. "The cost of Zionism," Uri Avnery and Jon Elmer, From Occupied Palestine, February 23, 2004. "Anti-Semitism vs. Anti-Zionism: A Practical Manual," Uri Avnery, Counterpunch, January 19, 2004.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY, abs-cbnnews.com
April 26, 2004
After spending 18 years in prison - 12 in solitary confinement - Mordechai Vanunu walked out a free man. He is warned by those who imprisoned him that he has been given his freedom and that he must be thankful he has been freed. That even though he has been freed he is not allowed to leave Israel. That he is forbidden to talk to any foreigners, is not allowed to talk to the press, is not allowed to talk about his past work in Dimona, a deadly nuclear facility that his conscience caused him 18 years ago to expose as Israel's dirty deadly secret.
Vanunu's first act - after he takes his first step out of prison - causes people the world over to cry. Vanunu is a new man. The same new man who decided to follow his conscience 18 years ago. Vanunu approaches the local press; he approaches the foreign press. He makes the victory sign with his fingers and speaks directly to microphones and cameras. "You have not broken me," Vanunu tells the Israeli government. Call me a traitor, he taunts his abductors; "I have a greater responsibility."
"I am proud, I am happy, you have not made me crazy. I still believe Israel is wrong to develop nuclear weapons, and I still believe the abolition of nuclear weapons is possible in our lifetime," Vanunu tells the media. "I call on Mohammed ElBaradei, on the international nuclear inspectors of the UN. Come to Israel. Inspect Dimona. Dimona must be shut down."
Outside, a gang of Israelis chant "Kill Vanunu!" Israeli Justice minister - a misplaced term - Joseph Lapid advises the media: "Since Vanunu is surrounded by a throng of activists who worship him, they can very well take care of him. We are not providing him security." Israeli newspapers publish with malice Vanunu's home address. Another paper called Maariv International publishes a poll where readers are asked to choose whether Vanunu should be kept in jail or allowed to leave Israel. Or killed. A day later, after receiving howls of protest, Maariv backs down, takes out its poll, and explains the word kill was improper and should have been replaced instead with the more "appropriate" word "executed."
Israeli officials take turns lambasting Vanunu, accusing Vanunu that he is a traitor, that he wants Israel defenseless. Noone is supposed to question Israel's intentions, duty and obligation to "protect" Israel.
"I visited Auschwitz this morning!" Lapid hectors the host of BBC's program Hard Talk, Tim Sebastian, who merely asked the Israeli minister (who kept insisting that Vanunu caused serious damage to Israel) to give examples of the damage Israel suffered because of Vanunu's revelations. Lapid wields the horror suffered by the Jewish peoples like a bludgeon: anytime the Israeli government is pressed to account for its duplicity, for its malevolent intentions, for its singular racism, the Holocaust is waved around to shut up its critics; Israel has suffered; Israel can do no wrong. Sebastian does the right thing. He tells Lapid to his face: "Excuse me, how can Auschwitz be relevant? I am asking about Vanunu."
Maybe Sebastian should have also asked whether Israel's nuclear weapons are supposed to stop suicide bombers.
"What exactly is a country surrounded by hundreds of millions of people each one of whom have sworn to destroy her supposed to do?" some Israelis ask, as if the mere question is supposed to still the opposition demanding the dismantling of Israel's nuclear facilities.
The question ignores the fact that Arab governments have recognized Israel's right to exist for over 20 years. That polls taken among Arab nations confirms what most people already know - the outrage over the brutal treatment of Palestinians under Israel's occupation is increasing not diminishing - and yet at the same time acknowledges what is all too often ignored - the continued legitimacy among most Arabs of a solution to the Middle East peace problem that includes Israel.
Those who bring up the matter of Israel's supposed "impending annihilation" by its "sworn enemies" do not always realize that the reasoning used to justify Israel's possession of nuclear weapons is in reality a way of thinking framed by a familiar narrative - the small civilized community in a wasteland versus the hundreds of millions of murderous savages intent on annihilating their way of life. Racist.
To prevent "another Holocaust" from being inflicted on them, Israel threatens everyone - in particular the non-Jew - that it will unleash its own Holocaust on them, for reasons that are not entirely as benign as "defending Israel."
Such as to increase Israel's dominance in the region. To legitimize the continuation of its inhumane occupation. To sustain the reign of a regime in the Middle East that favors Jews and Jews alone. A regime that continues to provoke a torrent of hatred - and terrorist acts - against innocent Israelis.
Anti-Semitic statements? Clumsily crafted words, probably, but anti-Semitic? Probably not:
"The wish for peace, so often assumed as the Israeli aim, is not in my view a principle of Israeli policy, while the wish to extend Israeli domination and influence is," said the late Dr. Israel Shahak, a Warsaw-born concentration camp survivor, who was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Internationally acclaimed for research that contributed to cancer treatment, Dr. Shahak had lived in Israel since its creation in 1948 till the time of his death in 2001. Shahak, who spent most of his childhood trying to stay alive in Nazi-occupied ghettos and death camps, often compared the experience of Palestinians under Israeli rule to his own experience living under the Nazis. "Israel is preparing for a war, nuclear if need be, for the sake of averting domestic change not to its liking, if it occurs in some or any Middle Eastern states ... Israel clearly prepares itself to seek overt hegemony over the entire Middle East ... without any hesitation to use for the purpose all means available, including nuclear ones."
