Over the next 6 to 18 months, we will likely see an increase in inflation, an increase in interest rates, and a devaluation of the American dollar. Americans pay approximately $2 trillion a year in taxes. However, the budget deficit is about $3.5 trilllion. Therefore, a huge tax increase is likely― not just for the rich but for everybody.
There will likely be another crash on Wall Street, causing people to lose millions of dollars invested in their pensions. People are also likely to lose money that they have invested in life insurance. Therefore, people with universal life and whole life insurance should buy term insurance policies.
Now is a better time to rent rather than buy real estate. If you already own real estate, it would be better to refinance for a fixed rate of interest, if you haven’t already done so. Since it is not a seller’s market, you should hold onto your holdings if you can; inflation can benefit people with secured debt at fixed rates of interest, provided inflation isn’t too high.
If you can’t pay your mortgage and are in danger of foreclosure, file for Chapter 7 or Chapter 8 personal bankruptcy. You will at least receive protection from your non-secured debt holders like credit card companies. Since bankruptcy doesn’t absolve you of secured debt like car loans, you should try to pay off your car loan as soon as possible.
Oil prices will continue to skyrocket. However, petroleum is a risky commodity to invest in because high prices at the gas pump reflect the fear that supply will not keep up with demand. Robert Widemer advises people to invest in precious metals like gold and mining stocks. However, I am sceptical. While mining stocks may look like a good investment now, gold looks another bubble, because it is rising faster than the rate of inflation while generating little economic growth. Several times in history, somebody has illegally tried to corner the markets in gold and silver, causing investors to lose millions. Therefore, look before you leap: the stock market and commodities markets like gold should never be seen as a get rich quick scheme. You should never invest more than you think you can afford to lose.
Over the past several months, unemployment has held steady at around 10%, according to the Labour Department. While advances in technology have driven economic growth since the start of the Industrial Revolution more than 250 years ago, changes in technology have also resulted in the disappearance of whole trades and occupations. For instance, AT&T has eliminated almost all of its human telephone operators. US Steel has cut its work force by 90% in the past 30 years while doubling productivity. Therefore, unemployment will continue to be high for the immediate future.
Good professions for people in college to go into are fields like the health care professions and wholesale food distribution. However, these fields are only secure enough to guarantee employment over the next few decades; they aren’t very lucrative. This indicates a downward mobility trend. College graduates will be very fortunate if they make as much as their parents or grandparents did. Expect to see people with advanced degrees facing extended periods of unemployment.
There’s good reason to believe the gloomy economic forecasts for the months ahead. However, it could always be worse, and it may get worse. If you are fortunate enough to still have a job, work hard, save your money, and give 10% of your earnings to your church or to a charity. The younger you are, the older you will more likely be when you retire. You should count on working past the age of 70 if you have just entered the job market for the first time.
At some point, there will be another economic boom. There will be young couples who will need new appliances like washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, gas or electric stoves, and microwave ovens. People will need home improvements, like vinyl siding and new shingles. People will finally conclude that they can no longer put off buying a new car or SUV. Seventy percent of this country’s wealth is generated by consumer spending, but you must look out after yourself and your family first. If you can hold off on a new set of golf clubs, maybe you should do that.
In the meantime, the first order of the day, is survival. See if you can limit your monthly grocery expenses to $200 a month, like people on food stamps have to do. You can go far just buying these 12 items once or twice a month: 1 gallon of milk, 1 loaf of bread, 1 pound of butter, 1 dozen eggs, 1 pound of cheese, 1 pound of bacon, 5 pounds of potatoes, 5 pounds of onions, 1 box of cereal, 1 gallon of orange juice, 1 pound of rice, and 1 pound of beans. You should still be able to buy fruits, vegetables and meat, as well as flour, sugar and coffee. You should learn to make use of leftovers. Five pounds of hamburger can be used to make an Italian meatloaf, the leftovers of which can be used to make a meat sauce for spaghetti.
With every crisis, there is both danger and opportunity. We could all go under with the economy the way it is, but we can also learn to live within our means.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
Review of "A Savage War of Peace" by Alistair Horne
While I was an undergraduate student at Eastern Michigan University, I had to write a paper for a class in post-World War II European history. I had initially chosen to write about the French president Charles de Gaulle. Then I found about the French war in Algeria between 1954 and 1962. After I found out about the FLN, the Battle of Algiers, and the OAS, any biography of Charles de Gaulle was out the window.
The war in Algeria started with a series of bombings by the Algerian National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, in French) that began 1 November 1954. Though civilians were killed, the targets were French soldiers, important members of the French community, and Arabs suspected of being collaborators. The French authorities responded by rounding up the usual suspects. But that wasn’t all: the French also engaged in collective reprisals, wiping out villages in the bled, holding suspected terrorists incommunicado, and subjecting them to tortures that seemed out of the Gestapo handbook for police interrogations.
If former members of the Free French had learnt anything from the time they spent in SS dungeons undergoing torture during World War II, it was how to employ the same methods of interrogation against Algerian nationalists fighting for independence in the 1950s and 1960s. La gégène, an electric generator hooked up to body parts like testicles and vaginal labia soon became a favourite instrument for extracting information like name, rank and serial number.
Alistair Horne’s “A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962” is an historical account of the war in Algeria. Many students of military history know about how the minuscule Viet Minh forced the mighty French Foreign Legion to surrender at Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954, resulting in the loss of French Indochina. Six months later, France faced a new assault on it empire in North Africa. These were shots heard round the Third World. Though the French were easily able to overwhelm the FLN on the field of battle, they lost the peace with the Treaty of Evian on 18 March 1962, giving in on every point. You’d have thought that Paris and Marseille had just been nuked.
Guerrilla warefare is sort of like nuclear war; the last man standing wins the war. If you survive long enough to pass your AK-47 down to your oldest son, the struggle continues indefinitely, until either your side overwhelms the enemy in battle (hardly likely, if you are outnumbered 15 to 1), or the enemy gets bored and decides to go home. As long as the war continues, you hold all the cards.
Naturally, law enforcement officials have a great stake in wiping out guerrilla insurgencies. Any city’s worst nightmare is gangs running the streets, shooting people right and left. You can’t run a city when people are afraid to go the store for a pack of cigarettes for fear of getting shot. The main argument for the legalization of drugs has always been that legalized marijuana would put the gangs out of business.
Alistair Horne divides “A Savage War of Peace” into three parts: “Prelude 1830-1954”; “The War 1954-1958”; and “The Hardest of All Victories 1958-1962.”
Horne starts his prelude with the terrorist attack on the village of Sétif in the Aurès Mountains of northern Algeria in 1945, just as the Germans were surrendering to the victorious Allies at the end of World War II. After the village constable was overwhelmed and a number of pieds noirs were killed―men, women and children― the French came in with guns a-blazing. Every Algerian Arab leader who had ever talked about independence out loud was rounded up while their followers hid out in caves. But General Duval, commander of the gendarmes who made the attackers head for hills, warned: “I can guarantee you ten years of peace of peace. But after that…”
Sétif had the same effect on Algerians that the Boston Massacre had on Americans before the Revolutionary War; it radicalized them. People who thought that they could play by French rules and talk to them found themselves faced with a choice: us or them. Most of the “moderates” sided with the radicals, in part because it was dangerous to be seen talking to the enemy. The FLN killed housands of Algerian Arabs as suspected collaborators between 1954 and 1962.
One of these moderates was Ferhat Abbas, who had fought with the Free French during World War II. He even had the honour of having Charles de Gaulle, commander of the Free French, pin the Medaille d’honneur on his chest during the war. However, Abbas threw his medals away, rejected the offer of a commission in the French Army, and joined the rebels. He paid a high price, spending years of his life in prison. He was eventually Algeria’s first President, but he died in exile in Switzerland after he was overthrown.
Let’s be blunt about it: the FLN was a terrorist group, pure and simple, setting off bombs and assassinating their enemies. Saadi Yacef, who starred as himself in “The Battle of Algiers,” developed the modus operandi of wearing women’s clothes, the abaya, that black table cloth that Arab women wear, and shooting his victims. You might think of the movie “The Battle of Algiers” as cinéma vérité, but this writer looks at it more as the attempt of a retired terrorist to rehabilitate his image.
To be fair, however, the FLN terrorist was a kinder, gentler terrorist, compared to the likes of Osama bin Ladin today. The goal of the FLN was not to inspire terror― the goal of the “real” terrorist― but to drive the French from Algeria. Initially, their orders were not to kill innocent men, women and children, but only to strike at “hard” targets.
However, the FLN weren’t above using civilians as cover. In any major operation, operatives were kept off the street, except those directly involved, so that all the “usual suspects” rounded up were people who had nothing to do with it. You could call it an attempt at recruitment. A lot of people who signed up with the FLN had been tortured by French gendarmes first.
The main event of the war itself was the Battle of Algiers in 1958. Like the Thet Offensive of 1968 in Vietnam, it was a strategic blunder for the FLN. Most of those who took part in the battle were either killed or arrested, including Saadi Yacef, who was arrested rather than killed. He was sentenced to death at least four times, but never executed. When parachutists of the French Foreign Legion under Gen. Jacques Massu saved the day, it seemed to the French inhabitants of Algiers, the pieds noirs, that Algeria would remain forever French. This was another dark moment for the FLN.
So what happened? It seems that the French in Algeria, the pieds noirs, were victims of their own excesses. The French had hoped for a “third force,” a group of moderates in Algeria who could steer the conflict to a middle ground where all parties involved could negotiate. The pieds noirs made any “third force” impossible as they raped, murdered and tortured suspected terrorists, in retaliation for what was done to them. When they adopted the tactics of the FLN, they were lost; they only succeeded in alienating the very people that the French government hoped to win over.
Let’s face it, folks: terrorism works while counter-terrorism doesn’t. By blowing up “soft targets” like hotels and making the enemy overreact, you can easily make yourself look like the victim when the enemy starts murdering civilians and subjects you to cruel and unusual punishment. If you can get the authorities to suspend habeas corpus and throw people in jail right and left for even “looking like a terrorist,” you have won half the battle.
We all have some idea why people become terrorists; it could be because of a moment of religious conversion, or because you believe in a cause. Why would anybody become a police interrogator― just to get a pension and buy a home on the Gulf of Mexico? When somebody becomes an activist, you think he or she might be a little crazy. When a friend tells you that he wants to become a cop, you hope that somebody around you doesn’t light up a joint.
