By Gaither Stewart
Rome 11 February, 2008

It is a paradox that the Americanism of which Americans are so proud is the source of the pandemic anti-Americanism throughout the world. Precisely the same Americanism of which Americans boast generates a worldwide antipathy toward them. And today, not just toward the US government, but in many places—to begin with in Iraq, as testified by blog writers from there—that antipathy, that hate, is directed against Americans in general.

“We hate Americans!”

One wonders if there is some great misunderstanding at play. Is this a cultural matter? A lack of true information about Americanism and what it stands for? Are Americans simply misunderstood in the world?

However that may be, the nature of Americanism as it is understood by the majority of Americans and that perceived and experienced by non-Americans are so diametrically opposed that sometimes the two concepts seem to concern different historical times and different geographical places; Americans and the others seem to inhabit different worlds.

So what is it, this Americanism? From my vantage point I experience forms of Americanism chiefly in the context of the hegemonic tendencies, bullying globalization, arrogance, militarism and imperialism of the United States of America. One glaring, arrogant example is the construction of yet another US military base in the ancient city of Vicenza in north Italy, where (anachronistically) American soldiers in military dress jog over the cobbled streets of the city center, as if it were wartime, as if it were theirs, past cathedrals and Palladium architecture, weaving and dodging among startled women and children. This military display is a form of the Americanism become anti-Americanism in Europe. In this particular case the insistence on making of small and vassal Italy an aircraft carrier at the service of imperialistic America has alienated much of north Italy.

But speaking of Americanism I don’t have in mind only American militarism and its preemptive wars! Not by a long shot. I have in mind the homeland. For there is something in the exaggerated patriotism in the homeland itself that the others out there experience first hand. Those others who know America well detest the super patriotic, Amerika über alles America—the foreign specialists and US-based foreign journalists and academics and scientists, even those foreigners in the arts attracted by one of the admirable aspects of “America”—these days increasingly hard to find—i.e. the velocity and high ceiling afforded new ideas.

Even bedazzled non-American tourists of the kind who visit Disneyland and Las Vegas, who know little about American life, instinctively see the super patriotic flag-waving, Star Spangled Banner singing America as vulgar expressions of Americanism.

Finally, such worldviews coincide with the Americanism pinpointed, analyzed and criticized by a small but growing group of awakened Americans.

The implications of the term Americanism had long lingered in my mind before recently I heard the word used in an Italian talk show in reference to America’s foreign wars. My spontaneous thought was, OK, but that’s much too reductive. The thing is, once you use the word in that one context, it’s like opening Pandora’s box; you have to be prepared to take the next step and delve into what Americanism really is.

Je vous demande pardon! if I immediately begin to skirt too much around the edges. My excuse is that the subject is too menacingly broad to undertake in a single article. Still, digressions sometimes inevitably lead back toward the bull’s eye. Or, to use the old Italian seaman’s term, avanzare di ritorno—advance by return. And for that matter the first paragraph above already pinpoints the target.

WHERE TROUBLES MELT LIKE LEMON DROPS

“Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.”

The overly sweet, overly optimistic image returns like a leitmotiv. It both repels and attracts, the land that I heard of, the land that exists only in the imagery of dreamers. What I have in mind is a pet theme, the famous go-to-war-for “American way of life,” which for me again underlines America’s persistent claims of a monopoly on morality.

What is it, this American morality? This righteousness? Is it our religious roots in the fable of the Puritan settlers, those super religious people who in their hardships were bigots, perhaps also practitioners of incest and racists soon morphing into dogmatic chauvinists who early-on labeled their dissidents and different-thinkers witches and demons.

Pre-Americanism! The same Americanism initiated then which today fosters the rights of the rich to become richer, the strong to trample the weak and the contempt for and the crushing of anything smacking of the social in our land, real trade unions and, heaven forbid, universal health care.

Meanwhile, out in the empire, as long as it is distant, the Puritan legacy instills blindness to the use of cluster bombs from the stratosphere and hidden torture in places with foreign names like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib … and while our neighbors in Haiti eat dirt, literally?

When I asked a friend and writer colleague in heartland America what he understands by Americanism, he stunned me and overwhelmed me with the following:

“From birth I have been immersed, enculterated, inculcated, and surrounded by the myriad toxic components of the ‘American Dream’ or ‘Americanism.’ There are some admirable aspects to ‘America’ but by and large we live in a spiritual/psychological sewer.” He then listed two dozen aspects of Americanism, which I repeat here: narcissism, greed, hyper-individualism, consumerism, capitalism, corporatism, faux democracy, media whoredom, asphyxiation of the Left, Christian fundamentalism, Mammon worship, moral retardation, militarism, imperialism, celebrity worship, wars on drugs and terrorism, prison industrial complex, mean-spiritedness, self-absorption, American exceptionalism, bullying, anti-intellectualism and the abandonment of many uninsured and homeless in the wealthiest nation on earth.

Whew! That is article, essay, denouncement and indictment.

The indictment raises many questions: Is that the American way of life? Do you recognize the indictment—for an indictment it is—as representative of “our way of life”? As Americanism? But most important do you accept and hold to that “way of life?”

Meanwhile more and more people of the world are answering, non merci, nein danke, no, grazie, no, muchas gracias, we can live without the American way of life.

ISMS AND MORE ISMS

The Greek “ism” suffix is a devilish affair indeed. Those three letters continue to create problems when applied to religious, philosophic, political or artistic movements or to tendencies or qualities of certain persons or groups: misunderstandings and disputes, hate and love, blind faith and war on whomever doesn’t fall in line. “Ism” wanders from Classicism to Futurism in the arts, from Romanticism to Realism in literature and from Nazism to Communism in European 20th century politics.

Today the West—the Occident!—uses the word Islamism in a negative sense—much as the word Communism or terrorism still emerges from a magician’s sleeve by a slick sleight-of-hand for our enemies in general—to slander Islam and the Islamic religion, its peoples and nations as something negative or to condemn political adversaries.

At The Same Time

others too are adopting the term Americanism. The way it is viewed is crucial. The Americanism seen by the others is America’s excessive admiration for non-admirable displays of American culture. For its unjustified optimism … where troubles melt like lemons drops. For its insistence on calling things by their opposites, such as peace for war. For the political correctness and false questions of “taste” and “sensitivity,” as Joan Didion once recalled, in the demand for more information about what really happened on 9/11; it was not the “appropriate time.”

In this sense the difference between Americanism and anti-Americanism is like the two sides of the same coin. The two concepts are the black and the white. Americanism becomes the backside of the moon. In Italian it is common to use the word Americanata to define an ostentatious, negative and unreliable action; an Americanata reveals the negative nuance of Americanism. A bad American film is always an Americanata.

The bitter truth is that the Americanism of many Americans, who, sheathed in their false consciousness, believe they are exceptional and the envy of the world, is an illusion. An illusion! A mirage in the desert. For the others out there, there is something childlike about their blind faith in their supposed superior life style and phony democracy that sometimes even sparks a feeling of commiseration and pity in other peoples who tend to consider them at the very best spoiled but dangerous brats.

And they continue to sing where troubles melt like lemon drops….

There was a time after World War II when other peoples imitated the way Americans speak, dress, walk and think. No longer! Once Americans were welcomed everywhere. No more! The aura of the “American dream” once made of Americanism a cult. Now the others do not understand why they feel unwelcome in America; they do not understand the reigning terrorism mania; they cannot understand the wars.

Although Americans have been spoiled, foreigners are becoming aware that the former personal freedoms that were once the key to Americanism have diminished. (Pardon these generalizations but sometimes in such matters surveys and polls and data are useless.) Though without comparing charts and scales on salaries and rents and economic aspects of life, Europeans realize their living standards are higher. Admittedly on the other hand, they do not yet appreciate the difficulties or the extent of the unfairness many many Americans face—unemployment and precarious employment, lack of basic health care, homelessness.

For arriving foreigners ten fingerprints and body searches at US entrance points serve to accentuate the sensation of “America-fortress-against-the-world and aggravate America’s globalization-imperialism urge. Europeans’ former positive, envious feelings toward America have vanished in the swirl and whorl of US militarism. The reality is that except in personal cases, few Europeans aspire to live in the USA today. As a rule only the very poor of the world seek to immigrate to the USA.