"Israel is still a democracy for Jews alone. The problems of Israel, in every walk of life, can be traced to the all-pervasive racism, whether generalized anti-Gentile racism or particularized anti-Arab racism, both of which dominate its society," said Shahak who did not tire reminding Jews who called him "a self-hating Jew" that the slur was originally "a Nazi expression. The Nazis called Germans who defended Jewish rights self-hating Germans."
According to Amira Hass, the distinguished writer and journalist of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, "Every Jew, man or woman, citizen of any country in the world, has potential more rights in Israel than any Arab citizen in the state. The Jew will have more chances to find a job, respectable housing, financial aid for higher education, personal advancement. Every foreign Jew has, de facto, more rights in the West Bank and Gaza than Palestinians."
Israel wants to see itself as "the light unto nations." But until Israel realizes what it has become, there will only be darkness.
The truth of the matter is that, according to Yaakov Perry, former chief of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security service, "Israel is heading downhill towards near-catastrophe. If Israel goes on living by the sword, Israel will continue to wallow in the mud and destroy itself."
Listen to Avraham Burg, former chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization:
"Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.
"Israel could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below - from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption ...
"Israel cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think itself the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live in Israel, Arab as well as Jew. Israel cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state - not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish."
Here is Major Ishai Menuhin, IDF and chairman of Yesh Gvul, the soldiers movement for selective refusal: "Daily funerals and thoughts of revenge among Israelis tend to blur the fact that we, the Israelis, are the occupiers. And as much as we live in fear of terrorism and war, it is the Palestinians who suffer more deaths hourly and live with greater fear because they are the occupied. Israel's military occupation of Palestine has over the decades made Israel less secure and less humane ... I and others who serve in the [Israeli] defense forces cannot by our actions alone change government policies or make peace negotiations more likely. But we can show our fellow citizens that occupation of the territories is not just a political or strategic matter. It is also a moral matter. We can show them an alternative: they can say no to occupation."
And here is the respected writer and founding member of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) Uri Avnery, a three-term member of the Israeli Parliament: "Violence is a symptom; occupation is the disease ... Israel is in the middle of a war in which three and a half million Palestinians are oppressed by Israel's occupation. The world is shocked that yesterday's victims are today's victimizers. A higher moral standard is required from Israel than from other peoples. And rightly so."
Rightly so.
NOTES:
1. "Anniversary of a whistle blower," Renato Redentor Constantino, TODAY, October 6, 2003.
2. There have been numerous polls conducted among Arab states indicating such sentiment. In the Palestinian territories in particular, a small example among many others: the results of a recent poll released in March 28, 2004 conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between March 14 to 17, 2004 (before the Israeli assassination of Ahmad Yasin). In the poll, 84% support mutual cessation of violence and 70% support a Hudna. "After reaching a peace agreement and the establishment of a Palestinian state, 74% would support reconciliation between the two peoples."
3. "Israeli weapons of mass destruction: a threat to peace," John Steinbach, Center for Research on Globalisation (CRG), March 3, 2002.
4. "The Israeli Myth of Omniscience: Nuclear Deterrence and Intelligence," Israel Shahak, The Middle East Policy Council Journal, Spring 1991, Number 36,
5. "Breaking an iron rule," Amira Hass, Haaretz, April 21, 2004.
6. "Israel on the road to ruin warn former Shin Bet chiefs," Chris McGreal, The Guardian-UK, November 15, 2003.
7. "A failed Israeli society is collapsing," Avraham Burg, International Herald Tribune, September 6, 2003.
8. "Saying no to Israel's Occupation," Ishai Menuhin, March 9, 2002. See http://www.yesh-gvul.org
9. Quotes are from a variety of sources: "Violence is a symptom," Jon Elmer interview of Uri Avnery, September 15, 2003
Monday, April 19, 2004
A WHISTLE BLOWER MIGHTIER THAN ISRAEL
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
April 19, 2004
Mightier than the government of Israel. One man.
He has been incarcerated for almost 18 years, 12 spent in solitary confinement, yet he remains freer than his tormentors could ever hope to be - the government of Israel, which continues to languish in the prison of its singular cowardice.
His name is Mordechai Vanunu, whistleblower extraordinaire and the world's first independent nuclear inspector. On April 21 - the day before Earth Day, a fitting occasion - Vanunu will walk out of Israel's Ashkelon Prison with his conscience intact and his motive no less urgent.
The prisoner of conscience is a family hero, an icon of the global peace movement, a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize and a citizen of the world. If only for the message that Vanunu continues to carry and the example of his sacrifice, the Philippine government should be sending a peace keeping force not to Iraq but to Israel. To receive Vanunu. To embrace him. To provide palpable support to a man who best embodies what is presumed to be a collective aspiration of the world - the abolition of all nuclear weapons.