That’s why counter-terrorism never works. While the terrorist may or may not have a touch of sadism, with the counter-terrorist, there seems to be no doubt. Few people want torturers at their parties. You wouldn’t want a torturer as best man at your wedding.
The last phase of the war occurred after Charles de Gaulle was asked to form a government as Premier of France in 1958. By this time, the French in Algeria were rising up against the colonial adminstration in Algeria. Parachutists in the French Army had even landed on the island of Corsica, with the object of overthrowing the government. When the last premier of the Fourth Republic, Pierre Pflimlin, doubted that he had the Army on his side, he offered to resign and let De Gaulle form a government.
De Gaulle got a new constitution and almost imperial powers as President of the Fifth Republic. Never a fan of party politics, De Gaulle soon saw most of the old parties of the Fourth Republic fall by the wayside.
If there was any “third force” in Algeria, it was the pieds noirs, only they were no moderating influence. Their conditions were very clear: l’Algérie française, or French rule in Algeria. Preferably forever.
The mistake that both the French government and the FLN made, it seems, was in underestimating the attachment that the pieds noirs felt towards Algeria rather than France. Some of the French families had been in Algeria since the 1830; many French Algerians had never been to France. To many of the French in Algeria, France was a different country. Most of them had little attachment to France.
The “third force” that French colonial admistrators had banked on turned out to be a nationalism on the part of the French settlers that worked not only against the Arab nationalists but also against the Mother Country. There might have been French people in Algeria willing to declare independence in order to maintain their way of life, if necessary; but thoughts of a white minority declaring independence so that it might rule a non-white majority were a little premature. It wasn’t until 1964 that the whites in Rhodesia declared independence to maintain their white supremacist government in Africa.
The last phase of the war in Algeria was the war against terrorism. All the excesses by the French gendarmes in Algeria, the parachutists under Jacques Massu, and pied noir mobs are well-documented in Horne’s book. However, the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète or OAS) adds a whole new chapter to the history on the war against terrorism.
The OAS was a group of army officers fanatically dedicated to overthrowing the French government in order to preserve French rule in Algeria. It’s leader was Gen. Raoul Salan, known as “The Mandarin” because of his immersion in Asian culture while serving in Indochina. Salan had served under De Gaulle as a member of the Free French. In the beginning, the OAS limited its actions to acts of sabotage and assassinations in Algeria. Once it became clear that President de Gaulle was seriously negotiating with the FLN, however, they turned their sights on France.
By the summer of 1961, the explosion of plastiquages, or “plastic explosives,” became a daily occurance in France. At first, the French public was bewildered. What were the OAS thinking, and what had the French done to deserve this? Then, after a blomb intended for De Gaulle’s Minister of Information, André Malraux, exploded and permanently blinded a four-year-old girl, the public demanded that France cut Algeria loose and destroy the OAS.
By the spring of 1962, the OAS was broken and its leaders were arrested, including Salan. Under the agreement between De Gaulle and FLN, Algeria won it’s indepenence. The FLN got everything that it wanted at the bargaining table, including the rights to recently discovered oil in the Sahara Desert. Initially, the FLN offered the pieds noirs a choice between French and Algerian citizenship and allowed them to stay, but nearly all of them fled to France once the ink on the treaty was dry. Because of their support for the OAS, they had burnt their bridges. Before they left Algeria, they went on an orgy of destruction, burning and tearing apart anything that wasn’t nailed down. Burning their bridges.
The role of Charles de Gaulle in all this is very complex. At what point did he realize that the only way out of the violence in Algeria was for France to leave? He clearly wasn’t ready to show his hand when he flew to Algiers in 1958 and affirmed to the crowd, “Je vous ai compris!” I understood you. He may have understood them, but they clearly didn’t understand them. The pieds noirs in Algeria and the Army had supported De Gaulle because they thought that he was as committed to l’Algérie française as they were, but they were wrong.
The secret of De Gaulle’s appeal among the French was that he loved France at a time when France seemed justified in hating itself after the shame of surrender and the collaborationist regime in Vichy. Committed to France’s “grandeur,” however, he realized that France’s destiny didn’t include Algeria. De Gaulle was willing to invest in a future that included nuclear weapons while foregoing France’s colonies. He lost Algeria, but most of the people thought that he saved France from endless colonial wars.
The FLN has also been profoundly misunderstood. While they saw themselves as committed to Islam but willing to tolerate the peoples of the dhimma, or non-Muslims, the West saw them as agents of Moscow. Khrushchev understood the FLN better than the West; his support for them was never more than lukewarm because he understood that the FLN was only trying to use the Russians like Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt had tried to use them. The main supporters of the FLN was always Algeria’s neighbours, Morocco and Tunisia. Once the French granted independence to those countries, the FLN used their territory as bases of operations against the French.
As I said before, the FLN moudjahad was a kinder, gentler terrorist in comparison to the moudjahadine with Al-Qaida. They rarely, if ever, strapped bombs to themselves, or left imrovised explosive devices that could be detonated by children. Their targets were military: off-duty French officers in officers’ clubs, or suspected collaborators (as well as the usual bridges and railways). At least that’s the FLN mythos.
However, once you resort to terrorism, you are compromised, even if your tactics lead to victory. If you resort to terror in the name of Islam, people who think that they are better Muslims than you might resort to the same tactics. In the 1990s, the FLN government in Algeria found itself embroiled in a civil war against the Islamist Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut or FIS). This civil war is a major reason why Algerians have shown little inclination to take to the streets during the “Arab Spring.”
If any lessons are to be learnt from Horne’s books, it’s that terrorism works while counter-terrorism does not. Also, there’s no “third force,” unless another radical group appears, like the OAS. Let's face it: few people want to be on the wrong end of a terrorist bomb. The French found out the hard way― after a useless eight-year war― that people never forget an injustice. Even after more than 100 years of French rule, the Algerians clearly never accepted it. However, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander: Algerians under the FLN became victims of the same tactics that they used against the French with the civil war in the 1990s.
If anything is to be learnt from history, it’s that people don’t learn from history.
The war in Algeria started with a series of bombings by the Algerian National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, in French) that began 1 November 1954. Though civilians were killed, the targets were French soldiers, important members of the French community, and Arabs suspected of being collaborators. The French authorities responded by rounding up the usual suspects. But that wasn’t all: the French also engaged in collective reprisals, wiping out villages in the bled, holding suspected terrorists incommunicado, and subjecting them to tortures that seemed out of the Gestapo handbook for police interrogations.
If former members of the Free French had learnt anything from the time they spent in SS dungeons undergoing torture during World War II, it was how to employ the same methods of interrogation against Algerian nationalists fighting for independence in the 1950s and 1960s. La gégène, an electric generator hooked up to body parts like testicles and vaginal labia soon became a favourite instrument for extracting information like name, rank and serial number.
Alistair Horne’s “A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962” is an historical account of the war in Algeria. Many students of military history know about how the minuscule Viet Minh forced the mighty French Foreign Legion to surrender at Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954, resulting in the loss of French Indochina. Six months later, France faced a new assault on it empire in North Africa. These were shots heard round the Third World. Though the French were easily able to overwhelm the FLN on the field of battle, they lost the peace with the Treaty of Evian on 18 March 1962, giving in on every point. You’d have thought that Paris and Marseille had just been nuked.
Guerrilla warefare is sort of like nuclear war; the last man standing wins the war. If you survive long enough to pass your AK-47 down to your oldest son, the struggle continues indefinitely, until either your side overwhelms the enemy in battle (hardly likely, if you are outnumbered 15 to 1), or the enemy gets bored and decides to go home. As long as the war continues, you hold all the cards.
Naturally, law enforcement officials have a great stake in wiping out guerrilla insurgencies. Any city’s worst nightmare is gangs running the streets, shooting people right and left. You can’t run a city when people are afraid to go the store for a pack of cigarettes for fear of getting shot. The main argument for the legalization of drugs has always been that legalized marijuana would put the gangs out of business.
Alistair Horne divides “A Savage War of Peace” into three parts: “Prelude 1830-1954”; “The War 1954-1958”; and “The Hardest of All Victories 1958-1962.”
Horne starts his prelude with the terrorist attack on the village of Sétif in the Aurès Mountains of northern Algeria in 1945, just as the Germans were surrendering to the victorious Allies at the end of World War II. After the village constable was overwhelmed and a number of pieds noirs were killed―men, women and children― the French came in with guns a-blazing. Every Algerian Arab leader who had ever talked about independence out loud was rounded up while their followers hid out in caves. But General Duval, commander of the gendarmes who made the attackers head for hills, warned: “I can guarantee you ten years of peace of peace. But after that…”
Sétif had the same effect on Algerians that the Boston Massacre had on Americans before the Revolutionary War; it radicalized them. People who thought that they could play by French rules and talk to them found themselves faced with a choice: us or them. Most of the “moderates” sided with the radicals, in part because it was dangerous to be seen talking to the enemy. The FLN killed housands of Algerian Arabs as suspected collaborators between 1954 and 1962.
One of these moderates was Ferhat Abbas, who had fought with the Free French during World War II. He even had the honour of having Charles de Gaulle, commander of the Free French, pin the Medaille d’honneur on his chest during the war. However, Abbas threw his medals away, rejected the offer of a commission in the French Army, and joined the rebels. He paid a high price, spending years of his life in prison. He was eventually Algeria’s first President, but he died in exile in Switzerland after he was overthrown.
Let’s be blunt about it: the FLN was a terrorist group, pure and simple, setting off bombs and assassinating their enemies. Saadi Yacef, who starred as himself in “The Battle of Algiers,” developed the modus operandi of wearing women’s clothes, the abaya, that black table cloth that Arab women wear, and shooting his victims. You might think of the movie “The Battle of Algiers” as cinéma vérité, but this writer looks at it more as the attempt of a retired terrorist to rehabilitate his image.
To be fair, however, the FLN terrorist was a kinder, gentler terrorist, compared to the likes of Osama bin Ladin today. The goal of the FLN was not to inspire terror― the goal of the “real” terrorist― but to drive the French from Algeria. Initially, their orders were not to kill innocent men, women and children, but only to strike at “hard” targets.