Before 9/11, I had occasion to live in New York City for a couple years in an apartment building on the Upper West Side in which the 16-man staff of service personnel were all Latin Americans, living frugally on low pay. Each of them confessed his dream of returning “home” to Mexico or to the Dominican Republic or to Peru as soon as he accumulated enough savings for a house or to open a business there.

In that immigrant microcosm the “American dream” was dead and gone.

Since the majority of people of the world seem to be infected with the disease, anti-Americanism is a good starting point to understand Americanism. But first, one wonders why has anti-Americanism contaminated the world? Once, the US government blamed it on the nefarious European Left and Radical Chic and Communists and also on Europe’s green envy of the American way of life.

That the real European Left from Sartre on has always been wary of America is true, but never as today.

Instead the real reasons as seen from Europe and Latin America stem first of all from stupid, arrogant and self-defeating US foreign policy. At the same time, French or Dutch can hardly believe the ignorance and naiveté of Americans about the world. While many Americans boast of their anti-intellectualism and their President has trouble finding strange places like Kenya or even Afghanistan on the map, the “green” media inform French and Italians that the waste and consumerism in the USA is destroying planet earth and Germans and Scandinavians are realizing that American democracy is a sham and has defiled the very word.

People are more and more aware that the Patriots Act and legislation subsequent to 9/11 have eroded America’s civil liberties. That the divide between rich and poor has never been more profound, the word “social” is taboo, and American capitalism has become more and more savage and vicious. For many others, American culture seems to be limited to mall shopping and TV sports, while America’s absurd theories of exportation of democracy and globalization as a solution to world poverty are widely scoffed at: exportation of democracy means war and globalizations means loss of jobs in Italy or France.

Europeans are right to wonder why Americans, even well intentioned people of the Left, cannot see the obvious. The answer is that their continuing faith in a mythical Americanism blinds them. And their false consciousness created and maintained by disgraceful mainline media that distorts the concept of freedom of the press.

American conservatives twist things around and point out that foreigners don’t know the USA. Nothing more false! Europeans are well-informed about the USA. In these months day after day arrive into peoples’ homes news and talk shows about the USA and its incomprehensible money-based electoral system. People are familiar with South Carolina and New England and Colorado. Italian TV and press have their correspondents following the primaries today because it matters to Europe, to the world, who is elected, they believe (naively). In this, Europeans show their good faith. They still believe there is a difference between America’s two political parties, when they could be suggesting and advising and pleading for third and fourth parties in the USA—in their own interest—something Americans seem loath to do.

Each new school shooting somewhere in the USA, each new massacre in Iraq and Afghanistan, the death tolls of US and European casualties, and analyses and media coverage of US events, the decline of the US economy, the falling stock market in New York and the threat of recession are all part of Europe’s daily fare.

I was perplexed this morning when my wife, an Italian, asked me in all sincerity as to why what happens in the USA so important to the rest of the world. My point is that though the world studies the USA, the others out there in the world are terrified of what the next fool-hardy, dangerous and unpredictable act this big oaf of a child will pull off in the name of its Americanism.

European American specialists often return to those Puritan individualists I mentioned earlier “who so passionately believed that they could individually establish a direct relationship with God,” who emigrated to North America and invented “an explosively new and radical ideology” that justified “an individualist rather than a social view of property.”

The decline of that idea we are all witnessing shows that in an individualistic world that is wholly private we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us. According to even a minimum social philosophy (which for Washington and US capitalism is straight out of Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Mao’s Little Red Book) one simple but pressing need would be publicly owned TV with the (impossible) mandate to provide a universal public service to guarantee ordinary citizens core news and comment free of hype and spin. While the U.S. spends little money on public TV, European governments finance and aggressively regulate broadcasting content so that state TV has remained more complete and in some countries surprisingly free.

American private broadcasters instead plead the First Amendment’s commitment to absolute free speech, making public interest regulation almost impossible.

THE IMPULSE FOR U.S HEGEMONY IN THE WORLD

I often return to the passage from Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes’ masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz, the gist of which is that one cannot commit what North Americans have committed against Mexico and expect to be loved. The historical imperialistic, hypocritical, vicious, greedy and vulgar attitudes of the United States toward its southern neighbor are the model for America’s drive for world hegemony and its urge to control other peoples. From the beginnings of the nineteenth century until the present era, the United States has attempted to export its “American dream” to Mexico. Hypocritically that manifest destiny vision tried to superimpose Protestant values, a capitalist free market and a consumer society onto a culture foreign to such Protestant values.

The results: Shouts of “Long Live Mexico” and “Death to the Yankees” today echo similar protests ringing out from Afghanistan to the Middle East.

It is fact that more and more peoples of the world consider America evil, distant and cut off from the rest of humanity. I believe American people too, no less than Europeans, could bear up under the reality that the message of Americanism is not true. You know, people do not need to be lied to. Most can take the truth. Or they might prefer the truth after they get used to it; our minds after all have the task of distinguishing between true and false.

Still, it continues to be bizarre that we live our little lives inside our shell and have no idea of what is taking place on the outside. Only a thin wall separates our shell of comfort and ease from the exterior world where torture continues. In my mind, the kind of Americanism spoken of here, a life style based on comfort and ease, reflect anti-reality, anti-man, anti-life.

If anything, we have to learn to live without illusions.

No matter how clever, how perceptive and well grounded its positions, official America—and many Americans—seem to see Iraq and Iran, Kosovo and Algeria, from a virtual point of view. Europeans see those peoples instead as real places in a real world. A fundamental difference in attitude toward war is that Europeans know what war is on home soil. They know that war is not peace. War means suffering and destruction and death. War does not bring democracy.

A glaring assumption of Americanism is that the US military is a force for good (as reactionaries like to put it). That the US is the guiding light for the world, and is in sole possession of moral authority.

Cold War Revisionism

Because I once felt lonely in my nascent revisionist ideas on Soviet Communism and Stalinism and doubted the validity of my own thinking, I have postponed the question of Soviet Communism, which is not as distant from the power of Americanism as it might seem. Though as a rule I dislike the constant revisionism (that ism suffix again!), it goes without saying that the last word about Lenin’s heirs has not yet been spoken.

So careful here, for we’re speaking of seventy plus years of the 20th century that changed our world. Nor can one dispute that the Bolshevik Revolution changed the face of America, too. The revolutionary myth and four great events remain fixed in the memory of some of us: the American, French, Mexican and Russian revolutions. However, in America the revolutionary legacy morphed into one of the worst aspects of Americanism.

Fear and terror of Revolution transformed Americanism into a “way of life”, crusaded for in uninterrupted anti-progress wars ever since, accompanied by the Nazification of America’s institutions.

Like the many questions today open to re-interpretation, Communism is not a closed issue. Likewise, Soviet Communism is not a closed issue. With the broadening of the European Union toward the East the question of Communism is recurrent today because the EU is formed by peoples with opposite perceptions of it. For many East Europeans Communism was a nightmare. Nor was the exit from totalitarian regimes in East Europe a happy one in that it led some of those countries to blind faith in a savage market economy and abandonment of the spirit of social solidarity.

However, for many people in the world the word Communism is not a dirty word. Former East Germans in Berlin have described to me the nostalgia for the sense of social solidarity in former East Germany. Though the totalitarian regimes in East Europe vanished and Communist parties are marginalized, for the 450,000,000 people of the now twenty-seven nations of the European Union the sensation of something missing is real. Even though controversial, the memory of Communism is alive. Though Communism in practice is no longer considered a credible alternative in free market democracy, and though it no longer aims at revolution and though it still suffers from the image of Soviet totalitarian past, its memory is alive. The question of Communism has not been settled.

George Washington, the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy have each been re-evaluated. I believe the time will come when also Joseph Stalin will be regarded with different eyes. In the end, the six to ten million or more dead will not all be charged to evil Uncle Joe. Most certainly he will not be charged with the Cold War, which engaged America’s chief energies for four decades and has now reawakened over the wars for oil and gas.

