When the attacks on Gaza first started, you could turn to the front page of every newspaper in the world and see Palestinians wailing and gnashing their teeth because their "loved ones" have been killed by Israeli rockets. Like they really care about their loved ones!
I say to both of the "Children of Abraham," "A pox on both of your houses! You are living the lives that you have chosen."
People in most countries of the world want to live in peace and security. The Israelis and the Palestinians, on the other hand, have chosen perpetual war because their gods "want it."
Only it isn't their gods that want it; they are the ones that want it.
There's a perverse symbiosis here. The Israeli military gets the lion's share of that country's budget because the members of Hamas fire rockets into Israel for something to do on a Saturday night. Then, when the Israelis retaliate and Palestinian women and children get killed, the Palestinian extremists say, "See? I told you those Zionists were evil!"
That's a symbiotic relationship. If you want a steady job in that part of the world, you can either become a full-time member of the Israeli Defence Force or a member of Hamas. Would that laid-off auto workers in Michigan and Ontario had it that good.
What that part of the world really needs is a decade of atheism. Then, maybe Israel could scale down its military machine while the leaders of the Palestinian Authority concern themselves with things like garbage pickup and running water.
Until then, I wish that the press would take the same interest in Israel and the Gaza Strip that it does when a civil war breaks out somewhere in Africa, because I don't want to hear about it anymore.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Judgment at The Hague: Try the Terrorists for War Crimes
On Sunday November 30, 2008, ten members of a militant Islamist group from Pakistan attacked several sites in Mumbai, India, killing at least 120 and wounding scores of others. The dead included 65 Canadians at the Taj Mahal Hotel, though the militants also attacked the Jewish Community Centre and also killed Americans, Australians and Indians. The Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Tabai, has been linked with Al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Of the ten suspected terrorists, only Ajmal Amir Kassab has been apprehended, after a standoff of more than 60 hours with police. He now faces charges of terrorist acts, though formal charges have yet to be laid against him.
The fact that the outgoing Bush administration in the US has seen it more fit to hold suspected Iraqi and Afghan insurgents at Guantanamo incommunicado shows that the US doesn't know what to do with suspected terrorists. They are hardly common criminals, since strapping a bomb to yourself and driving into a crowd of people is hardly a common criminal act. Yet the Pentagon is naturally reluctant to dignify them by classifying them as prisoners of war. There also is the question of which department of the US government really holds jurisdiction: the Justice Department (since terrorist acts are clearly criminal acts), or the Defence Department, since terrorist acts are strategically plotted out and then tactically executed in a manner that can only be considered military. Therefore, the third option that the US has so far carried out: holding alleged insurgents incommunicado at Guantanamo while denying them both the right to counsel and a fair trial, and many of the protections accorded legitimate prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.
Alleged insurgents are neither soldiers who suffered the misfortune of being captured in war, nor are they dissenters in the legitimate sense. To treat suspected insurgents like the ones at Guantanamo as prisoners of wars is to accord them a dignity under the Geneva Convention that only real prisoners of war deserve. That's to say, they shouldn't be treated like soldiers when they are merely armed thugs and criminals. On the other hand, to hold them incommunicado and try to "break them," either through torture or psychological means is wrong in the eyes of most people. It seems like something out of Kafka to most people to hold suspects for an indefinite period on charges of something that can be vague like terrorism, and the suspects don't know the rules of the game, and the captors make them up as they go along. Besides, one might argue that convicted mass murderers like Charles Manson are worse than your average terrorist, yet the rights of mass murderers like Manson are usually respected in the United States.
The war between the democracies of the world and insurgent groups like Al-Qaida is, in large part, a war of symbols and ideas. I fear that the West is losing the war of ideas, and I found it frustrating that the Bush administration in general, and his ousted Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, have had little or no understanding of the value of propaganda in this struggle.
There exists a perverse symbiosis between Al-Qaida and the Arab cable television news network, Al-Jezeera— one where Al-Qaida received a mouthpiece for its rhetoric of hate against the West, while Al-Jezeera received breaking news stories. However, the Bush administration has cultivated a hostile relationship with the press, choosing secrecy over openness. Whenever a stray bomb falls on an orphanage or hospital in Afghanistan, it ends up on Al-Jezeera the moment it happens, but when an insurgent drives a truck into a convoy of troops, it only receives scant coverage in the press, and no photos are allowed.
What is the Bush administration afraid of? You know very well what the Bush administration is afraid of. If the American people were bombarded with nightly images of death and destruction on television, like they were during the Vietnam War, support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would evaporate completely. Already, less than 50 per cent of the American people support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. George W. Bush will leave office with an approval rating around 20 per cent, once Barrack Obama is inaugurated January 20, 2009. One doesn't have to be a Wall Street analyst to predict, with some accuracy, that the nose-diving stock market will probably rally on the day that Bush leaves office. That's why the Pentagon tries to acknowledge the fighting as little as possible, and President Bush (sic) tells people of their patriotic duty to go shopping.
However, I would not be overstating the matter to say that terrorism is an unprecedented threat to civilization itself. We are like ancient Rome, trying to fight off the Vandals and the Visigoths, only the barbarians have already entered the city before the gates were closed, and they strike only when people least suspects it. You can make everybody take off their shoes before boarding an airplane, remove all waste baskets from the washrooms, or go over each baby carriage with metal detectors or K9 dogs, but there's always the danger that authorities will miss one carefully concealed bomb in a package somewhere. And you can bet that the terrorists themselves will call the FBI beforehand to confuse them with tips on their activities to throw them off: I'm sure that members of Al-Qaida warned the FBI that they were going to bomb the World Trade Center and the Pentagon several times— along with dozens of other places that they never had any intention of hitting.
Democracy, along with any other form of government, requires a bond of trust between the ruler and the ruled. Terrorism threatens that bond by promoting chaos and anarchy in order to make any kind of government impossible.
There is a fourth option to prisoner-of-war camps, detentions without trial, and treating people who aren't common criminals like common criminals: war crimes trials for suspected terrorists. Ajmal Amir Kassab should be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Or, he could be tried at Nuremberg, like the Nazi leaders after World War II. Then, if he was convicted, they could lock him up at Spandau Prison, where they kept Rudolf Hess.
The reason for suggesting war crimes trials is very simple: kidnapping individuals and holding them for ransom, or murdering soldiers and civilians while held in captivity are war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Geneva Convention. The attack of foreign tourists at the Taj Mahal simply because they were there at the time was mass murder, another war crime under the Geneva Convention. Likewise, murdering civilians in attacks, like the one on the Jewish Community Centre in Mumbai, because of their race or religion is genocide under the Geneva Convention. It is also a war crime to force captured soldiers to plea for their release on video, or make propaganda broadcasts against their countries under the threat of death or torture— something that terrorist groups do routinely.
Most people in the United States and its allies believe that Osama Bin Ladine and his cronies are no better than Hitler or Stalin. To label somebody with little sense of self a terrorist may give that person a mystique or an aura of power that he or she may believe they didn't have before. While Bin Ladine is definitely an "outlaw," even in the Arab world, being branded an outlaw only helped to make the James Brothers legendary in the American Wild West; this label hasn't hurt Bin Ladine's image, either. But who wants to be charged as a war criminal? Osama Bin Ladine doesn't want to face judgment at Nuremberg any more than the Nazis did after World War II. It's the one thing that both the leaders of the countries in NATO and the Terror Sheiks have in common; the label of "war criminal" is a stigma in both camps.
After the attacks in Mumbai, there's still the question of jurisdiction. In the case of Ajmal Amir Kassab, the defendant should be tried before an international body, because his alleged victims included citizens of several countries, not just Indian citizens. For instance, the Jews who were killed at the Jewish Community Centre were Israeli citizens under Israel's Law of Return. What's more, things will get complicated further if any of the victims had duel citizenship, say both Canadian and Indian citizenship. Rather than have several countries queue up to put Kassab on trial, let the International Court of Justice jump the queue and try him first.
The world should not miss the opportunity to try an alleged terrorist before the World Court. Whether Kassab gets the death penalty, if convicted, is beside the point. What matters is that the world send a tough message to terrorists: that terrorist attacks are wrong and will not be tolerated, and they constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The fact that the outgoing Bush administration in the US has seen it more fit to hold suspected Iraqi and Afghan insurgents at Guantanamo incommunicado shows that the US doesn't know what to do with suspected terrorists. They are hardly common criminals, since strapping a bomb to yourself and driving into a crowd of people is hardly a common criminal act. Yet the Pentagon is naturally reluctant to dignify them by classifying them as prisoners of war. There also is the question of which department of the US government really holds jurisdiction: the Justice Department (since terrorist acts are clearly criminal acts), or the Defence Department, since terrorist acts are strategically plotted out and then tactically executed in a manner that can only be considered military. Therefore, the third option that the US has so far carried out: holding alleged insurgents incommunicado at Guantanamo while denying them both the right to counsel and a fair trial, and many of the protections accorded legitimate prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.
Alleged insurgents are neither soldiers who suffered the misfortune of being captured in war, nor are they dissenters in the legitimate sense. To treat suspected insurgents like the ones at Guantanamo as prisoners of wars is to accord them a dignity under the Geneva Convention that only real prisoners of war deserve. That's to say, they shouldn't be treated like soldiers when they are merely armed thugs and criminals. On the other hand, to hold them incommunicado and try to "break them," either through torture or psychological means is wrong in the eyes of most people. It seems like something out of Kafka to most people to hold suspects for an indefinite period on charges of something that can be vague like terrorism, and the suspects don't know the rules of the game, and the captors make them up as they go along. Besides, one might argue that convicted mass murderers like Charles Manson are worse than your average terrorist, yet the rights of mass murderers like Manson are usually respected in the United States.
The war between the democracies of the world and insurgent groups like Al-Qaida is, in large part, a war of symbols and ideas. I fear that the West is losing the war of ideas, and I found it frustrating that the Bush administration in general, and his ousted Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, have had little or no understanding of the value of propaganda in this struggle.
There exists a perverse symbiosis between Al-Qaida and the Arab cable television news network, Al-Jezeera— one where Al-Qaida received a mouthpiece for its rhetoric of hate against the West, while Al-Jezeera received breaking news stories. However, the Bush administration has cultivated a hostile relationship with the press, choosing secrecy over openness. Whenever a stray bomb falls on an orphanage or hospital in Afghanistan, it ends up on Al-Jezeera the moment it happens, but when an insurgent drives a truck into a convoy of troops, it only receives scant coverage in the press, and no photos are allowed.
What is the Bush administration afraid of? You know very well what the Bush administration is afraid of. If the American people were bombarded with nightly images of death and destruction on television, like they were during the Vietnam War, support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would evaporate completely. Already, less than 50 per cent of the American people support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. George W. Bush will leave office with an approval rating around 20 per cent, once Barrack Obama is inaugurated January 20, 2009. One doesn't have to be a Wall Street analyst to predict, with some accuracy, that the nose-diving stock market will probably rally on the day that Bush leaves office. That's why the Pentagon tries to acknowledge the fighting as little as possible, and President Bush (sic) tells people of their patriotic duty to go shopping.
However, I would not be overstating the matter to say that terrorism is an unprecedented threat to civilization itself. We are like ancient Rome, trying to fight off the Vandals and the Visigoths, only the barbarians have already entered the city before the gates were closed, and they strike only when people least suspects it. You can make everybody take off their shoes before boarding an airplane, remove all waste baskets from the washrooms, or go over each baby carriage with metal detectors or K9 dogs, but there's always the danger that authorities will miss one carefully concealed bomb in a package somewhere. And you can bet that the terrorists themselves will call the FBI beforehand to confuse them with tips on their activities to throw them off: I'm sure that members of Al-Qaida warned the FBI that they were going to bomb the World Trade Center and the Pentagon several times— along with dozens of other places that they never had any intention of hitting.
Democracy, along with any other form of government, requires a bond of trust between the ruler and the ruled. Terrorism threatens that bond by promoting chaos and anarchy in order to make any kind of government impossible.
There is a fourth option to prisoner-of-war camps, detentions without trial, and treating people who aren't common criminals like common criminals: war crimes trials for suspected terrorists. Ajmal Amir Kassab should be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Or, he could be tried at Nuremberg, like the Nazi leaders after World War II. Then, if he was convicted, they could lock him up at Spandau Prison, where they kept Rudolf Hess.
The reason for suggesting war crimes trials is very simple: kidnapping individuals and holding them for ransom, or murdering soldiers and civilians while held in captivity are war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Geneva Convention. The attack of foreign tourists at the Taj Mahal simply because they were there at the time was mass murder, another war crime under the Geneva Convention. Likewise, murdering civilians in attacks, like the one on the Jewish Community Centre in Mumbai, because of their race or religion is genocide under the Geneva Convention. It is also a war crime to force captured soldiers to plea for their release on video, or make propaganda broadcasts against their countries under the threat of death or torture— something that terrorist groups do routinely.
Most people in the United States and its allies believe that Osama Bin Ladine and his cronies are no better than Hitler or Stalin. To label somebody with little sense of self a terrorist may give that person a mystique or an aura of power that he or she may believe they didn't have before. While Bin Ladine is definitely an "outlaw," even in the Arab world, being branded an outlaw only helped to make the James Brothers legendary in the American Wild West; this label hasn't hurt Bin Ladine's image, either. But who wants to be charged as a war criminal? Osama Bin Ladine doesn't want to face judgment at Nuremberg any more than the Nazis did after World War II. It's the one thing that both the leaders of the countries in NATO and the Terror Sheiks have in common; the label of "war criminal" is a stigma in both camps.
After the attacks in Mumbai, there's still the question of jurisdiction. In the case of Ajmal Amir Kassab, the defendant should be tried before an international body, because his alleged victims included citizens of several countries, not just Indian citizens. For instance, the Jews who were killed at the Jewish Community Centre were Israeli citizens under Israel's Law of Return. What's more, things will get complicated further if any of the victims had duel citizenship, say both Canadian and Indian citizenship. Rather than have several countries queue up to put Kassab on trial, let the International Court of Justice jump the queue and try him first.
The world should not miss the opportunity to try an alleged terrorist before the World Court. Whether Kassab gets the death penalty, if convicted, is beside the point. What matters is that the world send a tough message to terrorists: that terrorist attacks are wrong and will not be tolerated, and they constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
We Really Could Lose Detroit This Time
In 1965, we almost lost Detroit (and a good portion of the United States and Canada) when the Enrico Fermi nuclear power plant in Monroe, Michigan, nearly melted down. Histrionics aside, we could really lose Detroit, if something isn't down about sudden meltdown of Ford, GM and Chrysler on the stock market. If the US Congress just sits back and watches the US automotive industry implode without seriously trying to do something about it, not only could 10 per cent of the US economy be wiped out in terms of job loss, but good portions of the economies of Canada and Mexico will also be affected— without mentioning the regional economies Latin America, western Europe, and Asia.
This is serious, boys.
The fact is, that along with the oil industry, the automotive industry has been a leading force in the globalization of the world's economy. Multinational corporations with roots in the US— like Ford and GM— have done for the Asian economies what the Marshall Plan did for western Europe after World War II. Even in the early 1980s, about a third of GM's operations, and two-thirds of Ford's operations were overseas. Probably the reason why Chrysler will eventually be swallowed up by one of its competitors is because Chrysler has never really been a multinational corporation. Suburu has never been a multinational like Nissan and Toyota, despite its partnership with Chrysler, and Daimler Chrysler went back to being Daimler Benz when the Germans saw how much money they were losing. Ford, Volvo and Mercedes Benz all manufacture and sell lots of pickup trucks and semi-trucks in western Europe, but not Chrysler.
Now, the average auto assembly worker in Michigan decries globalization and foreign competition, and with good reason. For many years, the US automotive has gradually moved its operations to Mexico and Brazil, where wages are lower and environmental standards are more lax. Words like maquiladora are part of the average auto worker's Spanish vocabulary in the US. What's more, the vacuum of lost jobs in "rust belt" states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania have partially been filled by Toyoto, Nissan and Mercedes Benz building plants in "right to work" states like Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama. For the auto worker in Detroit (and Windsor, Ontario), the Third World begins at the Mason-Dixon Line. In the states of the former Confederacy, you have lower wages and very little union activity, and the Japanese-based and German-based automobile corporations have taken advantage of that fact. Just think! If Mercedes Benz, et al., had only moved some of their operations to the South before the civil rights movement, they also could have taken advantage of Jim Crow laws as well.
Yet globalization has been a force for good in the world economy. Largely because of globalization, we have seen the rise of countries like India and China, whose standards of living have increased dramatically since 1975. Starting in the 1960s, the world has emerged from an historically aberrant period where 85 to 90 per cent of the world's wealth was concentrated in the United States after World War II, with most of the rest in the former Soviet Union. The socialist believes in "share the wealth," and the capitalist thinks in terms of Newtonian physics, where everything reaches its "principle of moments" and ends up in a state of balance. Throughout most of the world's history, the economies of the world have always been pretty much equal. The economies of England, Saudi Arabia, and China were pretty much the same during the Crusades nearly a thousand years ago, and they will probably be similar a century from now. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how we manage events, like the current crisis that faces the automotive industry.
The members of the US Senate and the US House of Representatives do not have to be told that that the consequences will be grave internationally, if the US automobile industry is allowed to collapse. All the same, it is only reasonable that they expect the chairmen of Ford, GM and Chrysler to come up with some kind of realistic plan to make the auto industry profitable again. You don't throw good money after bad. Just because the US automotive industry only wants a modest bailout package of $25 billion while Wall Street asked, and received a package of $700 billion, it doesn't mean that Congress (or rather, you and I, the taxpayer) should come up with the money. While it would be cheaper to bail out Chrysler than the Citibank Group, that in itself doesn't mean that Congress should do it, if the likelihood is that Chrysler would still fail anyway. If you follow that line of reasoning, why not bail out the television repairman down the street? So what if most people simply buy a new televison the moment the old one is on the fritz.
Yet the consequences, at least in the immediate future for Michigan and the rest of the rust belt, will be catastrophic if the Big Three are allowed to fail. Congress cannot allow the Big Three to go under, but more importantly, the chairmen of the Big Three have to come up with a viable plan for a future that is likely to include alternative sources of energy and the cost of lower labour in places like India and China (and Mexico and Brazil). What's more, states like Michigan will have to invest heavily in other industries besides those dependent on the automotive industry.
We all should have seen this coming, particularly those who were around when Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacoca successfully appealed to Congress for a bailout in 1978. Even if the Big Three weathers the storm, and the world economy comes back strong, the stock market will take a dive at some point in the future, leaving a new generation of investors dumping their stocks in a panic, and a new generation of would-be retirees scrambling to save their pensions. You can count on it. But if history teaches us anything, it's that people don't learn from history. Especially the Big Three.
There are those who would argue that we have already lost Detroit.
This is serious, boys.
The fact is, that along with the oil industry, the automotive industry has been a leading force in the globalization of the world's economy. Multinational corporations with roots in the US— like Ford and GM— have done for the Asian economies what the Marshall Plan did for western Europe after World War II. Even in the early 1980s, about a third of GM's operations, and two-thirds of Ford's operations were overseas. Probably the reason why Chrysler will eventually be swallowed up by one of its competitors is because Chrysler has never really been a multinational corporation. Suburu has never been a multinational like Nissan and Toyota, despite its partnership with Chrysler, and Daimler Chrysler went back to being Daimler Benz when the Germans saw how much money they were losing. Ford, Volvo and Mercedes Benz all manufacture and sell lots of pickup trucks and semi-trucks in western Europe, but not Chrysler.
Now, the average auto assembly worker in Michigan decries globalization and foreign competition, and with good reason. For many years, the US automotive has gradually moved its operations to Mexico and Brazil, where wages are lower and environmental standards are more lax. Words like maquiladora are part of the average auto worker's Spanish vocabulary in the US. What's more, the vacuum of lost jobs in "rust belt" states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania have partially been filled by Toyoto, Nissan and Mercedes Benz building plants in "right to work" states like Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama. For the auto worker in Detroit (and Windsor, Ontario), the Third World begins at the Mason-Dixon Line. In the states of the former Confederacy, you have lower wages and very little union activity, and the Japanese-based and German-based automobile corporations have taken advantage of that fact. Just think! If Mercedes Benz, et al., had only moved some of their operations to the South before the civil rights movement, they also could have taken advantage of Jim Crow laws as well.
Yet globalization has been a force for good in the world economy. Largely because of globalization, we have seen the rise of countries like India and China, whose standards of living have increased dramatically since 1975. Starting in the 1960s, the world has emerged from an historically aberrant period where 85 to 90 per cent of the world's wealth was concentrated in the United States after World War II, with most of the rest in the former Soviet Union. The socialist believes in "share the wealth," and the capitalist thinks in terms of Newtonian physics, where everything reaches its "principle of moments" and ends up in a state of balance. Throughout most of the world's history, the economies of the world have always been pretty much equal. The economies of England, Saudi Arabia, and China were pretty much the same during the Crusades nearly a thousand years ago, and they will probably be similar a century from now. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how we manage events, like the current crisis that faces the automotive industry.
The members of the US Senate and the US House of Representatives do not have to be told that that the consequences will be grave internationally, if the US automobile industry is allowed to collapse. All the same, it is only reasonable that they expect the chairmen of Ford, GM and Chrysler to come up with some kind of realistic plan to make the auto industry profitable again. You don't throw good money after bad. Just because the US automotive industry only wants a modest bailout package of $25 billion while Wall Street asked, and received a package of $700 billion, it doesn't mean that Congress (or rather, you and I, the taxpayer) should come up with the money. While it would be cheaper to bail out Chrysler than the Citibank Group, that in itself doesn't mean that Congress should do it, if the likelihood is that Chrysler would still fail anyway. If you follow that line of reasoning, why not bail out the television repairman down the street? So what if most people simply buy a new televison the moment the old one is on the fritz.
Yet the consequences, at least in the immediate future for Michigan and the rest of the rust belt, will be catastrophic if the Big Three are allowed to fail. Congress cannot allow the Big Three to go under, but more importantly, the chairmen of the Big Three have to come up with a viable plan for a future that is likely to include alternative sources of energy and the cost of lower labour in places like India and China (and Mexico and Brazil). What's more, states like Michigan will have to invest heavily in other industries besides those dependent on the automotive industry.
We all should have seen this coming, particularly those who were around when Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacoca successfully appealed to Congress for a bailout in 1978. Even if the Big Three weathers the storm, and the world economy comes back strong, the stock market will take a dive at some point in the future, leaving a new generation of investors dumping their stocks in a panic, and a new generation of would-be retirees scrambling to save their pensions. You can count on it. But if history teaches us anything, it's that people don't learn from history. Especially the Big Three.
There are those who would argue that we have already lost Detroit.