However, the FLN weren’t above using civilians as cover. In any major operation, operatives were kept off the street, except those directly involved, so that all the “usual suspects” rounded up were people who had nothing to do with it. You could call it an attempt at recruitment. A lot of people who signed up with the FLN had been tortured by French gendarmes first.
The main event of the war itself was the Battle of Algiers in 1958. Like the Thet Offensive of 1968 in Vietnam, it was a strategic blunder for the FLN. Most of those who took part in the battle were either killed or arrested, including Saadi Yacef, who was arrested rather than killed. He was sentenced to death at least four times, but never executed. When parachutists of the French Foreign Legion under Gen. Jacques Massu saved the day, it seemed to the French inhabitants of Algiers, the pieds noirs, that Algeria would remain forever French. This was another dark moment for the FLN.
So what happened? It seems that the French in Algeria, the pieds noirs, were victims of their own excesses. The French had hoped for a “third force,” a group of moderates in Algeria who could steer the conflict to a middle ground where all parties involved could negotiate. The pieds noirs made any “third force” impossible as they raped, murdered and tortured suspected terrorists, in retaliation for what was done to them. When they adopted the tactics of the FLN, they were lost; they only succeeded in alienating the very people that the French government hoped to win over.
Let’s face it, folks: terrorism works while counter-terrorism doesn’t. By blowing up “soft targets” like hotels and making the enemy overreact, you can easily make yourself look like the victim when the enemy starts murdering civilians and subjects you to cruel and unusual punishment. If you can get the authorities to suspend habeas corpus and throw people in jail right and left for even “looking like a terrorist,” you have won half the battle.
We all have some idea why people become terrorists; it could be because of a moment of religious conversion, or because you believe in a cause. Why would anybody become a police interrogator― just to get a pension and buy a home on the Gulf of Mexico? When somebody becomes an activist, you think he or she might be a little crazy. When a friend tells you that he wants to become a cop, you hope that somebody around you doesn’t light up a joint.
That’s why counter-terrorism never works. While the terrorist may or may not have a touch of sadism, with the counter-terrorist, there seems to be no doubt. Few people want torturers at their parties. You wouldn’t want a torturer as best man at your wedding.
The last phase of the war occurred after Charles de Gaulle was asked to form a government as Premier of France in 1958. By this time, the French in Algeria were rising up against the colonial adminstration in Algeria. Parachutists in the French Army had even landed on the island of Corsica, with the object of overthrowing the government. When the last premier of the Fourth Republic, Pierre Pflimlin, doubted that he had the Army on his side, he offered to resign and let De Gaulle form a government.
De Gaulle got a new constitution and almost imperial powers as President of the Fifth Republic. Never a fan of party politics, De Gaulle soon saw most of the old parties of the Fourth Republic fall by the wayside.
If there was any “third force” in Algeria, it was the pieds noirs, only they were no moderating influence. Their conditions were very clear: l’Algérie française, or French rule in Algeria. Preferably forever.
The mistake that both the French government and the FLN made, it seems, was in underestimating the attachment that the pieds noirs felt towards Algeria rather than France. Some of the French families had been in Algeria since the 1830; many French Algerians had never been to France. To many of the French in Algeria, France was a different country. Most of them had little attachment to France.
The “third force” that French colonial admistrators had banked on turned out to be a nationalism on the part of the French settlers that worked not only against the Arab nationalists but also against the Mother Country. There might have been French people in Algeria willing to declare independence in order to maintain their way of life, if necessary; but thoughts of a white minority declaring independence so that it might rule a non-white majority were a little premature. It wasn’t until 1964 that the whites in Rhodesia declared independence to maintain their white supremacist government in Africa.
The last phase of the war in Algeria was the war against terrorism. All the excesses by the French gendarmes in Algeria, the parachutists under Jacques Massu, and pied noir mobs are well-documented in Horne’s book. However, the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète or OAS) adds a whole new chapter to the history on the war against terrorism.
The OAS was a group of army officers fanatically dedicated to overthrowing the French government in order to preserve French rule in Algeria. It’s leader was Gen. Raoul Salan, known as “The Mandarin” because of his immersion in Asian culture while serving in Indochina. Salan had served under De Gaulle as a member of the Free French. In the beginning, the OAS limited its actions to acts of sabotage and assassinations in Algeria. Once it became clear that President de Gaulle was seriously negotiating with the FLN, however, they turned their sights on France.
By the summer of 1961, the explosion of plastiquages, or “plastic explosives,” became a daily occurance in France. At first, the French public was bewildered. What were the OAS thinking, and what had the French done to deserve this? Then, after a blomb intended for De Gaulle’s Minister of Information, André Malraux, exploded and permanently blinded a four-year-old girl, the public demanded that France cut Algeria loose and destroy the OAS.
By the spring of 1962, the OAS was broken and its leaders were arrested, including Salan. Under the agreement between De Gaulle and FLN, Algeria won it’s indepenence. The FLN got everything that it wanted at the bargaining table, including the rights to recently discovered oil in the Sahara Desert. Initially, the FLN offered the pieds noirs a choice between French and Algerian citizenship and allowed them to stay, but nearly all of them fled to France once the ink on the treaty was dry. Because of their support for the OAS, they had burnt their bridges. Before they left Algeria, they went on an orgy of destruction, burning and tearing apart anything that wasn’t nailed down. Burning their bridges.
The role of Charles de Gaulle in all this is very complex. At what point did he realize that the only way out of the violence in Algeria was for France to leave? He clearly wasn’t ready to show his hand when he flew to Algiers in 1958 and affirmed to the crowd, “Je vous ai compris!” I understood you. He may have understood them, but they clearly didn’t understand them. The pieds noirs in Algeria and the Army had supported De Gaulle because they thought that he was as committed to l’Algérie française as they were, but they were wrong.
The secret of De Gaulle’s appeal among the French was that he loved France at a time when France seemed justified in hating itself after the shame of surrender and the collaborationist regime in Vichy. Committed to France’s “grandeur,” however, he realized that France’s destiny didn’t include Algeria. De Gaulle was willing to invest in a future that included nuclear weapons while foregoing France’s colonies. He lost Algeria, but most of the people thought that he saved France from endless colonial wars.
The FLN has also been profoundly misunderstood. While they saw themselves as committed to Islam but willing to tolerate the peoples of the dhimma, or non-Muslims, the West saw them as agents of Moscow. Khrushchev understood the FLN better than the West; his support for them was never more than lukewarm because he understood that the FLN was only trying to use the Russians like Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt had tried to use them. The main supporters of the FLN was always Algeria’s neighbours, Morocco and Tunisia. Once the French granted independence to those countries, the FLN used their territory as bases of operations against the French.
As I said before, the FLN moudjahad was a kinder, gentler terrorist in comparison to the moudjahadine with Al-Qaida. They rarely, if ever, strapped bombs to themselves, or left imrovised explosive devices that could be detonated by children. Their targets were military: off-duty French officers in officers’ clubs, or suspected collaborators (as well as the usual bridges and railways). At least that’s the FLN mythos.
However, once you resort to terrorism, you are compromised, even if your tactics lead to victory. If you resort to terror in the name of Islam, people who think that they are better Muslims than you might resort to the same tactics. In the 1990s, the FLN government in Algeria found itself embroiled in a civil war against the Islamist Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut or FIS). This civil war is a major reason why Algerians have shown little inclination to take to the streets during the “Arab Spring.”
If any lessons are to be learnt from Horne’s books, it’s that terrorism works while counter-terrorism does not. Also, there’s no “third force,” unless another radical group appears, like the OAS. Let's face it: few people want to be on the wrong end of a terrorist bomb. The French found out the hard way― after a useless eight-year war― that people never forget an injustice. Even after more than 100 years of French rule, the Algerians clearly never accepted it. However, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander: Algerians under the FLN became victims of the same tactics that they used against the French with the civil war in the 1990s.
If anything is to be learnt from history, it’s that people don’t learn from history.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Senator Joe Goes to Washington
Once upon a time, there was a man named Joe, who came from America's Dairyland, Wisconsin. One day, he decided to run for senator. So many Cheeseheads voted for him that he won the election. Years later, when the Greenbay Packers won the NFL championship for the first time since Jesus went skating on the Sea of Galilee, some of the Cheeseheads thought that he had the gift of prophecy because he had predicted that the Packers would win the NFL championship. (This was before the Super Bowl was even a gleam in Pete Rozelle's eye.) But Joe was just drunk, or he was in a bar when he made that prediction.
Yes, Joe had a drinking problem. Judging from his beady little eyes, he was probably a mean drunk rather than a happy drunk; or maybe he was only happy when he was drunk and mean when he was sober. In any case, he probably predicted that the Pack would be back while he was drunk. Since a lot of Cheeseheads also drank the Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous, they liked Joe and elected him to the Senate.
When Joe arrived in Washington, the first thing he did was take in the sights: the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, et al. Whether he remembered them or not is debatable, because he got drunk on the airplane, didn't stop drinking when he got off it, and made an ass of himself. For nearly six years, that's pretty much what Joe did: he got drunk. The barmaids in Georgetown, Alexandria, and DC knew him well, though he didn't seem to remember any of them.
He managed to make the Senate roll call most of the time, voting yay or nay on Senate bills that were all a blur to him. But after nearly six years, he hadn't introduced any legislation. It was almost time for reelection in America's Dairyland, and Joe—even in his nearly perpetual drunken state—was in a panic (or least his handlers were in a panic.)
Sometimes, even Joe got to speak before the Senate. One day, as he stood up to speak (in his normal state, of course), he slid his right hand into his pocket and felt something inside it. Not remembering what it was, Joe pulled out a matchbook. For a few minutes, he tottered back and forth as he tried to read a telephone number and somebody’s name on the matchbox.
“What do you have in your hand, senator?” the Senate Majority Leader asked.
Joe staggered a little, somehow managed to suppress a loud belch, and stammered, “I have a list of Commies in my hand!
There was a hush on the Senate floor. Joe allowed the Senators to talk excitedly among themselves before he told his first of many lies over the next 18 months: “And they are all in the State Department!”
There was another hush on the Senate floor.
