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July 27, 2001
How is it that America
How is it that America is either unilateralist or isolationist, but hardly ever multilateralist?
The list speaks for itself:
- This week, the United States refused to sign a protocol ensuring adherence to a ban on biological weapons, claiming that the protocol made them risk "industrial espionage". This from a country that has maintained brutal sanctions on Iraq for ten years, causing the deaths of 50,000 children a year from hunger and disease, for the ostensible reason---of refusing to allow international inspectors to search for biological weapons! America is refusing to submit to the very same inspection procedures it is bombing and starving Iraq for refusing to accept! The sheer hypocrisy boggles the mind.
- Last week, America refused to join a treaty restricting the international trade in small arms. Despite the fact, evident to anyone with a brain, that the purpose of the treaty was to combat the smuggling of arms into poor countries' civil wars, the US embarrassed itself by bringing up its bizarre "constitutional right to bear arms" claim. The American gun lobby, mostly the product of sport shooters, hunters, and the like, doesn't have the slightest inkling of the suffering caused in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, where the gun trade plies its deadly product to drug-crazed teenagers who go on to commit wanton massacres. Or in Sri Lanka, where an 18-year war drags on and on thanks to discreet supplies of small arms from around the world.
- In 1972 the USA and USSR signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. There was a very good reason for this. If a nuclear power is not itself threatened with any kind of retaliatory nuclear strike, it becomes invincible. It can then blackmail, bully, and humiliate other countries with virtual impunity using its nuclear weapons as a threat. Instead of becoming the deterrent, defensive weapon they were for most of the Cold War, nukes become an offensive weapon of unimaginable barbarity. There is one and only one reason for the United States to build a missile shield - the raw, naked, hunger for power. America wants to remain the world's only superpower forever, if it can possibly help it, regardless of any sense of fairness or justice. In its own way, it is every bit as pernicious as old-style imperialism.
- Economic conservatives around the world have long tried to minimize or deny the growing body of evidence supporting the fact that the earth's temperature is increasing, that the chief cause is carbon dioxide emissions from industries and vehicles, and that swift and painful action must be taken. In most other Western countries the democratic will of the people, generally pro-environmental, is able to restrain this kind of industrialist short-sightedness. Not so in the United States, especially one with a president with close ties to the oil industry. The internal combustion engine and the technology based upon it have been the foundation of the industrialized economy for over a century. To admit the need for a replacement is, in effect, to admit the need for the end of the old industrial order and the beginning of a truly different kind of economy. Yet just as the French aristocrats insisted on keeping their lands until their heads fell off the tumbrils, so too do American consumers and businesses hide in the sand from the consequences of their actions.
- When mass murders and massacres rise, national sovereignty is a poor defense indeed. No one, no matter what their domestic law or practice, has the moral right to kill thousands of innocent civilians. Government officials who push such savage policies fully deserve to be arrested and tried for their crimes, and we should not hesitate to use international courts for this if domestic courts are unwilling or unavailable. The United States is no stranger to this practice; it supplied many of the judges and facilities for the trials of German and Japanese war criminals after World War II. Why does it balk now at the idea of an International Criminal Court? Because, of course, many of the despots who would face such trials are former friends and allies of the U.S., including such figures as Augusto Pinochet of Chile, and Suharto of Indonesia. Indeed, there are more than a few American officials who have aided and abetted war crimes in Vietnam, Chile, Angola, Namibia, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Heaven forbid that Henry Kissinger and his ilk might actually be held responsible for the bombs they rained and the guns they sold to dictators.
- In 1999, the U.S. Senate rejected, by an incomprehensible 95-0 vote, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. Once again, this is not about defense; it is about offense. The basic horrific destructiveness of nuclear weapons hardly needs testing; the delivery systems and propulsion of specific weapons deployment are routinely tested now by computer simulations. To be fair, the United States has not actually conducted a nuclear test in nine years. Why scuttle the treaty then? Because of the hidden reason. Nuclear tests are not performed in order to make sure your weapons work; they are there to remind enemies, real and imagined, that America has nuclear power that it will use for whatever reason it sees fit, keeping only its own interests in mind and not those of the rest of the world. The result of this kind of sabre-rattling, of course, is that other countries rush to develop nuclear weapons. Israel was the first to join the Big Five; recently India and Pakistan, who have already fought three wars in the past fifty years, are aiming the deadly barrage at each other.
