Gustavo Esteva: Hope From The Margins (And my unsolicited assertion that hope is ultimately delusional)

Reposted by Commondreams
from The Wealth of the Commons
May 21, 2013.

A communal way of being still prevails in most of the 13,000 communities of Oaxaca (Mexico), in which communal obligations have priority over rights. No important decision can be taken without the explicit consent of the communal assembly, where all families are represented and know how to construct consensus. Some inequalities may be easily corrected: a person bringing many dollars after his stay in the US will spend most of them in the next fiesta, as a good majordomo (someone who protects a residence and family), and in exchange earn great prestige in the community. Every family event counts on the contribution of neighbors. Mutual help is used to build many houses and cultivate and harvest crops. Justice means that a crime requires consolation and compensation to the victim, rather than punishment, and it is delivered through community wisdom, not through jails, lawyers or trials. In most communities, every I is still a We.

The notion of comunalidad, coined by two indigenous Oaxaca intellectuals, Floriberto Díaz, Mixe, and Jaime Martínez Luna, Zapotec, may help to explain the vitality and complexity of those practices and attitudes. It can be translated as commonality: the juxtaposition of commons and polity, but it is something else. Comunalidad defines both a collection of practices formed as creative adaptations of old traditions to resist old and new colonialisms, and a mental space, a horizon of intelligibility: how you see and experience the world as a We. The foundation of comunalidad and its core are: 1) the communal territory, in which 2) authority fulfills an organizational function beginning with 3) communal work and 4) fiestas, creating a world through 5) the vernacular language. 

The hierarchical cargos are honorary services to the community that you begin to do very early in life. The tequio – unpaid work done by every family, approved in communal assemblies and organized by communal authorities – is a practice responsible for more than half of all the public works in indigenous communities. Guelaguetza is a complex system of reciprocity involving mutual help and material, symbolic and emotional exchanges, particularly in key moments in life, where a sense of both community ownership and personal freedom is forged as the ethical principle of comunalidad. Guelaguetza is also the normative framework weaving the interdependence between the people of the community and the region, creating new links between them and the gods and the dead, and thus recreating the communal territory. Within guelaguetza, giving and taking are sometimes tied, which strengthens a sense of mutual obligation between two persons or families. But reciprocity implies an attitude of open giving to others and the community, and trust and reliance in others and the community, when you are in need.

All this and much more is comunalidad, still alive and thriving in most Indigenous communities in spite of the individualistic veneer imposed on them by the Church, the Spanish Crown, the Mexican State, private corporations or migration to the US. The Oaxaca Commune was an audacious social experiment to bring the same spirit to the whole state.

Read the rest at Commondreams or The Wealth of the Commons.

*****

Comment: When I read this essay a part of me got swept away in the romance of another way of living and another way of valuing life.

It was and still is a big part of me and my value system to believe that our very survival is dependent on uprooting capitalism, its common sense, and its hold on our values.

The other part of me remains skeptical that we can ever get to a place where life - even one outside of late capitalism - can be better for all of us in any terms.

My best friend Art and I disagree somewhat on what makes us human and what accounts for our actions.  He being a world renowned social psychologist with more than 20 books to his name makes an elegant and complex appeal to the matter of socialization as cause and effect.

In other words, he believes that we are human because we are socialized to be so; biology has very little to do with with our cause and our effect or the project of our humanity.

I agree for the most part but there is a nagging part of me that holds onto the assumption that something inherent in our biology explains more of our existence - if even not in total.

And, I am not even making an attempt at a biological determinism argument or even an evolutionary one.  The former has been thoroughly discredited in the realm of struggles against race, gender, and sexuality determinisms and for good reasons.

My reluctance to accept the totality of the human by socialization thesis is observational, personal, and thoroughly pessimistic in philosophy.

It is why I think even if we were able to create a post-capitalist society here in my hometown of Kimberley I would still not immerse myself into the community that emerges.

I would remain skeptical about the human project and its ultimate value.  And I say this because I am convinced that as a species we are nothing more than a conglomerate of dumbasses and nothing more.

Socialization cannot save us from the biological certainty of remaining so until everything around us has been depleted and there is nothing left to sustain the concept of humanity.

And by nothing I mean not our theories of what makes us human, the things we create(d) to prove our humanity, our histories, our struggles, and definitely not our Gods.

We are an empty species and a deluded one that cannot bridge differences anymore than most of us can find food to eat were it not packaged somewhere on a shelf.  Our biology presses most of us to reproduce and we conflate such urges with the convoluted notions of love and do so while (re)floating meaningless theories about our presence and our afterlife. 

But there is also another problem I have with the notion of creating harmony as an essence of recreating or restoring our humanity.  It is a problem that bedevils most religions including non-religions like Buddhism and theories of socialism/communism like those proffered by Marx and Lenin.