In the list of aspects of Americanism, anti-Communism is a cornerstone. Revisionism of Stalin (the word means steel man!) rings seditious. The suggestion that Josef (Koba) Vissarionovich Djugashvili was not the anti-Christ incarnated overturns the history of Americanism. Yet that historical revisionism circulates here and there among a small circle of academics who believe that history will judge Stalin a great leader, as suggested by the historians Grover Burr and Yury Zhukov in his Inoy Stalin, A Different Stalin. Maybe not in our lifetime, but Stalin will one day be recorded as no worse and maybe better for Russia than many Russian Tsars.

But the gulags? one objects. Gulags? Well, read Dostoevsky among other Russian writers to experience the gulag existence since the early phases of Tsardom and the formation of Russia.

Then what about his “Socialism in one country,” the abandonment of world revolution and adoption of Russian nationalism? Lenin and Trotsky’s program of world revolution was the romantic view: without a world Socialist revolution, the Russian Revolution was doomed. Trotsky charged Stalin with betrayal of the Russian Revolution because he aimed at limiting original and necessary revolutionary goals. Now, in comparison, Stalin’s “Socialism is one country” turns out to be Russian nationalism and paradoxically differs chiefly in degree and methods from modern European leaders struggling for independence within the European Union.

Thus the Cold War remains a sore spot. For Soviet Russia there was NATO and US aggressiveness to contend with. There were the US-NATO military bases encircling the USSR, symbols of many aspects of continuing Americanism. Many Americans and Germans of those times agreed that the United States had fought the wrong war. The generals were ready to march on Moscow, again. Post-war German writer Wolfgang Borchert’s Verrostet träumen Waffen von Kriegen described the nearly rusted arms (in the generals’ fantasies) dreaming of wars to be fought. They should combat the real enemy: the Russkies. Moscow had good reason to believe that the US goal was the overthrow of the Soviet regime.

In post-war West Germany the former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen (1902-1979) and chief of Hitler’s Soviet intelligence service headed the nucleus of surviving German intelligence … under American direction. Gehlen’s Org, a nest of former SS and Gestapo killers, war criminals responsible for the deaths of millions in the Soviet Union and East Europe, became a decisive component of the CIA’s growing worldwide apparatus. Its thousands of experienced operatives, older and more cosmopolitan than incoming CIA recruits, had a major effect on the future culture of the CIA and thus on America.

So dependent was American intelligence on their Nazi brothers that it has been said that the new CIA was built around the Gehlen Org, the history of which is still misty today. The creation of the Gehlen Org thus constituted the most extreme provocation, contributing to the general climate of hostility, which came to be known as the Cold War.

The Cold War deformed our immature minds; not only two generations of Americans were brainwashed and hoodwinked; a whole world was brainwashed and hoodwinked. But, in the long run, I like many others concluded that despite the brainwash and the Cold War, Russia was Russia, complex, grand, enigmatic; but it was Russia.

CONCLUSIONS

For anyone with eyes to see it is clear that the reasons for the clash of the United States with the world today—while its presidential candidates traipse around the electoral circuit speaking of the new wars to come—are to be found in that complex of historical, social and political factors and the false values, which constitute today’s Americanism. That is, “our way of life,” in the name of which our increasingly illegitimate political leaders pontificate and send our troops, “our boys”, around the world, which, far from defending social justice or the downtrodden, serves to separate the people of America from the rest of the world.

A growing number of Americans realize that the time has arrived for a radical shift in American thinking. All those little placards of the electoral campaign bearing the word change reflect the necessity. Yet, with the Americanism mindset described above, revolution is still hardly conceivable in the minds of the masses.

A close analysis and dissection of the American values that constitute Americanism will be necessary in order to create a new set of values. A new mindset that will include a basic conception of social justice to counteract and replace the pervasive and visible sense of gloom and hopelessness in the obesity of consumerist America.

And that, I hope, I believe, is where people like us count.


Addendum: I have excerpted a few lines from my short story of New York: “Brooklyn Bridge-Arch Number Six” about a Hispanic muralist and Americanism.

“I’m painting the history, past, present—and future—of the city,” he (the Hispanic immigrant, painting his mural on arch number six.) whispered.

From clouds and nocturnal mists of memory emerged outlines of arriving ships—they were the Anglo-Saxons and the Dutch. Ghostly silhouettes of Indians with their indistinct faces painted white looked toward the sea. Out of ocean mists then came waves of blacks, with round faces and frightened eyes. New houses crept up the island of Manahattan like waves of the sea. Blue and gray uniforms and cannons and flags and luxurious mansions rose from the ground. Layer after layer—boatloads of dark foreigners with cardboard suitcases and packed ships departing with soldiers, railroads like spokes of a wheel and subway tracks in tunnels, parks with mansions on one side, slums on the other, dandies and rag pickers. The colors were speaking, crying and screaming, brilliant under powerful searchlights from above, the colors of the skins, white, yellow, red, brown, black. Palaces, cinemas and vaudeville halls, beer parlors, art galleries, train stations and stadiums, ships on white rivers turning black, smoke and steam, pale women and silent girls seated in long lines of old urban factories. In the night his story was exploding onto the walls of Arch No. 6. The banks, the Stock Exchange façade shrouded in ticker tape and bands of strikers whose ranks are gradually transformed into homeless sleeping in doorways, in parks, in subway stations. And in the lower right corner ranks of policemen in blue face to face with legions of the city’s homeless.)

What America Cannot

By Eric Margolis
Source The Sun

At this week's NATO conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, an angry U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates accused some Europeans of not being prepared to "fight and die" in Afghanistan in the battle against the Taliban.

The undiplomatic Gates is quite right. Most Europeans regard the Afghan conflict as a) wrong and immoral; b) America's war; c) all about oil; or d) probably lost.

To many Europeans, the NATO alliance was created to deter the real threat of Soviet aggression, not to supply foot soldiers for George Bush's wars in the Muslim world.

While Gates and the Harper government were pleading for more troops, the commander of the 40,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. Dan McNeill, landed a bombshell. If proper U.S. military counter-insurgency doctrine were followed, McNeill admitted, the U.S. and NATO would need 400,000 troops to defeat Pashtun tribal resistance in Afghanistan.

When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, they deployed 160,000 troops and about 200,000 Afghan Communist troops -- yet failed to crush the mostly Pashtun resistance. Now, the U.S. and NATO are trying the same mission with only 66,000 troops, backed by local mercenaries grandly styled the Afghan National Army.

Canada's calls for 1,000 more NATO troops, and the U.S. decision to send 3,200 marines, will not alter the course of this war, which is turning increasingly against the western occupiers. In fact, the war is spreading into neighbouring Pakistan, a nation of 165 million, stretching U.S. and NATO forces ever thinner.

A primary reason for Gates's recent call for U.S. troops to begin attacking pro-Taliban Pashtun tribesmen inside Pakistan is due to their growing attacks on allied supply lines to Afghanistan.

As this column has reported, over 70% of U.S./NATO supplies come in by truck through Pakistan's tribal belt known as FATA, including all of their oil and gas. Attacks by pro-Taliban tribesmen against these vulnerable supply lines are jeopardizing western military operations inside Afghanistan.

HUNTERS NOW HUNTED

The hunters are becoming the hunted. Cutting off invaders' supply lines is a time-honoured Pashtun military tactic. They used it against Alexander the Great, the British and Soviets, and are at it again.

What angry Gates fails to see is that by pushing NATO into a distant Asian war without political purpose or seeming end, he is endangering the very alliance that is the bedrock of U.S. power in Europe.

Europeans increasingly ask why they need the U.S.-dominated military alliance, a Cold War relic, in which they continue to play foot soldiers to America's atomic knights, to paraphrase the late German statesman, Franz Josef Strauss.

Why does the rich, powerful European Union even need NATO any more? The Soviet threat is gone -- at least for now. Nuclear-armed France and Britain are quite capable of defending Europe against outside threats. Why can't the new European Defence Force take over NATO's role of defending Europe and protecting EU interests?