Monday, November 17, 2008
It's the Economy
Now that the United States has a new president, Barack Obama, the first order of business in the new Obama administration will be the economy. National health insurance, like what Canada has, and immigration reform, will have to wait. So will global warming. The world economy has been effected by the meltdown on Wall Street, as some very messy shit has hit a very high-powered fan. The outgoing Bush administration has pushed through Congress a massive $700 billion bailout package for Wall Street, only to find that the US automobile industry and steel industry also want money from Washington to avoid bankruptcy. Who else will want money from Washington? The Bush administration has responded by trying to push a "stimulus package" through Congress, but even the Chinese are enacting stimulus packages. Beijing just announced a stimulus package of $500 billion, since the Chinese economy is also taking a shit. Because of the meltdown on Wall Street, every country in the world is queuing up to use the port-a-johns. Ronald Reagan probably didn't know how right he was when he said that the first order of government business was business.
President-elect Obama and his rival for the Democratic party nomination, Hilary Clinton, were asked during the election campaign what problem they expected to face for which they didn't think they had all the answers. While Clinton laughed off the question like a girly-girl, Obama replied that he thought that problem would be the issue of global warming. Little did either one of them know.
In US history, there have always been presidents who make messes, and then presidents who have to clean up the messes of their predecessors. It took two presidents to clean up after Ronald Reagan, who destroyed "the evil empire," and then made a royal mess in the process: George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. The Gipper left a huge budget deficit, and then both Bush 41 and Clinton raised taxes on the rich to try to balance it. The problem was that Bush the Father didn't quite balance the budget, and lost the 1992 election for going back on his "no new taxes" pledge, while Clinton got a lot of help from Gingrich and Co. in Congress, who forced Clinton to enact deep spending cuts in social programs. However, Clinton left office with the federal budget about $400 billion dollars in the black.
So what does George Bush the Son do? It's back to budget deficits. It seems that Bush 43 thought that the US economy had a slight headache, but instead of giving the US economy the equivalent of two aspirins, he prescribed the equivalent of 10 aspirins— that is, 10 years of tax cuts. One or two years of tax cuts probably would not have severely thrown the US economy out of whack, but Shrub was really asking for trouble when he tried to extend the tax cuts over a 10-year period. Since Congress was controlled by the Republicans (with plenty of conservative Democrats willing to go along), Bush got his tax cuts.
If nothing else, George W. Bush understood that a good Republican loves nothing more than tax cuts, and hates nothing more than taxes.
It was also a return to deficit spending, because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the post-9/11 world, the military can get all the hardware it wants. That's just the way it is in wartime. If there isn't enough money in the federal government for the military's needs, the federal government simply borrows. That's why Americans pay social security taxes: as something for the federal government to borrow against.
George W. Bush reminds this writer of another Texan who was President of the United States: Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson wanted to have his cake and eat it too: he wanted the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty (as well as other Great Society programs). Bush wanted his tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because the federal government is now in the red to the tune of something like $400 or $500 billion, the federal government is back to borrowing from the social security fund. It's robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Obama's supporters like to cast him as a new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The president-elect is expected to come up with a "New Deal" to pull the United States out of the mess that George W. Bush and the Republican Congress have left it in. More than likely, however, Obama will have to be devious and Machiavellian like another president who had to clean up the mess of his predecessor, Richard M. Nixon. Since Iraqi prime minister Nur al-Malaki has made it quite clear that he wants US troops out of Iraq by the end of 2010, we may see a pullout in Iraq before the end of Obama's first term. But that's only because Obama has already committed the United States to a surge in Afghanistan once he takes office: this is merely a lateral move, not a withdrawal from the region.
The people of the United States have elected a janitor. If Obama fails to clean up his predecessor's mess— if the economy does not rebound, or the US becomes bogged down in Afghanistan— the people will elect a new janitor in 2012. Count on it.
It's the economy first, and the war second. Everything else will have to wait, maybe indefinitely.
President-elect Obama and his rival for the Democratic party nomination, Hilary Clinton, were asked during the election campaign what problem they expected to face for which they didn't think they had all the answers. While Clinton laughed off the question like a girly-girl, Obama replied that he thought that problem would be the issue of global warming. Little did either one of them know.
In US history, there have always been presidents who make messes, and then presidents who have to clean up the messes of their predecessors. It took two presidents to clean up after Ronald Reagan, who destroyed "the evil empire," and then made a royal mess in the process: George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. The Gipper left a huge budget deficit, and then both Bush 41 and Clinton raised taxes on the rich to try to balance it. The problem was that Bush the Father didn't quite balance the budget, and lost the 1992 election for going back on his "no new taxes" pledge, while Clinton got a lot of help from Gingrich and Co. in Congress, who forced Clinton to enact deep spending cuts in social programs. However, Clinton left office with the federal budget about $400 billion dollars in the black.
So what does George Bush the Son do? It's back to budget deficits. It seems that Bush 43 thought that the US economy had a slight headache, but instead of giving the US economy the equivalent of two aspirins, he prescribed the equivalent of 10 aspirins— that is, 10 years of tax cuts. One or two years of tax cuts probably would not have severely thrown the US economy out of whack, but Shrub was really asking for trouble when he tried to extend the tax cuts over a 10-year period. Since Congress was controlled by the Republicans (with plenty of conservative Democrats willing to go along), Bush got his tax cuts.
If nothing else, George W. Bush understood that a good Republican loves nothing more than tax cuts, and hates nothing more than taxes.
It was also a return to deficit spending, because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the post-9/11 world, the military can get all the hardware it wants. That's just the way it is in wartime. If there isn't enough money in the federal government for the military's needs, the federal government simply borrows. That's why Americans pay social security taxes: as something for the federal government to borrow against.
George W. Bush reminds this writer of another Texan who was President of the United States: Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson wanted to have his cake and eat it too: he wanted the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty (as well as other Great Society programs). Bush wanted his tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because the federal government is now in the red to the tune of something like $400 or $500 billion, the federal government is back to borrowing from the social security fund. It's robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Obama's supporters like to cast him as a new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The president-elect is expected to come up with a "New Deal" to pull the United States out of the mess that George W. Bush and the Republican Congress have left it in. More than likely, however, Obama will have to be devious and Machiavellian like another president who had to clean up the mess of his predecessor, Richard M. Nixon. Since Iraqi prime minister Nur al-Malaki has made it quite clear that he wants US troops out of Iraq by the end of 2010, we may see a pullout in Iraq before the end of Obama's first term. But that's only because Obama has already committed the United States to a surge in Afghanistan once he takes office: this is merely a lateral move, not a withdrawal from the region.
The people of the United States have elected a janitor. If Obama fails to clean up his predecessor's mess— if the economy does not rebound, or the US becomes bogged down in Afghanistan— the people will elect a new janitor in 2012. Count on it.
It's the economy first, and the war second. Everything else will have to wait, maybe indefinitely.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Why the Liberals lost in Canada
How does a man like Stephen Harper get to be prime minister of Canada? When the leader of the official opposition, Stéphane Dion, is equally as colourless but backs an unpopular agenda. Dion wants to raise taxes in some form or another.
Canada is not in a green mood: Canadians want tax cuts, not a "green tax". As I write, BC is being clear-cut for lumber to sell to the States, and Hydroéléctrique du Québec is about to dam up 16 rivers near the Québec-Labrador border in order to sell the electricity to New York State (that is, if Québec has any leftover hydro to sell). As well, both Stephen Harper and George Bush are oil men and evangelical Christians: I don't think either one of those guys believe in global warming, unlike Elizabeth May and Stéphane Dion.
Really, Stéphane Dion should resign as leader of the Liberals, but who do the Liberals have as an alternative? Michael Ignatieff? Bob Rae? If Ignatieff or Rae had been suitable alternatives, I think one of them would have been able to head off Dion when the leadership position of the Liberal party opened up after Paul Martin retired from politics.
Do you want to know why the Liberals lost last Tuesday's election? Because they are out of touch. Yes, Stéphane Dion was right when he said to Stephen Harper, "It's the economy, Stephen."
However, the average Canadian voter understands that you can't blame the prime minister for things over which he has no control. The problem with blaming any Canadian prime minister for the economy in Canada is that politicians in every country of the world have lost control of their economies: the meltdown on Wall Street has spilled over into every country in the world, whether they like it or not.
The Dow Jones in New York and the TSX in Toronto have been doing a Texas Two-Step for nearly a fortnight now as they both crash to the dance floor together, and the Dow has been leading the dance.
Now let's look at the New Democrats. With Jack Layton daring to be photographed in suits that look like they would cost the average Canadian worker a week's salary, the NDP have shown that they know to handle spin as well as anybody in Canada, be it in politics or the entertainment industry. The problem is that Diamond Jack and his crowd are just as out of touch as the Liberals. The NDP government of Dalton McGuinty in Ontario has just announced that the province is $5 million Canadian in the red. (Wall Street is to blame, of course.) But don't worry: they say they're still going to hire all those nurses and teachers like they promised. They just don't know when they're going to be able to do it.
Socialism New Democrat-style is sort of like the Euro-Communist movement before the fall of the Berlin Wall. They behave as though they still think that socialism is the cause célèbre of the intellectual. They would like a dictatorship of the proletariat, but without any dictator; they want East Berlin without the Berlin Wall or the Stasi.
If there is any other politician in Canada as vainglorious as Diamond Jack Layton, that would be Gilles Duseppe in Québec. The BQ leader seems to think that he can still lead Québec out of the confederation, and he thinks that the way to do it is to court the gays and the lesbians by supporting gay marriage.
Of course, the working mums will still want their crèches to drop off the kiddies, but one of the by-products of the Quiet Revolution has been the emergence of a French-speaking bourgeoisie that hates taxes like the rest of the Canadian middle class. The Tories have risen from l'affaire Maxime Vernier smelling like a fleur-de-lis: they won about 30 per cent of the ridings in la belle province, whereas about 10 or 15 years ago, they didn't hold any seats.
Back in the 1990s, when Jean Chrétien was prime minister, the Canadian right was just as fragmented as the left. You had the Progressive Conservative Party, led by Joe Clark; the National Alliance, led by Stockwell Day; and the Reform Party, led by Preston Manning. Then, presto! The right-wing parties united to form the Conservative Party of Canada, with former Alliance member Stephen Harper as their leader. Canadian politics is never going to be the same again.
Now you would think that the left-wing parties would think that what's good enough for the goose could be good enough for the gander. Unfortunately, a merger is the farthest thing from the minds of Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton. The rank and file of the NDP (the steel workers and the auto workers, for example) would see a merger with the Grits as a hostile takeover by bourgeois French liberals from Québec. Why, Diamond Jack and all the other faux socialistes of the NDP would have to temper their socialism, and they're not about to do that when the Liberals have long ago written off western Canada in order to court the separatists in Québec. (By "western Canada", I mean "Canada west of the Ottawa River".)
As for Gilles Duseppe, the real aim of his party is to pull Québec out of Canada, and destroy the Liberals in Québec in the process. Maurice DuPlessis and his Union Nationale all but did that to the Conservatives in Québec in the 1940s and 1950s by providing conservative francophones with an alternative: a separatist but conservative party. (Of course, Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell all but completed what DuPlessis had started, what with NAFTA and all.)
That's why Québec premier Jean Charest bolted from the Conservatives during the 1980s and joined the Liberals: you don't hitch your wagon to a horse that can't pull it. However, the Conservative resurgence has even reached Québec.
Since the Liberals and the New Democrats won't unite, all that observers of Canadian politics can do is wait and see which party will become irrelevant first. In the meantime, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives win.
Canada is not in a green mood: Canadians want tax cuts, not a "green tax". As I write, BC is being clear-cut for lumber to sell to the States, and Hydroéléctrique du Québec is about to dam up 16 rivers near the Québec-Labrador border in order to sell the electricity to New York State (that is, if Québec has any leftover hydro to sell). As well, both Stephen Harper and George Bush are oil men and evangelical Christians: I don't think either one of those guys believe in global warming, unlike Elizabeth May and Stéphane Dion.
Really, Stéphane Dion should resign as leader of the Liberals, but who do the Liberals have as an alternative? Michael Ignatieff? Bob Rae? If Ignatieff or Rae had been suitable alternatives, I think one of them would have been able to head off Dion when the leadership position of the Liberal party opened up after Paul Martin retired from politics.
Do you want to know why the Liberals lost last Tuesday's election? Because they are out of touch. Yes, Stéphane Dion was right when he said to Stephen Harper, "It's the economy, Stephen."
However, the average Canadian voter understands that you can't blame the prime minister for things over which he has no control. The problem with blaming any Canadian prime minister for the economy in Canada is that politicians in every country of the world have lost control of their economies: the meltdown on Wall Street has spilled over into every country in the world, whether they like it or not.
The Dow Jones in New York and the TSX in Toronto have been doing a Texas Two-Step for nearly a fortnight now as they both crash to the dance floor together, and the Dow has been leading the dance.
Now let's look at the New Democrats. With Jack Layton daring to be photographed in suits that look like they would cost the average Canadian worker a week's salary, the NDP have shown that they know to handle spin as well as anybody in Canada, be it in politics or the entertainment industry. The problem is that Diamond Jack and his crowd are just as out of touch as the Liberals. The NDP government of Dalton McGuinty in Ontario has just announced that the province is $5 million Canadian in the red. (Wall Street is to blame, of course.) But don't worry: they say they're still going to hire all those nurses and teachers like they promised. They just don't know when they're going to be able to do it.
Socialism New Democrat-style is sort of like the Euro-Communist movement before the fall of the Berlin Wall. They behave as though they still think that socialism is the cause célèbre of the intellectual. They would like a dictatorship of the proletariat, but without any dictator; they want East Berlin without the Berlin Wall or the Stasi.
If there is any other politician in Canada as vainglorious as Diamond Jack Layton, that would be Gilles Duseppe in Québec. The BQ leader seems to think that he can still lead Québec out of the confederation, and he thinks that the way to do it is to court the gays and the lesbians by supporting gay marriage.
Of course, the working mums will still want their crèches to drop off the kiddies, but one of the by-products of the Quiet Revolution has been the emergence of a French-speaking bourgeoisie that hates taxes like the rest of the Canadian middle class. The Tories have risen from l'affaire Maxime Vernier smelling like a fleur-de-lis: they won about 30 per cent of the ridings in la belle province, whereas about 10 or 15 years ago, they didn't hold any seats.
Back in the 1990s, when Jean Chrétien was prime minister, the Canadian right was just as fragmented as the left. You had the Progressive Conservative Party, led by Joe Clark; the National Alliance, led by Stockwell Day; and the Reform Party, led by Preston Manning. Then, presto! The right-wing parties united to form the Conservative Party of Canada, with former Alliance member Stephen Harper as their leader. Canadian politics is never going to be the same again.
Now you would think that the left-wing parties would think that what's good enough for the goose could be good enough for the gander. Unfortunately, a merger is the farthest thing from the minds of Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton. The rank and file of the NDP (the steel workers and the auto workers, for example) would see a merger with the Grits as a hostile takeover by bourgeois French liberals from Québec. Why, Diamond Jack and all the other faux socialistes of the NDP would have to temper their socialism, and they're not about to do that when the Liberals have long ago written off western Canada in order to court the separatists in Québec. (By "western Canada", I mean "Canada west of the Ottawa River".)
As for Gilles Duseppe, the real aim of his party is to pull Québec out of Canada, and destroy the Liberals in Québec in the process. Maurice DuPlessis and his Union Nationale all but did that to the Conservatives in Québec in the 1940s and 1950s by providing conservative francophones with an alternative: a separatist but conservative party. (Of course, Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell all but completed what DuPlessis had started, what with NAFTA and all.)
That's why Québec premier Jean Charest bolted from the Conservatives during the 1980s and joined the Liberals: you don't hitch your wagon to a horse that can't pull it. However, the Conservative resurgence has even reached Québec.
Since the Liberals and the New Democrats won't unite, all that observers of Canadian politics can do is wait and see which party will become irrelevant first. In the meantime, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives win.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Canada's Upcoming Elections
It is likely that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will call for elections by October 14, 2008. Talks with Liberal party leader Stéphane Dion and Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duseppe have lead nowhere. Talks with New Democrat party leader Jack Layton will most likely also yield nothing. It's just as well, for the Tories.
I think Mr. Harper is eager to take on the Liberals, the Bloc and the New Democrats. Canadians are a little nervous about Canada having been governed by a minority government for so long. While the Finance Ministry is playing with statistics to deny that Canada is in recession, the fact is that many Canadians already believe that the country is in recession. As well, the war in Afghanistan doesn't look like it's going to end anytime soon.
However, the Tories are expected to make a strong showing in Quebec, projected to win about 30 per cent of the ridings there if elections are held. Before the sponsorship scandal, the Tories were completely shut out in Quebec. The province was a meat tortière to be divided between the Liberals and the Bloc at Christmas time. But not any more: better save some for the Tories.
So what's happening, and what's on Mr. Harper's mind? The Canadian economy's weak showing in the past year can be linked to the weak US dollar. When the Canadian and US dollars are at or near par, that means Americans would rather stay at home than make Ontario theirs to discover. More importantly, a weak US dollar means lower profits for Petro Canada and other business that deal with the US. Lower trade barriers and a weaker Canadian dollar vis-a-vis the US dollar had worked to Canada's advantage in the past. Remember when BC could flood the US with it's lumber?
However, the US economy had a strong showing the last quarter (up 3 per cent) while Canada's economy barely grew at 1 per cent. Mr. Harper is gambling that happy days for the US will mean happy days for Canada.
As well, Mr. Harper is at his best when he is campaigning. Many Canadians are not as blasé about social issues like gay marriage as people living south of Point Pelée might think. Remember, many Canadians share Mr. Harper's evangelical Christian faith. Where else else but Canada could a staunch Catholic and abortion opponent like David Kelley of New Brunswick refuse to pay his taxes as a protest against abortion and not go to jail? Certainly not the US.
Over the past 15 years, the centre-left parties in Canada have been asleep at the wheel. The Reform, Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties have united to form the Conservative Party of Canada while the Liberals, Bloc Québécois and New Democrats are still divided. The centre-left parties will have to unite, or they will soon be traunced at the polls. It may not happen in 2008, but it will happen.
The multi-party system in Canada is near an end, but the Liberals, the Bloc and the New Democrats just don't get it.
This writer's projection: the Tories will surprise all the "experts" and win a majority in the elections that are sure to come.
I think Mr. Harper is eager to take on the Liberals, the Bloc and the New Democrats. Canadians are a little nervous about Canada having been governed by a minority government for so long. While the Finance Ministry is playing with statistics to deny that Canada is in recession, the fact is that many Canadians already believe that the country is in recession. As well, the war in Afghanistan doesn't look like it's going to end anytime soon.
However, the Tories are expected to make a strong showing in Quebec, projected to win about 30 per cent of the ridings there if elections are held. Before the sponsorship scandal, the Tories were completely shut out in Quebec. The province was a meat tortière to be divided between the Liberals and the Bloc at Christmas time. But not any more: better save some for the Tories.
So what's happening, and what's on Mr. Harper's mind? The Canadian economy's weak showing in the past year can be linked to the weak US dollar. When the Canadian and US dollars are at or near par, that means Americans would rather stay at home than make Ontario theirs to discover. More importantly, a weak US dollar means lower profits for Petro Canada and other business that deal with the US. Lower trade barriers and a weaker Canadian dollar vis-a-vis the US dollar had worked to Canada's advantage in the past. Remember when BC could flood the US with it's lumber?
However, the US economy had a strong showing the last quarter (up 3 per cent) while Canada's economy barely grew at 1 per cent. Mr. Harper is gambling that happy days for the US will mean happy days for Canada.
As well, Mr. Harper is at his best when he is campaigning. Many Canadians are not as blasé about social issues like gay marriage as people living south of Point Pelée might think. Remember, many Canadians share Mr. Harper's evangelical Christian faith. Where else else but Canada could a staunch Catholic and abortion opponent like David Kelley of New Brunswick refuse to pay his taxes as a protest against abortion and not go to jail? Certainly not the US.
Over the past 15 years, the centre-left parties in Canada have been asleep at the wheel. The Reform, Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties have united to form the Conservative Party of Canada while the Liberals, Bloc Québécois and New Democrats are still divided. The centre-left parties will have to unite, or they will soon be traunced at the polls. It may not happen in 2008, but it will happen.
The multi-party system in Canada is near an end, but the Liberals, the Bloc and the New Democrats just don't get it.
This writer's projection: the Tories will surprise all the "experts" and win a majority in the elections that are sure to come.
After the Inauguration...
Vice-president Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, allegedly tried to use his new security clearance to break into the White House and assassinate the President while he slept in the Oval Office, with help from a few of his salmon fisherman buddies from Alaska. The attack occurred hours after president-elect John McCain was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States on January 28, 2009.
John McCain was asleep in bed with Sarah Palin when he heard a curtain rip after a fishing lure snagged it. The President then used the martial arts training that he had learned in the Navy during the Vietnam War to fend off his attackers before Secret Service men arrived and disarmed them.
McCain assumed a martial arts stance as he told the White House press corps how he faced his attackers. Most of the press seemed to believe that McCain was telling the truth, though Helen Thomas remained skeptical.
"There was about six of them," McCain told a press conference. "I stopped about five of them before I found myself one on one with Todd Palin. Then, about four or five Secret Service agents burst in. They had trouble finding Todd at first, because it was dark and they were still wearing their sunglasses.
The President added, "We need night vision sunglasses for our Secret Service men, so that they can see better at night."
Because Thomas expressed doubt that McCain faced his attackers alone, her White House press pass was revoked. However, the White Press secretary claimed that Thomas' skepticism had nothing to do with her losing her press credentials.
Vice-president Palin immediately disavowed any prior knowledge of the assassination attempt. "I can't imagine Todd ever doing something like this," she said. "I thought he was home taking care of our baby, Trig. I had no idea what was going on."
Then the Vice-president added, "I guess Trig isn't the only member of my family who's retarded..."
The motive for the assassination attempt is still unclear, but there are allegations that the Vice-president's husband wanted to kill McCain so that his wife would immediately become the President. Sarah Palin would become the first woman President of the United States if McCain died in office.
Former President Bill Clinton said, "It's a good thing that Barack Obama didn't win the election and my wife, Hilary, didn't become Vice-president. Otherwise, I could also be falsely implicated in an assassination attempt on the new President."
Comedian Chris Rock said, "Now you see why John McCain didn't choose Alan Keys as his vice-president? Some brother would have shot McCain's a--, and Keys would be the new president. No brother would have missed."
Some Senate and House Democrats are calling for an investigation of the Vice-president's role in the assassination attempt. An aide to Sen. Joe Biden said, "How can the Vice-president not know what's going on in her own household? If she doesn't know what her husband is up to, how can she be expected to know what White House staff are up to, let alone the country. This is Washington DC, not Juneau, Alaska."