From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu had been a technician at Dimona, Israel's nuclear installation in the Negrev desert. It was at Dimona where he learned of and documented Israel's secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The world learned of Israel's clandestine armory when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu's interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986. Photographs that revealed nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and "the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually." In 1986. When America was still in bed with Saddam.
Vanunu's only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which Vanunu would be kidnapped and drugged - five days after the Sunday Times published his interview - and shipped to Israel to be sentenced in a secret trial to 18 years' imprisonment
Israel started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East yet today it remains the only country in the Middle East that is not party to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Israel is the world's sixth largest nuclear power yet the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, and Israel's biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion remain closed to international inspection.
Vanunu. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a poem he wrote in prison: "I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don't look left or right, don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp."
"What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency toward violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people faced with an overwhelming environment of injustice to submit to it," said the historian Howard Zinn. "Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience."
Vanunu chose disobedience, chose to obey his conscience instead, and was forced to spend the next 18 years of his life behind bars. Was it worth it? For this giant of a man, the answer is an emphatic yes.
"We've succeeded in overcoming this long time of silence ... You were my voice, my conscience - you kept all these issues of secret nuclear weapons in the center and followed my path, " wrote Vanunu recently to his supporters in the US. "We'll not rest until we see a new international agreement to ban, abolish all kinds of nuclear weapons ... We believe it is possible and we can witness it in our lifetime ... The end of nuclear weapons is possible."
"The dreams men dream in sleep are mist and shadow," said Barrows Dunham. "The dreams men dream while waking can become the substance of a world." True.
"I won. I'll be free. The gates and the locks will be opened. They didn't succeed in breaking me," wrote Vanunu, to his brother Meir last February.
Giant, how do we repay you?
We are all caught up in the thousand and one things that life imposes daily, but we will try. For starters, this Wednesday, on April 21, at the Embassy of Israel in Makati City, a small Filipino family will bring a garland of flowers to welcome you.
And all of you who are free - especially this Wednesday - come and join and break bread. Tell Israel that it must get rid of its nuclear weapons and that it must sign the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons treaty. Send your letters and flowers to Israel's embassy at Trafalgar Plaza, H.V. dela Costa Street, Salcedo Village.
Each flower stem will serve to welcome Vanunu and each petal will symbolize the abolition of a nuclear missile.
* * * * *
Dr. Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped nearly 18 years ago in a terrorist act of the Israeli government and he should not have spent even one day behind bars and yet, as if all these were not enough, the Israeli government still intends to enforce barbaric restrictions on the Nobel Peace Prize nominee after his release from prison on April 21. Another display of the moral bankruptcy of a government all too often erroneously called "the only democracy in the Middle East."
Vanunu will be forbidden to leave city limits unless he reports his intentions to the local police force; he will not be allowed to approach any border terminal, including Ben-Gurion International Airport, the country's ports, or borders with the Palestinian Authority; he is forbidden to be in contact with foreigners - whether in face-to-face meetings or by telephone, fax, or email - including foreign citizens residing in Israel; he is not allowed to approach foreign embassies and divulge details to anyone regarding the Dimona plant where he worked or the circumstances of his being kidnapped and transported to Israel; and he will not have passport privileges, and therefore, cannot leave the country.
Vanunu has formally asked to renounce his Israeli citizenship as a way to prevent the government from confining him to the country after his release from prison.
Send your messages of concern regarding the inhumane restrictions on Vanunu to H.E. Yehoshua Sagi, Ambassador of Israel, at fax number 894-1027 and via email at pressil@info.com.ph.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
April 19, 2004
Mightier than the government of Israel. One man.
He has been incarcerated for almost 18 years, 12 spent in solitary confinement, yet he remains freer than his tormentors could ever hope to be - the government of Israel, which continues to languish in the prison of its singular cowardice.
His name is Mordechai Vanunu, whistleblower extraordinaire and the world's first independent nuclear inspector. On April 21 - the day before Earth Day, a fitting occasion - Vanunu will walk out of Israel's Ashkelon Prison with his conscience intact and his motive no less urgent.
The prisoner of conscience is a family hero, an icon of the global peace movement, a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize and a citizen of the world. If only for the message that Vanunu continues to carry and the example of his sacrifice, the Philippine government should be sending a peace keeping force not to Iraq but to Israel. To receive Vanunu. To embrace him. To provide palpable support to a man who best embodies what is presumed to be a collective aspiration of the world - the abolition of all nuclear weapons.
From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu had been a technician at Dimona, Israel's nuclear installation in the Negrev desert. It was at Dimona where he learned of and documented Israel's secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The world learned of Israel's clandestine armory when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu's interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986. Photographs that revealed nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and "the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually." In 1986. When America was still in bed with Saddam.