In short, most Europeans see no benefit in playing junior members in an alliance whose historic time has passed and that serves primarily as an instrument of U.S. power. Washington's sharpest geopolitical thinker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, calls NATO a "stepping stone" the U.S. uses to project power into Europe.

By pushing NATO towards a bridge too far, the Bush administration may end up fatally undermining the alliance and encouraging anti-American forces in Europe.
In fact, it's becoming evident that the cash-strapped U.S. needs the EU more than the EU needs the U.S.

CONSCRIPTION

Final point. If impassioned claims by U.S. and Canadian politicians that the little Afghanistan war must by won at all costs, then why don't they stop orating, impose conscription, and send 400,000 soldiers, including their own sons, to fight in Afghanistan?

Of course they won't. They prefer to waste their own soldiers, and grind up Afghanistan, rather than admit this war against 40 million Pashtun tribesmen was a terrible mistake that will only get worse.

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted February 7, 2008.


Seal-the-border hysteria is everywhere. Instead of blaming immigrants for America's problems, let's look at executives on both sides of the border.

The wailing in our country about the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English ...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."

That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the United States itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness -- around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."

Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate.

Wedge issue

There is way too much xenophobia, racism and demagoguery at play around illegal immigration, but such crude sentiments are not what is bringing this problem to a national political boil. Polls show -- as do conversations at any Chat & Chew Cafe in the country -- that there is a deep and genuine alarm about the issue among the nonxenophobic, nonracist American majority. In particular, workaday families are fearful about what an endless flow of low-wage workers portends for their economic future, and they're not getting good answers from Republicans, Democrats, corporate leaders or the media.

For the GOP candidates in this year's presidential run, the contest is coming down to who can be the most nativist knucklehead. They accuse each other of not wanting to punish immigrant children enough, of not being absolutists on "English-only" proposals, of having coddled illegal entrants in the past with amnesty proposals and sanctuaries, and of not being hawkish enough on sealing off and militarizing the border.

The leader of the anti-immigrant Republican pack is Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congress-critter who based his ill-fated presidential campaign on immigrant bashing. This goober is so nasty he'd scare small children. His website screeched that immigrants are "pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives," and his campaign slogan is a sledgehammer demand: "Deport those who don't belong. Make sure they never come back." As for illegal immigrants, Tom thinks that the term "illegal" is too soft, preferring to demonize immigrants as "aliens." Tancredo doesn't merely rant, he foams at the mouth, maniacally warning about waves of Mexican terrorists who are "coming to kill me and you and your children." Accused of trying to turn America into a gated community, he exulted, "You bet!"

At least he's taken a position, even if it's un-American and loopy. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have mostly tried to do a squishy shuffle, wanting to beef up law enforcement against illegal immigrants while also mouthing soothing words about the good work ethic of our friends south of the border and offering a bureaucratic rigmarole to allow some of the younger ones to gain permanent residency in our country. Worse, such corporate Democrats as Rep. Rahm Emanuel urge the party's candidates either to adopt the Republican's punitive message or simply to try ducking the issue.

Which brings us to the wall, both figuratively and literally. The fact that we are resorting to the construction of an enormous fence between two friendly nations admits to an abject failure by policy makers, who are so bereft of ideas, honesty, courage and morality that all they can do is to try walling off the problem.

We've had experience here in Texas with the futility of tall border fences. Molly Ivins reported a beer-induced incident that took place in 1983. Walling off Mexico had been proposed back then by the Reaganauts, and a test fence had been built way down in the Big Bend outpost of Terlingua. This little town also happened to be the site of a renowned chili cookoff that Molly helped judge, and it attracted a big crowd of impish, beer-drinking chiliheads.

There stood the barrier, 17 feet tall and topped with barbwire. It didn't take many beers before the first-ever "Terlingua Memorial Over, Under, or Through the Mexican Fence Climbing Contest" was cooked up. Winning time: 30 seconds.

Yet here come the border sealers again. Bush & Co. (including Democrats who have allowed the funding) is putting up an initial $1.2 billion to start building this version of the wall, which is projected to cost up to $60 billion over the next 25 years to build and maintain. It's a monster wall -- two or three 40-foot-high rows of reinforced fencing that take a swath of land 150 feet wide and stretch for 700 miles.

The Mexican government and people are insulted and appalled by the wall; ranchers, mayors and families living on either side of the border hate it; environmentalists are aghast at its destructive impact on the ecology of the area. Still, it's being built. Indeed, a 2005 federal act contained a little-noticed section authorizing Bush's Homeland Security czar to suspend any laws that stand in the way of building the wall. Current czar Michael Chertoff has already used this unprecedented authority to waive 19 statutes, including the Endangered Species, Clean Water and National Historic Preservation Acts.

All this for something that will not work. As Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona put it, "Show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder." People have literally been dying to cross into the United States, and it's not possible to build a wall tall enough to stop them. They will keep coming.

Why?

The question that policy makers have not faced honestly is this one: Why do these immigrants come? The answer is not that they are pulled by our jobs and government benefits, but that they are pushed by the abject poverty that their families face in Mexico. That might seem like a mere semantic difference, but it's huge if you're trying to develop a policy to stop the human flood across our border.

Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: "Up north, even though they pay more, you're not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town, and it's comfortable. Life is easier."

Their family, language, culture, identity and happiness is Mexican -- yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love.

Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico's longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials and "free market" ideologues. In the name of "modernizing" the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and GE -- in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico -- have laid waste to that country's grass-roots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions.

The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico's ruling elites touted NAFTA as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the United States. They were horribly wrong:


Economic growth in Mexico has been anemic since '94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families.


Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs.


Average factory wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5 percent under NAFTA.


Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day.


U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land.


Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2 an hour.


Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40 percent of the country's formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the No. 1 employer.


Nineteen million more Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA was passed.

So, here's the deal: Thanks to Mexico's newly corporatized economy, wage earners there get poverty pay of $5 a day (about $1,600 a year), while a few hundred miles north, they might draw that much in an hour. What would you do?

The wrong debate

In our national imbroglio over Mexican immigration (yes, some illegal migrants come from elsewhere, but more than three-fourths are from Mexico), our "leaders" have set us up to look down at impoverished working people forced to leave their homeland and risk death in order to help their families escape poverty.

Instead of coming down on them, why not start looking up -- up at the executive suites on both sides of the border. Up is where the power is. The moneyed elites in those suites are the profiteering few who have rigged all of our trade and labor policies to knock down workers, farmers and small businesses, not merely in Mexico but in our country as well.

In the United States, the middle class feels imperiled because ... well, because it is imperiled. Politicians, economists and the richly paid pundits keep telling us that the American economy is robust and that people's financial pessimism and anxieties are irrational. At the kitchen table level, however, folks know the difference between chicken salad and chicken manure. Yes, these are boom times for the luxury class, but the middle class is imploding. In a recent letter to the editor, a working stiff in California put it this way:


"We've replaced steaks with corn flakes; we can't afford to get sick; our kids can't afford health insurance; we hope that our 10-year-old van keeps running because we can't afford a new one; our kids can't buy a home because housing prices are exorbitant; our purchasing power continually regresses; and worst of all, the poverty and near-poverty classes are growing."

It's this economic fragility that anti-immigrant forces play on. But even if there were no illegal workers in our country -- none -- the fragility would remain, for poor Mexican laborers are not the ones who:


Downsized and offshored our middle-class jobs.


Perverted our bankruptcy laws to let corporations abrogate their union contracts.


Stopped enforcement of America's wage and hour laws.


Perverted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-worker tool for corporations.


Illegally reclassified millions of employees as "independent contractors," leaving them with no benefits or labor rights.


Subverted the right of workers to organize.


Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart.


Made good healthcare a luxury item.


Let rich campaign donors take over both political parties.


Passed by hook and crook a continuing series of global-trade scams to enrich the few and knock down the many.