What Joe really read on the matchbook was this: “For a good time, call 867-5308. Connie.” However, nobody will ever know who “Connie” was because Joe didn’t remember, either. Not only that, but "Connie" probably wasn't even her real name, since Ladies of the Evening don't like to release their names to their clients. Then again, maybe he just got her name from a bathroom wall.
Historians will probably be forever divided on the question of whether Joe misread the name “Connie” for “Commie” because he was drunk at the time; some think that he improvised a lie on the spot while others are willing to give him the benefit of a doubt because of his drinking problem. Nearly all are unanymous in the belief that he lied about the list of the names of Communists in the State Department. He never had a list but improvised as he proceeded through his witch hunt. In the end, he was pulling names from the telephone book, or so they say.
The Republicans in the Senate—God bless ‘em—knew what they had to do: they appointed Joe Chairman of the Senate Un-American Activities Committee. For the next several months, he called normal, everyday citizens to come all the way to Washington—at the taxpayers’ expense—to answer questions about what they did during the thirties, when they were still young. A lot of them couldn’t remember, because it was too long ago. As well, there were a few who had drinking problems like Senator Joe.
The question that made nearly everyone freeze was: “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?”
You could have made a US Sprint commercial in the Senate chamber whenever Senator Joe asked that question.
A young man who had a promising career as a diplomat, Peter Chris, had his whole life ruined. Peter Chris faced the possibility of the electric chair when he was later charged with treason in a federal court. In the end, he was only convicted of perjury. Today, few people know what he lied about, but his name became synonymous with “traitor” with the Right as newspapers across the country called him “Judas Chris Cariot.”
After Joe ran out of people in the State Department, he started going after Hollywood movie stars and directors. After one Greek-born director, Zorba Onasis, who dared to suggest in his films that African-Americans were actually human, was ostracized by the Hollywood community when he admitted that some of his friends had been Communists. However, the actor who was the President of the Screen Actor’s Guild, Ronnie Ratpeizen, a man with prematurely orange hair, loudly proclaimed, “I for one am willing to do anything to help root out these fellow travellers from the movie industry!”
I don't know. Maybe the senator saw a movie that he didn't like.
Then Joe went after some folksingers. One trio of folksingers called “The Reefers,” had their careers ruined at least until the sixties, but not before their leader, a tall and reedy man who looked like a middle-aged corn farmer from Kansas, said, “Yes, I am a Communist! I can be a Communist if I want to because this is supposed to be a free country!” But the key phrase was “supposed to be”: Clete Seager and the Silver Reefer Band still had their careers ruined.
The Golden Grail in Senator Joe’s fight against Communism was the labour movement, because that was the Golden Grail for every Republican politician in those days. Even in the fifties, there were still a lot of Wobblies and former Wobblies in the labour movement. When Joe tried to drop his stink bombs on them, many of them ran for cover like married men caught in a police raid on a gay bathhouse in San Francisco. However, one African-American organizer from Detroit basically said to Joe and his Committee: “You can kiss my black ass!”
This outspoken champion of the working man later became Mayor of Detroit. He never let up on his jungle defoliant-style of rhetoric for a minute, though he was accused of everything from fathering half of all babies from within a five-mile radius of Manoogian Mansion to smuggling in Uzis to the crack dealers of Detroit. He later became part-owner of a Mexican restaurant in downtown Detroit called “Nacho Boy.”
When his Hizzoner finally went up to the Manoogian Mansion in the Sky, a Detroit newscaster with a drinking problem almost as bad as Senator Joe’s, made this lachrymous tribute at his funeral: “What’s-his-name was the most unforgetable man I’ll ever know! Hic!”
African-Americans loved him for the way he stood up to Senator Joe.
But let’s get back to our sheep! There was a broadcaster from one of the Big Three of American network television (probably the one with the eye, CBS) named Edward R. Burroughs, with slick-backed hair prematurely dyed black, a suitably grave mouth in a perpetual frown, and the somber, baritone voice of a man who broadcasted the funerals of famous people for a living. Every night when he went on the air, American viewers were captivated by a minimum of six ashtrays on his desk, because he smoked like the automobile plant on the Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan. He could have been a poster child for the American Cancer Society, because those cigarettes snuffed him out like a butt in one of his ashtrays in the end.
Burroughs was a man who had seen it all: skeletal concentration camp inmates after the liberation of Buchenwald walking like the zombies in "Night of the Living Dead," for example, and Korean refugees who looked like matchsticks with clothes stolen from scarecrows in Kansas along the Pusan Perimeter, fleeing a Communist onslaught comprised of “volunteers” from half the city of Beijing. He thought he knew absolute evil when he saw it, having seen both Hitler and Stalin. He thought he saw it in the face of a rotund, piggy little man with piggy little eyes who could get you pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving just by breathing on you.
Between the two of them, Edward R. Burroughs and Senator Joe probably made the Senate chambre smell like a bar counter in Georgetown or Alexandria. Since smoking wasn’t banned in public places yet, the television viewer could see a white curly-cue levatating towards the celing fans from one of Mr. Burrough’s endless supply of Lucky Strikes. Senators weren’t supposed to drink alcohol, but Senator Joe periodically sipped from a glass of a mysterious clear liquid. Historians are divided on whether this clear fluid was water, vodka, or some other clear alcoholic beverage.
That’s right, Edward R. Burroughs broadcasted a hearing of the Senate Un-American Activities Committee on prime time, with Senator Joe chairing.
Unlike the Soviet Politburo during the thirties, or even the British Parliament today, the American Senate in the fifties liked to conduct their business behind closed doors. Maybe it was something that the senators had learned from women like “Connie,” whose name Joe found on a matchbook in his pocket. However, American even then had a tendency to think of secrecy as an “un-American activity.”
In the words of Otto von Bismark: "The less people know about the making of sausage and the doings of government, the better they sleep at night."
Senator Joe, it's said, had plenty of support from former members of the American Bund, German-American Nazi sympathizers before World War II, who probably knew something about the making of bratwurst and wiener schnitzel.
The senators, both Republican and Democrat, might have wanted to scurry away from the television cameras, but the video cam is the All-Seeing Eye of God in this country. You can’t avoid it for very long, if people outside your hometown or home county know your name. Unfortunately for Senator Joe, most Cheeseheads in Wisconsin already knew who he was.
Once the idiot box goes on, the viewer becomes almost like a voyeur. The viewer may long remember outrageous images, like a stripper slowly taking it all off, while forgetting the more banal, like a white tablecloth on a kitchen table. Because Mr. Ed and Senator Joe came of age when people sat glued in front of a radio, expecting images to magically materialize, they didn’t understand the power of televised images. Both Ed and Joe understood the power of the human voice as a medium of expression, however.
Senator Joe used the sing-song monotony of his voice to lull the witness into a state of torpor before springing his trap. When his interrogation took an aggressive turn on one witness, a blueblood senator from somewhere in New England, like Vermont or Connecticutt stood up and shouted, “You piece of shit! You’re wiping your ass with the Constitution!”
A week after the SUAC showed America just a little of how it conducted its business, most of the country forgot about Senator Joe’s line of questioning, or even the unfortunate witness who had to leave his hardware store in Peoria to appear before the Senate. The viewers remembered a fellow senator calling Senator Joe “a douche bag” when he faced the press after the session in the Senate. The microphone howled with feedback.
Historians are still divided on whether the senator from New England called Senator a douche bag or “a piece of shit,” because there are some things that you can’t say on television today. Maybe the senator didn’t call Senator Joe anything.
Historians are unanymous that Edward R. Burroughs called Senator Joe a “slime ball.” Television images don’t lie. It wouldn’t be on TV if it wasn’t true, right? That’s why advertising works, though nobody is sure exactly how.
The country was shocked when the Senate voted to censure Senator Joe. That meant that he could vote on all bills before the Senate, but he couldn’t enter into the debate. A politician not being able to speak is like a dog condemned to licking his privates in private. Just like dogs can’t understand why people want to slam the door when they do their business, politicians can’t understand why they shouldn’t be allowed to use every rhetorical trick in the business to persuade other politicians to see things their way—which always changes according to what the latest polls say.
Senator Joe’s most ardent supporters believed that his censure by the Senate made him turn to drink, when more likely, drink ultimately led to the Senate censuring him. By the end of the 1950s, Senator Joe was found dead (some say) in a hotel room in a fetal position. Historians debate on whether the bottle of liquor was half full or half empty.
Good triumphed over evil, they say, and everybody happily ever after, except for Senator Joe.
Yes, Joe had a drinking problem. Judging from his beady little eyes, he was probably a mean drunk rather than a happy drunk; or maybe he was only happy when he was drunk and mean when he was sober. In any case, he probably predicted that the Pack would be back while he was drunk. Since a lot of Cheeseheads also drank the Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous, they liked Joe and elected him to the Senate.
When Joe arrived in Washington, the first thing he did was take in the sights: the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, et al. Whether he remembered them or not is debatable, because he got drunk on the airplane, didn't stop drinking when he got off it, and made an ass of himself. For nearly six years, that's pretty much what Joe did: he got drunk. The barmaids in Georgetown, Alexandria, and DC knew him well, though he didn't seem to remember any of them.
He managed to make the Senate roll call most of the time, voting yay or nay on Senate bills that were all a blur to him. But after nearly six years, he hadn't introduced any legislation. It was almost time for reelection in America's Dairyland, and Joe—even in his nearly perpetual drunken state—was in a panic (or least his handlers were in a panic.)
Sometimes, even Joe got to speak before the Senate. One day, as he stood up to speak (in his normal state, of course), he slid his right hand into his pocket and felt something inside it. Not remembering what it was, Joe pulled out a matchbook. For a few minutes, he tottered back and forth as he tried to read a telephone number and somebody’s name on the matchbox.
“What do you have in your hand, senator?” the Senate Majority Leader asked.
Joe staggered a little, somehow managed to suppress a loud belch, and stammered, “I have a list of Commies in my hand!
There was a hush on the Senate floor. Joe allowed the Senators to talk excitedly among themselves before he told his first of many lies over the next 18 months: “And they are all in the State Department!”
There was another hush on the Senate floor.
What Joe really read on the matchbook was this: “For a good time, call 867-5308. Connie.” However, nobody will ever know who “Connie” was because Joe didn’t remember, either. Not only that, but "Connie" probably wasn't even her real name, since Ladies of the Evening don't like to release their names to their clients. Then again, maybe he just got her name from a bathroom wall.