It is the problem of creating a pathway to the goal of release or Nirvana to borrow a concept: that mythical place where all is solved, where life's questions are answered and the promise land is reached.

I have long thought of this process of reasoning as being akin to sperm behavior in the continuum from entry to fertilization.  Seeking the egg to fertilize is the path of determined existence for a sperm.  And most fail, perhaps tellingly so in biological terms.  Yet, most of us live this trajectory deluded by hope and conjecture and, thereby, approximating the most biological fact of our existence.  That fact is that our existence is a random chance in a million(s) yet our death is certain, permanent, and final without resolution.

Still, it is not that socialization does not tell us immediate truths about our condition.  It does.  But I think it does not tell us everything about our existence.  We are not evolving in social or biological terms as Darwinists may expect because there simply is nowhere to go other than where we are now.

In fact, a great part of existing and continuing to exist is based on being dumbasses - oblivious to our collective mortality and its finality as a species inside a larger system of biological contestation.  If we were smarter and more adept then few of us would kill and destroy in the name of culture, religion, or politics, for example.

But we do.  And we claim to do so because we assume a higher purpose or relevance for existing.

And just because some folks are able to live together in a reorganized sphere of existence that spends less time on overt capitalization does not mean that any of them would be consequently happier or live more meaningful lives.

Perhaps the meaning of life is to embrace the fact that we are a dumbass species.  And in so doing it would be best if those who do not have the need to join a club or reorganized society remain on the outside where it is safer than the incestuousness of community.

I say all of this knowing that we will never solve our propensity to be vicious and selfish.  It is hardwired into our beings and no amount of socialization can overcome its prevalence in any epoch and in any societal arrangement.

The best we can do is to rely on socialization as a means of creating more room to live in less restricted terms.

But even then life is absolutely meaningless beyond our immediate existence.  There simply is no grand design.  And Art, who is an atheist, would agree.  I am taking the argument of meaninglessness even further though - even our socialization is meaningless when stacked up against our biological destructiveness.

Coming to terms with these two realities means squaring up to the precariousness of existence.  As a species we have to disappear if this planet we call earth is to survive.  That is the only ecological solution and the most green option.

Forget your carbon footprint.  The solution is to take our dumbasses out of the equation.

But even if we do not act to remove our presence as a matter of consciousness it is inevitable in a Taoist sense since the system is bigger than our existence.

Our disappearance will mean that the balance will be restored.  So like the dinosaurs we are determined to disappear and at most life is just a matter of rehearsing the inevitable.

Until then it is unlikely in my last decades living here or anywhere else that I would give a damn about most people who surround me other than to afford them their right to exist and expect the same until it is all over.

Sorry to say it all but most of us are just idiots.  And if most of us did not exist at any one time through our combined history hardly anyone who mattered would have noticed.

It is a biological fact made palatable by our socialization(s).  As a species we suck despite the presence of exceptional individuals who from time to time seem to defy how dumb we really are.

Onward! 

Gene Simmons of Rock Band Kiss Calls Muslims "Vile"

Ynet News

Ashley Baylen
May 18, 2013.

After sparking outrage with anti-Islam comments on Melbourne radio station, Israeli-born musician explains he was specifically referring to 'extremists'

Legendary rock legend Gene Simmons sparked outrage in Australia earlier this month when he made anti-Muslim comments on a Melbourne radio station.

“This is a vile culture and if you think for a second that it’s willing to just live in the sands of God’s armpit, you’ve got another thing coming,” the Israeli-born musician said on Melbourne’s 3AW radio.

“They want to come and live right where you live and they think that you’re evil. Extremism believes that it’s okay to strap bombs onto your children and send them to paradise and whatever else and to behead people,” he continued.

The Kiss bassist, who was in Australia on tour, continued on his anti-Muslim rant for over a minute stating that dogs were treated better than Muslim women, and insinuating that the West was under threat.

“Your dog, however, can walk side by side, your dog is allowed to have its own dog house… You can send your dog to school to learn tricks, sit, beg, do all that stuff – none of the women have that advantage,” Simmons stated.

Simmons said that the United Nations approach was not effective, suggesting that the West had to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

 Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: I have never listened to anything by Kiss but like most folks of my generation I would recognize Gene Simmons with his trademark face paint and disgusting tongue hanging out of his grill just about anywhere.

That this over-the-hill geezer thinks Muslims are "vile" is laughable given his less than savory reputation - and I am not just referring to the apologist role he plays for Israel.

But it is in the details that stories like this tell of a steady dehumanization of Muslims that has taken root in diverse sectors of Western society.