Biden ran unsuccessfully for Vice-President on the Democratic party ticket with Barack Obama. After another close race in which Florida again decided the election, Biden had expressed doubt that the election was fair. McCain won 35 states while Obama only won 13. Ralph Nader, the Green party candidate, won Washington and Oregon. It was the Electoral College again.
Sen. Obama commented, "When I said that it was time for a change, an assassination attempt on President McCain was not the kind of change that I meant."
A few seconds later, Obama was heard to say before an open mike, "But we'll take it."
Obama later disavowed the comment and said that he was "misunderstood."
John McCain was asleep in bed with Sarah Palin when he heard a curtain rip after a fishing lure snagged it. The President then used the martial arts training that he had learned in the Navy during the Vietnam War to fend off his attackers before Secret Service men arrived and disarmed them.
McCain assumed a martial arts stance as he told the White House press corps how he faced his attackers. Most of the press seemed to believe that McCain was telling the truth, though Helen Thomas remained skeptical.
"There was about six of them," McCain told a press conference. "I stopped about five of them before I found myself one on one with Todd Palin. Then, about four or five Secret Service agents burst in. They had trouble finding Todd at first, because it was dark and they were still wearing their sunglasses.
The President added, "We need night vision sunglasses for our Secret Service men, so that they can see better at night."
Because Thomas expressed doubt that McCain faced his attackers alone, her White House press pass was revoked. However, the White Press secretary claimed that Thomas' skepticism had nothing to do with her losing her press credentials.
Vice-president Palin immediately disavowed any prior knowledge of the assassination attempt. "I can't imagine Todd ever doing something like this," she said. "I thought he was home taking care of our baby, Trig. I had no idea what was going on."
Then the Vice-president added, "I guess Trig isn't the only member of my family who's retarded..."
The motive for the assassination attempt is still unclear, but there are allegations that the Vice-president's husband wanted to kill McCain so that his wife would immediately become the President. Sarah Palin would become the first woman President of the United States if McCain died in office.
Former President Bill Clinton said, "It's a good thing that Barack Obama didn't win the election and my wife, Hilary, didn't become Vice-president. Otherwise, I could also be falsely implicated in an assassination attempt on the new President."
Comedian Chris Rock said, "Now you see why John McCain didn't choose Alan Keys as his vice-president? Some brother would have shot McCain's a--, and Keys would be the new president. No brother would have missed."
Some Senate and House Democrats are calling for an investigation of the Vice-president's role in the assassination attempt. An aide to Sen. Joe Biden said, "How can the Vice-president not know what's going on in her own household? If she doesn't know what her husband is up to, how can she be expected to know what White House staff are up to, let alone the country. This is Washington DC, not Juneau, Alaska."
Biden ran unsuccessfully for Vice-President on the Democratic party ticket with Barack Obama. After another close race in which Florida again decided the election, Biden had expressed doubt that the election was fair. McCain won 35 states while Obama only won 13. Ralph Nader, the Green party candidate, won Washington and Oregon. It was the Electoral College again.
Sen. Obama commented, "When I said that it was time for a change, an assassination attempt on President McCain was not the kind of change that I meant."
A few seconds later, Obama was heard to say before an open mike, "But we'll take it."
Obama later disavowed the comment and said that he was "misunderstood."
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Open Letter to My Daughter
Dear Daughter,
Even though there was a lot of shouting, I don't want you to think that I didn't hear some of the things that you said. You said, "I'm a kid." I replied, "No, you're an adult."
Then we got into a stupid shouting match where both of us were saying, in effect, "I'm right and you're wrong."
The truth is that we were both right and wrong: Yes, you're still a kid, but you're also an adult — both legally and physically. You're still a kid because you still want to do things that kids do, like go to that concert with Samantha for her birthday.
Trust me: when you get to be my age, you probably won't want to go to rock concerts like you did when you were 18. You might not understand Iggy Pop's "I'm An Adult Now," but people like me find it amusing because we know what he's talking about. When your mother and I went to see David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails, we both had our ears plugged with wadded toilet paper because of the noise level. Neither babies nor senior citizens like loud noises, you know.
I think part of the problem is that adults send kids mixed messages. When the government wants 19-year-olds like you to go to war, it hands them an M-16 and says, "You're an adult now."
Why not? We let kids vote once they turn 18, expecting them to make an intelligent decision when they vote — right ? But a year before that 18-year-old is allowed to vote, at age 17, he or she can be tried as an adult for any crime committed. Yet when that same 17-year-old wants a beer, then we as a society want to treat that 17-year-old as a child, because the legal drinking age in all the states is 21.
What, they can't make an intelligent decision like adults are supposed to?
Years from now, when you actually consider yourself an adult, you're probably going to be horrified that both your and mother and I let you get away with. But I bet you turned your back and snickered into your hand when we thought you were going to a pyjama party with your friends when you were really going to some wild party with drinking, dancing and boys. Well, I believe in being consistent, even if I haven't always been consistent. Once you turn 16, you can get a driver's license and drive a car, so you ought to be able to drink and vote.
Now what could be more of an adult responsibility than driving a car ? While the American people may elect the "wrong" man or woman as President, that may not be potentially as devastating a consequence as getting behind the wheel of a car while drunk and possibly hurting or killing somebody in an accident. Yet we let people drive before we let them drink or vote. Something's wrong here.
Maybe we should start by trying people for violent crimes as adults when they turn six. Then we lower the drinking age to 12 or 13, let them vote at 18, and raise the driving age to 25 — because the way things are going now, you and a lot of your friends won't be able to afford a decent car until you turn 25 anyway.
I agree, Daughter, you're still a kid, though you want to do adult things. For example, you prefer a bottle of vodka over Barbie dolls. You would rather get a decent used car for Christmas rather than a brand new 10-speed bicycle. You work at the Joe's Bar and Grill 40 hours a week while going to college because $10 a week for an allowance is no longer enough money for you. Yet you still consider yourself a kid, and in some ways, you still are.
Right now, you feel that your mother and I have both failed you. After all, your mother and I went through a complicated divorce with you caught in the middle. If you have learned to play us off against each other, it's probably because you feel that we have both used you as leverage against each other. (I will stand mute at my arraignment rather then enter a plea here.)
Trust me, most kids feel that their parents have failed them — I blamed my parents too. I'm sure that each therapist that you have gone to at least thinks that your mother and I are the reason why you started cutting yourself with razor blades while at West Middle School rather than any conscious choice on your part. I'm sure that the reason why you spent your 16th birthday in jail in downtown Detroit had nothing to do with the fact that you raised an empty beer bottle against me in a manner that the arresting police officer thought was threatening. Even though the police arrested you for illegal possession of a jack knife just a few months before your 16th birthday and gave you a break, I'm sure you thought that you hadn't done anything wrong then either. Hey, a jack knife was considered a tool at one time, right ?
Well, Daughter, your mother and I could say that you have let us down, too, if we wanted. I'm sure that if you girlfriends had thought it was a good idea to chop off your nose, you would have thought it was a good idea, too. Mentally, you are well-above average in intelligence, yet I saw kids at your high school graduation get $5,000 scholarships for college that could have easily gone to you if you had only studied harder, instead of the measly $500 scholarship that didn't even pay for a full semester. Whose fault was that, eh ?
Physically, you are a beautiful young woman with beautiful naturally blond hair, yet you want to dye your hair in unnatural colours, put huge ear gauges in your ear lobes and cover your body with tattoos. The way I see it, you still want to mutilate yourself, except that you use ear gauges and tattoos instead of razor blades. You only mutilate yourself the way other kids do now.
Now who's your role model for that ? Your mother — who has no body piercings or tattoos of any kind — or Amy Winehouse ? I don't think it's fair to blame your mother on this one.
Now, I could go into great length about you smoking marijuana and tobacco, but I won't. You know as well as me that smoking cigarettes causes cancer while smoking marijuana is illegal — right ?
You can call me a hypocrite, if you want, because I used to smoke marijuana too. As well, I have admitted to dropping acid at least 16 times. But hypocrisy isn't illegal, nor does it cause lung cancer — at least for me.
But I quit smoking pot without ever having spent a day in jail for illegal possession, while you were arrested on our back porch with a bong in your hand in broad daylight while I was on the telephone to your grandmother in California. Whose fault was that ?
Yet I saw the logic in your decision then : you didn't want to disrespect both me and our landlord by using it in the basement ; the landlord wanted no drugs on the premises as part of the terms of our lease.
You and I, Daughter, are both at an age where we should know better. You would credit yourself with having good sense if someone suggested you jump off a freeway overpass onto oncoming traffic and you decided not to do it, yet you insist on blaming me for not wanting to get help when you admit that you have an addiction problem too. Something's wrong here too.
No, Rachel, you can't have it both ways: you can't take credit for good sense while denying any responsibility for bad judgment. While I definitely could have been a better parent, it's you who has made the decision to drive through your life on cruise control; you're still the driver. What's more, you're an adult now — we're both adults.
Jesus very rightly said: "Do as they say and not as they do." He understood that people may say the right thing, even if they don't do it.
I will freely admit to being a hypocrite, but if you call me "dad" without considering me your father, and say that you love me when you don't, then you are also a hypocrite.
I say this not to criticize you, but because you are right to call me your father even if you can't accept me as a father. I hope that your children will treat your husband with respect, even if everybody thinks he sometimes doesn't deserve it. I hope that your children will treat you with respect as well, even if you don't seem to deserve it sometimes.
You and I both need to grow up, Daughter.
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (I Cor. 13:11)
Even though there was a lot of shouting, I don't want you to think that I didn't hear some of the things that you said. You said, "I'm a kid." I replied, "No, you're an adult."
Then we got into a stupid shouting match where both of us were saying, in effect, "I'm right and you're wrong."
The truth is that we were both right and wrong: Yes, you're still a kid, but you're also an adult — both legally and physically. You're still a kid because you still want to do things that kids do, like go to that concert with Samantha for her birthday.
Trust me: when you get to be my age, you probably won't want to go to rock concerts like you did when you were 18. You might not understand Iggy Pop's "I'm An Adult Now," but people like me find it amusing because we know what he's talking about. When your mother and I went to see David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails, we both had our ears plugged with wadded toilet paper because of the noise level. Neither babies nor senior citizens like loud noises, you know.
I think part of the problem is that adults send kids mixed messages. When the government wants 19-year-olds like you to go to war, it hands them an M-16 and says, "You're an adult now."
Why not? We let kids vote once they turn 18, expecting them to make an intelligent decision when they vote — right ? But a year before that 18-year-old is allowed to vote, at age 17, he or she can be tried as an adult for any crime committed. Yet when that same 17-year-old wants a beer, then we as a society want to treat that 17-year-old as a child, because the legal drinking age in all the states is 21.
What, they can't make an intelligent decision like adults are supposed to?
Years from now, when you actually consider yourself an adult, you're probably going to be horrified that both your and mother and I let you get away with. But I bet you turned your back and snickered into your hand when we thought you were going to a pyjama party with your friends when you were really going to some wild party with drinking, dancing and boys. Well, I believe in being consistent, even if I haven't always been consistent. Once you turn 16, you can get a driver's license and drive a car, so you ought to be able to drink and vote.
Now what could be more of an adult responsibility than driving a car ? While the American people may elect the "wrong" man or woman as President, that may not be potentially as devastating a consequence as getting behind the wheel of a car while drunk and possibly hurting or killing somebody in an accident. Yet we let people drive before we let them drink or vote. Something's wrong here.
Maybe we should start by trying people for violent crimes as adults when they turn six. Then we lower the drinking age to 12 or 13, let them vote at 18, and raise the driving age to 25 — because the way things are going now, you and a lot of your friends won't be able to afford a decent car until you turn 25 anyway.
I agree, Daughter, you're still a kid, though you want to do adult things. For example, you prefer a bottle of vodka over Barbie dolls. You would rather get a decent used car for Christmas rather than a brand new 10-speed bicycle. You work at the Joe's Bar and Grill 40 hours a week while going to college because $10 a week for an allowance is no longer enough money for you. Yet you still consider yourself a kid, and in some ways, you still are.
Right now, you feel that your mother and I have both failed you. After all, your mother and I went through a complicated divorce with you caught in the middle. If you have learned to play us off against each other, it's probably because you feel that we have both used you as leverage against each other. (I will stand mute at my arraignment rather then enter a plea here.)
Trust me, most kids feel that their parents have failed them — I blamed my parents too. I'm sure that each therapist that you have gone to at least thinks that your mother and I are the reason why you started cutting yourself with razor blades while at West Middle School rather than any conscious choice on your part. I'm sure that the reason why you spent your 16th birthday in jail in downtown Detroit had nothing to do with the fact that you raised an empty beer bottle against me in a manner that the arresting police officer thought was threatening. Even though the police arrested you for illegal possession of a jack knife just a few months before your 16th birthday and gave you a break, I'm sure you thought that you hadn't done anything wrong then either. Hey, a jack knife was considered a tool at one time, right ?
Well, Daughter, your mother and I could say that you have let us down, too, if we wanted. I'm sure that if you girlfriends had thought it was a good idea to chop off your nose, you would have thought it was a good idea, too. Mentally, you are well-above average in intelligence, yet I saw kids at your high school graduation get $5,000 scholarships for college that could have easily gone to you if you had only studied harder, instead of the measly $500 scholarship that didn't even pay for a full semester. Whose fault was that, eh ?
Physically, you are a beautiful young woman with beautiful naturally blond hair, yet you want to dye your hair in unnatural colours, put huge ear gauges in your ear lobes and cover your body with tattoos. The way I see it, you still want to mutilate yourself, except that you use ear gauges and tattoos instead of razor blades. You only mutilate yourself the way other kids do now.
Now who's your role model for that ? Your mother — who has no body piercings or tattoos of any kind — or Amy Winehouse ? I don't think it's fair to blame your mother on this one.
Now, I could go into great length about you smoking marijuana and tobacco, but I won't. You know as well as me that smoking cigarettes causes cancer while smoking marijuana is illegal — right ?
You can call me a hypocrite, if you want, because I used to smoke marijuana too. As well, I have admitted to dropping acid at least 16 times. But hypocrisy isn't illegal, nor does it cause lung cancer — at least for me.
But I quit smoking pot without ever having spent a day in jail for illegal possession, while you were arrested on our back porch with a bong in your hand in broad daylight while I was on the telephone to your grandmother in California. Whose fault was that ?
Yet I saw the logic in your decision then : you didn't want to disrespect both me and our landlord by using it in the basement ; the landlord wanted no drugs on the premises as part of the terms of our lease.
You and I, Daughter, are both at an age where we should know better. You would credit yourself with having good sense if someone suggested you jump off a freeway overpass onto oncoming traffic and you decided not to do it, yet you insist on blaming me for not wanting to get help when you admit that you have an addiction problem too. Something's wrong here too.
No, Rachel, you can't have it both ways: you can't take credit for good sense while denying any responsibility for bad judgment. While I definitely could have been a better parent, it's you who has made the decision to drive through your life on cruise control; you're still the driver. What's more, you're an adult now — we're both adults.
Jesus very rightly said: "Do as they say and not as they do." He understood that people may say the right thing, even if they don't do it.
I will freely admit to being a hypocrite, but if you call me "dad" without considering me your father, and say that you love me when you don't, then you are also a hypocrite.
I say this not to criticize you, but because you are right to call me your father even if you can't accept me as a father. I hope that your children will treat your husband with respect, even if everybody thinks he sometimes doesn't deserve it. I hope that your children will treat you with respect as well, even if you don't seem to deserve it sometimes.
You and I both need to grow up, Daughter.
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (I Cor. 13:11)
Saturday, May 3, 2008
How to Pick Up a Muslim Girl
This post is in response to an article that some magazine in Europe published on how to pick up Muslim women on the sly. Irate Muslims made death threats against the editors, and the owners felt compelled to print a retraction.
So you want to pick up a Muslim girl, eh? If you want to "pick up" a Muslim girl, you must proceed with caution. You see, Muslims don't like the idea of non-Muslims picking up Muslim girls for one-night stands and then tossing them aside when they're done. (Just like Christians don't like the idea of Muslim men doing the same to Christian girls.) However, it can be done: if you really want to pick up a Muslim girl, you can do it. Here's how: convert to Islam and then marry one.
"What?" I hear you say. "Me, become a Muslim and marry a Muslim?"
"Sure," I reply. "Really, it's very easy..."
Converting to Islam isn't very difficult. All you have to do is go to a mosque, say that you want to convert, and then repeat the Islamic confession of faith before other Muslims: "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."
Voilà, you're a Muslim. That wasn't so hard, was it? You didn't even have to click your heels and say it three times.
Of course, whether you want to be a good Muslim or not, that's another pair of sleeves. Being a good Muslim is a little trickier than simply being a Muslim, but what did you expect? There's always a catch, you know. The confession of faith is only one of the Five Pillars of Islam. You also have to bow down and pray towards Mecca five times a day, pay a tax to support the poor, observe the fast during the holy month of Ramadan, and make a pilgrimage to Mecca (if you are able.) As well, you have to observe sharia: no drinking, no eating pork, no adultery, no stealing, etc.
Okay, you are probably finding out already that being a Muslim isn't as easy as you thought it would be. But, trust me, being a born-again Christian isn't any easier, either. Oh sure, the evangelists will tell you that, by your faith, you are already saved and guaranteed salvation. Then you have to "show" that you are saved by voting for John McCain, because faith without works is dead. (James 2:17)Again, there's always a catch.
Well, it's no different being a Muslim. You can't just say that you're a Muslim; you have to prove it. Just like Christians, Muslims believe that the proof is in the pudding. If you go to a delicatessen right after you have converted and have a ham-on-rye sandwich, chances are that your fellow Muslims won't believe that you were sincere when you converted. And if you go to a bar and get smashed, they may really doubt your sincerity. (Though they may just think you're a neophyte who doesn't know better yet.)
But keep your eye on the prize: you want to pick up a Muslim girl, remember?
In trying to pick up a Muslim girl (and hopefully make her your wife), you are bound to confront other problems. You see, Middle Eastern society isn't as open as ours. In fact, Middle Eastern society is so segregated by gender that there is an Arab dialect in Yemen that is spoken only by women. (There are probably female dialects in Morocco and Algeria as well, but I think you get my drift.) Even if you were fluent in Arabic, and you were able to sneak into somebody's harem (by which I mean all the women of the household, not necessarily wives and concubines), the object of your affections may not be able to understand you. While the two of you may hook atoms, communication could be difficult, and relationships, in the end, are based on communication.
One of the great things about being a Muslim today, however, is that you don't have to be fluent in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, or any other language traditionally spoken by Muslims in the world. That's because a growing number of Muslims in the world today speak languages like English, German and French as their first language. Oh sure, it helps to know Arabic if you want to read the Koran, the sacred text of Islam, but we're not talking about reading the Koran here.
Besides, sneaking into a harem would be next to impossible. That's because harems really don't exist anymore. Like most Christians, Muslims in the West don't live in vast extended families like they do in Saudi Arabia or Yemen. Rather, they live in small houses or cramped apartments in the city. You may find a granny living under the same roof as her son, his wife and their children, but the son isn't likely to have three other wives. Nor is he likely to have dozens of children, though Muslim families in the West tend to be bigger than non-Muslim families. No, picking up a Muslim girl is more difficult than sneaking into a harem, because virtuous Muslim women no more hang out in harems today than they do in bars.
Because Muslim culture is a patriarchal culture, the way to a woman's heart is through her father. You will have to meet him, get to know him, and gain his trust. Above all, you must show respect — towards the daughter and the father. That means meeting the father on his terms. If he invites you over to his house for dinner, consider it an honour; that means that he sees you as a possible son-in-law. If he invites to dinner again, your chances are getting better. If there's a third and fourth time, you practically have a match. If there's a fifth time, the deal is almost certain. (Five is a magic number among the Muslims, just like three is among the Christians.)
The daughter is supposed to have some say in who she marries, but the father will forbid the match, no matter what, if he finds you unsuitable.
I trust that you see by now that finding a Muslim girl is an elaborate process. If you expect to find a sexually frustrated housewife or widow (or an errant daughter), you may get lucky, but you would really have to understand Muslim society in order to navigate the back roads and alleys in order to find a woman that observant Muslims would consider to be one of loose morals. That could be dangerous and ill-advised: they stone adulteresses and prostitutes in many Muslim countries, you know.
The best thing, therefore, is to play by their rules. If you want a Muslim girl, become a Muslim and marry a Muslim, and doors will open for you.
Good luck, and salaam aleikum.
So you want to pick up a Muslim girl, eh? If you want to "pick up" a Muslim girl, you must proceed with caution. You see, Muslims don't like the idea of non-Muslims picking up Muslim girls for one-night stands and then tossing them aside when they're done. (Just like Christians don't like the idea of Muslim men doing the same to Christian girls.) However, it can be done: if you really want to pick up a Muslim girl, you can do it. Here's how: convert to Islam and then marry one.
"What?" I hear you say. "Me, become a Muslim and marry a Muslim?"
"Sure," I reply. "Really, it's very easy..."
Converting to Islam isn't very difficult. All you have to do is go to a mosque, say that you want to convert, and then repeat the Islamic confession of faith before other Muslims: "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."
Voilà, you're a Muslim. That wasn't so hard, was it? You didn't even have to click your heels and say it three times.
Of course, whether you want to be a good Muslim or not, that's another pair of sleeves. Being a good Muslim is a little trickier than simply being a Muslim, but what did you expect? There's always a catch, you know. The confession of faith is only one of the Five Pillars of Islam. You also have to bow down and pray towards Mecca five times a day, pay a tax to support the poor, observe the fast during the holy month of Ramadan, and make a pilgrimage to Mecca (if you are able.) As well, you have to observe sharia: no drinking, no eating pork, no adultery, no stealing, etc.
Okay, you are probably finding out already that being a Muslim isn't as easy as you thought it would be. But, trust me, being a born-again Christian isn't any easier, either. Oh sure, the evangelists will tell you that, by your faith, you are already saved and guaranteed salvation. Then you have to "show" that you are saved by voting for John McCain, because faith without works is dead. (James 2:17)Again, there's always a catch.
Well, it's no different being a Muslim. You can't just say that you're a Muslim; you have to prove it. Just like Christians, Muslims believe that the proof is in the pudding. If you go to a delicatessen right after you have converted and have a ham-on-rye sandwich, chances are that your fellow Muslims won't believe that you were sincere when you converted. And if you go to a bar and get smashed, they may really doubt your sincerity. (Though they may just think you're a neophyte who doesn't know better yet.)
But keep your eye on the prize: you want to pick up a Muslim girl, remember?