Vanunu's only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which Vanunu would be kidnapped and drugged - five days after the Sunday Times published his interview - and shipped to Israel to be sentenced in a secret trial to 18 years' imprisonment
Israel started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East yet today it remains the only country in the Middle East that is not party to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Israel is the world's sixth largest nuclear power yet the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, and Israel's biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion remain closed to international inspection.
Vanunu. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a poem he wrote in prison: "I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don't look left or right, don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp."
"What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency toward violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people faced with an overwhelming environment of injustice to submit to it," said the historian Howard Zinn. "Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience."
Vanunu chose disobedience, chose to obey his conscience instead, and was forced to spend the next 18 years of his life behind bars. Was it worth it? For this giant of a man, the answer is an emphatic yes.
"We've succeeded in overcoming this long time of silence ... You were my voice, my conscience - you kept all these issues of secret nuclear weapons in the center and followed my path, " wrote Vanunu recently to his supporters in the US. "We'll not rest until we see a new international agreement to ban, abolish all kinds of nuclear weapons ... We believe it is possible and we can witness it in our lifetime ... The end of nuclear weapons is possible."
"The dreams men dream in sleep are mist and shadow," said Barrows Dunham. "The dreams men dream while waking can become the substance of a world." True.
"I won. I'll be free. The gates and the locks will be opened. They didn't succeed in breaking me," wrote Vanunu, to his brother Meir last February.
Giant, how do we repay you?
We are all caught up in the thousand and one things that life imposes daily, but we will try. For starters, this Wednesday, on April 21, at the Embassy of Israel in Makati City, a small Filipino family will bring a garland of flowers to welcome you.
And all of you who are free - especially this Wednesday - come and join and break bread. Tell Israel that it must get rid of its nuclear weapons and that it must sign the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons treaty. Send your letters and flowers to Israel's embassy at Trafalgar Plaza, H.V. dela Costa Street, Salcedo Village.
Each flower stem will serve to welcome Vanunu and each petal will symbolize the abolition of a nuclear missile.
* * * * *
Dr. Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped nearly 18 years ago in a terrorist act of the Israeli government and he should not have spent even one day behind bars and yet, as if all these were not enough, the Israeli government still intends to enforce barbaric restrictions on the Nobel Peace Prize nominee after his release from prison on April 21. Another display of the moral bankruptcy of a government all too often erroneously called "the only democracy in the Middle East."
Vanunu will be forbidden to leave city limits unless he reports his intentions to the local police force; he will not be allowed to approach any border terminal, including Ben-Gurion International Airport, the country's ports, or borders with the Palestinian Authority; he is forbidden to be in contact with foreigners - whether in face-to-face meetings or by telephone, fax, or email - including foreign citizens residing in Israel; he is not allowed to approach foreign embassies and divulge details to anyone regarding the Dimona plant where he worked or the circumstances of his being kidnapped and transported to Israel; and he will not have passport privileges, and therefore, cannot leave the country.
Vanunu has formally asked to renounce his Israeli citizenship as a way to prevent the government from confining him to the country after his release from prison.
Send your messages of concern regarding the inhumane restrictions on Vanunu to H.E. Yehoshua Sagi, Ambassador of Israel, at fax number 894-1027 and via email at pressil@info.com.ph.
Monday, April 12, 2004
BEIJING TAXI RIDE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
April 12, 2004
It took about 40 minutes by taxi to get to Beijing International Airport from the Dongcheng District apartment. Enough time for breakfast on the go. Fresh sweet yoghurt in a small clay jar sipped through a straw, Dido singing on the MP3 player, and thoughts of the family waiting back home.
The short trip was somehow like a long train ride minus the clacking of the rails. It was dreamy and yet indifferent, the pining for home fertilizing the blur of urban vistas and the uncertain climate of the present.
Only weeks ago, the trees of Beijing were barren as temperatures hovered between below-7 and 12 degrees. And yet that morning, as I was making my way to the airport, peach, cherry and pear trees were in full bloom, a riot of unruly pastel colors quarreling with infantries of greenery. It was quite jarring.
According to the Beijing Meteorological Observatory, last Thursday was actually the second-warmest April day in Beijing since the foundation of the New China in 1949. Over the next week, "more dry and warm weather is expected."
The sharp shift of the capital's climate was as if spring had somehow hurled and impaled itself on Beijing, expiring as quickly as it arrived, "giving residents the impression that spring simply did not happen."
Warmest weather. Sounds familiar. The ten hottest years in recorded history all occurred around the last ten years.
I think of the photo a friend had given last month, a snapshot of camel owner Baoyin Culu kneeling in prayer at the very place where his last camel died. The camel's bleached bones are scattered in front of Baoyin, like sentries confronting the camel owner's shadow. In the photo, the desert dunes of Inner Mongolia surrounding Baoyin appear as desolate as his plight; once upon a time, he owned 80 camels. But each one has died due to disappearing grasslands and accelerating desertification.