Gene Simmons is not alone by far.  He even has his supporters crawling out of the woodwork in the comments published below the post above.

We should be paying attention and resisting nonetheless.

Onward!

Ríos Montt genocide case collapses

The Guardian (UK)
May 21, 2013.

Conviction of Guatemala's former dictator is thrown out by constitutional court after row among judges over jurisdiction

Guatemala's former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt during his 

trial on genocide charges. (Photograph: Moises Castillo/AP)

Guatemala's constitutional court has overturned a genocide conviction against former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, throwing out all proceedings against him since a dispute broke out in April over who should hear it.

Ríos Montt was found guilty on 10 May of overseeing the deliberate killings by the armed forces of at least 1,771 members of the Maya Ixil population during his 1982-83 rule. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

But the constitutional court said it had thrown out all proceedings in the case that took place after 19 April. It was then that the trial against Ríos Montt was suspended after a spat between judges over who should take the case.

Constitutional court secretary Martin Guzman said the trial needed to go back to where it stood on 19 April to solve several appeal issues.

A three-judge panel convicted the 86-year-old of genocide and crimes against humanity in what was regarded as a historic decision involving a Latin American leader.

His lawyers immediately filed an appeal and he spent only one day in prison before he was moved to a military hospital, where he remains.

See original article here.

*****

Comment:  Seems like the celebration of justice was too soon and too eager to applaud Guatemala's resolve to confront its ugly genocidal past.

I am dismayed by the decision of the constitutional court.

Ríos Montt spent all of one day in prison.  What a shame and a sham.

The truth cannot, however, be repressed.

Onward!

Guatemala’s Ríos Montt Genocide Conviction Omen for US Presidents and Their Assassins

Dissident Voice
Jay Janson
May 18, 2013.

José Efraín Ríos Montt began the his political and military career as a young officer taking part in the bloody successful CIA-organized coup against the first democratically elected president in Guatemalan history that was ordered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. Two years earlier he had attended what peace activists call, the ‘US School for Assassins,’ namely, the long infamous School of the Americas. He ended his career a few days ago, convicted of genocide by the Guatemalan court he once controlled as president and dictator.

Associate Press reported, “The three-judge panel essentially concluded that the massacres followed the same pattern, showing they had been planned, something that would not be possible without the approval of the military command, which Rios Montt headed. In delivering the verdict, Presiding Judge Yassmin Barrios said, ‘he knew about everything that was going on and he did not stop it, despite having the power to stop it from being carried out.’”

US President Ronald Reagan also had the power to stop the massacres being perpetrated by dictator General and President Ríos Montt. Reagan must have been aware of them, known enough about them, and could have stopped those year-and-half-long massacres with far less effort than President Eisenhower had made in ordering the bloody and merciless overthrowing of a popularly elected president, a democratic president, who in making land reform, had gotten in the way of the massive United Fruit Company that owned more than half of Guatemala. In the case of the President of Guatemala and in President Reagan’s case, there was no room for sentiment. It was just business.

Prosecutors argued that Ríos Montt oversaw the massacres of Mayan Indians when he ruled Guatemala from March 1982 to August 1983. Ríos Montt held his power as dictator of Guatemala with the financial, political, and military backing he was receiving from US President Ronald Reagan’s administration, and the administrations of US presidents before him, all of whom represented the interests of the financial consensus that really rules in America.

Midway through the eighteen months of horrific massacres, December of 1982, President Ronald Reagan visited President-General Ríos Montt in Guatemala City and in a press release, praised the dictator, “President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment…. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.”

Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: The truth will be known and justice is certain.  It is the way of the natural order of things.  Balance is inevitable.

See interview with Nobel Peace laureate and indigenous leader, Rigoberta Menchú, by Democcracy Now!

You may remember that Menchú's father, mother and brother were killed during the Guatemalan genocide.

Onward!

Albert Camus and the Liberal Dilemma

Counterpunch
Ron Jacobs
May 10-12, 2013.

Albert Camus is arguably one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His relatively short life is well chronicled and the fodder of multiple conversations in university literature classes. His novels and essays raise fundamental questions about life in a world where life can easily be seen to mean absolutely nothing. Like Jean Paul Sartre–another writer with whom Camus is often compared and contrasted–Camus’ search for meaning in a world rendered meaningless strikes a chord in every human, especially those who do not seek easy answers. The conclusion these men reached was that it is up to us to provide our own meaning.

It has always been a curiosity, then, why Camus had such a difficult time understanding the desire of the Algerians to create a meaning to their lives that required overthrowing the French colonialists. His understanding that human freedom was perhaps the greatest quality humanity possessed seemed to stop short of recognizing the denial of that freedom under colonialism. This shortsightedness led Camus to justify situations in a manner that remind this reviewer of Rube Goldberg’s inventions, only without the result desired.  In other words, explanations full of loops and turns but without even the conclusive ending Goldberg’s inventions achieved.