Powerless immigrants didn't do these things to us. The richest, most-powerful, best-connected corporate interests did them. Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri, offers this example of Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), the largest meatpacker in the United States, now owned by the multibillion-dollar conglomerate Tyson Foods:

Until the late 1970s, meatpacking was a high-wage industry, with highly skilled workers in charge. Factories were in union cities, union contracts provided good wages and benefits, and unions set professional standards for everything from worker training to safety conditions. Then IBP's executives transformed this beneficial model into today's profiteering system. The factories moved to nonunion cities and rural areas, and lower-skilled workers were hired to do repetitive cuts on speeded-up assembly lines. With Reagan as president, meat-industry lobbyists were able to emasculate labor laws, and unions lost their influence over the workplace, which became much less rewarding and more dangerous. IBP began intensive recruiting of Mexican workers (legal or not) to do what had become very nasty work. In only 20 years, meatpacking wages dropped by roughly half, the union was ousted, and the rate of workplace injury became one of the highest of any industry (more than a fourth of meatpacking workers now suffer "accidents").

The fix

Immigration reform cannot be separated from labor and trade reform. We can't fix the former without dealing with the other two. We must stop the exploitative NAFTAfication of such aspiring economies as Mexico and instead develop genuine grass-roots investment policies that give people there an ability to remain in their homeland. Then we must enforce our own labor laws -- from wage and hour rules to the NLRB -- so as to empower American workers to enforce their own rights.

Eliminating the need to migrate from Mexico and rebuilding the middle-class ladder, here is an "immigration policy" that will work. But it requires us to go right at the corporate kleptocracy that now owns Washington and controls the debate.

We must challenge Democrats, especially, to broaden the debate and to recognize that they must choose sides -- to be for workers or for more trade imperialism. Right now, the Democratic leadership is siding with imperialism and exacerbating the economic causes of Latino migration. For example, just last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered a vote to extend NAFTA to Peru, a corporate favor that could be called the Tom-Rahm Bipartisan Axis of Immigration Stupidity, for it drew enthusiastic support from both Tom Tancredo and Rahm Emanuel.

America's immigration problem is not down on the border, it's in Washington and on Wall Street.

To Scrap Food Program
By June To Comply With World Bank

By Ali Jawad
Source Azzaman

The government has decided to end the rationing food program which has saved millions of Iraqis from starvation.

The decision, the government said, was in line with the obligations it has made to the World Bank.

But Finance Ministry officials, refusing to be named, said they opposed the move and feared it could lead to unexpected hikes in food prices.

The government said it was also determined to end fuel subsidies, but it declined to say when.

The food rationing system was started by former leader Saddam Hussein to offset the hardships emanating from U.N. trade sanctions.

For nearly 13 years, the program continued without hiccups with the United Nations praising it as the world's largest and most effective relief effort.

But the program has run into serious trouble since U.S. troops landed in Baghdad. The volume of rations was slashed several times and food failed to reach many beneficiaries.

The system which cost the treasury billions of dollars a year was mired in corruption.

The government took the decision without parliamentary approval.

Analysts say millions of Iraqis will be affected, particularly families with no income earners and the jobless -- currently estimated at about 40 of the workforce.

As of February 2008, analysis of UNICEF data (see UNICEF statistics on Occupied Afghanistan: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/afghanistan_statistics.html ) allows the following estimate of 3.3-6.6 million post-invasion excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that should not have happened) in Occupied Afghanistan:

1. annual under-5 infant deaths 370,000.

2. post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 2.3 million (90% avoidable).

3. post-invasion avoidable under-5 infant deaths 2.1 million.

4. post-invasion non-violent excess deaths 3.2 million (2.3 million /0.7 = 3.3 million; for impoverished, worst case Third world countries the under-5 infant deaths are about 0.7 of total non-violent excess deaths (see A Layperson’s Guide to counting Iraq deaths: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ ).

5. post-invasion violent deaths about 3.3 million (assuming roughly 1 violent death for every non-violent avoidable death i.e. roughly as in US-occupied Occupied Iraq where the ratio of violent deaths to non-violent excess deaths is 0.8-1.2 million to 0.7-0.8 million; see Continued Australian and US Coalition war crimes in Occupied Iraq: http://ruddaustraliareportcard.blogspot.com/2008/01/rudd-australia-report-card-1-continued.html

6. upper estimate of non-violent plus violent post-invasion excess deaths 3.3 million + 3.3 million = 6.6 million excess deaths.

What is happening in Afghanistan is an Afghan Holocaust. One sees that post-invasion under-5 infant deaths in Occupied Afghanistan (2.3 million) vastly exceeds the number of Jewish children murdered by the Nazis in World War 2 (1.5 million). The upper estimate of post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan (6.6 million out of an average 2001-2008 Afghan population of about 25 million) exceeds the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis in World War 2 ( 5.6 million out of 8.2 million Jews in German-occupied Europe in the period 1941-1945) (see: Gilbert, M. (1969), Jewish History Atlas (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London) and Gilbert, M. (1982), Atlas of the Holocaust (Michael Joseph, London)).

Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention (see: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html ) states “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

From the data summarized above, it is apparent that the Afghan Holocaust is also an Afghan Genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention.

Occupied Afghanistan is the New Auschwitz of the US and its complicit allies including former Axis countries Germany and Japan who have on US instigation joined the US-NATO Afghan Genocide.

Those Bush-ite and neo-Bush-ite politicians, military and Mainstream media executives complicit in the Afghan Genocide should be arraigned before the International Criminal Court.

In his 2005 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (see: http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-pinter081205.htm ), UK playwright Harold Pinter urged the arraignment of Bush and Blair before the International Criminal Court for war crimes and stated “How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought.”

Eleven million? More than enough, I would have thought.

Petition against the nomination of Tony Blair as "President of the European Union"

February 8, 2008

We, European citizens of all origins and of all political persuasions, wish to express our total opposition to the nomination of Tony Blair to the Presidency of the European Council.

The Treaty of Lisbon provides for the new post of President of the European Council, to be elected by the Council for a mandate, renewable once only, of two and a half years. Under the terms of the Treaty: "The President of the European Council shall chair it and drive forward its work" and "shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European Council". Further, "The President of the European Council shall, at his level and in that capacity, ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy".

The future President of the European Council will therefore have a key role in determining the policies of the European Union and its relations with the rest of the world. This first Council Presidency will also have a major symbolic weight for both citizens of the European Union and for the image of the Union in the rest of the world. In this perspective, we believe it is essential that the first president embodies the spirit and values of the European project.

For some time now, increasingly insistent news reports have made evident a wish, in some quarters, to see Tony Blair appointed the first President of the European Council. This appointment, were it to take place, would be in total contradiction with the values professed by the European project.

In violation of international law, Tony Blair committed his country to a war in Iraq that a large majority of European citizens opposed. This war has claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and displaced millions of refugees. It has been a major factor in today's profound destabilisation of the Middle East, and has weakened world security. In order to lead his country into war, Mr Blair made systematic use of fabricated evidence and the manipulation of information. His role in the Iraq war would weigh heavily on the image of the Union in the world, should he in fact be named its president.

The steps taken by Tony Blair's government, and his complicity with the Bush administration in the illegal programme of "extraordinary renditions", have led to an unprecedented decline in civil liberties. This is in contradiction with the terms of the European Convention of Human Rights, which is an integral part of the treaty.

The European Charter of Fundamental Rights formalises the founding values of the European project and is one of the pillars of the new treaty. Tony Blair fought its inclusion in the Treaty of Lisbon, and eventually managed to secure an exemption for the UK.

Rather than move European integration forward, the former British Prime Minister set a series of so-called red lines during the Lisbon negotiations, with the intent of blocking any progress in social issues and tax harmonisation, as well as common defence and foreign policy.

Furthermore, it seems unthinkable that the first President of the European Council should be the former head of a government that kept its country out of two key elements of the construction of Europe: the Schengen area of free movement of people and the Euro zone.

At a time when one of the priorities of the European institutions is to reconnect with its citizens, we believe it is essential that the President of the European Council should be a person with whom a majority of citizens can identify, rather than one rejected by a majority. Therefore, we declare our total opposition to this nomination.

Sign the petition here

Linked To NATO Expansion

By Heather Cottin
Source Workers World

The U.S. calls it “Operation Status.” The United Nations calls it “The Ahtisaari Plan.” It is the U.S./NATO “independence” project for Kosovo, which has been a province of Serbia since the 14th century. With NATO’s 17,000 troops backing it, Kosovo’s government is set to secede on Feb. 6, declaring itself a separate country.