- One of the cruelest and most heartrending weapons of war is the land mine. Laid indiscriminately across a wide area, the mines often remain for years or even decades after the war in question ends. Countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan have hundreds of thousands of mines in their territory, which kill and maim thousands of people every year, nearly all civilian. Children have their arms blown off, pregnant women have their wombs ripped open by the sudden blasts, farmers see their crops destroyed, and the countryside remains a forbidding terror for many endless years. Yet, apparently, the military needs to have this sick weapon at its disposal, even if virtually every other country in the world has agreed to give them up.
In this respect, the Bush administration differs only in degree from its Democratic predecessor, which also dragged its feet on the land-mine treaty and the nuclear test-ban. The American public is only marginally interested in these issues, which play a scant role in elections and receive ridiculously distorted coverage in the American press. And so on America goes, secure in the arrogance of its imperialism and self-righteous with the pomposity of the powerful.
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Posted by Tyrone at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2001
It's 2 am, there's too
It's 2 am, there's too much noise, don't you people ever wanna go to bed?
Yesterday I came across something that simply horrified me. Pro-anorexia sites, that call themselves pro-ana. That's right, web sites aimed at the promotion and encouragement of a dangerous and often life-threatening mental illness. Anorexics trade tips on how to starve, how to fend off concerned friends and relatives, how to idolize being reduced to a skeleton, how to distort their thinking out of belief. Doing a few web searches turned up hundreds of these sites, many with large message boards and some even with live chatrooms.
These sites are an abomination. They are the product of a mind that is not just diseased but determined to spread its cancerous self-cruelty onto others. Anorexia is ultimately about control, about power. Anorexics find power in starvation, power in resisting the physical cravings and needs of the body. They find power, as well, in the warped perceptions of their world, where 100 pounds is "fat" and eating a single cookie is considered a monstrous binge.
Why does the anorexic do what she (it still is usually a she) does? How can vision become so distorted, reason become so fragmented, senses disappear? Anorexia is a madness where the world becomes a funhouse mirror, where needs are turned into indulgences and cruelties into kindnesses. And now this disease, sneering at the world's futile attempts to slow it down, is making its insidious presence felt on the web.
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Posted by Tyrone at 03:05 AM | Comments (0)
July 16, 2001
I've been reading a bit
I've been reading a bit today about Cambodia and the massacres of 1975-79. Just the beginning part so far, but it was worse than I thought. I'd never before heard the real impact of the American bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973. Aimed at hitting villages that allegedly harbored "communists", American planes in effect levelled entire communities, killing children, destroying lives and property, and putting a huge propaganda weapon in the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The KR themselves started out as a diverse group. In 1969 Pol Pot was a comparatively minor figure in the Cambodian rebel hierarchy; the leaders were mostly Vietnamese-trained, educated in traditional Buddhist schools, and from a rural background. Pol Pot was the opposite of this; he was educated in France and had a deep hostility towards the Vietnamese and, indeed, every ethnic group except his own Khmers.
It turns out that Pol Pot's massacres were in quite different character than what I had supposed. For starters, racism was a major part. Twenty percent of Cambodia's population in 1975 was made up of ethnic minorities - mostly Vietnamese, but some Laotian and Thai as well. These were singled out for especially brutal treatment. Indeed, in many ways Pol Pot's ideology was almost the exact opposite of classical Marxism. Marx believed in the inevitability of historical progression; Pol Pot believing in rolling back time, of returning to the time of the medieval Angkor kingdom. Marx believed in the unity of the proletariat around the world; Pol Pot believed only in his Khmer people. Marx believed that technology would eventually lead to a workers' revolution; Pol Pot wanted nothing to do with technology (except, of course, military technology) but only wanted to return to a mythical, autarkic past.
Why am I so fascinated with genocide? I watch Holocaust movies compulsively (Judgment at Nuremberg was on TV this weekend), I have obsessed for years about the 1994 Rwanda massacres. I suppose something in me is fascinated by cruelty, as if I want to horrify myself with the utmost depravity the human soul is capable of.
I'd also read a bit of an academic book that attempts to explain the causes of the mass participation in the Rwanda massacre of 1994. How could ordinary people, farmers, merchants, teachers, clergy, even children willingly participate in brutal murders, sometimes of their own neighbors, friends, even spouses? The book goes into history on that. Along the way it points out some facts I didn't know. In 1904, for instance, German troops in Namibia (then called South West Africa) massacred the Herero people who refused to accept their rule. The Herero were wiped out; genocide. A precursor to the Holocaust.
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Posted by Tyrone at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)