Historians will probably be forever divided on the question of whether Joe misread the name “Connie” for “Commie” because he was drunk at the time; some think that he improvised a lie on the spot while others are willing to give him the benefit of a doubt because of his drinking problem. Nearly all are unanymous in the belief that he lied about the list of the names of Communists in the State Department. He never had a list but improvised as he proceeded through his witch hunt. In the end, he was pulling names from the telephone book, or so they say.
The Republicans in the Senate—God bless ‘em—knew what they had to do: they appointed Joe Chairman of the Senate Un-American Activities Committee. For the next several months, he called normal, everyday citizens to come all the way to Washington—at the taxpayers’ expense—to answer questions about what they did during the thirties, when they were still young. A lot of them couldn’t remember, because it was too long ago. As well, there were a few who had drinking problems like Senator Joe.
The question that made nearly everyone freeze was: “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?”
You could have made a US Sprint commercial in the Senate chamber whenever Senator Joe asked that question.
A young man who had a promising career as a diplomat, Peter Chris, had his whole life ruined. Peter Chris faced the possibility of the electric chair when he was later charged with treason in a federal court. In the end, he was only convicted of perjury. Today, few people know what he lied about, but his name became synonymous with “traitor” with the Right as newspapers across the country called him “Judas Chris Cariot.”
After Joe ran out of people in the State Department, he started going after Hollywood movie stars and directors. After one Greek-born director, Zorba Onasis, who dared to suggest in his films that African-Americans were actually human, was ostracized by the Hollywood community when he admitted that some of his friends had been Communists. However, the actor who was the President of the Screen Actor’s Guild, Ronnie Ratpeizen, a man with prematurely orange hair, loudly proclaimed, “I for one am willing to do anything to help root out these fellow travellers from the movie industry!”
I don't know. Maybe the senator saw a movie that he didn't like.
Then Joe went after some folksingers. One trio of folksingers called “The Reefers,” had their careers ruined at least until the sixties, but not before their leader, a tall and reedy man who looked like a middle-aged corn farmer from Kansas, said, “Yes, I am a Communist! I can be a Communist if I want to because this is supposed to be a free country!” But the key phrase was “supposed to be”: Clete Seager and the Silver Reefer Band still had their careers ruined.
The Golden Grail in Senator Joe’s fight against Communism was the labour movement, because that was the Golden Grail for every Republican politician in those days. Even in the fifties, there were still a lot of Wobblies and former Wobblies in the labour movement. When Joe tried to drop his stink bombs on them, many of them ran for cover like married men caught in a police raid on a gay bathhouse in San Francisco. However, one African-American organizer from Detroit basically said to Joe and his Committee: “You can kiss my black ass!”
This outspoken champion of the working man later became Mayor of Detroit. He never let up on his jungle defoliant-style of rhetoric for a minute, though he was accused of everything from fathering half of all babies from within a five-mile radius of Manoogian Mansion to smuggling in Uzis to the crack dealers of Detroit. He later became part-owner of a Mexican restaurant in downtown Detroit called “Nacho Boy.”
When his Hizzoner finally went up to the Manoogian Mansion in the Sky, a Detroit newscaster with a drinking problem almost as bad as Senator Joe’s, made this lachrymous tribute at his funeral: “What’s-his-name was the most unforgetable man I’ll ever know! Hic!”
African-Americans loved him for the way he stood up to Senator Joe.
But let’s get back to our sheep! There was a broadcaster from one of the Big Three of American network television (probably the one with the eye, CBS) named Edward R. Burroughs, with slick-backed hair prematurely dyed black, a suitably grave mouth in a perpetual frown, and the somber, baritone voice of a man who broadcasted the funerals of famous people for a living. Every night when he went on the air, American viewers were captivated by a minimum of six ashtrays on his desk, because he smoked like the automobile plant on the Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan. He could have been a poster child for the American Cancer Society, because those cigarettes snuffed him out like a butt in one of his ashtrays in the end.
Burroughs was a man who had seen it all: skeletal concentration camp inmates after the liberation of Buchenwald walking like the zombies in "Night of the Living Dead," for example, and Korean refugees who looked like matchsticks with clothes stolen from scarecrows in Kansas along the Pusan Perimeter, fleeing a Communist onslaught comprised of “volunteers” from half the city of Beijing. He thought he knew absolute evil when he saw it, having seen both Hitler and Stalin. He thought he saw it in the face of a rotund, piggy little man with piggy little eyes who could get you pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving just by breathing on you.
Between the two of them, Edward R. Burroughs and Senator Joe probably made the Senate chambre smell like a bar counter in Georgetown or Alexandria. Since smoking wasn’t banned in public places yet, the television viewer could see a white curly-cue levatating towards the celing fans from one of Mr. Burrough’s endless supply of Lucky Strikes. Senators weren’t supposed to drink alcohol, but Senator Joe periodically sipped from a glass of a mysterious clear liquid. Historians are divided on whether this clear fluid was water, vodka, or some other clear alcoholic beverage.
That’s right, Edward R. Burroughs broadcasted a hearing of the Senate Un-American Activities Committee on prime time, with Senator Joe chairing.
Unlike the Soviet Politburo during the thirties, or even the British Parliament today, the American Senate in the fifties liked to conduct their business behind closed doors. Maybe it was something that the senators had learned from women like “Connie,” whose name Joe found on a matchbook in his pocket. However, American even then had a tendency to think of secrecy as an “un-American activity.”
In the words of Otto von Bismark: "The less people know about the making of sausage and the doings of government, the better they sleep at night."
Senator Joe, it's said, had plenty of support from former members of the American Bund, German-American Nazi sympathizers before World War II, who probably knew something about the making of bratwurst and wiener schnitzel.
The senators, both Republican and Democrat, might have wanted to scurry away from the television cameras, but the video cam is the All-Seeing Eye of God in this country. You can’t avoid it for very long, if people outside your hometown or home county know your name. Unfortunately for Senator Joe, most Cheeseheads in Wisconsin already knew who he was.
Once the idiot box goes on, the viewer becomes almost like a voyeur. The viewer may long remember outrageous images, like a stripper slowly taking it all off, while forgetting the more banal, like a white tablecloth on a kitchen table. Because Mr. Ed and Senator Joe came of age when people sat glued in front of a radio, expecting images to magically materialize, they didn’t understand the power of televised images. Both Ed and Joe understood the power of the human voice as a medium of expression, however.
Senator Joe used the sing-song monotony of his voice to lull the witness into a state of torpor before springing his trap. When his interrogation took an aggressive turn on one witness, a blueblood senator from somewhere in New England, like Vermont or Connecticutt stood up and shouted, “You piece of shit! You’re wiping your ass with the Constitution!”
A week after the SUAC showed America just a little of how it conducted its business, most of the country forgot about Senator Joe’s line of questioning, or even the unfortunate witness who had to leave his hardware store in Peoria to appear before the Senate. The viewers remembered a fellow senator calling Senator Joe “a douche bag” when he faced the press after the session in the Senate. The microphone howled with feedback.
Historians are still divided on whether the senator from New England called Senator a douche bag or “a piece of shit,” because there are some things that you can’t say on television today. Maybe the senator didn’t call Senator Joe anything.
Historians are unanymous that Edward R. Burroughs called Senator Joe a “slime ball.” Television images don’t lie. It wouldn’t be on TV if it wasn’t true, right? That’s why advertising works, though nobody is sure exactly how.
The country was shocked when the Senate voted to censure Senator Joe. That meant that he could vote on all bills before the Senate, but he couldn’t enter into the debate. A politician not being able to speak is like a dog condemned to licking his privates in private. Just like dogs can’t understand why people want to slam the door when they do their business, politicians can’t understand why they shouldn’t be allowed to use every rhetorical trick in the business to persuade other politicians to see things their way—which always changes according to what the latest polls say.
Senator Joe’s most ardent supporters believed that his censure by the Senate made him turn to drink, when more likely, drink ultimately led to the Senate censuring him. By the end of the 1950s, Senator Joe was found dead (some say) in a hotel room in a fetal position. Historians debate on whether the bottle of liquor was half full or half empty.
Good triumphed over evil, they say, and everybody happily ever after, except for Senator Joe.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Michael Vick: Lock Him Up and Throw Away the Key?
As many people know, Michael Vick was a star quarterback in the National Football League, even leading the Atlanta Falcons to the Super Bowl in 2002. Then he was arrested by the FBI for participating in a dog-fighting ring. After a trial, he was convicted and sentenced to three years in a federal prison.
Upon his release from prison, Vick served a year's suspension before being reinstated in the NFL. He was signed to a contract by the Philadelphia Eagles before the state of the 2010 football season and is now playing professional football. His dog-fighting days seem to be behind him.
Here in the state of Michigan (and in probably every other state), politicians talk about getting tough on crime, but nobody wants to spend the money to build more prisons or hire more police officers. And if somebody in the department of corrections says, "Hey, let's build a prison in this community," the people of that community scream, "Not in MY town!"
There are people who would like to line up all the criminals and shoot them, but nobody wants to pay for the bullets. Because of magical thinking on the part of the average American taxpayer, the bullets are supposed to materialize from nowhere. But it doesn't work that way.
As of now, any punk in Detroit sent to Dickerson knows that he or she won't serve the whole 90 days of his or her sentence because prisoners obtain early release because of overcrowding. Only the most incorrible serve the entire sentence.
Now some of you might want to stuff small jail cells with 20 to a cell like people used to stuff Volkswagens back in the 60s, but if you were arrested for drunk driving because you were involved in an accident that wasn't your fault and the cop smelled alcohol on your breath, your tune might change, even if your blood alcohol content was over the legal limit and you were guilty of drunk driving.
Not everybody who is legally drunk is drunk. Some people can handle a Molson Canadian (roughly 6% alcohol) better than others, but one Molson in an hour will make you legally impaired while two will make you legally drunk.
The conviction rate in this country is over 99%. What's more, 99% of all cases never even go to trial because the defendant usually pleads guilty at the arraignment. I have spent entire days in court just watching people line up before the judge, and I have seen only person ask for a trial.