Kosovo’s president is Hashim Thaci, who was the leader of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK for its Albanian initials), which U.S. diplomat Robert Gelbard called “terrorist” in 1998, just before the U.S. started funding the UCK to use it against Yugoslavia. Thaci, whose UCK code name was “Snake,” and his UCK cronies are well funded by drug running and the European sex trade.

In a series of wars and coercive diplomacy in the 1990s, the U.S. government and the European NATO powers backed the secession of four republics of Yugoslavia, a sovereign socialist state. It took another 78 days of NATO bombing in 1999, aggression that President Bill Clinton described as “humanitarian,” and a coup financed by the National Endowment for Democracy and other imperialist agencies in 2000, to install a pro-western regime in Serbia that was open to Western intervention and privatization.

State resources were privatized. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was almost totally dismantled politically and economically.

But the U.S. then moved to break up the rest of Yugoslavia. Through lies and raw military power, the U.S. supported a pro-imperialist group of gangsters—the UCK—in the war against Yugoslavia, and this gang then took over Kosovo.

Then the U.S. supported UCK moves to detach Kosovo, where the U.S. had built the massive military base “Bondsteel.” Washington and its NATO allies allowed this criminal element to drive over 200,000 Serbs, Roma people and other minorities out of Kosovo, and terrorize the impoverished Albanian population.

Wealth and poverty in Kosovo

Kosovo is sitting on fifteen billion tons of brown coal. Its mines contain 20 billion tons of lead and zinc and fifteen billion tons of nickel. EU and U.S. corporations are going to buy Kosovo as soon as its status is settled as “independent.” (Inter Press Service Italy, Jan. 15)

But in Stari Trg, the most profitable state-owned mine in former Yugoslavia, inactive since 1999, rich with lead, zinc, cadmium, gold and silver, unemployment is above 95 percent. With unemployment high, wages will be low, and profits fabulous.

In Kosovo half of the population doesn’t get enough to eat. Unemployment hovers near 60 percent (IHT Jan. 28). Kosovo Albanians in the U.S. or Europe send home 450 million euros in remittances each year, half of Kosovo’s entire budget. “I don’t know how we would survive without this,” said economist Ibrahim Rexhepi. (Deutche Welle, Jan 27).

An Albanian living in New York told Workers World recently that he knows many families in Kosovo and Albania that have had to sell their daughters to get the remittances from their work in the sex trade. “Unemployment is so high that most people are poor, and many bought into the Ponzi scheme in 1997 that robbed most Albanians at home and in Kosovo of their entire life savings.”

The U.N. Charter forbids the forced breakup of nations, and U.N. Security Council resolution 1244 guarantees the territorial integrity of Serbia. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Kosovo independence “is fraught with serious damage for the whole system of international law, negative consequences for the Balkans and the whole world and for the stability in other regions.” (Interfax, Jan. 25)

The U.S. and its NATO partners are ignoring legalities. But they have to pay attention to the possibility of Serbia making energy deals with Russia. The two countries agreed to build a large gas storage facility in Serbia, while Russia’s state-controlled oil concern Gazprom signed an agreement granting Gazprom control of 51 percent of Serbia’s state-owned oil-refining monopoly NIS. The Russians have commenced work on the South Stream gas pipeline through Serbia to supply southern Europe.

The U.S. and the EU have been working feverishly on the rival Nabucco pipeline to cut European dependence on Russian energy (Reuters, Jan 25).

Kosovo and NATO growth

The Kosovo crisis has prompted leading Serbian presidential candidate Tomislav Nikolic, of the Radical Party, to suggest the creation of a Russian military base in his country. (Itar-Tass, Jan. 25).

Why is Kosovo so crucial to NATO expansion?

The creation of Kosovo as an “independent” state would be a precedent for other schemes U.S. imperialism could take advantage of to break away areas of other sovereign nations, including China and Russia, applying the old “divide and conquer” strategy perfected by British imperialism.

The Russian and Chinese governments both have spoken out against the Ahtisaari plan.
Russia’s foreign minister Sergy Lavrov said NATO’s buildup in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet republics are “a process of territorial encroachment similar to what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve by cruder means.” (Voice of Russia, June 28, 2007)

The planned NATO/U.S. plot to make Kosovo independent is a continuation of NATO military expansionism to ensure U.S. economic control in Eastern Europe. NATO is the military arm of international capital on five continents. Popular opposition is rising in Serbia, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, the Czech Republic, Poland, the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Africa.

But anywhere NATO tries to go, resistance grows. The secession of Kosovo may still blowback to haunt the imperialists.

Spreads Humor Throughout Region

Local comedians benefit from buzz generated by American stand-up trio's recent tour of Middle East
By Hassan Abdo and Christian Porth
Special to The Daily Star
Saturday, February 02, 2008

taken from here

JOUNIEH: "It's so nice to be in Beirut, because we've been censored in all other countries," said Ahmed Ahmed in his opening gambit at the Casino du Liban in December. After that first remark, Ahmed let loose a string of expletives, his curses as humorous to the audience as they were cathartic to the performer.

Ahmed represents one-third of the popular comedy troupe Axis of Evil, which wrapped up the last leg of its regional tour with a five-night stint at the venue north of Beirut following performances in Amman, Cairo, Dubai and Kuwait. In the months since, the Axis of Evil gigs have had a notable knock-on effect for Lebanon's local stand-up comedy scene.

The term "axis of evil" was first coined back in 2002. In his annual "State of the Union" address, US President George W. Bush asserted to Congress and the American people that Iran, Iraq and North Korea represented an "axis of evil" that was threatening to undermine world peace.

"It's taking a term we felt was silly and we're twisting it on its head," said another member of the comedy troupe, Maz Jobrani, who is of Iranian ancestry.

Axis of Evil is composed of Ahmed, Jobrani and Aron Kader - all Americans of Middle Eastern decent. For their five-night engagement at Casino du Liban, they were joined onstage by Won Ho Chung, who is of South Korean and Filipino ancestry and speaks fluent Arabic, and by Lebanon's own Nimr Abu Nassar.

It is said that laughter is the best medicine, and in times of political crisis, when the situation in the country leaves people with little to laugh about, a good dose of stand-up comedy may be just what the doctor ordered. The Axis of Evil comedy tour that swept through Lebanon in December drew in crowds by the thousands. The trio of stand-up comedians performed before a sold-out crowd each and every night.

According to Tarek Sikias of the Lebanese production company 2U2C, which produced the Axis of Evil appearance, the show was a huge success and sold over 5,000 tickets for five nights. The comedy routine had originally been scheduled for three nights only, but the organizers added two additional performances to meet the demand for tickets.

The Egyptian-born Ahmed, who also served as the show's host, said that in addition to the comedy tour, the group was also shooting a documentary designed for Western - specifically American - audiences. The aim of the documentary was to highlight the tour's message: "The rest of the world can laugh with us."

Although stand-up comedy existed in Lebanon before Axis of Evil took to the stage, it has benefited handsomely from the success and buzz of the December tour. Now local comedians such as Nimr Abu Nassar have no problem packing the house at local venues such as Gemmayzeh's Bar Louie to lay down jokes about everything from politics to sex.

In fact, Lebanon is arguably the only country in the Middle East that has a robust stand-up-comedy scene. According to Abu Nassar, the king of Lebanese stand-up comedy, the Axis of Evil show "gave us a lot of credibility."

"Their showing of support only helped to legitimize the demand for stand-up comedy in Lebanon," he said.

For Abu Nassar, the comedy tour gave him a personal boost. After his appearance at Casino du Liban, he sold out two shows at B018 Classique, near Sodeco Square, in an hour and followed up with a New Year's Eve performance at the Hard Rock Cafe. Now he said he had "a plethora of shows" lined up in the coming months.