I think of Peter Timeon who, as foreign secretary of the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati, said in 1990 in Sweden at a United Nations plenary session on Climate Change: "Mr. Chairman, distinguished delegates, I wonder how many people in this hall know where my country is? ... Without wishing to take up so much of this meeting's precious time, it suffices to say briefly that ... no place among our 33 tiny atolls rises higher than two meters above sea leve ... [In the absence of] concerted international action ... commensurate with the dire warnings of ... scientists ... long before the sea rises that far, my country and others like it will have been condemned to annihilation."
I remember the warning issued last March by Swiss Re, the world's second largest reinsurer, that if the world did not curb the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, the economic costs of global warming may double to $150 billion a year in 10 years and hit insurers with $30-40 billion in claims - "the equivalent of one World Trade Center attack annually."
The impacts of climate change are not trivial, after all. In fact, consequences of humankind's addiction to fossil fuels are the reason why climate change is considered by many as the greatest threat the planet is facing today. The increase in frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts, flooding and storms. Retreating glaciers. Rising sea levels.
I think of the words of Lord Peter Levene, board chair of Lloyd's of London, who said recently that terrorism is not the insurance industry's biggest worry, despite the fact that his company was the largest single insurer of the World Trade Center. According to Levene, "Like other large international insurance companies, [Lloyd's] is bracing for an increase in weather disasters related to global warming." In the business sector, the insurance industry is the canary in the coal mine, and right now the canary is nervously tottering on its perch.
I think of Sir John Houghton, a co-chair of the UN-formed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said that "Global warming is already upon us ... The impacts of global warming are such that that I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction."
And I think of Hans Blix who said that he too was "more worried about global warming than [he was] of any major military conflict."
In the volley of my worries, I think of my son and daughter and I collide once more with a familiar impasse: that I have not contributed enough to make the world that they will inherit a better one. And that I have not spent enough time with them eating ice cream, reading books and romping around the bedroom.
It is a good dilemma, one that I am in no hurry to resolve. "We worry too much," someone once said, "about something to live on and too little about something to live for." Another good dilemma.
I smile as a gust of cold wind enters the vehicle. I take out a photo of my wife and kids, my mind shifting to dreams of kite-flying.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
April 12, 2004
It took about 40 minutes by taxi to get to Beijing International Airport from the Dongcheng District apartment. Enough time for breakfast on the go. Fresh sweet yoghurt in a small clay jar sipped through a straw, Dido singing on the MP3 player, and thoughts of the family waiting back home.
The short trip was somehow like a long train ride minus the clacking of the rails. It was dreamy and yet indifferent, the pining for home fertilizing the blur of urban vistas and the uncertain climate of the present.
Only weeks ago, the trees of Beijing were barren as temperatures hovered between below-7 and 12 degrees. And yet that morning, as I was making my way to the airport, peach, cherry and pear trees were in full bloom, a riot of unruly pastel colors quarreling with infantries of greenery. It was quite jarring.
According to the Beijing Meteorological Observatory, last Thursday was actually the second-warmest April day in Beijing since the foundation of the New China in 1949. Over the next week, "more dry and warm weather is expected."
The sharp shift of the capital's climate was as if spring had somehow hurled and impaled itself on Beijing, expiring as quickly as it arrived, "giving residents the impression that spring simply did not happen."
Warmest weather. Sounds familiar. The ten hottest years in recorded history all occurred around the last ten years.
I think of the photo a friend had given last month, a snapshot of camel owner Baoyin Culu kneeling in prayer at the very place where his last camel died. The camel's bleached bones are scattered in front of Baoyin, like sentries confronting the camel owner's shadow. In the photo, the desert dunes of Inner Mongolia surrounding Baoyin appear as desolate as his plight; once upon a time, he owned 80 camels. But each one has died due to disappearing grasslands and accelerating desertification.
I think of Peter Timeon who, as foreign secretary of the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati, said in 1990 in Sweden at a United Nations plenary session on Climate Change: "Mr. Chairman, distinguished delegates, I wonder how many people in this hall know where my country is? ... Without wishing to take up so much of this meeting's precious time, it suffices to say briefly that ... no place among our 33 tiny atolls rises higher than two meters above sea leve ... [In the absence of] concerted international action ... commensurate with the dire warnings of ... scientists ... long before the sea rises that far, my country and others like it will have been condemned to annihilation."
I remember the warning issued last March by Swiss Re, the world's second largest reinsurer, that if the world did not curb the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, the economic costs of global warming may double to $150 billion a year in 10 years and hit insurers with $30-40 billion in claims - "the equivalent of one World Trade Center attack annually."
The impacts of climate change are not trivial, after all. In fact, consequences of humankind's addiction to fossil fuels are the reason why climate change is considered by many as the greatest threat the planet is facing today. The increase in frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts, flooding and storms. Retreating glaciers. Rising sea levels.
I think of the words of Lord Peter Levene, board chair of Lloyd's of London, who said recently that terrorism is not the insurance industry's biggest worry, despite the fact that his company was the largest single insurer of the World Trade Center. According to Levene, "Like other large international insurance companies, [Lloyd's] is bracing for an increase in weather disasters related to global warming." In the business sector, the insurance industry is the canary in the coal mine, and right now the canary is nervously tottering on its perch.