So, it was with just such a hope for clarification that I picked up Camus’ recently published (in English) Algerian Chronicles. Perhaps these writing would reveal some clarity to his position not found previously. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. While Camus certainly goes further in explaining his position (or perhaps lack of a position would be a better phrasing) regarding the situation of the French vis-a-vis their occupation of Algeria, that position is no less muddleheaded than any explanation previously published.

This collection of writings includes a number of articles and essays Camus wrote for French journals.  It also includes some rather extensive reporting on the situation of the colonized Algerians.  These writings do much toward describing the plight of these people, but suffer from an inability to acknowledge, much less examine the root cause for their situation. After citing example after example of colonial neglect and abuse, Camus still fails to point the finger at the cause of these failings.  My visceral reaction is simply, how can he not understand that these examples are not failings of colonialism, but exactly how colonialism works. The psychological underpinnings are fundamental to the dynamic, affecting both the colonized and the colonizer.

In what is best described as the liberal dilemma, by refusing to accept that history is as important as the present when examining colonial and imperial situations, Camus’ writing consistently falls short in its explanation of why Algeria and France found themselves in conflict in the years of the Algerian liberation struggle.  In the historical vacuum that Camus places himself in, he ends up accepting the facts of French colonialism and oppression as immutable.  Furthermore, he seems to reject the idea that the Algerians should have any say in their own future unless it is on terms determined mostly by the French colonizers.

Read the rest here.
__________

Ron Jacobs is the author of the just released novel All the Sinners, Saints. He is also the author of The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground and Short Order Frame Up and The Co-Conspirator’s Tale. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden.  His third novel All the Sinners Saints is a companion to the previous two and is due out in April 2013.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press.  He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.
__________ 

*****

Comment: Ron Jacobs has written an important, albeit it brief, article that raises important questions about the sincerity of Albert Camus to identify entirely with an anti-colonial revolution in Algeria.

I am not using the word 'sincerity' (my word here and not Jacobs') to hypothesize that Camus was insincere or wholly unable to see the brutality of what his home country, France, was doing in Algeria. I am, nonetheless, saying that I agree with Jacobs that Camus did not carry the recognition of brutality to a call for revolution against France. And in so doing he did not, perhaps could not, identify with the self-determination of the Algerian revolution.

His resistance was, therefore, in effect window dressing and in course ineffectual.

As brilliant as Camus was and as much as his collected works give us reason to pause and think about the purpose of life and the big questions that pertain, he failed to afford the Algerian people their self-determination.

Makes me wonder if Camus was unable to uncouple the racist tendency to see whiteness (Western agency specifically) as the universal default condition. In other words, did he want an outcome that looked like the French Republic? One in which the Algerians would not be mistreated but on French terms, and in so doing their liberated state would be an extension of Frenchness and not self-determination.

My thinking is that Camus assumed French centrality.  He sought a reform of abuses and not a revolution in much the same terms that his counterpart, Jean Paul Sartre did.

Satre was more blatant about condemning France, its colonial doings, and its inherent racism.  His position was more wide-reaching and damning in outcome.  Revolution for Sartre was not unthinkable.  It was, in fact, inevitable and for no small reason because of colonialism.

It is, therefore, not too difficult to see why Frantz Fanon associated himself closely with Sartre.  For Fanon, liberation was about revolution in material and psychological terms.  And Sartre did not disagree.

Camus, on the other hand, never even got close to this position of deconstruction.

It is for this reason that Jacobs thinks that Camus suffered from the "liberal dilemma".

Change for liberals is not undesirable.  What is undesirable is unlinking change from its Enlightenment-derived essence.  Liberals - like the recent Occupy movement demonstrated - seek change that reforms the system over uprooting the system.

Camus seems to have assumed that reason - a major Enlightenment value - makes change desirable insofar as it replicates the agency of French centrality (read whiteness in post-colonial terms).

French abuses had to be reformed through reason and, thereby, the colonial project could be redeemable because it had at its core the 'reasonable' assumption that "all men" could be free like the French - if even modified to be so.

It is a problematic position and its inherent biases are clear from the outside.  One of those biases is the fact of appropriation.  Speaking on behalf of the Other, and even worse in consequence, speaking toward erasure of the Other.

It is this unremedied bias that has post-colonial critics and theorists pointing to the colonial baggage and disruption of the post-colonial era; an ongoing reality that Camus did not foresee.

Onward!