In trying to pick up a Muslim girl (and hopefully make her your wife), you are bound to confront other problems. You see, Middle Eastern society isn't as open as ours. In fact, Middle Eastern society is so segregated by gender that there is an Arab dialect in Yemen that is spoken only by women. (There are probably female dialects in Morocco and Algeria as well, but I think you get my drift.) Even if you were fluent in Arabic, and you were able to sneak into somebody's harem (by which I mean all the women of the household, not necessarily wives and concubines), the object of your affections may not be able to understand you. While the two of you may hook atoms, communication could be difficult, and relationships, in the end, are based on communication.
One of the great things about being a Muslim today, however, is that you don't have to be fluent in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, or any other language traditionally spoken by Muslims in the world. That's because a growing number of Muslims in the world today speak languages like English, German and French as their first language. Oh sure, it helps to know Arabic if you want to read the Koran, the sacred text of Islam, but we're not talking about reading the Koran here.
Besides, sneaking into a harem would be next to impossible. That's because harems really don't exist anymore. Like most Christians, Muslims in the West don't live in vast extended families like they do in Saudi Arabia or Yemen. Rather, they live in small houses or cramped apartments in the city. You may find a granny living under the same roof as her son, his wife and their children, but the son isn't likely to have three other wives. Nor is he likely to have dozens of children, though Muslim families in the West tend to be bigger than non-Muslim families. No, picking up a Muslim girl is more difficult than sneaking into a harem, because virtuous Muslim women no more hang out in harems today than they do in bars.
Because Muslim culture is a patriarchal culture, the way to a woman's heart is through her father. You will have to meet him, get to know him, and gain his trust. Above all, you must show respect — towards the daughter and the father. That means meeting the father on his terms. If he invites you over to his house for dinner, consider it an honour; that means that he sees you as a possible son-in-law. If he invites to dinner again, your chances are getting better. If there's a third and fourth time, you practically have a match. If there's a fifth time, the deal is almost certain. (Five is a magic number among the Muslims, just like three is among the Christians.)
The daughter is supposed to have some say in who she marries, but the father will forbid the match, no matter what, if he finds you unsuitable.
I trust that you see by now that finding a Muslim girl is an elaborate process. If you expect to find a sexually frustrated housewife or widow (or an errant daughter), you may get lucky, but you would really have to understand Muslim society in order to navigate the back roads and alleys in order to find a woman that observant Muslims would consider to be one of loose morals. That could be dangerous and ill-advised: they stone adulteresses and prostitutes in many Muslim countries, you know.
The best thing, therefore, is to play by their rules. If you want a Muslim girl, become a Muslim and marry a Muslim, and doors will open for you.
Good luck, and salaam aleikum.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
How Did 6 Million Jews Die?
In 1993, Ernst Zundel wrote a pamphlet entitled: "Did 6 Million Jews Really Die?" For his pamphlet, the Canadian government deported the German-born national after allegedly holding him for months incommunicado, including time in isolation. He was allegedly denied access to a lawyer or to any exculpatory evidence for national security reasons.
His crime: denying that the Nazi Holocaust took place.
In many countries, including Canada, it is a crime to deny the "reality" of the Nazi Holocaust. After Zundel returned to Germany, charges were laid against him in Mannheim, where he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Since he was 65 years old at the time of his conviction, it is possible that he will die in prison, and for what? Because he didn't think that Hitler tried to kill all the Jews?
The Canadian governments cited anti-Semitism and Neo-Nazi sympathies in its decision to deport Zundel, but this writer finds it disturbing that a man should be held for months incommunicado without having charges laid against him for merely disagreeing with the consensus about the Nazi Holocaust. Are we so afraid that Zundel and other muddle-headed thinkers of his ilk might actually be right about the Holocaust? If we are that afraid, then what does that say about us?
I will say that I, too, am a revisionist when it comes to the Holocaust. It isn't because I don't believe that the Holocaust took place, but because I believe that each historian is, by the nature of his or her profession, a revisionist. The historian examines accepted "facts," questions those that need to be questioned, tosses out those that he finds to be incorrect, but — most importantly — affirms those that are true to be true.
The number one criterion of the historian should not be "political correctness" or any preconceived bias, but the evidence at hand. Scholarship must never allow itself to be at the mercy of prevailing trends but must rise above these trends for the sake of truth and clarity. The moment that scholars allow themselves to be the propagandists for any idea, however noble, then they have threatened the credibility of their entire profession. This is nothing less than a serious ethical breach, for we must tell the truth or say nothing at all.
I do not wish to debate the merits of Zundel's silly pamphlet, because the number of people who died in the Nazi Holocaust doesn't matter. If even one person was murdered by the Nazis for any reason — let alone for being Jewish — that in itself constitutes a crime against humanity. In all civilized countries, it is a crime to commit murder. It was even a crime to commit murder in Nazi Germany. Even in Berlin, circa 1933, you couldn't just walk up to your neighbour and shoot him. That would have resulted in charges being laid against you for murder.
When somebody publishes something like "Did 6 Million Jews Really Die?", it gives the real Holocaust scholars the occasion to refute the "revisionists" like Zundel and solidify their position. This writer would like to know not whether 6 million Jews really died, but how they died. This is important, because we owe it to the dead to learn as much about the Holocaust as we can. As well, it does not serve scholarship to maintain that 6 million Jews died at Auschwitz if only 1.5 million "at most" died there, as Zundel claims in his pamphlet.
But I would like to see Holocaust "revisionists" like Zundel dispute these facts:
— The Nazis did away with parliamentary democracy and imposed a one-man dictatorship under Hitler.
— The Nazis did away with habeas corpus and the right to a fair trial.
— The Nazis suppressed civil liberties like freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom of religion guaranteed under the constitution of the Weimar Republic, under which Hitler was elected chancellor.
— The Nazis did away with equal protection under the law and favoured Germans over all other races in the Third Reich, especially Jews.
— The Nazis punished political dissent by detaining people in concentration camps like the ones at Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany even before World War II.
— The Nazis practised collective reprisals against entire communities, like Lidice in Czechoslovakia, for example, for crimes that only one or a few persons may have committed.
— The Nazis forcibly segregated Jews in ghettoes like the ones in Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz, where thousands died of starvation, disease and exposure to the elements.
— The Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws that made German Jews non-persons in their own country.
— The death camps like the one at Auschwitz actually existed.
This writer is willing to concede that far less than 6 million Jews may have died in concentration camps. This is because people starved to death in ghettoes and were shot by SS Einsatzgruppen, or "special detachments." Jews were also murdered in camps in Romania, which was an ally of Nazi Germany. As well, Jews were executed in the commission of crimes like smuggling; some Jews were, in fact, bandits and thieves — racketeers who took advantage of the extreme situation brought about by the war.
The Nazis are not to be condemned because they punished crimes like rape, looting and murder. Rather, they are to be condemned for the way they punished these crimes. It is beyond dispute that the Nazis were a savage and barbarous lot. Hitler himself ordered that 100 civilians be executed for the death of a single German soldier in Nazi-occupied Europe. This was calculated not to bring about peace, order and good government, but to instill terror in the peoples that they ruled. The Nazis were terrorists.
While Leon Uris' Mila 18 is a work of fiction, the numbers of people who died in the Warsaw Ghetto in the autumn and winter of 1941 increased exponentially each month between September and March of that year, according to a breakdown of his statistics. From an estimated 600,000 people in the summer of 1941, there was a mere 54,000 people left in the Warsaw Ghetto when the Jewish Fighters' Organization revolted in the spring of 1944. After putting down the insurrection there, SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop stated in his report to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler that "the Warsaw Ghetto is no more." If Stroop didn't exterminate the inhabitants there, then what happened to them? They were abducted by aliens?
According to William Shirer in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, SS Colonel Otto Ohlendorf testified at his trial in 1954 that his unit, Einsatzgruppe D, executed over 100,000 Jews in the Ukraine. If the other three Einsatzgruppen killed at least that many apiece, then the Einsatzgruppen killed at least 400,000 people all together. At least 10 per cent of all Jews who died in the Holocaust died in the ghettoes of cities like Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz, as well as those in Riga, Vilna and Minsk. According to A.A . Anatoli's Babi Yar, one of the Einsatzgruppen wiped Kiev's Jewish population in just one day. That's about 30,000 people, according to Anatoli's figures.
We know from the KGB files that were made public in 1988 that the Soviets deliberately over-estimated the numbers of people killed at Auschwitz by 1 million in order to obscure the fact that the victims were mostly Jews. The Soviets had reasons of their own for denying the role of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust. We know that the Soviets persecuted Soviet Jews under Stalin in the 1920s, suppressing all Yiddish newspapers and banning the use of the Yiddish language. We know now that the Soviets massacred thousands of Polish prisoners-of-war at places like the Katyn forest. What's more, we know that the Soviets did not follow the Geneva Convention very strictly, vis-à-vis Polish, and later, German prisoners-of-war. They didn't repatriate the German soldiers that surrendered at Stalingrad until the middle of the 1950s. As for Polish prisoners-of-war captured by the Russians, men like future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin were given the choice of fighting for the Red Army against the Germans or languishing in Soviet Gulags.
This we know from the KGB files that were made public in 1988. What we don't know is what role, if any, that the Soviets may have played in the Nazi Holocaust. What is known is that both the Bolsheviks and their enemies, the tsarist counter-revolutionaries, massacred entire Jewish villages during the Russian civil war of the 1920s. Anti-Semitism was alive and well in Russia even under Lenin. If you add up the statistics in Nora Levin's Holocaust, more than 85 per cent of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust were from the Soviet Union and the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, with over 3 million from Poland alone, and another 2 million from the republics that made up the Soviet Union. The Holocaust was most successful in countries that already had a long tradition of anti-Semitism.
If you add up the numbers of people killed in the extermination camps at Belsec, Chelmno, Lublin, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka in the Government-General of Central Poland, the numbers add up to about 500,000 or 600,000. Probably only a minority of the victims of Hitler's "Final Solution" died in the extermination camps of the Government-General. Only a minority died at Auschwitz, maybe 1.5 million, which was a combination extermination facility like those of the Government-General, and a concentration, or labour, camp like Dachau.
However, it is accepted by most reputable Holocaust historians that a decision to exterminate the Jews was made at a Nazi party conference in Wannsee, Germany, in 1942. The Nazis simply lacked the means to carry out their plans, because they were involved in a war on two fronts against the Allies and the Soviets.
However, this writer does not want to see pamphlets like Ernst Zundel's suppressed, because there is no need. There are too many eye-witness accounts and too much documentation for naysayers like Zundel to be credible: there was a Holocaust. As well, it gives Holocaust historians the opportunity to answer the question: how did 6 million Jews die in the Holocaust.
This writer believes that the majority died in places like the Warsaw Ghetto — due to starvation, disease, and the cold of winter — as well as in places like Babi Yar in Kiev. Even without the concentration camps, there was still a Nazi holocaust. It could be that more than 6 million died in the Holocaust.
But if Canadians wish to remain a free and democratic people, they would do well to remember these words attributed to Voltaire: "I may disagree with everything that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
In a democracy, even people like Ernst Zundel have freedom of speech.
His crime: denying that the Nazi Holocaust took place.
In many countries, including Canada, it is a crime to deny the "reality" of the Nazi Holocaust. After Zundel returned to Germany, charges were laid against him in Mannheim, where he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Since he was 65 years old at the time of his conviction, it is possible that he will die in prison, and for what? Because he didn't think that Hitler tried to kill all the Jews?
The Canadian governments cited anti-Semitism and Neo-Nazi sympathies in its decision to deport Zundel, but this writer finds it disturbing that a man should be held for months incommunicado without having charges laid against him for merely disagreeing with the consensus about the Nazi Holocaust. Are we so afraid that Zundel and other muddle-headed thinkers of his ilk might actually be right about the Holocaust? If we are that afraid, then what does that say about us?
I will say that I, too, am a revisionist when it comes to the Holocaust. It isn't because I don't believe that the Holocaust took place, but because I believe that each historian is, by the nature of his or her profession, a revisionist. The historian examines accepted "facts," questions those that need to be questioned, tosses out those that he finds to be incorrect, but — most importantly — affirms those that are true to be true.
The number one criterion of the historian should not be "political correctness" or any preconceived bias, but the evidence at hand. Scholarship must never allow itself to be at the mercy of prevailing trends but must rise above these trends for the sake of truth and clarity. The moment that scholars allow themselves to be the propagandists for any idea, however noble, then they have threatened the credibility of their entire profession. This is nothing less than a serious ethical breach, for we must tell the truth or say nothing at all.
I do not wish to debate the merits of Zundel's silly pamphlet, because the number of people who died in the Nazi Holocaust doesn't matter. If even one person was murdered by the Nazis for any reason — let alone for being Jewish — that in itself constitutes a crime against humanity. In all civilized countries, it is a crime to commit murder. It was even a crime to commit murder in Nazi Germany. Even in Berlin, circa 1933, you couldn't just walk up to your neighbour and shoot him. That would have resulted in charges being laid against you for murder.
When somebody publishes something like "Did 6 Million Jews Really Die?", it gives the real Holocaust scholars the occasion to refute the "revisionists" like Zundel and solidify their position. This writer would like to know not whether 6 million Jews really died, but how they died. This is important, because we owe it to the dead to learn as much about the Holocaust as we can. As well, it does not serve scholarship to maintain that 6 million Jews died at Auschwitz if only 1.5 million "at most" died there, as Zundel claims in his pamphlet.
But I would like to see Holocaust "revisionists" like Zundel dispute these facts:
— The Nazis did away with parliamentary democracy and imposed a one-man dictatorship under Hitler.
— The Nazis did away with habeas corpus and the right to a fair trial.
— The Nazis suppressed civil liberties like freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom of religion guaranteed under the constitution of the Weimar Republic, under which Hitler was elected chancellor.
— The Nazis did away with equal protection under the law and favoured Germans over all other races in the Third Reich, especially Jews.
— The Nazis punished political dissent by detaining people in concentration camps like the ones at Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany even before World War II.
— The Nazis practised collective reprisals against entire communities, like Lidice in Czechoslovakia, for example, for crimes that only one or a few persons may have committed.
— The Nazis forcibly segregated Jews in ghettoes like the ones in Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz, where thousands died of starvation, disease and exposure to the elements.
— The Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws that made German Jews non-persons in their own country.
— The death camps like the one at Auschwitz actually existed.
This writer is willing to concede that far less than 6 million Jews may have died in concentration camps. This is because people starved to death in ghettoes and were shot by SS Einsatzgruppen, or "special detachments." Jews were also murdered in camps in Romania, which was an ally of Nazi Germany. As well, Jews were executed in the commission of crimes like smuggling; some Jews were, in fact, bandits and thieves — racketeers who took advantage of the extreme situation brought about by the war.
The Nazis are not to be condemned because they punished crimes like rape, looting and murder. Rather, they are to be condemned for the way they punished these crimes. It is beyond dispute that the Nazis were a savage and barbarous lot. Hitler himself ordered that 100 civilians be executed for the death of a single German soldier in Nazi-occupied Europe. This was calculated not to bring about peace, order and good government, but to instill terror in the peoples that they ruled. The Nazis were terrorists.
While Leon Uris' Mila 18 is a work of fiction, the numbers of people who died in the Warsaw Ghetto in the autumn and winter of 1941 increased exponentially each month between September and March of that year, according to a breakdown of his statistics. From an estimated 600,000 people in the summer of 1941, there was a mere 54,000 people left in the Warsaw Ghetto when the Jewish Fighters' Organization revolted in the spring of 1944. After putting down the insurrection there, SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop stated in his report to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler that "the Warsaw Ghetto is no more." If Stroop didn't exterminate the inhabitants there, then what happened to them? They were abducted by aliens?
According to William Shirer in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, SS Colonel Otto Ohlendorf testified at his trial in 1954 that his unit, Einsatzgruppe D, executed over 100,000 Jews in the Ukraine. If the other three Einsatzgruppen killed at least that many apiece, then the Einsatzgruppen killed at least 400,000 people all together. At least 10 per cent of all Jews who died in the Holocaust died in the ghettoes of cities like Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz, as well as those in Riga, Vilna and Minsk. According to A.A . Anatoli's Babi Yar, one of the Einsatzgruppen wiped Kiev's Jewish population in just one day. That's about 30,000 people, according to Anatoli's figures.
We know from the KGB files that were made public in 1988 that the Soviets deliberately over-estimated the numbers of people killed at Auschwitz by 1 million in order to obscure the fact that the victims were mostly Jews. The Soviets had reasons of their own for denying the role of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust. We know that the Soviets persecuted Soviet Jews under Stalin in the 1920s, suppressing all Yiddish newspapers and banning the use of the Yiddish language. We know now that the Soviets massacred thousands of Polish prisoners-of-war at places like the Katyn forest. What's more, we know that the Soviets did not follow the Geneva Convention very strictly, vis-à-vis Polish, and later, German prisoners-of-war. They didn't repatriate the German soldiers that surrendered at Stalingrad until the middle of the 1950s. As for Polish prisoners-of-war captured by the Russians, men like future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin were given the choice of fighting for the Red Army against the Germans or languishing in Soviet Gulags.
This we know from the KGB files that were made public in 1988. What we don't know is what role, if any, that the Soviets may have played in the Nazi Holocaust. What is known is that both the Bolsheviks and their enemies, the tsarist counter-revolutionaries, massacred entire Jewish villages during the Russian civil war of the 1920s. Anti-Semitism was alive and well in Russia even under Lenin. If you add up the statistics in Nora Levin's Holocaust, more than 85 per cent of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust were from the Soviet Union and the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, with over 3 million from Poland alone, and another 2 million from the republics that made up the Soviet Union. The Holocaust was most successful in countries that already had a long tradition of anti-Semitism.
If you add up the numbers of people killed in the extermination camps at Belsec, Chelmno, Lublin, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka in the Government-General of Central Poland, the numbers add up to about 500,000 or 600,000. Probably only a minority of the victims of Hitler's "Final Solution" died in the extermination camps of the Government-General. Only a minority died at Auschwitz, maybe 1.5 million, which was a combination extermination facility like those of the Government-General, and a concentration, or labour, camp like Dachau.
However, it is accepted by most reputable Holocaust historians that a decision to exterminate the Jews was made at a Nazi party conference in Wannsee, Germany, in 1942. The Nazis simply lacked the means to carry out their plans, because they were involved in a war on two fronts against the Allies and the Soviets.
However, this writer does not want to see pamphlets like Ernst Zundel's suppressed, because there is no need. There are too many eye-witness accounts and too much documentation for naysayers like Zundel to be credible: there was a Holocaust. As well, it gives Holocaust historians the opportunity to answer the question: how did 6 million Jews die in the Holocaust.
This writer believes that the majority died in places like the Warsaw Ghetto — due to starvation, disease, and the cold of winter — as well as in places like Babi Yar in Kiev. Even without the concentration camps, there was still a Nazi holocaust. It could be that more than 6 million died in the Holocaust.
But if Canadians wish to remain a free and democratic people, they would do well to remember these words attributed to Voltaire: "I may disagree with everything that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
In a democracy, even people like Ernst Zundel have freedom of speech.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Tales of the Iraqi Reconstruction
The war in Iraq is over. I repeat: the war is over, and the United States and its coalition can declare victory and go home. The Iraqi army has been beaten and Saddam Hussein has been hung. What lingers now is the Iraqi reconstruction. It is this reconstruction that has claimed the vast majority of the 4,000 US troops and at least ten times that number of Iraqis killed in the five years since the war started and ended.
Of course, I have redefined the terms, but I have done so only in the historical context of war and reconstruction. After Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox and ended the US Civil War, the United States government began its reconstruction of the vanquished South. Similarly, the victorious Allies began their reconstruction of the prostrate Third Reich after Alfred Jodl surrendered to Dwight D. Eisenhower. The reconstruction of the old Confederacy was largely a failure, whereas the reconstruction of Nazi Germany allowed Germany to rise from the ashes like a phoenix and become the pre-eminent economic power of postwar Europe.
Will the reconstruction in Iraq be a failure? It depends on who handles the reconstruction after the US elections in November. The Democrats did better in Germany after World War II than the Republicans did in the South after the Civil War. Russia is still a mess because the Republicans under Reagan "won" the Cold War, then left the reconstruction to the first George Bush.
In the February 6, 2003 edition of Le Monde, columnist Thierry de Montbrial warned that, while the United States had a grand design for a postwar Iraq, it no plan on how to go about achieving it. Well, actually, the Department of Defence had a plan: to install Ahmed Chalabi as president. It didn't bother anybody that Chalabi hadn't lived in Iraq for more than 40 years, but when everybody found out that he was the primary source of "intelligence" about the weapons of mass destruction — that he probably lied about the weapons of mass destruction — the Bush administration couldn't very well present him as a candidate to be Iraq's new president. So the best laid plans of mice and men were out a Pentagon window.
Chalabi was Plan A. Unfortunately, there was no Plan B at the Pentagon. Sensing that there was a real vacuum, the Iraqis were soon looting and settling old scores in Baghdad. The toppling of Saddam's statue was just the beginning. How many miles to the gallon does a car in Iraq get? Enough to hit its target and explode. I don't know why the insurgents didn't think to buy as many Ford Pintos from the '70s as they could, because those cars exploded on impact too, if you hit them in the rear. I don't know, maybe they don't how to drive in reverse. But those guys at the DOD needn't have worried: the insurgents didn't have a Plan B either; you don't see very many Ford Pintos around Baghdad.
Remember, folks, this is the reconstruction, not the war. The US military marched into Iraq straight to its target — Baghdad — like parts on a fast conveyor belt. Nobody in his or her right mind wants to oppose a military on the battlefield that has enough fire power to blow up the moon, and Iraqi Revolutionary Guards were apparently in their right minds. No, they decided to blend in with the crowd that was toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi message has always been: "You respect us, we respect you." When the US High Commissioner in Iraq, Paul Bremer, tried to cut out all former Iraqi Baathists from the postwar government, the Baathists felt disrespected. That was the first insurgency, the Baathist insurgency. The first battle of Fallujah ended inconclusively (at least the Marines that fought it think it ended inconclusively). After the second battle of Fallujah, the Marines had the Baathists on the run (at least the Marines think they had them on the run), and the Baathists felt respected again.
The second insurgency was started by Al-Qaida In Iraq. These were Sunnis who looked at the struggle as one of Islam against the infidel, not just Iraq against the US. Of course, the AQI insurgency was really directed by Al-Qaida outside of Iraq, but after their leader, a Jordanian by the name of Al-Zarqawi, was killed, the members of Al-Qaida both in and outside of Iraq felt respected again.
To make sure that the Sunnis of Anbar Province that supported Al-Qaida continued to feel respected, the US military started its "surge" in January under General David Petraeus. Now you have the Army and the Marines out on patrol like police officers walking a beat. It doesn't hurt that Petraeus started making nice with the Sunni sheiks in Anbar Province after they become disenchanted with Al-Qaida.