I think of Sir John Houghton, a co-chair of the UN-formed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said that "Global warming is already upon us ... The impacts of global warming are such that that I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction."
And I think of Hans Blix who said that he too was "more worried about global warming than [he was] of any major military conflict."
In the volley of my worries, I think of my son and daughter and I collide once more with a familiar impasse: that I have not contributed enough to make the world that they will inherit a better one. And that I have not spent enough time with them eating ice cream, reading books and romping around the bedroom.
It is a good dilemma, one that I am in no hurry to resolve. "We worry too much," someone once said, "about something to live on and too little about something to live for." Another good dilemma.
I smile as a gust of cold wind enters the vehicle. I take out a photo of my wife and kids, my mind shifting to dreams of kite-flying.
Monday, March 22, 2004
THE TWENTIETH OF MARCH
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
March 22, 2004
Solidarity and indifference. Relevance and inconsequence.
The truth is, like each day of the year, the twentieth of March is in a mortal struggle with itself.
On this day in 1345, "the planets Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were in conjunction in Aquarius. Some astrologers saw this as an omen, bringing on the bubonic plague that killed a third of Europeans before it was over."
Ahem.
On March 20, 1896, US Marines invade Nicaragua for the first time. "To protect American interests."
Yes sir.
Just over a month after the United States' annexed the Philippines - A.A. Barnes of Battery G of the 3rd U.S. Artillery wrote to his family on March 20, 1899 about America's mission to liberate the Filipino:
"Last night one of our boys was found shot, and his stomach cut open. Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight, which was done to a finish. About one thousand men, women, and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger."
On the same day in America, the San Francisco Call reported a story concerning a US senator's proposal "to increase the regular army to the number of 35,000 additional men if it would be recruited largely from the Negro ranks" because the task of garrisoning America's new possession and of pacifying Filipino "savages" who refused to accept the American yoke were best left to Negroes.
"It has been pointed out," wrote The Call, "that the Negro regiments are not only very efficient, but the Negro, whose progenitors were accustomed to the rays of a fierce African sun, will not be afraid of spoiling their complexion in the Philippines, Cuba, or Puerto Rico."
Impeccable logic.
On the twentieth of March in 1933 in Germany, the Nazis opened their first concentration camp in Dachau.
On March 20, 1946 the Tule Lake relocation center was closed. Located just south of the Oregon border, Tule Lake was a US concentration camp for Japanese-Americans.
On March 20, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono flew on a private plane to Gibraltar. Upon arrival they proceed directly to the British Consulate and get married in a ten-minute ceremony. Hours later, they arrive in Amsterdam where they have reserved a hotel suite for their honeymoon and for the famous "lie-in" where, "from the comfort of their own bed, John and Yoko talked peace to anyone who would listen. Not surprisingly, the whole world did."
Remember The Ballad of John and Yoko?
"Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton talking in our beds for a week / The newspapers said, say what're you doing in bed / I said we're only trying to get us some peace."
Bed peace; hair peace, said John. It was a restless time. On the same day of their wedding - on March 20, 1969 - US President Nixon "stated flatly that the war will be over by next year."
Yup.
Thirty four years later in Iraq, on March 20, 2003, another purported cake walk - an act of aggression "of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before" - is initiated again by the US. Exactly a year later, over 10,000 Iraqi civilians are dead and not one weapon of mass destruction has been found.
On the twentieth of March in 2004, a pair of Greenpeace anti-war activists in London scale the Big Ben and unfurl a banner which read "Time for Truth" while millions marched across the globe in a 24-hour protest against America's occupation of Iraq.
It is the global day of action and in Manila a five year-old boy is holding the hand of his father as he walks with 500 other people demonstrating against war. The little boy's name is Rio; he is my son and it his first march. He wonders why there are so many colorful flags and why people are shouting and why people sound angry even though many of them are smiling.
I tell him a story about bullies and braggarts and small people banding together. Rio recognizes the story and proceeds to re-tell the story in a shorter and simpler way. I smile and squint, embarrassed at my clumsiness. I am about to open my mouth to try another story when Rio grips my hand and gives it a tug. "They're moving Tatay. Let's go."
***
Comments welcome at xioi@excite.com
References:
1. Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar. See http://www.nortexinfo.net/McDaniel/0320.htm
2. "Negroes to Fight the Filipinos," San Francisco Call, March 20, 1899, http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/sctexts/sfcall990320.html
3. "Nixon Redivivus" Theodore H. Draper, New York Review of Books, Volume 41, Number 13, July 14, 1994, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2173
4. Interview by Jim Lehrer with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. See http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/rumsfeld_3-20.html
5. "Anti-War Protesters Climb London's Big Ben," March 20, 2004, http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4611542
6. I flew in from Guangzhou in time to join the rally. My wife and one-year old daughter both had a mild cold; they showed up at the assembly point of the demonstration to see us off.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
March 22, 2004
Solidarity and indifference. Relevance and inconsequence.
The truth is, like each day of the year, the twentieth of March is in a mortal struggle with itself.