Guantánamo Hunger Strike: 100 Days and Counting in Obama's Gulag

A news report says the US is frantically working to disrupt the hunger strike by more than 100 of the 166 prisoners at Guantánamo:

Thirty of the detainees are being force-fed through a nasal tube, a practice the American Medical Association called “a violation of medical ethics.”

Prisoners are also being moved from communal cells to solitary detention cells where guards and prison staff are working to break their resolve according to Cindy Panuco, a human rights lawyer for Afghan detainee Obaidullah.

Their efforts appear to be failing as word leaks out that more prisoners are joining the hunger strike.

See Professor Marjorie Cohn's Counterpunch article "Gitmo: Where Death is Preferable to Life" (May 10-12, 2013) for a fuller analysis.

Also see Cageprisoners.com fom more activist reports and analysis.  Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo prisoner, is the director of Cageprisoners and the author of a compelling account of his experiences entitled "Enemy Combatant: My imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar" (2007).

You can read an "Open letter from former Guantánamo prisoners" penned by Moazzam Begg and endorsed by other former prisoners here.

For another personal account by a former Guantánamo prisoner see Murat Kurnaz's "Five Years of My Life: An innocent man in Guantanamo" (2009).

And for a leaked account by a current Guantánamo prisoner see "Gitmo is killing me" (April 14, 2013) by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel as published by the New York Times.

To stay updated you can follow RT's ongoing timeline of the hunger strike and related events.

Onward!

Poster Credit

The Three Heroines of Guatemala: The Judge, the Attorney General and the Nobel Peace Laureate

Truthdig
Amy Goodman
May 15, 2013.

Former Guatemalan President Efrain Rios Montt was hauled off to prison last Friday. It was a historic moment, the first time in history that a former leader of a country was tried for genocide in a national court. More than three decades after he seized power in a coup in Guatemala, unleashing a U.S.-backed campaign of slaughter against his own people, the 86-year-old stood trial, charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. He was given an 80-year prison sentence. The case was inspired and pursued by three brave Guatemalan women: the judge, the attorney general and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

“My brother Patrocinio was burnt to death in the Ixil region. We never found his remains,” Rigoberta Menchu told me after Rios Montt’s verdict was announced. She detailed the systematic slaughter of her family: “As for my mother, we never found her remains, either. ... If her remains weren’t eaten by wild animals after having been tortured brutally and humiliated, then her remains are probably in a mass grave close to the Ixil region. ... My father was also burned alive in the embassy of Spain [in Guatemala City] on January 30th, 1980.”

Rigoberta Menchu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, “in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.” She continued telling me about her family’s destruction: “In 1983, my brother Victor Menchu was also shot dead. His wife had her throat slit, and he was fleeing with his three children. Victor was jailed in the little town, but his three children were kept in a military bunker. My two nieces died of hunger in this military base, and my brother Victor was shot. We still have not found his remains.”

According to the official Commission on Historical Clarification, which undertook a comprehensive investigation of Guatemala’s three-decade genocide, at least 200,000 people were killed. Menchu brought one of the original lawsuits against the perpetrators of the genocide, which resulted in the trial that ended with Rios Montt’s conviction.

Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey was appointed as Guatemala’s first female attorney general in December 2010, and has earned wide acclaim for her pursuit of perpetrators of crimes against humanity. The judge in the case is another woman, Yassmin Barrios. In a country where, historically, people who challenge those in power are often killed, Paz y Paz and Barrios demonstrated tremendous courage.

Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: I had my doubts in mid-April when the trial was disrupted.  It appeared to me as if a political decision had been taken to avert a fallout that would put the ruling elite under greater suspicion.

I am happy to know that justice was served and that former President Efrain Rios Montt is finally in prison for genocide.

I would be happier if the attention in this historic case leads to charges being brought against the US for the Reagan administration's aiding and abetting the genocide in Guatemala.

I am, of course, not holding my breath.  But at the very least Rios Montt can rot in jail now and the truth has been freed in official terms.

Who knows what the future may bring?

Onward!

Best Ever Craigslist Ad: Obama bumpersticker removal kit

Obama bumpersticker removal kit - $1 (USA) 

For sale 1 obama bumpersticker removal kit.
Contains 1 razor blade and a pocket constitution

• Location: USA
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Posting ID: 3808222523

Posted: 2013-05-15, 9:34PM PDT

email to a friend

*****

Comment: I came across this advertisement while surfing the used car listings at Craigslist (Portland, Oregon) today.

It cracked me up. 

I guess quite a few bucks can be made selling these kits to deluded liberals all over the US who did not dream of the day when Obama would be rubbishing their constitutional liberties.

Onward!

A Displaced Rohingya Boy Washes Vegetables

A Rohingya boy cleans vegetables for a meal at the
Mansi Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp on
the outskirts of Sittwe. (Soe Than Win, AFP)

Credit

*****

Comment: How does Aung San Suu Kyi sleep at night now that she resides in the house of the devil?