But remember, folks, this is the reconstruction, not the war. When those tanks drove all the way to Baghdad practically unopposed, the palm trees in the desert made obeisance. Nobody in his or her right mind wants to oppose a military on the battlefield with the power to destroy all life on the planet and make it look like the moon (or Iraq). The palm trees were in their right minds.
Now Muqtada al-Sadra, the leading Shiite cleric, has been complaining about getting no respect and has turned his militia, the Mahdi Army, loose. Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Malaki decided to show him some respect by sending in the army and the police into Basra and "Sadra City" in Baghdad. It turns out that some of the police in Basra were members of the Mahdi Army, but the army and the police in Baghdad have Sadra City surrounded. Right now, everybody is waiting for Muqtada al-Sadra's "spiritual advisors" in Iran to tell him if he has gotten enough respect.
If that doesn't make Muqtada al-Sadra the agent of a foreign government, I don't know what does. If I was waiting for word from Cuba's Raul Castro (see "Obituary For Fidel Castro) on whether or not I should write this blog entry, everybody would think I was working for the Cubans.
Remember, folks, this is the reconstruction. When coalition troops made a stop in the Shiite south to get some gas for their tanks, the Shiite clerics greeted the US and British troops with arms folded across their chests, scowling. If looks could kill, US casualties in Iraq might be double or triple what they are today. If you believe the photographs in magazines like Newsweek, Muqtada al-Sadra has a look that could wipe out whole divisions.
The Shiites remember how the coalition did nothing when they rose up in revolt against Saddam Hussein during the war in Kuwait and got cut down. This writer remembers seeing the video of the inside of an Iraqi hospital under bombardment by the Revolutionary Guards. Just before the Baathists (apparently) destroyed their target, a woman waved her arms frantically in the air and screamed, "We can't cope!" But the video was in subtitles: this writer doesn't speak Arabic.
Face to face with an enemy having the ability to land beachheads at Normandy, Anzio and North Africa at the same, the Shiites in Basra knew that they couldn't cope very well with a full frontal assault by the Marines any better than they could against Saddam. They were in their right minds — at least then.
To quote an obscure song by Led Zeppelin, "The Battle of Evermore": "The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath."
This is the reconstruction, and it has cost the US — and the entire world— more than both wars in Iraq combined. The US will have to declare victory and go home, eventually.
The war is over.
Of course, I have redefined the terms, but I have done so only in the historical context of war and reconstruction. After Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox and ended the US Civil War, the United States government began its reconstruction of the vanquished South. Similarly, the victorious Allies began their reconstruction of the prostrate Third Reich after Alfred Jodl surrendered to Dwight D. Eisenhower. The reconstruction of the old Confederacy was largely a failure, whereas the reconstruction of Nazi Germany allowed Germany to rise from the ashes like a phoenix and become the pre-eminent economic power of postwar Europe.
Will the reconstruction in Iraq be a failure? It depends on who handles the reconstruction after the US elections in November. The Democrats did better in Germany after World War II than the Republicans did in the South after the Civil War. Russia is still a mess because the Republicans under Reagan "won" the Cold War, then left the reconstruction to the first George Bush.
In the February 6, 2003 edition of Le Monde, columnist Thierry de Montbrial warned that, while the United States had a grand design for a postwar Iraq, it no plan on how to go about achieving it. Well, actually, the Department of Defence had a plan: to install Ahmed Chalabi as president. It didn't bother anybody that Chalabi hadn't lived in Iraq for more than 40 years, but when everybody found out that he was the primary source of "intelligence" about the weapons of mass destruction — that he probably lied about the weapons of mass destruction — the Bush administration couldn't very well present him as a candidate to be Iraq's new president. So the best laid plans of mice and men were out a Pentagon window.
Chalabi was Plan A. Unfortunately, there was no Plan B at the Pentagon. Sensing that there was a real vacuum, the Iraqis were soon looting and settling old scores in Baghdad. The toppling of Saddam's statue was just the beginning. How many miles to the gallon does a car in Iraq get? Enough to hit its target and explode. I don't know why the insurgents didn't think to buy as many Ford Pintos from the '70s as they could, because those cars exploded on impact too, if you hit them in the rear. I don't know, maybe they don't how to drive in reverse. But those guys at the DOD needn't have worried: the insurgents didn't have a Plan B either; you don't see very many Ford Pintos around Baghdad.
Remember, folks, this is the reconstruction, not the war. The US military marched into Iraq straight to its target — Baghdad — like parts on a fast conveyor belt. Nobody in his or her right mind wants to oppose a military on the battlefield that has enough fire power to blow up the moon, and Iraqi Revolutionary Guards were apparently in their right minds. No, they decided to blend in with the crowd that was toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi message has always been: "You respect us, we respect you." When the US High Commissioner in Iraq, Paul Bremer, tried to cut out all former Iraqi Baathists from the postwar government, the Baathists felt disrespected. That was the first insurgency, the Baathist insurgency. The first battle of Fallujah ended inconclusively (at least the Marines that fought it think it ended inconclusively). After the second battle of Fallujah, the Marines had the Baathists on the run (at least the Marines think they had them on the run), and the Baathists felt respected again.
The second insurgency was started by Al-Qaida In Iraq. These were Sunnis who looked at the struggle as one of Islam against the infidel, not just Iraq against the US. Of course, the AQI insurgency was really directed by Al-Qaida outside of Iraq, but after their leader, a Jordanian by the name of Al-Zarqawi, was killed, the members of Al-Qaida both in and outside of Iraq felt respected again.
To make sure that the Sunnis of Anbar Province that supported Al-Qaida continued to feel respected, the US military started its "surge" in January under General David Petraeus. Now you have the Army and the Marines out on patrol like police officers walking a beat. It doesn't hurt that Petraeus started making nice with the Sunni sheiks in Anbar Province after they become disenchanted with Al-Qaida.
But remember, folks, this is the reconstruction, not the war. When those tanks drove all the way to Baghdad practically unopposed, the palm trees in the desert made obeisance. Nobody in his or her right mind wants to oppose a military on the battlefield with the power to destroy all life on the planet and make it look like the moon (or Iraq). The palm trees were in their right minds.
Now Muqtada al-Sadra, the leading Shiite cleric, has been complaining about getting no respect and has turned his militia, the Mahdi Army, loose. Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Malaki decided to show him some respect by sending in the army and the police into Basra and "Sadra City" in Baghdad. It turns out that some of the police in Basra were members of the Mahdi Army, but the army and the police in Baghdad have Sadra City surrounded. Right now, everybody is waiting for Muqtada al-Sadra's "spiritual advisors" in Iran to tell him if he has gotten enough respect.
If that doesn't make Muqtada al-Sadra the agent of a foreign government, I don't know what does. If I was waiting for word from Cuba's Raul Castro (see "Obituary For Fidel Castro) on whether or not I should write this blog entry, everybody would think I was working for the Cubans.
Remember, folks, this is the reconstruction. When coalition troops made a stop in the Shiite south to get some gas for their tanks, the Shiite clerics greeted the US and British troops with arms folded across their chests, scowling. If looks could kill, US casualties in Iraq might be double or triple what they are today. If you believe the photographs in magazines like Newsweek, Muqtada al-Sadra has a look that could wipe out whole divisions.
The Shiites remember how the coalition did nothing when they rose up in revolt against Saddam Hussein during the war in Kuwait and got cut down. This writer remembers seeing the video of the inside of an Iraqi hospital under bombardment by the Revolutionary Guards. Just before the Baathists (apparently) destroyed their target, a woman waved her arms frantically in the air and screamed, "We can't cope!" But the video was in subtitles: this writer doesn't speak Arabic.
Face to face with an enemy having the ability to land beachheads at Normandy, Anzio and North Africa at the same, the Shiites in Basra knew that they couldn't cope very well with a full frontal assault by the Marines any better than they could against Saddam. They were in their right minds — at least then.
To quote an obscure song by Led Zeppelin, "The Battle of Evermore": "The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath."
This is the reconstruction, and it has cost the US — and the entire world— more than both wars in Iraq combined. The US will have to declare victory and go home, eventually.
The war is over.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Goodbye, Poverty!
What happened to communism in Russia? Foreign companies are free to invest their money in the Russian economy now. The Russians are free to make money hand over fist. That's capitalism, isn't it? Its glasnost and perestroika, the end of the welfare state in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is as if the Russians have lost a war against the West, the way the Russian economy is now a shambles. But things are really moving here.
Anna is a woman of a certain age, born in Baku, over forty, divorced, the mother of a teenage daughter who is not yet sixteen. She is a secondary school teacher, but she sees an ad in a newspaper: a foreign company is looking for a translator who speaks English and French. Anna fits the bill: she speaks English, French and German as well as Russian. What's more, the job pays more money than a teacher's job.
For the interview, she meets Mr. Chernier, who is the owner of the company. Born in Montreal, Mr. Chernier is over fifty, but he possesses a certain charm. After the interview, while holding her hand, he says to her in a low voice: "What beautiful eyes you have, Madame!" Then he plants a little kiss on her hand.
Anna blushes very much, but she manages to say thank you. Of course, she gets the job as translator for Mr. Chevrier. The moment that Mr. Chernier asks Anna to have dinner with her, to sleep with him, she says yes and kisses him on the mouth. She will spend many nights at his place, in a little dacha in the countryside. She will learn to speak French better, as well as English. While making love to her, he always says that he loves her entire body, which is pleasantly plump. She will bloom like a flower in the little dacha, because he knows how to treat a woman. As well, he knows that the only difference between age and youth is experience.
It isn't love, it isn't even sex that makes her do it. No, it's hunger. Although Anna has a college degree, she lives with her daughter in a little apartment without much to eat in the refrigerator. Her ex-husband neither sees nor supports their daughter; he's merely a drunk. At night then, Anna sleeps on a hard sofa in the little living room while Natasha sleeps in the little bedroom. Its rare that the water in the little bathroom and the little kitchen is hot. Every morning, nearly every day, they are hungry.
Ever the skeptic, the little cynic, Natasha doesn't like Mr. Chernier at first. The way she sees it, her mother is only fooling herself if she thinks that Mr. Chernier is going to marry her. However, she knows that her mother isn't going to listen to her advice. Besides, he's teaching her to drive his brand new car. When she needs an abortion, he gladly pays for it. Then he lets them live with him in his beautiful little dacha in the countryside. Maybe Mr. Chernier isn't such a bad guy: it seems that he and her mother are really hitting it off. But little Natasha gives her mother this advice: "Get some money from him!"
Now, Anna and Natasha are Jewish. Though Mr. Chernier isn't Jewish, Anna invites him to spend a Passover seder on the Sabbath with her parents; he accepts the invitation. It's an interesting experience. Everybody really gets drunk, including Natasha, who is only a teenager. Mr. Chernier seems to like Anna's family. Her family seems to like him. Maybe their relationship is getting serious. They even kiss under the mezuzah.
Alas, it will never happen: they will never get married. Mr. Chernier leaves Russia for good when his wife in Canada is stricken with a sudden illness. Of course, Anna is dumbstruck; she didn't know that he was married. He says that he's sorry, but she gives him a good slap in the face.
The hard reality is this: Anna and Natasha have to leave the beautiful little dacha in the countryside; somebody has been renting it to Mr. Chernier. Without jobs, without an apartment, Anna and Natasha have to live with some relatives until they find jobs and an apartment.
It's hello poverty again!
Anna is a woman of a certain age, born in Baku, over forty, divorced, the mother of a teenage daughter who is not yet sixteen. She is a secondary school teacher, but she sees an ad in a newspaper: a foreign company is looking for a translator who speaks English and French. Anna fits the bill: she speaks English, French and German as well as Russian. What's more, the job pays more money than a teacher's job.
For the interview, she meets Mr. Chernier, who is the owner of the company. Born in Montreal, Mr. Chernier is over fifty, but he possesses a certain charm. After the interview, while holding her hand, he says to her in a low voice: "What beautiful eyes you have, Madame!" Then he plants a little kiss on her hand.
Anna blushes very much, but she manages to say thank you. Of course, she gets the job as translator for Mr. Chevrier. The moment that Mr. Chernier asks Anna to have dinner with her, to sleep with him, she says yes and kisses him on the mouth. She will spend many nights at his place, in a little dacha in the countryside. She will learn to speak French better, as well as English. While making love to her, he always says that he loves her entire body, which is pleasantly plump. She will bloom like a flower in the little dacha, because he knows how to treat a woman. As well, he knows that the only difference between age and youth is experience.
It isn't love, it isn't even sex that makes her do it. No, it's hunger. Although Anna has a college degree, she lives with her daughter in a little apartment without much to eat in the refrigerator. Her ex-husband neither sees nor supports their daughter; he's merely a drunk. At night then, Anna sleeps on a hard sofa in the little living room while Natasha sleeps in the little bedroom. Its rare that the water in the little bathroom and the little kitchen is hot. Every morning, nearly every day, they are hungry.
Ever the skeptic, the little cynic, Natasha doesn't like Mr. Chernier at first. The way she sees it, her mother is only fooling herself if she thinks that Mr. Chernier is going to marry her. However, she knows that her mother isn't going to listen to her advice. Besides, he's teaching her to drive his brand new car. When she needs an abortion, he gladly pays for it. Then he lets them live with him in his beautiful little dacha in the countryside. Maybe Mr. Chernier isn't such a bad guy: it seems that he and her mother are really hitting it off. But little Natasha gives her mother this advice: "Get some money from him!"
Now, Anna and Natasha are Jewish. Though Mr. Chernier isn't Jewish, Anna invites him to spend a Passover seder on the Sabbath with her parents; he accepts the invitation. It's an interesting experience. Everybody really gets drunk, including Natasha, who is only a teenager. Mr. Chernier seems to like Anna's family. Her family seems to like him. Maybe their relationship is getting serious. They even kiss under the mezuzah.
Alas, it will never happen: they will never get married. Mr. Chernier leaves Russia for good when his wife in Canada is stricken with a sudden illness. Of course, Anna is dumbstruck; she didn't know that he was married. He says that he's sorry, but she gives him a good slap in the face.
The hard reality is this: Anna and Natasha have to leave the beautiful little dacha in the countryside; somebody has been renting it to Mr. Chernier. Without jobs, without an apartment, Anna and Natasha have to live with some relatives until they find jobs and an apartment.
It's hello poverty again!
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Another Look at 1984
Probably most people born after World War II are familiar with George Orwell's landmark 1948 novel 1984. In this novel, Orwell presents a world where the governments knows your innermost thoughts even before you do. The "wrong" facial expression caught on the "telescreen" can result in you being convicted of a "thought crime," which is the crime of thinking the "wrong" thoughts.
The protagonist, Winston Hill, is a lower-level civil servant in the service of Big Brother in the futuristic state of Oceana (which is Britain, Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world). His world is turned upside down when he falls in love with Julia, another civil servant. They have regular rendezvous and compare notes, but they are denounced by another civil servant, O'Brien, who pretends to be their friend. In the end, they realize that they cannot win and end up denouncing each other. Big Brother's victory is complete when Winston loves him again. After that, it is safe to liquidate him, because you can't liquidate someone until you have won him back to your side.
Thanks to Orwell, most of us have some concept of "thought crime." However, we still don't understand how a would-be führer invites himself over as a guest and makes himself master of the household. The answer, in part, is that the despot cleans up the mess that the politicians make, and the citizens allow the politicians to make. Things got so bad in the Weimar Republic that the Germans were willing to give Hitler and his stormtrooopers free rein. But that's only part of the answer.
What democracies have in common with totalitarian regimes is that the majority of the people in jail are criminals. This was true in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein as well as in the United States. Most of the "boat people" that Fidel Castro deported from Cuba in the 1970s — the Marielitos — were the kind that anybody would like to deport: hardened criminals. The largest branch of the SS in the Third Reich was the Kripo, or "criminal police." The Kripo not only included every beat cop in Germany, but every cop in Nazi-occupied Europe as well.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn mentions in his Gulag Archipelago that political prisoners were thrown in with hardened criminals. The dissidents were at the mercy of these felons because they were in the minority. Most of the people exiled to Siberia in the 1930s were rapists, murders and thieves, not political subversives. What's more, most of them didn't come from very far away from where they lived, maybe only a hundred miles or less. Most of the dissidents in Moscow were sent to Lubianka Prison, which was just outside the city.
In the totalitarian state, it is not a question of freedom but of crime and punishment. Most undesirables in dictatorships would be undesirables in democracies as well.
Unfortunately, we are not made cognizant of that in 1984. You would think that nobody shoplifts in Oceana or breaks into other people's homes while they are away. There's no mention of people arrested for loitering around London opium dens or trying to smuggle hashish through customs at Heathrow Airport. Nobody commits murder, except for the state. Big Brother only prosecutes people for wanting to overthrow the government, at least in the world according to Orwell.
If it was possible to read people's minds, the prosecutor with evidence that a man was contemplating rape, for example, would be obliged to prosecute, wouldn't he? This has nothing to do with civil liberties or "freedom of thought"; it is a question of public safety. It is one thing to contemplate voting for the opposition party in an election; it is another to think of harming a fellow citizen. With rights come responsibilities.
Invariably, dictators come to power through quasi-legal means; usually, there's a crisis that precipitates their takeover. In the "Kornilov Affair," Lenin and the Bolsheviks moved to prevent a tsarist general, Lavr Kornilov, from mounting a coup and emerged the strongest party in the Russian Duma just before the October Revolution. Mussolini overthrew the Italian government to "prevent" a communist takeover. The Nazis set fire to the Reichstag and blamed it on the communists. The list goes on and on.
Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Most dictators have been fiery demagogues who suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus in the name of values that the people hold most dear: God and country, law and order, life and liberty, whatever. They promise more police protection in order to deal with the "crisis" and throw the bad guys in jail. They don't go to the people and say: "I'm your new dictator, so get used to it."
In 1984, you get a bleak picture of life in a totalitarian dictatorship, but not of how things got to be the way they are now. There's a sense of permanence, like that's the way it's always been. There's no Reichstag fire or "July Days" preceding the coup d'état, just the mention of a clique of party apparachiks who have fallen out of favour trying to overthrow Big Brother after the fact of Big Brother's takeover. Sort of like the fallout between Stalin and Trotsky after Lenin's death in 1924.
George Orwell, who was born in Britain — one of the great democracies — hints at a perpetual war — like maybe World War II, which then proceded into the cold war with barely a pause. Other than the fact that Big Brother's image is every where, he seems to be a leader entirely without personality, like George W. Bush in the US, Stephen Harper in Canada, and Gordon Brown in Britain. Gone is the fiery demogoque like Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini. The world today is a corporate state run by faceless men in business suits who make their decisions in corporate board rooms in secret.
This runs entirely contrary to the theory of democracy, because in a democracy, power is at the base of the pyramid (at least in theory). In hierarchies like the corporation, the military or churches, shit rolls downhill.
The world today finds itself in the midst of a vague "war on terror," where the terrorists are not seen as criminals in the conventional sense, but certainly not seen as soldiers when captured in battle either. They are seen as outside both the Geneva Convention and the jurisdiction of the World Court, which means that nobody knows what to do with them. As well, most of the parties involved are nameless and faceless, leaders as well as followers.
In the aftermath of 9/11, it might be more useful to know how something arguably well-intentioned like the Patriot Act could be used to destroy civil liberties and impose totalitarianism on an unsuspecting populace — or a populace that knows what's going on but is afraid or feels powerless to act. It might be useful to know why we can't look past temporary crises and see what we might be throwing away, like our freedom. We already know that Big Brother is watching us.
What makes the cult of personality surrounding Big Brother possible in 1984 is technology. Just as we are surrounded by surveillance cameras everywhere today, sixty years after 1984 was published, there are telescreens everywhere in Orwell's Oceana. Neither Hitler nor Stalin had the means to watch the people ruled by them like George W. Bush does today; such powers was only the hands of a fictional dictator like Big Brother — only dreamed of by someone like Orwell back in 1948.
Of course, technology does not a tyrant make. Otherwise, the technology at Abraham Lincoln's disposal during the US Civil War would have made him, by definition, more of a despot than the mad Roman emperor, Caligula, in the first century BC. Besides, it is the market place that benefits most from new technology. New inventions like the iPod have resulted in the start-up of new industries that didn't exist only a short time ago, and this has created economic growth as a whole. However, technology has the potential to give somebody like Caligula the means by which to take an empire by the neck and sever the head. That's a lot of power.
The temptation surrounding 1984 has always been to accept it as immutable prophecy when it really reads more like a cautionary tale (along with Orwell's fable, Animal Farm.) If the stakes weren't so serious, one might be tempted to look at Winston and Julia's inevitable demise as something laughable, the well-deserved fate of the gullible. Today, we think that it takes a certain naïvité to ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. However, somebody will probably resurrect this quote someday and use it in a speech, just as John F. Kennedy borrowed it from Cicero for his inauguration speech in 1961.
And so I leave you with the words from Shakespeare that inspired another cautionary tale of creeping totalitarianism by Aldous Huxley:
"O wonder, what goodly creatures there are! O brave new world that has such people in't!"
Brave new world indeed! We must control technology rather than let it control us, or let our leaders control us through it.
The protagonist, Winston Hill, is a lower-level civil servant in the service of Big Brother in the futuristic state of Oceana (which is Britain, Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world). His world is turned upside down when he falls in love with Julia, another civil servant. They have regular rendezvous and compare notes, but they are denounced by another civil servant, O'Brien, who pretends to be their friend. In the end, they realize that they cannot win and end up denouncing each other. Big Brother's victory is complete when Winston loves him again. After that, it is safe to liquidate him, because you can't liquidate someone until you have won him back to your side.
Thanks to Orwell, most of us have some concept of "thought crime." However, we still don't understand how a would-be führer invites himself over as a guest and makes himself master of the household. The answer, in part, is that the despot cleans up the mess that the politicians make, and the citizens allow the politicians to make. Things got so bad in the Weimar Republic that the Germans were willing to give Hitler and his stormtrooopers free rein. But that's only part of the answer.
What democracies have in common with totalitarian regimes is that the majority of the people in jail are criminals. This was true in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein as well as in the United States. Most of the "boat people" that Fidel Castro deported from Cuba in the 1970s — the Marielitos — were the kind that anybody would like to deport: hardened criminals. The largest branch of the SS in the Third Reich was the Kripo, or "criminal police." The Kripo not only included every beat cop in Germany, but every cop in Nazi-occupied Europe as well.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn mentions in his Gulag Archipelago that political prisoners were thrown in with hardened criminals. The dissidents were at the mercy of these felons because they were in the minority. Most of the people exiled to Siberia in the 1930s were rapists, murders and thieves, not political subversives. What's more, most of them didn't come from very far away from where they lived, maybe only a hundred miles or less. Most of the dissidents in Moscow were sent to Lubianka Prison, which was just outside the city.