The defendant was a 19-year-old woman whose home had been raided by a combined SWAT team from Ecorse, Lincoln Park, and River Rouge, Michigan. The individual that the police really wanted to arrest was the woman's boyfriend, a suspected drug dealer. The police knew that he wasn't home that day, but they conducted the raid anyway because you have to go through a lengthy process to get approval for a police raid on a drug house. Naturally, the police didn't want to go through the process all over again.
I don't know outcome of the case, but the defendant was probably convicted. The advantage is almost always in favour of the prosecution because the prosecutor almost always has access to the evidence, like police reports, while the counsel for the defence may not have such access. Sometimes, a public attorney can't even get a copy of the police report.
People who commit violent crimes are seldom in their right minds when they commit them. A man from Toronto has just been arrested in Jamaica for slashing his wife's throat after he caught her texting another man; he clearly wasn't thinking when he did it.
Most criminals are ordinary people; criminals like Charles Manson or Michael Vick are rare. Many are young people who haven't acquired the wisdom to learn from their mistakes or the self-control to keep from making them.
The problem is not with the courts and the police being too leniant on crime, nor is it with liberals who "want to help the criminals." The problem is that there is simply too much crime, and the case load has become too much for our criminal justice system to handle.
The conservatives say, "Lock 'em up and throw away the key!" The Liberals say, "Let's try to rehabilitate those that can change their behaviour, like petty criminals and drug addicts."
Both approaches have failed, or we wouldn't be having this debate. We think in terms of rehabilitation when the hard-nosed approach is seen as a failure, and then we swing back in the opposite direction when rehabilitation is seen as a failure as well.
Therefore, we should celebrate Michael Vick's return to the NFL as a success story, if he has learned from his mistakes and doesn't repeat them.
In a country where the recidivism rate is about 85%, at least one ex-convict has managed to stay out of trouble, so far.
Upon his release from prison, Vick served a year's suspension before being reinstated in the NFL. He was signed to a contract by the Philadelphia Eagles before the state of the 2010 football season and is now playing professional football. His dog-fighting days seem to be behind him.
Here in the state of Michigan (and in probably every other state), politicians talk about getting tough on crime, but nobody wants to spend the money to build more prisons or hire more police officers. And if somebody in the department of corrections says, "Hey, let's build a prison in this community," the people of that community scream, "Not in MY town!"
There are people who would like to line up all the criminals and shoot them, but nobody wants to pay for the bullets. Because of magical thinking on the part of the average American taxpayer, the bullets are supposed to materialize from nowhere. But it doesn't work that way.
As of now, any punk in Detroit sent to Dickerson knows that he or she won't serve the whole 90 days of his or her sentence because prisoners obtain early release because of overcrowding. Only the most incorrible serve the entire sentence.
Now some of you might want to stuff small jail cells with 20 to a cell like people used to stuff Volkswagens back in the 60s, but if you were arrested for drunk driving because you were involved in an accident that wasn't your fault and the cop smelled alcohol on your breath, your tune might change, even if your blood alcohol content was over the legal limit and you were guilty of drunk driving.
Not everybody who is legally drunk is drunk. Some people can handle a Molson Canadian (roughly 6% alcohol) better than others, but one Molson in an hour will make you legally impaired while two will make you legally drunk.
The conviction rate in this country is over 99%. What's more, 99% of all cases never even go to trial because the defendant usually pleads guilty at the arraignment. I have spent entire days in court just watching people line up before the judge, and I have seen only person ask for a trial.
The defendant was a 19-year-old woman whose home had been raided by a combined SWAT team from Ecorse, Lincoln Park, and River Rouge, Michigan. The individual that the police really wanted to arrest was the woman's boyfriend, a suspected drug dealer. The police knew that he wasn't home that day, but they conducted the raid anyway because you have to go through a lengthy process to get approval for a police raid on a drug house. Naturally, the police didn't want to go through the process all over again.
I don't know outcome of the case, but the defendant was probably convicted. The advantage is almost always in favour of the prosecution because the prosecutor almost always has access to the evidence, like police reports, while the counsel for the defence may not have such access. Sometimes, a public attorney can't even get a copy of the police report.
People who commit violent crimes are seldom in their right minds when they commit them. A man from Toronto has just been arrested in Jamaica for slashing his wife's throat after he caught her texting another man; he clearly wasn't thinking when he did it.
Most criminals are ordinary people; criminals like Charles Manson or Michael Vick are rare. Many are young people who haven't acquired the wisdom to learn from their mistakes or the self-control to keep from making them.
The problem is not with the courts and the police being too leniant on crime, nor is it with liberals who "want to help the criminals." The problem is that there is simply too much crime, and the case load has become too much for our criminal justice system to handle.
The conservatives say, "Lock 'em up and throw away the key!" The Liberals say, "Let's try to rehabilitate those that can change their behaviour, like petty criminals and drug addicts."
Both approaches have failed, or we wouldn't be having this debate. We think in terms of rehabilitation when the hard-nosed approach is seen as a failure, and then we swing back in the opposite direction when rehabilitation is seen as a failure as well.
Therefore, we should celebrate Michael Vick's return to the NFL as a success story, if he has learned from his mistakes and doesn't repeat them.
In a country where the recidivism rate is about 85%, at least one ex-convict has managed to stay out of trouble, so far.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Nailing the Boston Tea Party
What movements like the Boston Tea Party movement generally have in common is that they hearken back to a time when things were “simpler” and “less complicated.” These movements are generally popular among people who are fed up with “business as usual.” Therefore, they want “a real change” rather than merely “a cosmetic change.”
The first Boston Tea Party took place in 1775, when angry white men disguised as Mohawk Indians climbed on board an English ship in Boston Harbor and threw its cargo, black tea from the East Indies, into the harbour. This act of vandalism was an elaborate protest against a tax on tea that the British authorities had levied to pay for the French-Indian War, which had ended in 1763 with France losing Canada to the British Empire. The British had sent troops to North America and expected the Americans to pay the bill.
I call this an act of vandalism because we all know what would happen if a group of Americans disguised as Seminole Indians dumped a cargo of Colombian coffee into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida to protest a tax on Colombian coffee. First, anybody caught dumping a ship’s cargo would be arrested for malicious destruction of property and face charges in criminal court. The owners, perhaps Folger’s Coffee, could also sue the prepetrators in civil court to recoup their losses. The environmentalists would all howl about what the coffee in the water would do to the habitat of marine animals like the manitee, and the perpetrators would probably be fined by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Then there’s the real Seminoles. If they object to the idea of a college football team calling themselves the Seminoles, you know they’re not going to like the idea of a group of Florida rednecks dumping coffee into the water while disguised as Seminoles. They’re like: “You take our land and you gotta take our identity too?”
I am not so naive as to believe that the Tea Partiers in the United States care if they offend environmentalists or racial minorities. If they’re not committing acts of vandalism like dumping cargoes of Colombian coffee into the water, it’s because their handlers, the Central Committee of the Republican Party, is well-financed by business interests like Folger’s and Juan Valdes.
Then there are people like Glenn Beck, who held a little revival in front of the Washington Monument. Would a country trying to “get right with God” allow its citizens to dump coffee off the coast of Florida? Not when business owners make generous contributions to church collection plates on Sundays.
Let’s take a look at what these Boston Tea Partiers really are. They have been brainwashed from day-one into believing that the War for Independence was fought over “taxation without representation.”
Clearly, that wasn’t so. Otherwise, the very first bill that George Washington signed into law wouldn’t have been an excise tax bill. When Daniel Shays led a revolt in New England over a government attempt to collect a tax on his whiskey operation, George Washington showed them the real definition of “taxation without representation” by sending in the troops. Most of Shays’ followers couldn’t vote because they didn’t meet property qualifications. They had to pay taxes because they weren’t represented.
If you look at the line of descent from the first Boston Tea Party to the present Boston Tea Party movement, it goes through radical fringe movements like the Know-Nothing Party, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Militia Movement, the Minutemen, etc. These groups are all united by one thing: their resistance to change.
Anybody who has ever tried to institute any real change in this country has always faced resistance. Abraham Lincoln had to fight a civil war to abolish slavery. When Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to push the New Deal through Congress, he faced resistance not only from Republicans but also from Democrats. Three years after the Supreme Court declared racial segration in schools to be unconstitutional in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had to send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to escort four black students to Central High.
All change is made in spite of some very entrenched interests, not because of them. Slavery was abolished in spite of the slaveholding class in the South, not because of it. The federal income tax was instituted in spite of the very powerful business interests that opposed it, not because of them. The immigration laws that we have today banning “illegal immigration” are merely a compromise, because we have always had people who opposed immigration of any kind.
We shouldn’t be surprised that President Barack Obama has faced resistance to his national health care plan. We should expect it.
The Tea Party movement is a small but very vocal minority that knows how to get attention. Some of their grievances may be legitimate. Like all Americans, they have faced hard times living in a slow economy. Many of them have lost their jobs and face the loss of unemployment benefits. Some of them draw social security and fear that their benefits are threatened by those who, they think, don’t really “deserve it.”
However, they’re not going to roll back the federal income tax. They won’t roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1965 like senatorial candidate Rand Paul seems to want. They won’t repeal Brown v. Board of Education either. Nor will they see the abolition of the Department of Education and the EPA. The longer that this country has “Obama Care,” the less likely it is that we will see a repeal of that.
Any extremist who decides to wear an Indian costume in the commission of a felony had better wait till he gets home before he takes it off. Otherwise, he’ll get nailed.
The first Boston Tea Party took place in 1775, when angry white men disguised as Mohawk Indians climbed on board an English ship in Boston Harbor and threw its cargo, black tea from the East Indies, into the harbour. This act of vandalism was an elaborate protest against a tax on tea that the British authorities had levied to pay for the French-Indian War, which had ended in 1763 with France losing Canada to the British Empire. The British had sent troops to North America and expected the Americans to pay the bill.
I call this an act of vandalism because we all know what would happen if a group of Americans disguised as Seminole Indians dumped a cargo of Colombian coffee into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida to protest a tax on Colombian coffee. First, anybody caught dumping a ship’s cargo would be arrested for malicious destruction of property and face charges in criminal court. The owners, perhaps Folger’s Coffee, could also sue the prepetrators in civil court to recoup their losses. The environmentalists would all howl about what the coffee in the water would do to the habitat of marine animals like the manitee, and the perpetrators would probably be fined by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Then there’s the real Seminoles. If they object to the idea of a college football team calling themselves the Seminoles, you know they’re not going to like the idea of a group of Florida rednecks dumping coffee into the water while disguised as Seminoles. They’re like: “You take our land and you gotta take our identity too?”