Onward! to justice and freedom for the Rohingya

Japanese mayor says second world war 'comfort women' were necessary

The Guardian (UK)
Associated Press
May 14, 2013.

Nationalist Toru Hashimoto provokes anger in neighbouring countries with defence of wartime regime of sex slavery

The mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, said Japan’s second world war 

‘comfort women’ system was necessary to maintain discipline 

in the armed forces (Photograph: AP).

An outspoken nationalist mayor has said the Japanese military's "comfort women" regime of forced prostitution of Asian women before and during the second world war was necessary to maintain discipline in the ranks and provide rest for soldiers who risked their lives in battle.

The comments raised ire in neighbouring countries that bore the brunt of Japan's wartime aggression and have long complained that Japan has failed to fully atone for wartime atrocities.

Toru Hashimoto, the young, brash mayor of Osaka who is also co-leader of an emerging conservative political party, said on Monday there was no clear evidence that the Japanese military coerced women to become what are euphemistically called "comfort women".

"To maintain discipline in the military it must have been necessary at that time," said Hashimoto. "For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest a comfort women system was necessary. That's clear to anyone."

Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels. By some estimates 75% died in captivity.

An unidentified South Korean government official told the Yonhap news agency it was disappointing that a senior Japanese official had "made comments supportive of crimes against humanity and revealed a serious lack of a historical understanding and respect for women's rights".

Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: Mix conservative politics with heightened nationalism and this kind of brutish ignorance will raise its head almost without fail.

I think it would be a mistake not to recognize - as the article above points out - that this political posturing is comfortably seated within the positions that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is taking on war-time apologies.  The prime minister is in effect looking to revise Japan's position on the 1993 apology offered to the so called  "comfort women".

So Mayor Hashimoto is hardly sticking his head out in the cold.  See also my post (March 4) on far-right Japanese rock band "Scramble" and their references to comfort women as "prostitutes" and advocacy of violence against them in a song entitled "Slashing Koreans".

A related strand of analysis is perhaps the most telling indicator of what this all means.  In general it is an advocacy of lesser status to women - and the comfort women in particular.  The nonsense that comfort women were not coerced into sex slavery is a historical distortion that in large part rests on the patriarchal assumption that women serve men.  And that service extends to sex even where it is a forced transaction in wartime: the soldiers had needs and the women offered the service for payment.

A third strand of analysis relates to the historical animosity that continues to describe relations between Japan and China and South Korea (though comfort women came from Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines too and Hashimoto's comments apply to all).

The rise of China and South Korea in international politics and trade must worry Japan as it continues to struggle with a wobbly economy.  The conservative nationalists under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are likely weary of not being seen as humbled or more importantly, weak.

So, even an apology to the comfort women may be construed as a sign of weakness or complicity in the global condemnation of what Japan did to the comfort women.

This posturing is all very troubling.

Japan should be bending over backwards to reconcile its horrific treatment of the comfort women and assuring the global community that it recognizes the inhumanity that it represents.

There simply is no place for the movement toward historical revisionism and political buffoonery captured by Mayor Hashimoto's comments. 

Onward!

Poll: Americans angry about Benghazi can't find it on a map

UPI (Blog)
Kristen Butler
May 13, 2013.

41 percent of Republicans believe Benghazi is the worst political scandal in American history, but nearly half don't know where it is.

According to a new national poll from Public Policy Polling, the majority of American voters think Congress has more important things to do than talk about the administration's response to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Last week, Sen. James Inhofe said in an interview that, “Of all the great cover-ups in history -- the Pentagon papers, Iran-Contra, Watergate, all the rest of them -- this ... is going to go down as most egregious cover-up in American history." He further suggested President Obama could be impeached over it.

PPP put that question to voters. 41 percent of Republicans say they consider this to be the "biggest political scandal in American history" compared to only 43 percent who disagree. Only 10 percent of Democrats and 20 percent of independents agreed.

Of the 41 percent of Republicans who consider Benghazi to be the worst political scandal in American history, 39 percent are unaware that Benghazi is located in Libya. 10 percent said it's in Egypt, 9 percent in Iran, 6 percent in Cuba, 5 percent in Syria, 4 percent in Iraq, and 1 percent each in North Korea and Liberia, with 4 percent unwilling to venture a guess.

Read the rest here.  Also see the report by the polling company, Public Policy Polling, here.

*****

Comment: So much for Mark Twains' repudiating remark that "God created war so that Americans would learn geography."

It would seem that even God cannot be held responsible for the level of idiocy being demonstrated here.

But then again if you have spent any time in the faltering empire then you know that for most Americans any place outside of the US is just "over there".