In the totalitarian state, it is not a question of freedom but of crime and punishment. Most undesirables in dictatorships would be undesirables in democracies as well.
Unfortunately, we are not made cognizant of that in 1984. You would think that nobody shoplifts in Oceana or breaks into other people's homes while they are away. There's no mention of people arrested for loitering around London opium dens or trying to smuggle hashish through customs at Heathrow Airport. Nobody commits murder, except for the state. Big Brother only prosecutes people for wanting to overthrow the government, at least in the world according to Orwell.
If it was possible to read people's minds, the prosecutor with evidence that a man was contemplating rape, for example, would be obliged to prosecute, wouldn't he? This has nothing to do with civil liberties or "freedom of thought"; it is a question of public safety. It is one thing to contemplate voting for the opposition party in an election; it is another to think of harming a fellow citizen. With rights come responsibilities.
Invariably, dictators come to power through quasi-legal means; usually, there's a crisis that precipitates their takeover. In the "Kornilov Affair," Lenin and the Bolsheviks moved to prevent a tsarist general, Lavr Kornilov, from mounting a coup and emerged the strongest party in the Russian Duma just before the October Revolution. Mussolini overthrew the Italian government to "prevent" a communist takeover. The Nazis set fire to the Reichstag and blamed it on the communists. The list goes on and on.
Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Most dictators have been fiery demagogues who suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus in the name of values that the people hold most dear: God and country, law and order, life and liberty, whatever. They promise more police protection in order to deal with the "crisis" and throw the bad guys in jail. They don't go to the people and say: "I'm your new dictator, so get used to it."
In 1984, you get a bleak picture of life in a totalitarian dictatorship, but not of how things got to be the way they are now. There's a sense of permanence, like that's the way it's always been. There's no Reichstag fire or "July Days" preceding the coup d'état, just the mention of a clique of party apparachiks who have fallen out of favour trying to overthrow Big Brother after the fact of Big Brother's takeover. Sort of like the fallout between Stalin and Trotsky after Lenin's death in 1924.
George Orwell, who was born in Britain — one of the great democracies — hints at a perpetual war — like maybe World War II, which then proceded into the cold war with barely a pause. Other than the fact that Big Brother's image is every where, he seems to be a leader entirely without personality, like George W. Bush in the US, Stephen Harper in Canada, and Gordon Brown in Britain. Gone is the fiery demogoque like Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini. The world today is a corporate state run by faceless men in business suits who make their decisions in corporate board rooms in secret.
This runs entirely contrary to the theory of democracy, because in a democracy, power is at the base of the pyramid (at least in theory). In hierarchies like the corporation, the military or churches, shit rolls downhill.
The world today finds itself in the midst of a vague "war on terror," where the terrorists are not seen as criminals in the conventional sense, but certainly not seen as soldiers when captured in battle either. They are seen as outside both the Geneva Convention and the jurisdiction of the World Court, which means that nobody knows what to do with them. As well, most of the parties involved are nameless and faceless, leaders as well as followers.
In the aftermath of 9/11, it might be more useful to know how something arguably well-intentioned like the Patriot Act could be used to destroy civil liberties and impose totalitarianism on an unsuspecting populace — or a populace that knows what's going on but is afraid or feels powerless to act. It might be useful to know why we can't look past temporary crises and see what we might be throwing away, like our freedom. We already know that Big Brother is watching us.
What makes the cult of personality surrounding Big Brother possible in 1984 is technology. Just as we are surrounded by surveillance cameras everywhere today, sixty years after 1984 was published, there are telescreens everywhere in Orwell's Oceana. Neither Hitler nor Stalin had the means to watch the people ruled by them like George W. Bush does today; such powers was only the hands of a fictional dictator like Big Brother — only dreamed of by someone like Orwell back in 1948.
Of course, technology does not a tyrant make. Otherwise, the technology at Abraham Lincoln's disposal during the US Civil War would have made him, by definition, more of a despot than the mad Roman emperor, Caligula, in the first century BC. Besides, it is the market place that benefits most from new technology. New inventions like the iPod have resulted in the start-up of new industries that didn't exist only a short time ago, and this has created economic growth as a whole. However, technology has the potential to give somebody like Caligula the means by which to take an empire by the neck and sever the head. That's a lot of power.
The temptation surrounding 1984 has always been to accept it as immutable prophecy when it really reads more like a cautionary tale (along with Orwell's fable, Animal Farm.) If the stakes weren't so serious, one might be tempted to look at Winston and Julia's inevitable demise as something laughable, the well-deserved fate of the gullible. Today, we think that it takes a certain naïvité to ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. However, somebody will probably resurrect this quote someday and use it in a speech, just as John F. Kennedy borrowed it from Cicero for his inauguration speech in 1961.
And so I leave you with the words from Shakespeare that inspired another cautionary tale of creeping totalitarianism by Aldous Huxley:
"O wonder, what goodly creatures there are! O brave new world that has such people in't!"
Brave new world indeed! We must control technology rather than let it control us, or let our leaders control us through it.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Obituary For Fidel Castro
When do you write an obituary for a man who's still alive? When, for all intents and purposes, that man might as well be dead. That's why I'm writing this obit for Fidel Castro. By stepping down as El Jefe and turning the helm over to his brother, Raul, after ruling Cuba for 49 years, Fidel Castro has retired from history. The only thing to do now is to throw sand over him.
Because Castro was such a controversial figure, it is difficult to write a dispassionate obituary of him. The mere mention of the name "Fidel" is enough to bring out the shape-shifter in Cuban-Americans. Though I thought that the few Cuban-Americans that I have met were nice and agreeable, I thought it wise to hold out a silver cross the next time I wanted to talk politics with those people. The way the Cuban community acted during the Elian Gonzales affair was downright bizarre.
So let's address first why anti-Castro Cubans are, well, so anti-Castro. The obvious answer is that he was a brutal dictator, what the Latin Americans call a caudillo. You could enjoy the benefits of Cuba's "people's democracy" if you agreed with him completely. But if you were even mildly critical of him, you could find yourself in the moldy old dungeon of a Spanish fortress built in the 1500s. As well, you don't get elected by 99.99 per cent of the vote year after year by allowing any opposition at the polls. El Cuba libre wasn't so libre even by Latin American standards. Castro was the little tail(el caudillo) that wagged the dog.
That being said, Castro didn't liquidate all of his perceived enemies within the Communist Party of Cuba like Joseph Stalin did with the old Bolsheviks in Russia; he was much smarter than that. He merely told Che Guevara to go start a revolution somewhere else in Latin America, and Guevara ended up being shot by a Bolivian firing squad in 1967. (The Bolivians sent Guevara's hands back to Castro to confirm that reports of Che's death weren't exaggerated.)
But to get a more well-rounded picture of this scraggily bearded, cigar-chomping generalísimo in cammies, you have to examine his appeal as well. I mean, why put up with this guy for nearly 50 years? Why listen to him rant and rave for nearly four hours every time he spoke in public (or on the telephone)? Answer: a four-hour break from chopping sugar cane all is better than no break at all.
This writer still subscribes to the theory that angry farmers with pitchforks can make a difference, once they have had enough. Look at what those people who stormed the Bastille and the Tuileries accomplished during the French Revolution: they accomplished regime change. Marie-Antoinette doesn't fit anybody's definition of a survivor, political or otherwise.
Personally, Castro had a charisma, with women to the right of him and women to the left of him. Foreign reporters found him engaging, despite his tendency to "talk your ear off." When US President Dwight D. Eisenhower told his vice-president, Richard M. Nixon, to check this guy out while he was in the US on a fundraising tour in 1958, Nixon concluded that Castro was for real, "naïve but sincere." Nixon had only intended to talk with Fidel for about 15 minutes, but ended up talking with him for two hours, because they ended up on Fidel Castro Time, where 15 minutes can go two hours and beyond.
Nixon didn't take Castro very seriously. What's more, Castro's predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, didn't take Castro very seriously either. Just a few months before he roared into Havana on New Year's Day 1959 at the head of a victorious band of rum-swigging guerrillas, he was still hiding out in Cuba's Sierra Oriental Mountains, dealing with malaria and mosquitoes. He once avoided capture by spending three days with two of his comrades, crawling around in his own feces in a flooded sugar cane field. He spent New Year's Day 1958 begging for money in Mexico City, seemingly no closer to achieving revolution than when he started in 1953.
But if Americans have ever cheered lustily for anybody, it's the underdog: that why baseball fans outside of New York hate to see the New York Yankees win the World Series, and pull for the Chicago Cubs. Americans were initially praying that Castro "was on our side" when he first came to power in 1959, only to be disappointed. He didn't want to Ike's "bastard," unlike Batista.
This writer believes that part of what kept Castro in power all these years was a "perverse symbiosis." By placing Cuba "under quarantine," the US gave Castro a scapegoat. "If you're tired and hungry and poor," he could say, "blame it on those yanquis in Washington, DC. Your lot would be better if the Americans only bought our tobacco and our sugar, and sent their kids over to Havana on spring break."
However, there is a perverse symbiosis that has served US interests as well. By treating Cuban sugar and tobacco as contraband, like Colombian cocaine and marihuana, the sugar and tobacco growers in this country have one less competitor. (The US doesn't import very much sugar from Haiti or the Dominican Republic, either.) As well, the hoteliers in Daytona Beach and the casinos in Las Vegas don't have Havana with which to compete for tourist dollars. And if you don't think the agribusinesses and the Hilton chain hotels don't have the ear of the US State Department, then I have some swampland in Cuba that I would like to sell you.
If not for the symbiosis that has kept Castro in power, the Cubans would have gotten rid of him once an alternative presented itself a long time ago. If the Cubans only had the choice of even a benevolent despot like Jesus Christ for 50 years, they would be ready to take on the devil as an alternative toute suite, despite any "accomplishments" of El Salvador.
The fact is that nobody really wanted the change: not Castro and his comrades, and not the nine US presidents who came and went while Castro remained. Castro was always able to mingle freely with Cuban campesinos, as long as there wasn't somebody else to mingle with them as well. As for those anti-castroïstas in Florida, they are of no account anyway — just easy pickings for Republican demogoguery.
Now, the US government could not let go unchallenged Castro's confiscation of over $1 billion in US holdings in 1960. No government can ever allow somebody like Castro to confiscate the property of its private citizens and corporations. If your government just shrugs its shoulders and says "easy come, easy go," it's inviting every foreign government to do the same thing to US businesses and property holders abroad. As well, private citizens wouldn't be safe either: they could be beaten up in the streets or kidnapped and held for ransom at will. It would be very embarrassing for a big country like the US to have to invade tiny Luxembourg because Americans were getting beaten up on the streets there.
That being said, let's look at some of the accomplishments of the Castro regime. Numero uno, nearly everybody born in Cuba since 1959 has gone to school. When Cuba won its independence after the Spanish-American War in 1898, its population was about 95 per cent illiterate, with many of its people recently emancipated slaves. Even in 1959, most of Cuba's children still weren't in school, because dictators like Fulgencio Batista felt no sense of urgency as long as they were propped up by the likes of Lucky Luciano. Dictators like Batista don't want their people to be able to read newspapers, you know.
Numero dos, Cuba has national health coverage — something that the US and Haiti still do not have. Cuban cities like Havana have clinics like cities in other countries have party stores or bars — they're all over the place. While Cuba may not have the latest medical technology, it's much easier for a Cuban farmer to get a broken arm set than it was 50 years ago. As well, Cuba actually has a glut of doctors. Once Cuban doctors found that they could make more money as cabana boys for European and Canadian tourists, Castro started exporting cabana boys (and girls) to Venezuela to vaccinate Venezuelan children. Before that, he sent cabana boys to Angola in the 1970s, as well as some 50,000 troops to fight anti-Marxist guerrillas.
The fact is that no country in the West would have social security today, if not for the threat of communist takeover. Otto von Bismarck gave Germany social security to head off the socialists in 1874, and Franklin D. Roosevelt presented his New Deal for the same reason in 1936. Western Europe and Japan felt no sense of urgency until after World War II, when the likelihood of a communists takeover seemed very real. Women in France didn't even have the vote until 1949, let alone social security.
The fear of a communist hiding under the bed can do a lot of good. We mustn't let those corporate fat cats get too complacent, or they'll be coming to the government with their hands out for money when times get tough.
There has to be a change in Cuba, no doubt about it. It's time for Cuba to join the rest of the world. However, Castro's biggest accomplishment is this: after 49 years, there's no going back for Cuba. Maybe the casinos and the prostitutes catering to a western clientele will return once his brother, Raul, is gone, but Cuba is no longer the backwater that it once was. Now that Cuba's population is 99 per cent literate, Cubans can do more than pick tobacco, chop sugar cane and dance to the rumba. Cuba has doctors, teachers and engineers now, as well as cabana boys for the western tourists and the Venezuelan children. That should count for something.
So here's some sand on Fidel Castro.
Because Castro was such a controversial figure, it is difficult to write a dispassionate obituary of him. The mere mention of the name "Fidel" is enough to bring out the shape-shifter in Cuban-Americans. Though I thought that the few Cuban-Americans that I have met were nice and agreeable, I thought it wise to hold out a silver cross the next time I wanted to talk politics with those people. The way the Cuban community acted during the Elian Gonzales affair was downright bizarre.
So let's address first why anti-Castro Cubans are, well, so anti-Castro. The obvious answer is that he was a brutal dictator, what the Latin Americans call a caudillo. You could enjoy the benefits of Cuba's "people's democracy" if you agreed with him completely. But if you were even mildly critical of him, you could find yourself in the moldy old dungeon of a Spanish fortress built in the 1500s. As well, you don't get elected by 99.99 per cent of the vote year after year by allowing any opposition at the polls. El Cuba libre wasn't so libre even by Latin American standards. Castro was the little tail(el caudillo) that wagged the dog.
That being said, Castro didn't liquidate all of his perceived enemies within the Communist Party of Cuba like Joseph Stalin did with the old Bolsheviks in Russia; he was much smarter than that. He merely told Che Guevara to go start a revolution somewhere else in Latin America, and Guevara ended up being shot by a Bolivian firing squad in 1967. (The Bolivians sent Guevara's hands back to Castro to confirm that reports of Che's death weren't exaggerated.)
But to get a more well-rounded picture of this scraggily bearded, cigar-chomping generalísimo in cammies, you have to examine his appeal as well. I mean, why put up with this guy for nearly 50 years? Why listen to him rant and rave for nearly four hours every time he spoke in public (or on the telephone)? Answer: a four-hour break from chopping sugar cane all is better than no break at all.
This writer still subscribes to the theory that angry farmers with pitchforks can make a difference, once they have had enough. Look at what those people who stormed the Bastille and the Tuileries accomplished during the French Revolution: they accomplished regime change. Marie-Antoinette doesn't fit anybody's definition of a survivor, political or otherwise.
Personally, Castro had a charisma, with women to the right of him and women to the left of him. Foreign reporters found him engaging, despite his tendency to "talk your ear off." When US President Dwight D. Eisenhower told his vice-president, Richard M. Nixon, to check this guy out while he was in the US on a fundraising tour in 1958, Nixon concluded that Castro was for real, "naïve but sincere." Nixon had only intended to talk with Fidel for about 15 minutes, but ended up talking with him for two hours, because they ended up on Fidel Castro Time, where 15 minutes can go two hours and beyond.
Nixon didn't take Castro very seriously. What's more, Castro's predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, didn't take Castro very seriously either. Just a few months before he roared into Havana on New Year's Day 1959 at the head of a victorious band of rum-swigging guerrillas, he was still hiding out in Cuba's Sierra Oriental Mountains, dealing with malaria and mosquitoes. He once avoided capture by spending three days with two of his comrades, crawling around in his own feces in a flooded sugar cane field. He spent New Year's Day 1958 begging for money in Mexico City, seemingly no closer to achieving revolution than when he started in 1953.
But if Americans have ever cheered lustily for anybody, it's the underdog: that why baseball fans outside of New York hate to see the New York Yankees win the World Series, and pull for the Chicago Cubs. Americans were initially praying that Castro "was on our side" when he first came to power in 1959, only to be disappointed. He didn't want to Ike's "bastard," unlike Batista.
This writer believes that part of what kept Castro in power all these years was a "perverse symbiosis." By placing Cuba "under quarantine," the US gave Castro a scapegoat. "If you're tired and hungry and poor," he could say, "blame it on those yanquis in Washington, DC. Your lot would be better if the Americans only bought our tobacco and our sugar, and sent their kids over to Havana on spring break."
However, there is a perverse symbiosis that has served US interests as well. By treating Cuban sugar and tobacco as contraband, like Colombian cocaine and marihuana, the sugar and tobacco growers in this country have one less competitor. (The US doesn't import very much sugar from Haiti or the Dominican Republic, either.) As well, the hoteliers in Daytona Beach and the casinos in Las Vegas don't have Havana with which to compete for tourist dollars. And if you don't think the agribusinesses and the Hilton chain hotels don't have the ear of the US State Department, then I have some swampland in Cuba that I would like to sell you.
If not for the symbiosis that has kept Castro in power, the Cubans would have gotten rid of him once an alternative presented itself a long time ago. If the Cubans only had the choice of even a benevolent despot like Jesus Christ for 50 years, they would be ready to take on the devil as an alternative toute suite, despite any "accomplishments" of El Salvador.
The fact is that nobody really wanted the change: not Castro and his comrades, and not the nine US presidents who came and went while Castro remained. Castro was always able to mingle freely with Cuban campesinos, as long as there wasn't somebody else to mingle with them as well. As for those anti-castroïstas in Florida, they are of no account anyway — just easy pickings for Republican demogoguery.
Now, the US government could not let go unchallenged Castro's confiscation of over $1 billion in US holdings in 1960. No government can ever allow somebody like Castro to confiscate the property of its private citizens and corporations. If your government just shrugs its shoulders and says "easy come, easy go," it's inviting every foreign government to do the same thing to US businesses and property holders abroad. As well, private citizens wouldn't be safe either: they could be beaten up in the streets or kidnapped and held for ransom at will. It would be very embarrassing for a big country like the US to have to invade tiny Luxembourg because Americans were getting beaten up on the streets there.
That being said, let's look at some of the accomplishments of the Castro regime. Numero uno, nearly everybody born in Cuba since 1959 has gone to school. When Cuba won its independence after the Spanish-American War in 1898, its population was about 95 per cent illiterate, with many of its people recently emancipated slaves. Even in 1959, most of Cuba's children still weren't in school, because dictators like Fulgencio Batista felt no sense of urgency as long as they were propped up by the likes of Lucky Luciano. Dictators like Batista don't want their people to be able to read newspapers, you know.
Numero dos, Cuba has national health coverage — something that the US and Haiti still do not have. Cuban cities like Havana have clinics like cities in other countries have party stores or bars — they're all over the place. While Cuba may not have the latest medical technology, it's much easier for a Cuban farmer to get a broken arm set than it was 50 years ago. As well, Cuba actually has a glut of doctors. Once Cuban doctors found that they could make more money as cabana boys for European and Canadian tourists, Castro started exporting cabana boys (and girls) to Venezuela to vaccinate Venezuelan children. Before that, he sent cabana boys to Angola in the 1970s, as well as some 50,000 troops to fight anti-Marxist guerrillas.
The fact is that no country in the West would have social security today, if not for the threat of communist takeover. Otto von Bismarck gave Germany social security to head off the socialists in 1874, and Franklin D. Roosevelt presented his New Deal for the same reason in 1936. Western Europe and Japan felt no sense of urgency until after World War II, when the likelihood of a communists takeover seemed very real. Women in France didn't even have the vote until 1949, let alone social security.
The fear of a communist hiding under the bed can do a lot of good. We mustn't let those corporate fat cats get too complacent, or they'll be coming to the government with their hands out for money when times get tough.
There has to be a change in Cuba, no doubt about it. It's time for Cuba to join the rest of the world. However, Castro's biggest accomplishment is this: after 49 years, there's no going back for Cuba. Maybe the casinos and the prostitutes catering to a western clientele will return once his brother, Raul, is gone, but Cuba is no longer the backwater that it once was. Now that Cuba's population is 99 per cent literate, Cubans can do more than pick tobacco, chop sugar cane and dance to the rumba. Cuba has doctors, teachers and engineers now, as well as cabana boys for the western tourists and the Venezuelan children. That should count for something.
So here's some sand on Fidel Castro.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Review of "New Horizons" by Ordinary Mile
It was late in the autumn of 2007, and my 1998 Ford Contour was sitting there helpless in the garage, waiting for the mechanic to get to it. (I had to have it put down, folks, but that's another pair of sleeves, my Ford Contour.)
After waiting about an hour for my ride to come pick me up from work, I concluded that I would probably get home faster if I walked. The problem was that I work near Detroit Metropolitan Airport, so let this be a warning to you: If an air traffic controller sees somebody walking down Goddard Road with a guitar case, he or she might call the Michigan State Police and have them pick you up. I know, because that's what happened to me.
Somewhere on Goddard, between Vining and Middlebelt roads, I got stopped by a state trooper in an SUV with the Michigan state seal on the door, who asked me to open up my guitar case and show him what was inside. He was friendly and courteous about it, and gave me no reason to fear going to jail, unless there was a warrant out for my arrest. Since I had no unpaid traffic tickets, everything was cool. He was satisfied that I had a guitar in my case.
After the trooper explained to me why I was stopped, and I explained my situation, he gave me a ride to a British Petroleum gas station at the corner of Goddard and Middlebelt. But before he dropped me off, he left me a copy of a CD from his band, Ordinary Mile, "New Horizons." It turns out the state trooper was none other than Marty Kolakowski, guitarist, keyboardist and drummer with the band.
The personnel of Ordinary Mile at the time of this 2007 release was Kolakowski, Randy Sandusky on vocals, Steve Longworth on keyboards and guitar, and Matt Kubley on bass. Unfortunately, this was a posthumous release for Kubley. I only hope that he wasn't a state trooper killed in the line of duty.
Since I started listening to rock music as a teenager in the 1970s, the level of musicianship in rock music has really come a long way. Circa 1973, people as talented as Alex Lifeson of Rush or Steve Howe of Yes were very rare; now they're all over the place. In a very short time, some kid listening to Metallica now will come along and show that he's as good as Kirk Hammett. These kids always come along.
The challenge that faces bands today is to come up with a sound that sets them apart from the others. Because it seems like everything has been done under the sun, that's going to be hard for bands like Ordinary Mile. Shall we use a sitar? Oops, that was done in the Sixties! How about a fat synth here? That was done by Genesis in the Eighties. As for Brazilian drum ensembles backing rock or jazz bands, that started with Stan Getz in the 1950s. There was nothing new or radical done by the Tom Tom Club of Jerry Harrison and Tina Wertheimer of the Talking Heads.