On this day in 1345, "the planets Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were in conjunction in Aquarius. Some astrologers saw this as an omen, bringing on the bubonic plague that killed a third of Europeans before it was over."
Ahem.
On March 20, 1896, US Marines invade Nicaragua for the first time. "To protect American interests."
Yes sir.
Just over a month after the United States' annexed the Philippines - A.A. Barnes of Battery G of the 3rd U.S. Artillery wrote to his family on March 20, 1899 about America's mission to liberate the Filipino:
"Last night one of our boys was found shot, and his stomach cut open. Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight, which was done to a finish. About one thousand men, women, and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger."
On the same day in America, the San Francisco Call reported a story concerning a US senator's proposal "to increase the regular army to the number of 35,000 additional men if it would be recruited largely from the Negro ranks" because the task of garrisoning America's new possession and of pacifying Filipino "savages" who refused to accept the American yoke were best left to Negroes.
"It has been pointed out," wrote The Call, "that the Negro regiments are not only very efficient, but the Negro, whose progenitors were accustomed to the rays of a fierce African sun, will not be afraid of spoiling their complexion in the Philippines, Cuba, or Puerto Rico."
Impeccable logic.
On the twentieth of March in 1933 in Germany, the Nazis opened their first concentration camp in Dachau.
On March 20, 1946 the Tule Lake relocation center was closed. Located just south of the Oregon border, Tule Lake was a US concentration camp for Japanese-Americans.
On March 20, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono flew on a private plane to Gibraltar. Upon arrival they proceed directly to the British Consulate and get married in a ten-minute ceremony. Hours later, they arrive in Amsterdam where they have reserved a hotel suite for their honeymoon and for the famous "lie-in" where, "from the comfort of their own bed, John and Yoko talked peace to anyone who would listen. Not surprisingly, the whole world did."
Remember The Ballad of John and Yoko?
"Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton talking in our beds for a week / The newspapers said, say what're you doing in bed / I said we're only trying to get us some peace."
Bed peace; hair peace, said John. It was a restless time. On the same day of their wedding - on March 20, 1969 - US President Nixon "stated flatly that the war will be over by next year."
Yup.
Thirty four years later in Iraq, on March 20, 2003, another purported cake walk - an act of aggression "of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before" - is initiated again by the US. Exactly a year later, over 10,000 Iraqi civilians are dead and not one weapon of mass destruction has been found.
On the twentieth of March in 2004, a pair of Greenpeace anti-war activists in London scale the Big Ben and unfurl a banner which read "Time for Truth" while millions marched across the globe in a 24-hour protest against America's occupation of Iraq.
It is the global day of action and in Manila a five year-old boy is holding the hand of his father as he walks with 500 other people demonstrating against war. The little boy's name is Rio; he is my son and it his first march. He wonders why there are so many colorful flags and why people are shouting and why people sound angry even though many of them are smiling.
I tell him a story about bullies and braggarts and small people banding together. Rio recognizes the story and proceeds to re-tell the story in a shorter and simpler way. I smile and squint, embarrassed at my clumsiness. I am about to open my mouth to try another story when Rio grips my hand and gives it a tug. "They're moving Tatay. Let's go."
***
Comments welcome at xioi@excite.com
References:
1. Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar. See http://www.nortexinfo.net/McDaniel/0320.htm
2. "Negroes to Fight the Filipinos," San Francisco Call, March 20, 1899, http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/sctexts/sfcall990320.html
3. "Nixon Redivivus" Theodore H. Draper, New York Review of Books, Volume 41, Number 13, July 14, 1994, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2173
4. Interview by Jim Lehrer with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. See http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/rumsfeld_3-20.html
5. "Anti-War Protesters Climb London's Big Ben," March 20, 2004, http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4611542
6. I flew in from Guangzhou in time to join the rally. My wife and one-year old daughter both had a mild cold; they showed up at the assembly point of the demonstration to see us off.
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
FASHION IN HONGKONG
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
March 1, 2004
It is nighttime in Hong Kong and the drizzle which began early in the morning has not stopped. Buildings wink with moisture while the shadows of early vening blend with the fluorescent glow of Hong Kong's billboards and the general glimmer of wetness.
It is winter and in a shopping center in Hong Kong Central, a lanky woman is wearing an elegant warm-looking beige coat with soft amber piping. The woman is a model of femininity fronting the display of chic designer, Salvatore Ferragamo. She is wearing brown gloves that look equally elegant and which bears a hue that matches her well-pressed trousers. Her back is straight and a shoulder is slightly dipped; her head is tilted faintly and her eyes seem to be fixed on a far away unseen object while a muted pearl grey handbag hangs loosely from one of her hands.
The woman is a pageant by herself but she is not your usual Ferragamo model. In truth, despite the fact that she is more striking than the mannequins clothed with modish wear lining the shopping center's walls, the woman is sitting outside the designer's display window, her head leaning on the glass and her shoes - sneakers, really - far from her feet and far from the elan of Ferragamo's designs.