The roots of what is known today as stand-up comedy stem primarily from the 1970s, when acts such as Steve Martin, George Carlin and Bill Cosby wowed audiences with their jokes and antics about every possible issue under the sun. New York City proved to be center stage for the comedy scene, where tiny venues like the Comedy Cellar gave local amateurs a chance to test their talent. It was in such places that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock found their fame.

Today, Lebanon seems to be going through the same transition as local bars and pubs provide platforms for acts such as Abu Nassar's.

Regionally sponsored by the cable television network Showtime Arabia, the Axis of Evil tour also provided the pretext for a talent search across the Middle East. To this end, Showtime held open mic casting sessions throughout the tour.

Two students from the American University of Beirut (AUB), who earlier auditioned on campus for the New York-based comedy troupe, were selected by the Axis of Evil and Showtime to open one of the nights at Casino du Liban.

More than 40 students, mostly from AUB but also from other universities in Lebanon, signed up for the audition. About 20 actually turned up to perform. The two selected students, Arifi Waked, a graduate student in English literature, and Amir Haidar, a rising senior in mathematics, now have the opportunity to work with Showtime Arabia on producing original comedy routines.

Waked, who wears the hijab, said that she started doing stand-up comedy in order "to put a human face to the hijab, and invite people to lighten up the many issues that plague the Middle East."

"Showtime is very excited to be bringing the innovative Axis of Evil comedians to the Middle East for the first time," said Marc-Antoine d'Halluin, Showtime's president and CEO, at a news conference in December.

"This comedy tour, apart from entertaining," he added, "also educates its audiences by breaking down stereotypes and helping change minds."

By satirizing and critiquing all manner of stereotypes and misconceptions that dominate the discourse about the Middle East, the comedians hoped to prove that not only is there a viable market for comedy in the Middle East but also that the comprehension gap between the region and the West is bridgeable.

"It's really sad," said Jobrani. "American comedians never come to this part of the world to perform for the people of the region. They come to entertain American troops."

Although all three members of the comedic trio have roots in the Middle East, their humor is typically American, an offensive, no-holds-barred approach that is unafraid to tackle even the touchiest of subjects.

In fact, all three comedians expressed a degree of apprehension as to whether or not their style of humor would translate locally into laughs. But their worries proved unfounded as audiences roiled with laughter throughout the entire show.

Speaking about the perceived Israeli bias of the mainstream Western media, Kader, the product of a Palestinian father and a Mormon, said: "I'm tired of reading stories in the papers that say something like 'an Israeli tank was scratched by a rock.' Or 'Palestinian attacks Israeli bullets with body.'"

The performance, at least in Lebanon where greater freedoms of expression prevail, was both beautifully and poetically vulgar. "This is not church, we're not at mosque," Ahmed repeatedly reminded the crowd when some of the material touched on sensitive subjects, like religion and politics.

Admittedly, however, it does take an enlightened mind to understand the subtle argumentation in mocking ethnicity and the glorious, equalizing effect that it can provide.

Abu Nassar said unequivocally that they broke down stereotypes and did not reinforce them. "We're making fun of stereotypes we've all come to hate, but they are not true. We all know that," he added.

"To be reinforced they would also have to be justified. No one is justifying them. We are removing the mystery around these beliefs.

"Arabs know a lot about America and Americans. We see American movies, news, we read American books. We understand Americans very well. But Americans have little understanding of Arabs," Abu Nasser said.

"A few Indians got killed in the US after 9/11 because they were wearing turbans. The goal is to address American fears and show them to be unnecessary," he added.

In his final set, Jobrani concluded by issuing a stern, multi-dimensional warning: "Don't always blame Middle Easterners first," he said, "because it's not always us. I mean most of the time it is, but you know what I mean."

US, New Europe and Kosovo

By Andrej Grubacic and Ziga Vodovnik
Source: ZNet

Ancient historian Suetonius, in his The Lives of Twelve Caesars, writes about the attempt of the infamous Roman Emperor Caligula to make his favorite horse, Incitatus, ("Speedy") a consul. American Empire had advanced this animal friendly project by appointing not one horse but a whole stable. The name of this stable is New Europe. As in the case of the Third Emperor of the Roman Empire, the reason for lavishing horses with consular honor has more to do with imperial arrogance then insanity. Just like Caligula's treatment of Incitatus was a way of angering the Senate, New Europe is a way of ridiculing the European Union. This essay is devoted to one particular horse in the stable of New Europe, the horse of the state of Slovenia, and to the recent "Slovenian diplomatic scandal" which, as we contend, is not so much a scandal as it is a model. This essay has a twofold purpose. First, we intend to alert the international left to the nature of American and European colonial politics in the light of the construction of, and manipulation with, the political project of New Europe. Second, we wish to invite the Balkan left to define a politics of balkanization, a politics that would challenge both the imperialist and nationalist scenario for the Balkans.

Let us start with the "Slovenian scandal" which we recognize as a new colonial model. In one of our previous articles we suggested a possible explanation of the nature of American interests in the Balkans (http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/2854). We believe that our conclusions are further confirmed by the events in Slovenia, which, to remind our readers, today holds presidency of the European Union. European leaders woke up to an unpleasant surprise the other day, a leak of an internal document of Slovenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MZZ). This document, published in the Slovenian daily Dnevnik and the Serbian daily Politika, reveals content of a meeting between representatives of MZZ and representatives of the US State Department and National Security Agency (NSA),that took place on 24 December 2007 in Washington D.C. Slovenia's willful following of various exotic orders coming not from Brussels (the Senate) but from across the Atlantic (the Emperor), is already a well-known fact in the diplomatic hallways of Europe. But recent developments directly connected with orders and promises that were revealed in this leaked document, can mean the final transfer of our horse to the stable of New Europe, a group of states whose foreign policy is dictated by servile obedience to the United States. This, of course, also means the official end to all illusions about the credibility and importance of the Slovenian Presidency in the EU.

Stubborn pursuit of US interests, or those of the political and economic integration it is a part of, is already a constant of Slovenian foreign policy, or, rather its Foreign Minister, who personalizes and usurps it to a point that exceeds levels of good taste, not to mention old fashioned democratic standards. We remember his – and hence, Slovenian – support of the Vilnius Declaration, which meant New Europe's full support for US intervention in Iraq. In the same vein are also his recent moves, of which we are going to mentioned only a few: public statements about the need for immediate and unconditional independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo; full support of Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, war criminal of repute and former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (with a colorful nom de guerre Gjarpni, the Snake); recent lobbying at the International Criminal Court for Former Yugoslavia, to abandon its pressure on officials in Belgrade to gain their full-cooperation in locating Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. All those actions, for which Slovenian Minister of Foreign Affairs does not have a mandate, gained a very clear context with the document that leaked from Slovenian MZZ a few days ago – as an attempt to follow and realize the US political interests in the Balkans.

The document, with the official markings VWA070767, reveals that the main topic of the meeting between high officials from Slovene MZZ, the State Department, and NSA, has been Slovenia's role during its Presidency of the EU in organizing support for international recognition of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence. But the document also reveals other very important and interesting facts about the US involvement in, and planned actions concerned with, the future status of Kosovo. The document that in recent days circulated also on the Internet reveals, inter alia, that the:

* The US suggests that the session of Kosovo's parliament, when they would declare independence of the province, should be held on a Sunday, so the Russian Federation would not be able to call an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council;

* The US proposes the EU ignore any complaints and proposals from Serbia and the Russian Federation; the US estimates that the independence of Kosovo will not gain full support of the EU (only 15 of 27 countries), therefore the support of Slovenia as the Presiding country over the EU is crucial;

* The US plans to avoid giving public statements about the future status of Kosovo in the coming days, but will be among the first to officially recognize Kosovo's independence;

* The US estimates that it is of utmost importance to convince as many states as possible to officially recognize an independent Kosovo in the first few days after the declaration of its independence, and for this reason, the US is intensively lobbying Japan, Turkey, and the Arab states, who have already shown willingness to support Kosovo without hesitation;

* The US is currently helping the Kosovo Albanians draft their new constitution;

Now, this document itself is, for understandable reasons, a serious international scandal. The reactions from the mainstream press and EU officials are unanimous in calling it a "spectacular blunder". It clarifies, to the point of truism, the intended role of the New Europe in American imperial design. It provides us with irrefutable evidence of American meddling in the affairs of the European Union. More importantly, it discloses the true nature of US politics of humanitarian intervention (which we propose calling humanitarian imperialism). The document casts a very humiliating picture of the role of Slovenia, as well as other New European Balkan states, in the new colonial system.