All that being said, "New Horizon" owes a debt to Rush, right about the time Rush started getting into synthesizers. Ordinary Mile is no Rush clone: drummer Kolakowski doesn't have the all the drums and glockenspiels that Neal Peart of Rush had, nor does singer Sandusky sound anything like Geddy Lee. Though Ordinary Mile has two guitarists, Kolakowski and Longworth, neither of them have the same attack as Lifeson of Rush. As for bassist Kubley, his role was more traditional than Lee's: to provide a "bottom" for the music.
This is not to say that Kolakowski, Sandusky, Longworth and Kubley aren't four very competent musicians, because they are. However, the first time you play this CD, it's like you have heard it before. It's the synths, which give it a noir-ish kind of feel. If you were to think in terms of colour, black and green might be the most dominant: the black of a sky whose stars are obscured by city lights; the green from the streetlight giving off its radiation-green glow on the cover. If this CD took you anywhere (and some people are incapable of being transported anywhere by any kind of music), it might take you to a small town in the USA where the people sit home and watch reruns of "The X-Files" while city and state police patrol the roads and highways. Not much happening here, it would seem. Probably, no security guard will see an Aurora Borealis or his father's ghost tonight.
And yet a lot is happening inside each and every one of us; we just don't talk about it. You might say that "New Horizons" is more of an inward-looking CD rather than an outward one. Who is the one having the "Wicked Dreams" (the title of the first cut)? Everybody. Yet few of us share our "wicked dreams" with others, and those of us who do aren't likely to share them with others all the time. The "New Horizons" of the third cut are probably more of a personal nature rather than the "new frontier" on which President John F. Kennedy invited the whole nation to embark together in his inauguration speech in 1961. And "Marionettes," the title of the fourth cut? Hey, we have all felt like puppets on a string.
With titles like "Crash," "Hide" and "Sanctuary," it isn't difficult to figure out what these songs are about. Likewise with "Crimson Sunrise," "The Rose" and "Remember the Spirit." The protagonist of "Sanctuary" standing on a ledge is invited to "close your mind and fall back into bed," where nothing can harm you — least of all, your "wicked dreams." Because this is a new millennium, post 9/11, the listener is told to "Remember the Spirit" (the title of the tenth cut) rather than "Be True to Your School," the title of a Beach Boys tune. This isn't the Sixties anymore, with television fare like "Leave It To Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" ; this is the world of "The X-Files" and the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing like dominoes on a poster board.
Will Ordinary Mile change forever the way we listen to rock music? Probably not with this CD. What you will get is well-played music played by four competent musicians. Like a patient on the couch of a psychoanalyist, this CD will probably demand repeated listening to fully appreciate it. That's to say, you won't make a breakthrough with just one listening any more than a psychiatrist will get to the root of your problem in just one session.
This music is not for those who have an attention deficit, but no good music is. However, I would like to thank officer Kolakowski for giving me his band's CD rather than a ticket.
After waiting about an hour for my ride to come pick me up from work, I concluded that I would probably get home faster if I walked. The problem was that I work near Detroit Metropolitan Airport, so let this be a warning to you: If an air traffic controller sees somebody walking down Goddard Road with a guitar case, he or she might call the Michigan State Police and have them pick you up. I know, because that's what happened to me.
Somewhere on Goddard, between Vining and Middlebelt roads, I got stopped by a state trooper in an SUV with the Michigan state seal on the door, who asked me to open up my guitar case and show him what was inside. He was friendly and courteous about it, and gave me no reason to fear going to jail, unless there was a warrant out for my arrest. Since I had no unpaid traffic tickets, everything was cool. He was satisfied that I had a guitar in my case.
After the trooper explained to me why I was stopped, and I explained my situation, he gave me a ride to a British Petroleum gas station at the corner of Goddard and Middlebelt. But before he dropped me off, he left me a copy of a CD from his band, Ordinary Mile, "New Horizons." It turns out the state trooper was none other than Marty Kolakowski, guitarist, keyboardist and drummer with the band.
The personnel of Ordinary Mile at the time of this 2007 release was Kolakowski, Randy Sandusky on vocals, Steve Longworth on keyboards and guitar, and Matt Kubley on bass. Unfortunately, this was a posthumous release for Kubley. I only hope that he wasn't a state trooper killed in the line of duty.
Since I started listening to rock music as a teenager in the 1970s, the level of musicianship in rock music has really come a long way. Circa 1973, people as talented as Alex Lifeson of Rush or Steve Howe of Yes were very rare; now they're all over the place. In a very short time, some kid listening to Metallica now will come along and show that he's as good as Kirk Hammett. These kids always come along.
The challenge that faces bands today is to come up with a sound that sets them apart from the others. Because it seems like everything has been done under the sun, that's going to be hard for bands like Ordinary Mile. Shall we use a sitar? Oops, that was done in the Sixties! How about a fat synth here? That was done by Genesis in the Eighties. As for Brazilian drum ensembles backing rock or jazz bands, that started with Stan Getz in the 1950s. There was nothing new or radical done by the Tom Tom Club of Jerry Harrison and Tina Wertheimer of the Talking Heads.
All that being said, "New Horizon" owes a debt to Rush, right about the time Rush started getting into synthesizers. Ordinary Mile is no Rush clone: drummer Kolakowski doesn't have the all the drums and glockenspiels that Neal Peart of Rush had, nor does singer Sandusky sound anything like Geddy Lee. Though Ordinary Mile has two guitarists, Kolakowski and Longworth, neither of them have the same attack as Lifeson of Rush. As for bassist Kubley, his role was more traditional than Lee's: to provide a "bottom" for the music.
This is not to say that Kolakowski, Sandusky, Longworth and Kubley aren't four very competent musicians, because they are. However, the first time you play this CD, it's like you have heard it before. It's the synths, which give it a noir-ish kind of feel. If you were to think in terms of colour, black and green might be the most dominant: the black of a sky whose stars are obscured by city lights; the green from the streetlight giving off its radiation-green glow on the cover. If this CD took you anywhere (and some people are incapable of being transported anywhere by any kind of music), it might take you to a small town in the USA where the people sit home and watch reruns of "The X-Files" while city and state police patrol the roads and highways. Not much happening here, it would seem. Probably, no security guard will see an Aurora Borealis or his father's ghost tonight.
And yet a lot is happening inside each and every one of us; we just don't talk about it. You might say that "New Horizons" is more of an inward-looking CD rather than an outward one. Who is the one having the "Wicked Dreams" (the title of the first cut)? Everybody. Yet few of us share our "wicked dreams" with others, and those of us who do aren't likely to share them with others all the time. The "New Horizons" of the third cut are probably more of a personal nature rather than the "new frontier" on which President John F. Kennedy invited the whole nation to embark together in his inauguration speech in 1961. And "Marionettes," the title of the fourth cut? Hey, we have all felt like puppets on a string.
With titles like "Crash," "Hide" and "Sanctuary," it isn't difficult to figure out what these songs are about. Likewise with "Crimson Sunrise," "The Rose" and "Remember the Spirit." The protagonist of "Sanctuary" standing on a ledge is invited to "close your mind and fall back into bed," where nothing can harm you — least of all, your "wicked dreams." Because this is a new millennium, post 9/11, the listener is told to "Remember the Spirit" (the title of the tenth cut) rather than "Be True to Your School," the title of a Beach Boys tune. This isn't the Sixties anymore, with television fare like "Leave It To Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" ; this is the world of "The X-Files" and the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing like dominoes on a poster board.
Will Ordinary Mile change forever the way we listen to rock music? Probably not with this CD. What you will get is well-played music played by four competent musicians. Like a patient on the couch of a psychoanalyist, this CD will probably demand repeated listening to fully appreciate it. That's to say, you won't make a breakthrough with just one listening any more than a psychiatrist will get to the root of your problem in just one session.
This music is not for those who have an attention deficit, but no good music is. However, I would like to thank officer Kolakowski for giving me his band's CD rather than a ticket.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
The Glory Days of Santa Barbara
The Republic of Santa Barbara doesn't really exist, so if any natives of Santa Barbara take offence, I will be greatly surprised.
Edgardo Ortega Romero was a "man of the people," an Indian, pure blood, born in the little village of Dolores in the Santa Barbara mountains of the little Republic of Santa Barbara in Central America. Without the education of priests at a mission school, he would have been like all the other Indian villagers: penniless, illiterate. But he had a mentor, Father Junípero Sierra, and his mother understood that he was different from her other nine children: sensitive, intelligent. However, he couldn't go to university because the country didn't have one. His mother wanted him to go to a university in Europe, but it was too far away and too expensive. He grew up in poverty, you know.
So he was a simple school teacher, well-respected by the other villagers, a religious man. But he entered politics when he realized that the powerful owners of the haciendas cheated their illiterate employees by not paying them all the money that they owed them on pay day. As well, he was in love with the daughter of a landowner, Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera, who was already betrothed to Don Fernando Valenzuela Valdez.
Then he was forcibly evicted at gunpoint by a rich haciendero who wanted his meagre plot. Because of the death squads supported by the landowners, he had to hid in the jungle, where he became the head of a band of guerrillas. Edgardo Ortega Romero and his comrades became legendary, robbing banks to give money to the poor and support their cause, à la Robin Hood. Santa Barbara was tiny in comparison to Mexico, so he and his comrades often fled to Mexico and hid there, where it was safer.
In a bar in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico, Ortega met Hiram Walker, a Yankee who was looking for gold in the mountains. Now Ortega thought that Walker was just a raconteur while Walker thought that Ortega was just a dreamer. However, the two struck a deal: if Walker found his gold and financed the revolution, he would become the Minister of Mines for Santa Barbara. That is, if Ortega successfully overthrew the government of Santa Barbara. Of course, they were very drunk at the time.
Then Walker found a vein of gold in the Sierra Madres. Eureka! He was rich! With the help of Ortega and his comrades, Walker removed the gold from the mine under cover of darkness and deposited it in a bank. Then he financed Ortega's revolution: he bought weapons for Ortega and his comrades, then paid for their railroad tickets to the border of Santa Barbara. It was a small price to pay for their help, Walker thought. Once Ortega overthrow the government of Santa Barbara, he made Walker his Minister of Mines. With the revenue from the mines, Walker built a railroad across the country. So he became the Minister of Railways as well.
In the meantime, Ortega built schools and roads for his people. His beloved, Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera, became his mistress while her husband, Fernando Valenzuela Valdes, became one of his trusted lieutenants. He even consulted his old mentor, Father Junípero Sierra, from time to time. Though the rich landowners would have preferred that he take land from the church, rather than take it from them, he promised the old priest that he would never take land from the church.
However, the railroad didn't make much money for Hiram Walker. Built through dense jungle, thousands of men died of yellow fever. Many were also bitten by poisonous snakes, and a few were even eaten by jaguars. In the end, the Indians refused to do the work, and he had to hire Chinese workers from Jamaica to finish the job. However, the Chinese didn't want to go back home after the job was finished, so Santa Barbara now had a minority of Chinese who only spoke Spanish grudgingly.
As well, Ortega started to become unpopular among the people, because they were mostly poor and didn't use the railroad to transport their agricultural products to market anyway. So Ortega increasingly became a dictator and turned to the landowners that he once hated for their support; he had his own death squads, you know.
In the meantime, Hiram Walker decided to travel in Europe, where he met two persons of interest: one in London, the other in Paris. In London, he met Benny Rabino.
Now Benny Rabino was an interesting guy. A Jew born in Minsk in the Russian Empire, he was a vaudeville performer in London as a teenager. Then he found his fortune in the diamond mines of South Africa and came back to London a very rich man. He bought an estate along the Thames, married a girl from a good Jewish family, and became the father of a few children. Of course, Benny Rabino was a religious Jew: always the philanthropist, he gave lots of money to the poor in London. However, he was always looking for new ways to make money, because he was a business man.
At the Rabinos, where there was always a big party, Benny Rabino said to Hiram Walker: "Come and taste this fruit."
Rabino gave the fruit to Walker, who peeled it and tasted. Walker didn't like the taste of the fruit very much, whose skin was yellow when it was ripe. He said to Rabino frankly: "The taste is very bland. It doesn't really have a taste."
"I agree, sir," Rabino replied. "It's quite bland."
Then Rabino explained: "It's a banana, sir. It grows in the province of Natal on the eastern coast of South Africa, where it always rains. As I see it, this fruit will grow very well in Central America, where there's lots of jungle and it always rains. If you bought some property there, you could make lots of money. Your railroad, which is barely making money now, will soon begin to make money. You have my word. What do you say, sir?"
"But I don't like the taste of bananas!" Walker protested. "Who's going to buy any bananas if no one likes the taste!"
"But that's the trick, sir," Rabino explained. "If one can persuade you to taste this bland and tasteless fruit at a party, then one could persuade the public to buy this bland fruit en masse. If you sliced this fruit into little pieces, for example, you could put it in a bowl of cereal. The sky's the limit..."
Walker thought it was an intriguing idea. However, he still said nothing.
Then Rabino asked again: "What do you say, sir?"
However, Walker didn't want to make a decision hastily right now, though he was very interested.
Unfortunately, Benny Rabino suffered from severe depression from time to time. One night, under cover of the London fog, he committed suicide by jumping into the Thames and drowning himself. Thus the poor Benny Rabino couldn't be Hiram Walker's first investor.
In Paris, Walker met another interesting guy, another Russian, the Grand-Duke Igor Grigorievich Konstantinov. Now the Grand-Duke's country had been ruled by the Bolsheviks now, since the revolution in 1917. As it was the 1920s, there were a lot of Russian exiles at the time, those who preferred to drink vodka and party all night while mourning for their lost country. No matter how much they hated the Bolsheviks, they were in no hurry to return to Mother Russia. No, these beneficiaries of the largesse of the old regime preferred to complain about the "injustice" of being tossed out by their former subjects. (Of course, the bistro owners in Paris didn't like them very much, as they were always drunk and rude to the waiters.)
Now the Grand-Duke Igor Grigorievich was really dissolute. He always went out for a night on the town, always got drunk, and was easily moved by great schemes. As well, he was still young, in his thirties, while Walker was over fifty. While he couldn't stand his wife and his kids, his pretty little Parisian mistresses possessed some charm for him, but he was easily bored: he wanted some fun in his life! Walker would gladly provide some fun. Although the Grand-Duke thought that he was learned and wise, a man of the world, he was really simple and naïve.
It bears mentioning that, by now, Walker considered the president of the little Republic of Santa Barbara to be a great nuisance. Of course, Edgardo Ortega Romera had been very grateful for the railroad in his country, because he believed in the material and spiritual progress of his people; this belief was the reason why he had allowed the construction of this railroad in the first place. It was the reason why he had allowed the great cost in human life during its construction: the progress of his people.
However, Walker didn't give a damn about the people of Santa Barbara; he only wanted to make lots of money. So he bought as much land as he could and started to grow bananas. The rich and powerful landowners who sold him the land didn't care; they just moved to the capital city of Santa Barbara and lived in their beautiful chateaux and town houses there. However, the poor Indians who had worked the land of the hacienderos still didn't have land. Neither did the Chinese from Jamaica.
Then President Ortega's former mentor, old Father Junípero Sierra, led a revolt of Indians in the backwoods of San Marcos. From the top of the steeple of the little church in Dolores, Father Junípero rang the bell and shouted: "Long live justice! Long live liberty! Love live the love between our brothers and our sisters all over this land!"
This cry became known in Spanish as El Grito de Dolores: "The Cry of Dolores." However, Father Junípero's revolt was suppressed and thousands of peasants were killed. Ortega then seized land from the Church to gave it to the landless peasants. Father Junípero languished in a filthy prison the rest of his life in the San Marcos mountains, forgotten by everybody, including his church. The President could be very ruthless, you know.
But Ortega was a politician: he approached Hiram Walker and suggested that Walker give land to the Indians. "I don't want you to give all of it," Ortega explained. "Just some of it..."
But Walker refused point blank: "I need a lot of land," he explained. "Otherwise, I will not have enough land to grow bananas. Besides, I bought that land fair and square: I have paid millions of pesetas to your people."
Walker and Ortega had a heated discussion. Walker tried to explain how having him own most of the land in Santa Barbara was beneficial for the economy of Santa Barbara, but the President wouldn't listen; he just didn't understand economics. In the end, Ortega merely walked out, threatening to seize the land if Walker wouldn't give it up voluntarily. It was the end of a beautiful friendship.
There was talk of revolution in Santa Barbara; the people wanted land and liberty. In the capital of Santa Barbara, the President was confronted by a crowd of angry peasants on the grounds of the presidential palace, La Casa Rosada, or "The Pink House." From a balcony overlooking the crowd, the President promised in a grandiose speech to give them what they wanted: land and liberty. Then he concluded his speech with the rousing cry: "Tierra y libertad!" Land and liberty. And: "Muerte a los gringos!" Death to the gringos.
So this was Hiram Walker's plan: the Grand-Duc Igor Grigorievich Konstantinov would install himself at the head of a great army of mercenaries as Tsar Igor I of the former republic of Santa Barbara. The reason why this grotesque idea had an appeal for the Grand-Duke was this: Walker had made him believe that the people of Santa Barbara had really wanted a tsar, though their little country was no bigger than the tiny duchy of Luxembourg.
It was easy for Walker to convince the Grand-Duke of his scheme: a bottle of vodka did the trick. That night, the Grand-Duke found himself aboard a slow luxury liner to Central America, leaving behind his family (and his pretty little mistresses) in Paris.
Since the tiny country of Santa Barbara was only as big as Luxembourg, it would seem easy for the Grand-Duke Igor Grigorievich Konstantinov to march at the head of great army like Hernando Cortez, right? However, the march was long and difficult, several months through dense jungle full of mosquitoes and snakes, full of quick sand and creeping vines. It rained all day every day, it seemed, and there were the jaguars. The Grand-Duke lost half of his mercenaries because of mosquitoes and snakes, because of yellow fever and dengue (and the jaguars). Most of the survivors were stricken with yellow fever, including the Grand-Duke himself.
Now the Grand-Duke had been expecting a great welcome and a great parade in his honour in the capital of Santa Barbara, the only city of Santa Barbara. As the city was on top of a great hill that rose out of the jungle, he expected to see the city of El Dorado. He expected a fanfare of trumpets and trombones, but he was disappointed: no one raised even one hurrah. Rather, the city of Santa Barbara was merely a miserable little village in comparison to Paris or St. Petersburg, very filthy, almost deserted, except for a few Indians and a lot of thin and starving dogs. It was really a hole, the inhabitants, lazy and always drunk.
The Grand-Duke couldn't believe it! Where were his loyal subjects? Most of them had fled with their beloved president, Edgardo Ortega Romero, to the jungle, or to the little isolated villages far from the capital. The rest, those who had chosen to stay, stayed because they were infirm or curious (or had gotten drunk the night before and had massive hangovers).
However, the Grand-Duke decided to make a grandiloquent speech nevertheless. He started his speech in broken Spanish: "Since you have asked us to be your Tsar, we have decided to accept. We have come to bring a new era of peace and progress and justice for the whole country. Viva la Santa Barbara!"
The Grand-Duke Igor Grigorievich, or rather, the self-proclaimed Tsar, Igor I, couldn't finish his speech. He fainted before the thin crowd of confused Indians, because of yellow fever and dengue. The jungle was already taking its toll.
Because there was no doctor in town (the only doctor, having fled with the President and his entourage), the Indians had to bring their "Tsar" to a shaman, who fed him peyote and took care of him until he recovered. The Tsar Igor I barely spoke Spanish, and the shaman, of course, who looked to be a hundred years old, didn't speak Russian at all.
After some weeks of the Tsar being delirous, however, the Tsar got better. The old shaman, Don Juan, asked the Tsar without recourse: "What kind of madness has possessed you to sail across the sea in a steamship and march through the jungle to this city?"
The Tsar replied simply, in his broken Spanish: "We are your Tsar..."
Sometimes, it is better not to argue with a madman. The old shaman realized that this man was as crazy as a broom, as well as arrogant. Besides, he didn't know what a tsar was. As well, he was old enough to remember the previous dictator, Manuel de Rosas y Violetas, called El Caudillo, who had overthrown the president before him and killed the old president and thousands of his enemies before being overthrown and killed himself. (The assassination of Manuel de Rosas y Violetas was a national holiday, celebrated with fireworks: El día de la muerte del Caudillo, or "The Day of the Death of the Little Tail that Wagged the Big Dog.")
Don Juan was now afraid to speak frankly because the Russian Grand-Duke could have been another Manuel de Rosas y Violetas, a new El Caudillo. He had no way of knowing for sure.
It should have been apparent that the Russian Grand-Duke had every intention of being a benevolent ruler. The first thing, in the spirit of noblesse oblige, he sent a letter to each village in his "realm," asking them to send a representative to the capital so that he could form a parliament. However most of the villages, being very confused, ignored his request. With the advice of some of the representatives who had bothered to come to the capital, however, he promulgated a program of fixing the roads and installing a telephone system to replace the old telegraph system. However, the supporters of the former president, Edgardo Ortega Romero, resisted through acts of sabotage, blowing up bombs in the new roads after their completion and cutting the telephone lines. What's more, Ortega was robbing banks again.
Now the President wasn't really a bad guy. After all, he had encouraged the construction of the railroad, didn't he? However, we prefer our own bad government rather than the good government of a foreigner: Edgardo Ortega Romero could never submit to a Russian-born tsar, a tsar not elected by the people, no matter what. Even when the Tsar asked the President to be his prime minister in a spirit of peace and reconciliation, the President had to refuse. So there was a civil war in the former republic of Santa Barbara, now a monarchy ruled by a tsar. The hatred of monarchies runs strong in Latin America, you know.
The supporters of the President were called Los Colorados, those of the Tsar, Los Blancos. Of course, Ortega and the Colorados were more popular among the Indians and the Mestizos. However, the members of the forty families that owned all the haciendas (as well as the members of the petite bourgeoisie in the capital) supported the party of the Tsar, the Blancos. More importantly, Hiram Walker, who directed the construction of the railroad, also supported the Blancos. However, the Blancos only controlled the capital of Santa Barbara and its suburbs, that was it.
(But one shouldn't have worried about Hiram Walker: he had his own private army to protect his banana plantations, a state within a state. The guerrillas left him alone, because he had the biggest army in Santa Barbara.)
Now the former President had a mistress, Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera, gorgeous like a Spanish señorita, with a pretty heart-shaped face and hair long and black like a velvet night under the stars. And her eyes, her laughing eyes, she had eyes like two little pieces of chocolate — delicious! She was the wife of one of the president's lieutenants, Fernando Valenzuela Valdez, but it was a marriage of convenience — alas! — the conjugal union between two of the most powerful families in Santa Barbara for the good of the country. (A sense of nobless oblige ran strong in Santa Barbara as well.)