The woman is a Filipina domestic worker in Hong Kong and she is sitting with other Filipinas outside the mall on translucent plastic sheets that keep away the dampness of the sidewalk. Many are eating, some are playing cards and talking animatedly, and a few are looking through concrete walls, temporarily dissociated from the moment.
It is a Sunday, the day off from work for most of Hong Kong's foreign migrant workers.
I approach the woman in the beige coat and ask her for directions to the Tsim Sha Tsui-bound ferry, which I knew was just a few minutes away, and I ask her for her name and where she's from. "Elena," she said. "From Bulacan. The ferry is over there so you turn right at that corner and walk a few feet and you'll see the ferry sign which you just need to follow." I nod and she smiles and looks away once more. "Kain?" [Join us for a bite?] a woman in Elena's cluster asks me almost immediately in typical Filipino fashion, the question genuine. I decline politely, saying I had to be in Kowloon very soon.
I walk on and in seconds I pass by more clusters of Filipinas sitting on similar plastic sheets along covered sections of pavement. Many are also eating and playing cards. At the edge of one group a young woman in a black sweater is hugging her knees and swaying and kissing her ring. Or is she biting her knuckles? She is blinking slowly, repetitively, and she looks ad and her head is bowed and the pendant on her necklace is dangling gently. As she sways, her ornaments catch the sharp gleam of the tiny halogen lamps above her illuminating the small window display of Bulgari fine jewelry.
One set glitters radiantly, and another radiates melancholy.
Ferragamo and Bulgari.
Two classy names synonymous with timeless fashion, if the followers of today's fashion world are to be believed. Who knows? Maybe the late Blas Ople was a secret student of the two icons while he headed the Ministry of Labor and Employment during the martial law years.
Ople who, in a move to arrest the disintegrating Philippine economy which was threatening to disrupt the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, designed a class-based policy of such panache it would remain the fabric of choice of the Philippine government decades after the collapse of the dictatorship: the export of people, not products, to unfamiliar shores.
The export of Filipinos is still the rage today.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
March 1, 2004
It is nighttime in Hong Kong and the drizzle which began early in the morning has not stopped. Buildings wink with moisture while the shadows of early vening blend with the fluorescent glow of Hong Kong's billboards and the general glimmer of wetness.
It is winter and in a shopping center in Hong Kong Central, a lanky woman is wearing an elegant warm-looking beige coat with soft amber piping. The woman is a model of femininity fronting the display of chic designer, Salvatore Ferragamo. She is wearing brown gloves that look equally elegant and which bears a hue that matches her well-pressed trousers. Her back is straight and a shoulder is slightly dipped; her head is tilted faintly and her eyes seem to be fixed on a far away unseen object while a muted pearl grey handbag hangs loosely from one of her hands.
The woman is a pageant by herself but she is not your usual Ferragamo model. In truth, despite the fact that she is more striking than the mannequins clothed with modish wear lining the shopping center's walls, the woman is sitting outside the designer's display window, her head leaning on the glass and her shoes - sneakers, really - far from her feet and far from the elan of Ferragamo's designs.
The woman is a Filipina domestic worker in Hong Kong and she is sitting with other Filipinas outside the mall on translucent plastic sheets that keep away the dampness of the sidewalk. Many are eating, some are playing cards and talking animatedly, and a few are looking through concrete walls, temporarily dissociated from the moment.
It is a Sunday, the day off from work for most of Hong Kong's foreign migrant workers.
I approach the woman in the beige coat and ask her for directions to the Tsim Sha Tsui-bound ferry, which I knew was just a few minutes away, and I ask her for her name and where she's from. "Elena," she said. "From Bulacan. The ferry is over there so you turn right at that corner and walk a few feet and you'll see the ferry sign which you just need to follow." I nod and she smiles and looks away once more. "Kain?" [Join us for a bite?] a woman in Elena's cluster asks me almost immediately in typical Filipino fashion, the question genuine. I decline politely, saying I had to be in Kowloon very soon.
I walk on and in seconds I pass by more clusters of Filipinas sitting on similar plastic sheets along covered sections of pavement. Many are also eating and playing cards. At the edge of one group a young woman in a black sweater is hugging her knees and swaying and kissing her ring. Or is she biting her knuckles? She is blinking slowly, repetitively, and she looks ad and her head is bowed and the pendant on her necklace is dangling gently. As she sways, her ornaments catch the sharp gleam of the tiny halogen lamps above her illuminating the small window display of Bulgari fine jewelry.
One set glitters radiantly, and another radiates melancholy.
Ferragamo and Bulgari.
Two classy names synonymous with timeless fashion, if the followers of today's fashion world are to be believed. Who knows? Maybe the late Blas Ople was a secret student of the two icons while he headed the Ministry of Labor and Employment during the martial law years.
Ople who, in a move to arrest the disintegrating Philippine economy which was threatening to disrupt the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, designed a class-based policy of such panache it would remain the fabric of choice of the Philippine government decades after the collapse of the dictatorship: the export of people, not products, to unfamiliar shores.
The export of Filipinos is still the rage today.
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