Onward!

Boat carrying hundreds of Rohingya Muslim evacuees capsizes off Myanmar

Al Jazeera
May 14, 2013.

Vessel with 200 Rohingya Muslims evacuating camps ahead of storm sinks after hitting rocks off Pauktaw township.

Barbara Manzi, head of the Myanmar office at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on Tuesday that the boat struck rocks off the Pauktaw township in Rakhine State, and sank late on Monday.

Kirsten Mildren, also of OCHA, told Al Jazeera that there were 200 people on the boat, and that there is only one confirmed survivor.

Many of those aboard, now missing, are feared dead.

Cyclone Mahasen is expected on Thursday and Friday, with the UN warning it could lead to "life-threatening conditions".

Myanmar state television said on Monday that thousands of people displaced by communal violence last year had been evacuated from makeshift camps to safer ground in the event of the storm.

The report said authorities had moved 5,158 people from low-lying camps in the Rakhine state capital, Sittwe, to safer shelter.

But human rights groups said that the government has been too slow to act, and ignored earlier warnings to provide shelter to displaced people.

"The Burmese government didn't heed the repeated warnings by governments and humanitarian aid groups to relocate displaced Muslims ahead of Burma’s rainy season," said Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch Asia director.

"If the government fails to evacuate those at risk, any disaster that results will not be natural, but man-made," he said.

Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: The Burmese government could care less about the Rohingya - they are the victims of the most brutal oppression of any people, anywhere, at this troubling time.

Meanwhile, President Thein Sein is reportedly close to making an official visit to the US. 

His slated visit will marks the first time in five decades that a Burmese (Myanmar) leader has embarked on a state visit to the US.

Obama and his generals will no doubt offer Thein Sein even more congratulations and plaudits for the 'humanitarian' turnaround he and Aung San Suu Kyi are pursuing.  And, of course, not a word will be mentioned about the systematic oppression of the Rohingya by his government and Buddhist monks.

Speaking of the turncoat Nobel Peace laureate, her spokesperson and confidant, Nyan Win, "confirmed that Aung San Suu Kyi has no plans to champion the Rohingya cause despite criticism swirling around her silence on the crisis."

This confirmation was made known in a Global Post interview where Nyan Win said:

“She believes, in Burma, there is no Rohingya ethnic group. It is a made-up name of the Bengali. So she can’t say anything about Rohingya. But there is international pressure for her to speak about Rohingya. It’s a problem.”

Really?  So those people being persecuted by her new friends in the government are just figments of the imagination then?

How blatantly inhumane a position to take.  And, one must assume that this is her thinking since she has not retracted the statement or the sentiment conveyed by Nyan Win.

So, we are to assume then that Aung San Suu Kyi supports the erasure of the Muslim Rohingya in Burma - this is genocidal in intent, is it not?

She has become a sham and should be repudiated.  Her president's visit to the US should also be condemned/protested by peace and justice loving people everywhere - as I am sure it will be.

Hat tip to DD for reposting part of the Global Post article and interview (May 3) with Nyan Win at Mirage A' Trois.

Onward!

UPDATE (May 14, 9:20 pm CAT):

For more information on the dire Rohingya situation see "Burma: Lest we don't see, a genocide is in the making" by Bonojit Hussain in Countercurrents (May 14).

Saudi Student Visited by FBI After Using Pressure Cooker to Cook Food

Gawker
Neetzan Zimmerman
May 13, 2013.

FBI agents were called to the Michigan home of a Saudi student who was spotted walking around with a pressure cooker — only to learn that he was using it to bring food to his friend's house. 

 Talal al Rouki

Talal al Rouki told the Saudi daily Okaz he was visited by several FBI agents last Friday after a neighbor apparently called in to report his "bullet-colored" pressure cooker.

"They asked me about my major, when I arrived in the US and what I do in my spare time," al Rouki is quoted as saying.

He then showed the agents his cooker, which he had just used to cook kabsa, a traditional Saudi dish consisting of rice, meat, and vegetables.

Satisfied, the agents withdrew, but not before one of them told al Rouki to "be more careful moving around with such things."

*****

Comment: This is so funny it borders on tragic idiocy.  There is so much wrong with what happened to Talal al Rouki.

There is even more wrong with the mentality behind calling the FBI.

I liked one of the comments below the Gawker story that said it boils down to (my pun and intended by the way) "cooking while Muslim".

So don't speak Arabic on a plane or just about anywhere dumbass Americans are on the prowl for brown skin terrorists and definitely don't cook your rice in a pressure cooker and then take it over your friend's house to share.

When I was in graduate school in Indiana (late 80s) I would often eat with Saudi students who cooked kabsa and carried it over to my flat in a pressure cooker.