I am not so naive as to believe that the Tea Partiers in the United States care if they offend environmentalists or racial minorities. If they’re not committing acts of vandalism like dumping cargoes of Colombian coffee into the water, it’s because their handlers, the Central Committee of the Republican Party, is well-financed by business interests like Folger’s and Juan Valdes.
Then there are people like Glenn Beck, who held a little revival in front of the Washington Monument. Would a country trying to “get right with God” allow its citizens to dump coffee off the coast of Florida? Not when business owners make generous contributions to church collection plates on Sundays.
Let’s take a look at what these Boston Tea Partiers really are. They have been brainwashed from day-one into believing that the War for Independence was fought over “taxation without representation.”
Clearly, that wasn’t so. Otherwise, the very first bill that George Washington signed into law wouldn’t have been an excise tax bill. When Daniel Shays led a revolt in New England over a government attempt to collect a tax on his whiskey operation, George Washington showed them the real definition of “taxation without representation” by sending in the troops. Most of Shays’ followers couldn’t vote because they didn’t meet property qualifications. They had to pay taxes because they weren’t represented.
If you look at the line of descent from the first Boston Tea Party to the present Boston Tea Party movement, it goes through radical fringe movements like the Know-Nothing Party, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Militia Movement, the Minutemen, etc. These groups are all united by one thing: their resistance to change.
Anybody who has ever tried to institute any real change in this country has always faced resistance. Abraham Lincoln had to fight a civil war to abolish slavery. When Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to push the New Deal through Congress, he faced resistance not only from Republicans but also from Democrats. Three years after the Supreme Court declared racial segration in schools to be unconstitutional in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had to send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to escort four black students to Central High.
All change is made in spite of some very entrenched interests, not because of them. Slavery was abolished in spite of the slaveholding class in the South, not because of it. The federal income tax was instituted in spite of the very powerful business interests that opposed it, not because of them. The immigration laws that we have today banning “illegal immigration” are merely a compromise, because we have always had people who opposed immigration of any kind.
We shouldn’t be surprised that President Barack Obama has faced resistance to his national health care plan. We should expect it.
The Tea Party movement is a small but very vocal minority that knows how to get attention. Some of their grievances may be legitimate. Like all Americans, they have faced hard times living in a slow economy. Many of them have lost their jobs and face the loss of unemployment benefits. Some of them draw social security and fear that their benefits are threatened by those who, they think, don’t really “deserve it.”
However, they’re not going to roll back the federal income tax. They won’t roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1965 like senatorial candidate Rand Paul seems to want. They won’t repeal Brown v. Board of Education either. Nor will they see the abolition of the Department of Education and the EPA. The longer that this country has “Obama Care,” the less likely it is that we will see a repeal of that.
Any extremist who decides to wear an Indian costume in the commission of a felony had better wait till he gets home before he takes it off. Otherwise, he’ll get nailed.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Diversity Wins the World Cup
What kind of Spanish name is Carles Puyol? It seems that, on the day he first entered this world kicking and screaming, whoever wrote out his birth certificate misspelled his first name. It should have been “Carlos” rather than “Carles,” right? But maybe his mother wanted something different, like those women who would rather name their daughters after some flower that only a botanist would know, like “Bougainvillea,” rather than “Rose.”
Carles Puyol, who scored the winning goal against Germany on a header off a corner kick by Xavi Alonso, allowing Spain to advance to the World Cup final, is from Barcelona. While any Spaniard might hotly deny it, the people around Barcelona would hasten to tell you that they aren’t really Spanish. They speak their own language, Catalan, and they probably consider themselves to be occupied by a foreign power, Spain. Therefore, you don’t ask for agua in a Barcelona restaurant unless the Spanish and Catalan words for “water” are the same.
Probably most of the people who saw Spain upset Germany are thrilled that Spain advanced to the final while Germany didn’t. Pulling for the heavily favoured Mannschaft is sort of like hoping that Nazi Germany would successfully invade Poland at the start of World War II in 1939. While you might be an admirer of “German efficiency,” you seldom want the Germans to win at anything, any more than you want the French to win. It probably has something to do with the War.
For those in the know about soccer, this is the first time in a long time that the World Cup will be contested by two teams that have never won it, since the Netherlands (who beat Uruguay 3-2 on Tuesday) have never won it either.
Only eight countries have won the World Cup since its first tournament in 1930. World Cup soccer has been dominated by a few countries: Germany, Italy, Argentina, and, of course, Brazil. With the exception of Argentina, who has only won the World Cup twice, Germany, Italy and Brazil have won it at least three times. In any given tournament (which comes only once every four years) all of these countries are almost guarantied to qualify after two years of elimination rounds.
I can’t help but ask where World Cup soccer would be without the imperialism of the nineteenth century. The hero for France in the 1998 World Cup finals (and the goat of the 2006 finals) was Zinadine Zidane, whose parents were born in Algeria. If you look at some of the faces on the French roster in any given year, a lot of them don’t look very French. Thierry Henry, the captain of Les Bleus until just before the finals in South Africa, has a face as black as the night, but he has as much right to claim France as his country as Zidane because he was born there.
But let's look at the German roster in 2010: with names like Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski, you would think that the Nazis held onto Poland after World War II. And how did Germany get players like Musil Özil, Sami Khedira, and Jerome Boateng, who are of Turkish, Moroccan, and Ghanaian origin respectively? Must be, Hitler conquered the world, right?
The truth is that the roster of any European team in any World Cup tournament will reflect the ethnic diversity of that country. Apartheid never won South Africa the World Cup, you know.
The Spanish roster is almost as ethnically diverse as the German and French rosters. Carles Puyol, Xavi Alonso, Andrés Iniestra, Gerard Piqué and Pedro are all Catalan, not Spanish.
Diversity wins games. Don’t think that the United States team wouldn’t be ecstatic to have any players as talented as Spain’s David Villa (who actually failed to score a goal against Germany) or Argentina’s Lionel Messi (who didn’t score a goal against anybody), regardless of race, creed, or national origin.
It’s all about winning. The Catalan midfielder, Carles Puyol, is the toast of Spain as well as Barcelona.
Viva España, and all its ethnic groups. And long live diversity.
Carles Puyol, who scored the winning goal against Germany on a header off a corner kick by Xavi Alonso, allowing Spain to advance to the World Cup final, is from Barcelona. While any Spaniard might hotly deny it, the people around Barcelona would hasten to tell you that they aren’t really Spanish. They speak their own language, Catalan, and they probably consider themselves to be occupied by a foreign power, Spain. Therefore, you don’t ask for agua in a Barcelona restaurant unless the Spanish and Catalan words for “water” are the same.
Probably most of the people who saw Spain upset Germany are thrilled that Spain advanced to the final while Germany didn’t. Pulling for the heavily favoured Mannschaft is sort of like hoping that Nazi Germany would successfully invade Poland at the start of World War II in 1939. While you might be an admirer of “German efficiency,” you seldom want the Germans to win at anything, any more than you want the French to win. It probably has something to do with the War.
For those in the know about soccer, this is the first time in a long time that the World Cup will be contested by two teams that have never won it, since the Netherlands (who beat Uruguay 3-2 on Tuesday) have never won it either.
Only eight countries have won the World Cup since its first tournament in 1930. World Cup soccer has been dominated by a few countries: Germany, Italy, Argentina, and, of course, Brazil. With the exception of Argentina, who has only won the World Cup twice, Germany, Italy and Brazil have won it at least three times. In any given tournament (which comes only once every four years) all of these countries are almost guarantied to qualify after two years of elimination rounds.
I can’t help but ask where World Cup soccer would be without the imperialism of the nineteenth century. The hero for France in the 1998 World Cup finals (and the goat of the 2006 finals) was Zinadine Zidane, whose parents were born in Algeria. If you look at some of the faces on the French roster in any given year, a lot of them don’t look very French. Thierry Henry, the captain of Les Bleus until just before the finals in South Africa, has a face as black as the night, but he has as much right to claim France as his country as Zidane because he was born there.
But let's look at the German roster in 2010: with names like Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski, you would think that the Nazis held onto Poland after World War II. And how did Germany get players like Musil Özil, Sami Khedira, and Jerome Boateng, who are of Turkish, Moroccan, and Ghanaian origin respectively? Must be, Hitler conquered the world, right?
The truth is that the roster of any European team in any World Cup tournament will reflect the ethnic diversity of that country. Apartheid never won South Africa the World Cup, you know.
The Spanish roster is almost as ethnically diverse as the German and French rosters. Carles Puyol, Xavi Alonso, Andrés Iniestra, Gerard Piqué and Pedro are all Catalan, not Spanish.
Diversity wins games. Don’t think that the United States team wouldn’t be ecstatic to have any players as talented as Spain’s David Villa (who actually failed to score a goal against Germany) or Argentina’s Lionel Messi (who didn’t score a goal against anybody), regardless of race, creed, or national origin.
It’s all about winning. The Catalan midfielder, Carles Puyol, is the toast of Spain as well as Barcelona.
Viva España, and all its ethnic groups. And long live diversity.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
The Mavi Marmara Affair
When Israeli commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara, Israel marched right into a public relations minefield. What everybody forgets is that the commandos initially assaulted the Turkish vessel with paint guns, but then had to turn to Uzis with live ammo when they found out that the people on board the Mavi Marmara were armed with machetes and possibly even guns rather than paint brushes. Except for people in Israel, the world also forgets that an Israeli member of the Knesset, the Right Honourable Hanin Zoabi (who is an Arab) was also aboard, though she says that she was down in the hold at the time the commanders assaulted the ship and therefore wasn’t wielding a machete. Not everybody on board the Mavi Marmara had time to grab a machete.
What the world remembers is that the Mavi Marmara was trying to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Ms. Zoabi says that she was on aboard to dramatize the plight of the people in Gaza. Under the terms of the military embargo, it seems that Israel has a very board definition of what is “contraband.” For instance, PCV pipes are usually used for indoor plumbing in houses, apartment buildings and office buildings, but they can also be used to make pipe bombs. The members of Hamas have proved that they can effectively launch pipe bombs into Israel with rocket launchers. Therefore, the Israeli Defence Force considers PVC pipes to be contraband.