We would like to point to another, local dimension of this embarrassment. This is a dimension that concerns the province of Kosovo. There appears to be a curious agreement between the US backed New Europe and Old Europe, an agreement that is uncritically or unreflectively accepted by the international left, about the acceptance, tacit or explicit, of the legitimacy of the Albanian Kosovo leadership; about the support for the independence of Kosovo; about legitimization of the form of colonial rule we term "thacism"; and, finally, about the very framework of solving the Kosovo problem on the level of great power negotiations of the so-called "troika" – i.e., EU, US, Russian Federation.

We ask: Is it possible to achieve the democratization of the region by supporting the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), a political organization of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)? Is it possible to achieve democratization of Kosovo by supporting the former KLA leader, and now Prime Minister, Hashim Thachi? Are we not then supporting, instead of democratization, the continuation of the nationalist logic and a process of further ethnic cleansing of Kosovo? These are not academic questions. In March 2000, former UN Special Investigator for the former Yugoslavia Jiri Dienstbier reported to the UN Commission on Human Rights that "330,000 Serbs, Roma, Montenegrins, Slavic Muslims, pro-Serb Albanians and Turks had been displaced in Kosovo – double the earlier estimates. What that means is most of Kosovo's minorities no longer are in their original homes." In this respect, things have only deteriorated since Dienstbier's report was submitted. You will forgive our skepticism as to the fact that Thaci, a principal protagonist of Kosovo’s flourishing industry of arms, drug and sex trafficking, will prevent the inevitable ethnic violence, or that he will strive for the restoration of democracy, multiculturalism, and the rule of law in the independent Kosovo.

And whose independent Kosovo is it going to be? Let us try to explain the western fascination with "thacism". Former Special Representative to the Secretary General of the UN in Kosovo, Sergio Vieira de Mell, was often quoted to complain: "Madeleine Albright is in love with Thaci. Jamie Rubin is his best friend. It's not helpful. Thaci arrived here with the impression that he has the full weight of the American government behind him. He believes he has earned the right to rule." In the past few years "thacism" was somewhat modified, so as to answer to a different reality, but only on the superficial level of rhetoric – with more or less successful distancing from ideas of a great Kosovo and/or Albania – meanwhile in practice it stayed more or less the same, with the usual mix of murders, kidnappings, and violent attempts to crackdown political opponents. But we should not overestimate Thaci, who, as his nickname suggests, is a reptile of minor importance. Thaci is important only as a metaphor of thacism, a form of colonial rule by way of support of local warlords whose job it is to destroy any inkling of anti-colonial protest.

We had written about the problem of Kosovo before, and at some length. Our position, let us summarize it briefly, is that the international Left should not support the nationalist option (Serbian or Albanian), even when it is temptingly served in the guise of self-determination, and should most resolutely refuse to accept the imperialist option imposed, in a confused fashion, as evidenced in the above document, by the USA and the EU. The whole tragic history of the Balkans is one of colonialism and resistance to western colonialism. The so-called "troika", international community, great powers, or however they choose to call themselves, have no business in the Balkans. The form of colonialism that we have proposed to call "thacism" is indigenous to the Balkans the same way Thacherism was the politics of the British workers. It should not enjoy support from the international left. What is much more important, The Balkan left has to step up to the challenge, and define a coherent and regional anti-colonial politics that is in keeping with it's rebellious, heretical history. The resistance is well under way. Factories in Serbia are being occupied by the workers struggling against privatization and for new definitions of the "transition" (http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16230). The "Erased" of Slovenia are pointing ways to resistance formulated not in the name of nationality but of dignity (http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1168862569/print). The Roma, persecuted, as always, are organizing against the imposed mono-ethnicity of Kosovo. This is our Balkans. We need a new Balkans, built from below, and we need a New Europe, built from below. We need to go back to the historical project of the Balkans without nations, to the project of Balkan federation. We believe that the Kosovo question can only be answered in a regional framework, and we believe that the Balkans can provide a model for another Europe, a balkanized Europe of regions, as an alternative to both transnational European super-state and nation-states. The future of the Balkans is not in Europe. But the future of Europe is in the Balkans.

If the local political elites are happy being horses, ridden by European Senators or American Emperors, we should indulge them, but we need to get them another stable.

Andrej Grubačić and Žiga Vodovnik are anarchist writers from the Balkans. They are members of the editorial board of Balkan Z Magazine. You can reach them at zapata@mutualaid.org and ziga.vodovnik@fdv.uni-lj.si

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

By Amy Goodman
Source: truthdig

Attorney General Michael Mukasey sipped his water nervously. It was the first time he was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee since his controversial confirmation. At issue then and now: torture. Does he consider waterboarding torture? Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., made it personal: “Would waterboarding be torture if it was done to you?” “I would feel that it was,” Mukasey responded. Though he deflected questions, before and after Kennedy’s, his personal answer rang true.

Our attorney general should not have to be waterboarded to know that it is torture. Likewise, Americans should not have to suffer under a brutal dictatorship in order to know that it is wrong to support dictators abroad.

Take, for example, the long-reigning dictator of Indonesia, Suharto. He died this week at the age of 86, an age that most of his more than 1 million victims never reached. Suharto ruled Indonesia for more than 30 years, shored up by the most powerful country on Earth, the United States. Suharto rose to power in 1965 in a coup backed by the CIA, which provided him with lists of dissidents whom the Indonesian military then killed, one by one. He was forced from power in 1998, in a pro-democracy uprising.

Throughout Suharto’s reign, U.S. administrations—Democratic and Republican—armed, trained and financed the Indonesian military. In addition to the million Indonesians killed, hundreds of thousands were also killed during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, a small country 300 miles above Australia. It is a country I know well, having covered it for years. On Nov. 12, 1991, when I was covering a peaceful Timorese procession in Timor’s capital, Dili, Suharto’s occupying army opened fired on the crowd, killing 270 Timorese. I got off easy: The soldiers beat me with their boots and the butts of their U.S. M-16s. They fractured the skull of my colleague Allan Nairn, who was writing for The New Yorker magazine at the time. And that massacre was one of the smaller ones in Timor. Nevertheless, President George H.W. Bush, followed by Bill Clinton, continued to try to supply Indonesia with weapons. Only a grass-roots movement in the United States stopped the U.S. military sales.

Aside from being unimaginably brutal, Suharto was also corrupt. Transparency International estimated Suharto’s fortune to be between $15 billion and $35 billion. The current U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, Cameron Hume, praised Suharto’s memory this week, saying, “President Suharto led Indonesia for over 30 years, a period during which Indonesia achieved remarkable economic and social development. ... Though there may be some controversy over his legacy, President Suharto was a historic figure who left a lasting imprint on Indonesia and the region of Southeast Asia.” Imprint? Yes, if he means pulling out people’s fingernails, disappearing Indonesian dissidents, or wiping out a third of the population of East Timor, one of the great genocides of the 20th century. But clearly, that is not what Hume meant.

Whether it’s waterboarding, waging an illegal war or holding hundreds of prisoners without charge for years at Guantanamo Bay or at CIA black sites around the world, I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the world’s greatest nonviolent leaders. “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless,” he asked, “whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

The Mukasey hearing happened to take place on the 60th anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination. Also on this day, Rudolph Giuliani and John Edwards dropped out of the presidential race. In his exit speech, Edwards said, “America’s hour of transformation is upon us.” As the race narrows, it is a key moment to reflect: One leading candidate, John McCain, was actually tortured (unlike Mukasey, although McCain supported his confirmation). McCain predicted we may be in Iraq for 100 years. He is up against Mitt Romney, who said he would double the size of Guantanamo. Neither of the remaining leading Democratic candidates calls for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Yes, it is a key moment to reflect on the teachings of Gandhi. When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Gandhi responded, “I think it would be a good idea.”