We never blew a damn thing up.  I really miss those innocent kabsa-eating days.

In other news it seems the Daily Maverick has just broken a story that is ... well, broken.  It purports that there are Al-Qaida training camps in South Africa run by a prominent Muslim family just about everyone in the Indian community knows - the Dockrats.

You should come over for dinner tonight so we can talk more about the US/UK pressure to turn the focus on South African Muslims and their make-belief tendency to train and harbor terrorists.

Coconut Burfi (Credit)

Oh ... you should know that the momz uses a pressure cooker from time to time but probably won't tonight.  No worries then.  So, just come as you are and leave your troubles elsewhere.

We serve halal food with a side of radical salad for eternal balance.

And since at least half of my genetics come from Gujarat in India - the same place the Dockrat family's ancestors come from - we will even throw in some masala tea and burfi for desert.

You'll like it.  Promise.

Onward!

Walt Whitman on Life After Death

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Walt Whitman: Song of Myself, Part 52.

*****

Comment: I like the irreverence of these closing lines to both the poem and life.

I find no comfort in the notion that death is a door or passage to an afterlife where resolution makes clear all that is muddied and painful now.

It is a form of wishful thinking, is it not?  This thing called faith and its ordinary twin, hope.

Even if we were to be offered resolution in the form of resurrection what would it mean?  Would it cover the gross indecency of genocide, for example?  Would it offer a lighter side to the horror of children dying from hunger in a world filled with food and fat people?

Or more mundanely, would it offer meaning to a measured life of following rules and doing everything by the book only to come up short and die anyway?

I agree with the existentialists, sometimes.  Particularly Camus.  Life does not come with a meaningful directive or plot.

To live with meaning is to find meaning.  Just to live is suicide.

In these terms most of us commit suicide anyway.  Perhaps more so now than ever before.

In this world of manufactured everything we need not even think or fathom or feel.  It is packaged for us even before we exist and long after we have left.

If this is life then I feel vindicated each morning when I step outside of my comfortable hideaway and breath out the absolute contempt I have for what we have created: our politics, our beliefs, our things, and most of all, our brutality.

Inside of this contempt it is not death that should be feared.

It is, in fact, life.

Onward!

Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide

Consortium News
Robert Parry
May 11, 2013.

More than any recent U.S. president, Ronald Reagan has been lavished with honors, including his name attached to Washington’s National Airport. But the conviction of Reagan’s old ally, ex-Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt, for genocide means “Ronnie” must face history’s judgment as an accessory to the crime, reports Robert Parry.

The conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide against Mayan villagers in the 1980s has a special meaning for Americans who idolize Ronald Reagan. It means that their hero was an accessory to one of the most grievous crimes that can be committed against humanity.

The courage of the Guatemalan people and the integrity of their legal system to exact some accountability on a still-influential political figure also put U.S. democracy to shame. For decades now, Americans have tolerated human rights crimes by U.S. presidents who face little or no accountability. Usually, the history isn’t even compiled honestly.

By contrast, a Guatemalan court on Friday found  Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced the 86-year-old ex-dictator to 80 years in prison. After the ruling, when Rios Montt rose and tried to walk out of the courtroom, Judge Yasmin Barrios shouted at him to stay put and then had security officers take him into custody.

President Ronald Reagan.

Yet, while Guatemalans demonstrate the strength to face a dark chapter of their history, the American people remain mostly oblivious to Reagan’s central role in tens of thousands of political murders across Central America in the 1980s, including some 100,000 dead in Guatemala slaughtered by Rios Montt and other military dictators.

Indeed, Ronald Reagan – by aiding, abetting, encouraging and covering up widespread human rights crimes in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala – bears greater responsibility for Central America’s horrors than does Rios Montt in his bloody 17-month rule. Reagan supported Guatemala’s brutal repression both before and after Rios Montt held power, as well as during.

Despite that history, more honors have been bestowed on Reagan than any recent president. Americans have allowed the naming of scores of government facilities in Reagan’s honor, including Washington National Airport where Reagan’s name elbowed aside that of George Washington, who led the War of Independence, oversaw the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and served as the nation’s first president.

So, as America’s former reputation as a beacon for human rights becomes a bad joke to the rest of the world, it is unthinkable within the U.S. political/media structure that Reagan would get posthumously criticized for the barbarity that he promoted. No one of importance would dare suggest that his name be stripped from National Airport and his statue removed from near the airport entrance.

But the evidence is overwhelming that the 40^th president of the United States was guilty as an accessory to genocide and a wide range of other war crimes, including torture, rape, terrorism and narcotics trafficking. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]

Read the rest here.

***** 

Comment: The truth is always restless.  It cannot be buried, subdued or ignored.

Onward!