Nobody denies that the embargo has been catastrophic for the people of Gaza. Though food is getting into the Gaza Strip, an estimated 83 per cent of the people (according to a recent Time Magazine article) are on some form of public assistance. Stores are stocked with food stuffs, but most Gazans are unemployed and can’t afford to shop at these stores. People who give money for the people of Gaza risk being accused of giving money to a terrorist organization, since Hamas has been declared a terrorist organization by the United States State Department and undoubtedly has been involved in charity. (As Muslims, the members of Hamas have to pay what is called zakat, or a “poor tax.”)
There’s the danger of a cholera outbreak, since Gaza has become an open sewer. People have had to deal with bathtubs, toilets and sinks backing up. That’s where the pipes come in. In some cases, you can deal with sewage and plumbing problems by replacing the pipes. But if plumbing materials have been declared contraband by an enemy that is blockading your cities, chances are that you will be unable to deal with raw sewage in the streets and bathtubs overflowing at home.
All of this calls into question the morality of blockading civilian populations in time of war. Here, Ms. Zoabi deserves credit for drawing attention to this crisis by exposing it to the light of public opinion throughout the world. As well, she has shown the world that Israel is a functioning democracy that has at least some respect for minority rights, since she is an Arab serving in the parliament of a country that is predominantly Jewish. In most Arab countries, she probably would have been executed for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but she has been allowed to hold onto her seat in the Knesset, at least so far.
However, blockades have been proven to be an effective military tactic. Ideally, you would like to defeat the enemy on the battlefield badly enough so that he will raise a little white flag and surrender. However, wars usually don’t end until one side has been crippled so badly that it no longer has the capacity to fight. That’s why military planes bomb factories, bridges and railroads. That’s why naval vessels blockade the enemy’s ports and turn back nonbelligerent ships trying to enter and sink enemy ships trying to leave. If you can destroy a few strategically placed dams in an area that is prone to draught in the summer and make agriculture impossible, so much the better, even though famine may result.
In war, all casualties, both military and civilian, are collateral damage. The purpose of warfare is not to kill soldiers or civilians but to destroy the enemy and cripple his capacity to fight so that he will sue for peace. Because of the very brutal nature of war, only the immature or the religious fanatic think that it’s something glorious. However, there are lots of immature people and religious fanatics about. The members of Hamas see themselves as brave mujahidin waging war against the infidel. They don’t seem to care that people are suffering in the Gaza Strip in large part because of their religious fanaticism.
The United States and other friends of Israel can try to broker a peace in that region, but President Barak Obama will probably conclude that neither side is serious about peace and decide to go on to other more pressing issues in the region, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Therefore, it’s up to the Israelis and the Palestinians to show the world that they are serious about peace before it becomes worth while for the rest of the world to involve itself in the peace process (sic).
I have a suggestion for the leaders of Hamas like Ishmael Haniyeh. If you want to end the suffering of your people, why don’t you admit that you are defeated, raise the white flag, and surrender? If you want the conflict to continue, keep launching rockets into Israel and sending suicide bombers to discotheques and Jewish delicatessens. Then, when the Israelis eventually retaliate, more people in the Gaza Strip will die outright due to the bombings, and thousands more will die due to disease and starvation because of the blockade. If this seems inhumane, Mr. Haniyeh, please remember that this is war and this is what you and your followers wanted. If you expected Israel to give up, your tactics are not working.
Meanwhile, Turkish prime minister Recap Tayyip Erdoğan has been having a field day. Because of his expressions of outrage over the storming of the Mavi Marmara, he has probably never been more popular at home. Turkey has long been Israel’s most reliable ally in the region; the two countries’ air forces have even conducted training exercises together over Turkey until now. But why shouldn’t Mr. Erdoğan be outraged? Most of the 28 people killed were Turkish citizens. Over 99 per cent of all Turks are Muslims, like the people in Gaza.
Mr. Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party is Islamist rather than Kemalist or secularist in ideology. While they might not want to bring back Sharia, they don’t mind their daughters wearing the head scarf either. The head scarf is a compromise between a black table cloth and full frontal nudity in that part of the world. To the horror of the U.S. State Department, Mr. Erdoğan has even sought a rapprochement with Iran. Together with President Luis Lula Mendes of Brazil, Mr. Erdoğan sought but failed to prevent nuclear sanctions against Iran before the United Nations Security Council.
However, Ishmael Haniyeh and Hamas should not count on Israel being dragged down by the public relations disaster that is the Mavi Marmara for too long. The hawks and the doves will stage protest rallies and shout at each other in the Knesset, and some will even call Hanin Zoabi a traitor. There may even be a commission of inquiry. But within six months, only the families of the slain Turkish sailors aboard the Mavi Marmara will remember this incident. People will have forgotten about Ms. Zoabi and Mr. Erdoğan.
It will be same old shit, just a different day.
What the world remembers is that the Mavi Marmara was trying to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Ms. Zoabi says that she was on aboard to dramatize the plight of the people in Gaza. Under the terms of the military embargo, it seems that Israel has a very board definition of what is “contraband.” For instance, PCV pipes are usually used for indoor plumbing in houses, apartment buildings and office buildings, but they can also be used to make pipe bombs. The members of Hamas have proved that they can effectively launch pipe bombs into Israel with rocket launchers. Therefore, the Israeli Defence Force considers PVC pipes to be contraband.
Nobody denies that the embargo has been catastrophic for the people of Gaza. Though food is getting into the Gaza Strip, an estimated 83 per cent of the people (according to a recent Time Magazine article) are on some form of public assistance. Stores are stocked with food stuffs, but most Gazans are unemployed and can’t afford to shop at these stores. People who give money for the people of Gaza risk being accused of giving money to a terrorist organization, since Hamas has been declared a terrorist organization by the United States State Department and undoubtedly has been involved in charity. (As Muslims, the members of Hamas have to pay what is called zakat, or a “poor tax.”)
There’s the danger of a cholera outbreak, since Gaza has become an open sewer. People have had to deal with bathtubs, toilets and sinks backing up. That’s where the pipes come in. In some cases, you can deal with sewage and plumbing problems by replacing the pipes. But if plumbing materials have been declared contraband by an enemy that is blockading your cities, chances are that you will be unable to deal with raw sewage in the streets and bathtubs overflowing at home.
All of this calls into question the morality of blockading civilian populations in time of war. Here, Ms. Zoabi deserves credit for drawing attention to this crisis by exposing it to the light of public opinion throughout the world. As well, she has shown the world that Israel is a functioning democracy that has at least some respect for minority rights, since she is an Arab serving in the parliament of a country that is predominantly Jewish. In most Arab countries, she probably would have been executed for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but she has been allowed to hold onto her seat in the Knesset, at least so far.
However, blockades have been proven to be an effective military tactic. Ideally, you would like to defeat the enemy on the battlefield badly enough so that he will raise a little white flag and surrender. However, wars usually don’t end until one side has been crippled so badly that it no longer has the capacity to fight. That’s why military planes bomb factories, bridges and railroads. That’s why naval vessels blockade the enemy’s ports and turn back nonbelligerent ships trying to enter and sink enemy ships trying to leave. If you can destroy a few strategically placed dams in an area that is prone to draught in the summer and make agriculture impossible, so much the better, even though famine may result.
In war, all casualties, both military and civilian, are collateral damage. The purpose of warfare is not to kill soldiers or civilians but to destroy the enemy and cripple his capacity to fight so that he will sue for peace. Because of the very brutal nature of war, only the immature or the religious fanatic think that it’s something glorious. However, there are lots of immature people and religious fanatics about. The members of Hamas see themselves as brave mujahidin waging war against the infidel. They don’t seem to care that people are suffering in the Gaza Strip in large part because of their religious fanaticism.
The United States and other friends of Israel can try to broker a peace in that region, but President Barak Obama will probably conclude that neither side is serious about peace and decide to go on to other more pressing issues in the region, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Therefore, it’s up to the Israelis and the Palestinians to show the world that they are serious about peace before it becomes worth while for the rest of the world to involve itself in the peace process (sic).
I have a suggestion for the leaders of Hamas like Ishmael Haniyeh. If you want to end the suffering of your people, why don’t you admit that you are defeated, raise the white flag, and surrender? If you want the conflict to continue, keep launching rockets into Israel and sending suicide bombers to discotheques and Jewish delicatessens. Then, when the Israelis eventually retaliate, more people in the Gaza Strip will die outright due to the bombings, and thousands more will die due to disease and starvation because of the blockade. If this seems inhumane, Mr. Haniyeh, please remember that this is war and this is what you and your followers wanted. If you expected Israel to give up, your tactics are not working.
Meanwhile, Turkish prime minister Recap Tayyip Erdoğan has been having a field day. Because of his expressions of outrage over the storming of the Mavi Marmara, he has probably never been more popular at home. Turkey has long been Israel’s most reliable ally in the region; the two countries’ air forces have even conducted training exercises together over Turkey until now. But why shouldn’t Mr. Erdoğan be outraged? Most of the 28 people killed were Turkish citizens. Over 99 per cent of all Turks are Muslims, like the people in Gaza.
Mr. Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party is Islamist rather than Kemalist or secularist in ideology. While they might not want to bring back Sharia, they don’t mind their daughters wearing the head scarf either. The head scarf is a compromise between a black table cloth and full frontal nudity in that part of the world. To the horror of the U.S. State Department, Mr. Erdoğan has even sought a rapprochement with Iran. Together with President Luis Lula Mendes of Brazil, Mr. Erdoğan sought but failed to prevent nuclear sanctions against Iran before the United Nations Security Council.
However, Ishmael Haniyeh and Hamas should not count on Israel being dragged down by the public relations disaster that is the Mavi Marmara for too long. The hawks and the doves will stage protest rallies and shout at each other in the Knesset, and some will even call Hanin Zoabi a traitor. There may even be a commission of inquiry. But within six months, only the families of the slain Turkish sailors aboard the Mavi Marmara will remember this incident. People will have forgotten about Ms. Zoabi and Mr. Erdoğan.
It will be same old shit, just a different day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)