The moment that her souteneur, the President, fled into the jungle, she became the favourite of the Tsar. Although her body belonged to the Tsar, however, her heart belonged to her country. She was therefore a spy for the Colorados while her former lover (along with her husband) fought in the jungle. Through nights of pillow talk, the Tsar revealed his military secrets little by little, which Doña Carlota dutifully passed on to the former President, Edgardo Ortega Romero, her former lover. What a patriot Doña Carlota was!
However, Doña Carlota could never stoop to murdering the tsar, not even for her country: she was a lover, not a fighter.
Although there was a civil war in the country, Hiram Walker started quietly to buy property to cultivate his bananas and sell them in North America. Hiram Walker was getting older, past sixty, but he had a son, Johnny Walker, who was younger and more ruthless than him, who had boundless energy and a love of power. As well, Johnny Walker wanted to be President of the United States. In the future, he hoped to be the first president from the state of Texas. However, it was Hiram Walker who returned to the United States to be a Congressman, leaving his son in charge of his company, Boca Chica Banana.
Unlike the father, the son didn't trust the Russian Grand-Duke, Igor Grigorievich, who called himself Tsar Igor I. It was with justification: Johnny Walker overheard the Tsar say to himself: "If only the people spoke Russian! We must teach them to speak Russian..."
Johnny Walker was now sure that the Tsar was as crazy as a kid with a new electric guitar on Christmas Day. However, it was his mistress, Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera, whose advice that the Tsar followed. Exasperated, the Tsar complained to his mistress: "What more do the people want that we haven't already done? We build them schools and hospitals, we fix the only highway. It's never enough. So what do we do now?"
Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera replied frankly: "The people want land, Your Majesty. Without land, you have nothing. All of the haciendas are owned by only a few families, that's it. But if we divided the haciendas, then the people would have land..."
"Forget it!" replied the Tsar, shocked. "If we divided the haciendas among the peons, the strong and the sober would only take it back from them again. That's what the kulaks did in Russia, you know. The big fish will eat the little fish, my dear. That's life, survival of the fittest. Most of the peons are worthless as farmers anyway..."
"It's a question of peace, your Majesty," Doña Carlota replied. "There will never be peace if the people don't have land..."
Now the Tsar was capricious, like mentally ill people. Sometimes, he wanted to divide the haciendas among the Indians that worked them, sometimes not. In his more lucid moments, he realized that it was these same hacienderos, the supporters of the Blancos, who supported him against the Colorados in the jungle. Without the hacienderos, no friends. It was that simple.
However, the tsar wasn't always lucid, but was sometimes possessed of a grand and mystical vision of land and liberty for everyone, like some mad prophet out of Dostoyevsky.
Johnny Walker was ready to betray the mad Grand-Duke that his father had installed not very long ago. As Minister of Mines and Railways for San Marcos, he began a series of secret meetings with a general in the service of the Tsar, Edmundo Videla Blanca. Without further ado, General Videla overthrew the Tsar, who was drunk, re-declared Santa Barbara a republic, and threw the Tsar in a filthy prison in the mountains. Then the Blancos and the Colorados made peace while the Walker family quietly bought up all the land. All men were brothers again, except for the Chinese: President Videla sent them all back to Jamaica.
Then there was a presidential election between Edgardo Ortega Romero of the Colorados and Edmundo Videla Blanca of the Blancos. To everybody's surprise, Videla won in a landslide — the Colorados couldn't believe it! The Colorados screamed that the election was a fraud, and Ortega hid in the jungle again, blowing up bridges and robbing banks. The civil war was on again.
Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera tried to tempt the new president with her considerable charms, like Cleopatra with Octavian after the death of Marc Antony, but the new President was cold towards her. Alas, he had a mistress that was only eighteen years old.
There was a brief trial where the former Tsar Igor I was sentenced to death by firing squad by the five magistrates in a unanimous verdict. Before he was shot, however, the Tsar shouted: "Viva la Santa Barbara!"
The soldiers no longer wanted to shoot their beloved tsar, but they had to do it. Now the Tsar's chest was covered with so many medals that the medals stopped all the bullets in their tracks. So what do you do? It was a miracle, right? But they were not ruled by silly superstition even in the tiny Republic of Santa Barbara: the captain of the firing squad merely walked up to the Tsar and administered the coup de grâce. Santa Barbara was a modern and secular republic, you know, not a barbaric kingdom of the Middle Ages.
And they lived happily ever after in Santa Barbara, except for the Chinese, who were deported to Jamaica. Then some communists who were hiding in the jungle overthrew the government and established the People's Republic of Santa Barbara.
Edgardo Ortega Romero was a "man of the people," an Indian, pure blood, born in the little village of Dolores in the Santa Barbara mountains of the little Republic of Santa Barbara in Central America. Without the education of priests at a mission school, he would have been like all the other Indian villagers: penniless, illiterate. But he had a mentor, Father Junípero Sierra, and his mother understood that he was different from her other nine children: sensitive, intelligent. However, he couldn't go to university because the country didn't have one. His mother wanted him to go to a university in Europe, but it was too far away and too expensive. He grew up in poverty, you know.
So he was a simple school teacher, well-respected by the other villagers, a religious man. But he entered politics when he realized that the powerful owners of the haciendas cheated their illiterate employees by not paying them all the money that they owed them on pay day. As well, he was in love with the daughter of a landowner, Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera, who was already betrothed to Don Fernando Valenzuela Valdez.
Then he was forcibly evicted at gunpoint by a rich haciendero who wanted his meagre plot. Because of the death squads supported by the landowners, he had to hid in the jungle, where he became the head of a band of guerrillas. Edgardo Ortega Romero and his comrades became legendary, robbing banks to give money to the poor and support their cause, à la Robin Hood. Santa Barbara was tiny in comparison to Mexico, so he and his comrades often fled to Mexico and hid there, where it was safer.
In a bar in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico, Ortega met Hiram Walker, a Yankee who was looking for gold in the mountains. Now Ortega thought that Walker was just a raconteur while Walker thought that Ortega was just a dreamer. However, the two struck a deal: if Walker found his gold and financed the revolution, he would become the Minister of Mines for Santa Barbara. That is, if Ortega successfully overthrew the government of Santa Barbara. Of course, they were very drunk at the time.
Then Walker found a vein of gold in the Sierra Madres. Eureka! He was rich! With the help of Ortega and his comrades, Walker removed the gold from the mine under cover of darkness and deposited it in a bank. Then he financed Ortega's revolution: he bought weapons for Ortega and his comrades, then paid for their railroad tickets to the border of Santa Barbara. It was a small price to pay for their help, Walker thought. Once Ortega overthrow the government of Santa Barbara, he made Walker his Minister of Mines. With the revenue from the mines, Walker built a railroad across the country. So he became the Minister of Railways as well.
In the meantime, Ortega built schools and roads for his people. His beloved, Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera, became his mistress while her husband, Fernando Valenzuela Valdes, became one of his trusted lieutenants. He even consulted his old mentor, Father Junípero Sierra, from time to time. Though the rich landowners would have preferred that he take land from the church, rather than take it from them, he promised the old priest that he would never take land from the church.
However, the railroad didn't make much money for Hiram Walker. Built through dense jungle, thousands of men died of yellow fever. Many were also bitten by poisonous snakes, and a few were even eaten by jaguars. In the end, the Indians refused to do the work, and he had to hire Chinese workers from Jamaica to finish the job. However, the Chinese didn't want to go back home after the job was finished, so Santa Barbara now had a minority of Chinese who only spoke Spanish grudgingly.
As well, Ortega started to become unpopular among the people, because they were mostly poor and didn't use the railroad to transport their agricultural products to market anyway. So Ortega increasingly became a dictator and turned to the landowners that he once hated for their support; he had his own death squads, you know.
In the meantime, Hiram Walker decided to travel in Europe, where he met two persons of interest: one in London, the other in Paris. In London, he met Benny Rabino.
Now Benny Rabino was an interesting guy. A Jew born in Minsk in the Russian Empire, he was a vaudeville performer in London as a teenager. Then he found his fortune in the diamond mines of South Africa and came back to London a very rich man. He bought an estate along the Thames, married a girl from a good Jewish family, and became the father of a few children. Of course, Benny Rabino was a religious Jew: always the philanthropist, he gave lots of money to the poor in London. However, he was always looking for new ways to make money, because he was a business man.
At the Rabinos, where there was always a big party, Benny Rabino said to Hiram Walker: "Come and taste this fruit."
Rabino gave the fruit to Walker, who peeled it and tasted. Walker didn't like the taste of the fruit very much, whose skin was yellow when it was ripe. He said to Rabino frankly: "The taste is very bland. It doesn't really have a taste."
"I agree, sir," Rabino replied. "It's quite bland."
Then Rabino explained: "It's a banana, sir. It grows in the province of Natal on the eastern coast of South Africa, where it always rains. As I see it, this fruit will grow very well in Central America, where there's lots of jungle and it always rains. If you bought some property there, you could make lots of money. Your railroad, which is barely making money now, will soon begin to make money. You have my word. What do you say, sir?"
"But I don't like the taste of bananas!" Walker protested. "Who's going to buy any bananas if no one likes the taste!"
"But that's the trick, sir," Rabino explained. "If one can persuade you to taste this bland and tasteless fruit at a party, then one could persuade the public to buy this bland fruit en masse. If you sliced this fruit into little pieces, for example, you could put it in a bowl of cereal. The sky's the limit..."
Walker thought it was an intriguing idea. However, he still said nothing.
Then Rabino asked again: "What do you say, sir?"
However, Walker didn't want to make a decision hastily right now, though he was very interested.
Unfortunately, Benny Rabino suffered from severe depression from time to time. One night, under cover of the London fog, he committed suicide by jumping into the Thames and drowning himself. Thus the poor Benny Rabino couldn't be Hiram Walker's first investor.
In Paris, Walker met another interesting guy, another Russian, the Grand-Duke Igor Grigorievich Konstantinov. Now the Grand-Duke's country had been ruled by the Bolsheviks now, since the revolution in 1917. As it was the 1920s, there were a lot of Russian exiles at the time, those who preferred to drink vodka and party all night while mourning for their lost country. No matter how much they hated the Bolsheviks, they were in no hurry to return to Mother Russia. No, these beneficiaries of the largesse of the old regime preferred to complain about the "injustice" of being tossed out by their former subjects. (Of course, the bistro owners in Paris didn't like them very much, as they were always drunk and rude to the waiters.)
Now the Grand-Duke Igor Grigorievich was really dissolute. He always went out for a night on the town, always got drunk, and was easily moved by great schemes. As well, he was still young, in his thirties, while Walker was over fifty. While he couldn't stand his wife and his kids, his pretty little Parisian mistresses possessed some charm for him, but he was easily bored: he wanted some fun in his life! Walker would gladly provide some fun. Although the Grand-Duke thought that he was learned and wise, a man of the world, he was really simple and naïve.
It bears mentioning that, by now, Walker considered the president of the little Republic of Santa Barbara to be a great nuisance. Of course, Edgardo Ortega Romera had been very grateful for the railroad in his country, because he believed in the material and spiritual progress of his people; this belief was the reason why he had allowed the construction of this railroad in the first place. It was the reason why he had allowed the great cost in human life during its construction: the progress of his people.
However, Walker didn't give a damn about the people of Santa Barbara; he only wanted to make lots of money. So he bought as much land as he could and started to grow bananas. The rich and powerful landowners who sold him the land didn't care; they just moved to the capital city of Santa Barbara and lived in their beautiful chateaux and town houses there. However, the poor Indians who had worked the land of the hacienderos still didn't have land. Neither did the Chinese from Jamaica.
Then President Ortega's former mentor, old Father Junípero Sierra, led a revolt of Indians in the backwoods of San Marcos. From the top of the steeple of the little church in Dolores, Father Junípero rang the bell and shouted: "Long live justice! Long live liberty! Love live the love between our brothers and our sisters all over this land!"
This cry became known in Spanish as El Grito de Dolores: "The Cry of Dolores." However, Father Junípero's revolt was suppressed and thousands of peasants were killed. Ortega then seized land from the Church to gave it to the landless peasants. Father Junípero languished in a filthy prison the rest of his life in the San Marcos mountains, forgotten by everybody, including his church. The President could be very ruthless, you know.
But Ortega was a politician: he approached Hiram Walker and suggested that Walker give land to the Indians. "I don't want you to give all of it," Ortega explained. "Just some of it..."
But Walker refused point blank: "I need a lot of land," he explained. "Otherwise, I will not have enough land to grow bananas. Besides, I bought that land fair and square: I have paid millions of pesetas to your people."
Walker and Ortega had a heated discussion. Walker tried to explain how having him own most of the land in Santa Barbara was beneficial for the economy of Santa Barbara, but the President wouldn't listen; he just didn't understand economics. In the end, Ortega merely walked out, threatening to seize the land if Walker wouldn't give it up voluntarily. It was the end of a beautiful friendship.
There was talk of revolution in Santa Barbara; the people wanted land and liberty. In the capital of Santa Barbara, the President was confronted by a crowd of angry peasants on the grounds of the presidential palace, La Casa Rosada, or "The Pink House." From a balcony overlooking the crowd, the President promised in a grandiose speech to give them what they wanted: land and liberty. Then he concluded his speech with the rousing cry: "Tierra y libertad!" Land and liberty. And: "Muerte a los gringos!" Death to the gringos.
So this was Hiram Walker's plan: the Grand-Duc Igor Grigorievich Konstantinov would install himself at the head of a great army of mercenaries as Tsar Igor I of the former republic of Santa Barbara. The reason why this grotesque idea had an appeal for the Grand-Duke was this: Walker had made him believe that the people of Santa Barbara had really wanted a tsar, though their little country was no bigger than the tiny duchy of Luxembourg.
It was easy for Walker to convince the Grand-Duke of his scheme: a bottle of vodka did the trick. That night, the Grand-Duke found himself aboard a slow luxury liner to Central America, leaving behind his family (and his pretty little mistresses) in Paris.
Since the tiny country of Santa Barbara was only as big as Luxembourg, it would seem easy for the Grand-Duke Igor Grigorievich Konstantinov to march at the head of great army like Hernando Cortez, right? However, the march was long and difficult, several months through dense jungle full of mosquitoes and snakes, full of quick sand and creeping vines. It rained all day every day, it seemed, and there were the jaguars. The Grand-Duke lost half of his mercenaries because of mosquitoes and snakes, because of yellow fever and dengue (and the jaguars). Most of the survivors were stricken with yellow fever, including the Grand-Duke himself.
Now the Grand-Duke had been expecting a great welcome and a great parade in his honour in the capital of Santa Barbara, the only city of Santa Barbara. As the city was on top of a great hill that rose out of the jungle, he expected to see the city of El Dorado. He expected a fanfare of trumpets and trombones, but he was disappointed: no one raised even one hurrah. Rather, the city of Santa Barbara was merely a miserable little village in comparison to Paris or St. Petersburg, very filthy, almost deserted, except for a few Indians and a lot of thin and starving dogs. It was really a hole, the inhabitants, lazy and always drunk.
The Grand-Duke couldn't believe it! Where were his loyal subjects? Most of them had fled with their beloved president, Edgardo Ortega Romero, to the jungle, or to the little isolated villages far from the capital. The rest, those who had chosen to stay, stayed because they were infirm or curious (or had gotten drunk the night before and had massive hangovers).
However, the Grand-Duke decided to make a grandiloquent speech nevertheless. He started his speech in broken Spanish: "Since you have asked us to be your Tsar, we have decided to accept. We have come to bring a new era of peace and progress and justice for the whole country. Viva la Santa Barbara!"
The Grand-Duke Igor Grigorievich, or rather, the self-proclaimed Tsar, Igor I, couldn't finish his speech. He fainted before the thin crowd of confused Indians, because of yellow fever and dengue. The jungle was already taking its toll.
Because there was no doctor in town (the only doctor, having fled with the President and his entourage), the Indians had to bring their "Tsar" to a shaman, who fed him peyote and took care of him until he recovered. The Tsar Igor I barely spoke Spanish, and the shaman, of course, who looked to be a hundred years old, didn't speak Russian at all.
After some weeks of the Tsar being delirous, however, the Tsar got better. The old shaman, Don Juan, asked the Tsar without recourse: "What kind of madness has possessed you to sail across the sea in a steamship and march through the jungle to this city?"
The Tsar replied simply, in his broken Spanish: "We are your Tsar..."
Sometimes, it is better not to argue with a madman. The old shaman realized that this man was as crazy as a broom, as well as arrogant. Besides, he didn't know what a tsar was. As well, he was old enough to remember the previous dictator, Manuel de Rosas y Violetas, called El Caudillo, who had overthrown the president before him and killed the old president and thousands of his enemies before being overthrown and killed himself. (The assassination of Manuel de Rosas y Violetas was a national holiday, celebrated with fireworks: El día de la muerte del Caudillo, or "The Day of the Death of the Little Tail that Wagged the Big Dog.")
Don Juan was now afraid to speak frankly because the Russian Grand-Duke could have been another Manuel de Rosas y Violetas, a new El Caudillo. He had no way of knowing for sure.
It should have been apparent that the Russian Grand-Duke had every intention of being a benevolent ruler. The first thing, in the spirit of noblesse oblige, he sent a letter to each village in his "realm," asking them to send a representative to the capital so that he could form a parliament. However most of the villages, being very confused, ignored his request. With the advice of some of the representatives who had bothered to come to the capital, however, he promulgated a program of fixing the roads and installing a telephone system to replace the old telegraph system. However, the supporters of the former president, Edgardo Ortega Romero, resisted through acts of sabotage, blowing up bombs in the new roads after their completion and cutting the telephone lines. What's more, Ortega was robbing banks again.
Now the President wasn't really a bad guy. After all, he had encouraged the construction of the railroad, didn't he? However, we prefer our own bad government rather than the good government of a foreigner: Edgardo Ortega Romero could never submit to a Russian-born tsar, a tsar not elected by the people, no matter what. Even when the Tsar asked the President to be his prime minister in a spirit of peace and reconciliation, the President had to refuse. So there was a civil war in the former republic of Santa Barbara, now a monarchy ruled by a tsar. The hatred of monarchies runs strong in Latin America, you know.
The supporters of the President were called Los Colorados, those of the Tsar, Los Blancos. Of course, Ortega and the Colorados were more popular among the Indians and the Mestizos. However, the members of the forty families that owned all the haciendas (as well as the members of the petite bourgeoisie in the capital) supported the party of the Tsar, the Blancos. More importantly, Hiram Walker, who directed the construction of the railroad, also supported the Blancos. However, the Blancos only controlled the capital of Santa Barbara and its suburbs, that was it.
(But one shouldn't have worried about Hiram Walker: he had his own private army to protect his banana plantations, a state within a state. The guerrillas left him alone, because he had the biggest army in Santa Barbara.)
Now the former President had a mistress, Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera, gorgeous like a Spanish señorita, with a pretty heart-shaped face and hair long and black like a velvet night under the stars. And her eyes, her laughing eyes, she had eyes like two little pieces of chocolate — delicious! She was the wife of one of the president's lieutenants, Fernando Valenzuela Valdez, but it was a marriage of convenience — alas! — the conjugal union between two of the most powerful families in Santa Barbara for the good of the country. (A sense of nobless oblige ran strong in Santa Barbara as well.)
The moment that her souteneur, the President, fled into the jungle, she became the favourite of the Tsar. Although her body belonged to the Tsar, however, her heart belonged to her country. She was therefore a spy for the Colorados while her former lover (along with her husband) fought in the jungle. Through nights of pillow talk, the Tsar revealed his military secrets little by little, which Doña Carlota dutifully passed on to the former President, Edgardo Ortega Romero, her former lover. What a patriot Doña Carlota was!
However, Doña Carlota could never stoop to murdering the tsar, not even for her country: she was a lover, not a fighter.
Although there was a civil war in the country, Hiram Walker started quietly to buy property to cultivate his bananas and sell them in North America. Hiram Walker was getting older, past sixty, but he had a son, Johnny Walker, who was younger and more ruthless than him, who had boundless energy and a love of power. As well, Johnny Walker wanted to be President of the United States. In the future, he hoped to be the first president from the state of Texas. However, it was Hiram Walker who returned to the United States to be a Congressman, leaving his son in charge of his company, Boca Chica Banana.
Unlike the father, the son didn't trust the Russian Grand-Duke, Igor Grigorievich, who called himself Tsar Igor I. It was with justification: Johnny Walker overheard the Tsar say to himself: "If only the people spoke Russian! We must teach them to speak Russian..."
Johnny Walker was now sure that the Tsar was as crazy as a kid with a new electric guitar on Christmas Day. However, it was his mistress, Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera, whose advice that the Tsar followed. Exasperated, the Tsar complained to his mistress: "What more do the people want that we haven't already done? We build them schools and hospitals, we fix the only highway. It's never enough. So what do we do now?"
Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera replied frankly: "The people want land, Your Majesty. Without land, you have nothing. All of the haciendas are owned by only a few families, that's it. But if we divided the haciendas, then the people would have land..."
"Forget it!" replied the Tsar, shocked. "If we divided the haciendas among the peons, the strong and the sober would only take it back from them again. That's what the kulaks did in Russia, you know. The big fish will eat the little fish, my dear. That's life, survival of the fittest. Most of the peons are worthless as farmers anyway..."
"It's a question of peace, your Majesty," Doña Carlota replied. "There will never be peace if the people don't have land..."
Now the Tsar was capricious, like mentally ill people. Sometimes, he wanted to divide the haciendas among the Indians that worked them, sometimes not. In his more lucid moments, he realized that it was these same hacienderos, the supporters of the Blancos, who supported him against the Colorados in the jungle. Without the hacienderos, no friends. It was that simple.
However, the tsar wasn't always lucid, but was sometimes possessed of a grand and mystical vision of land and liberty for everyone, like some mad prophet out of Dostoyevsky.
Johnny Walker was ready to betray the mad Grand-Duke that his father had installed not very long ago. As Minister of Mines and Railways for San Marcos, he began a series of secret meetings with a general in the service of the Tsar, Edmundo Videla Blanca. Without further ado, General Videla overthrew the Tsar, who was drunk, re-declared Santa Barbara a republic, and threw the Tsar in a filthy prison in the mountains. Then the Blancos and the Colorados made peace while the Walker family quietly bought up all the land. All men were brothers again, except for the Chinese: President Videla sent them all back to Jamaica.
Then there was a presidential election between Edgardo Ortega Romero of the Colorados and Edmundo Videla Blanca of the Blancos. To everybody's surprise, Videla won in a landslide — the Colorados couldn't believe it! The Colorados screamed that the election was a fraud, and Ortega hid in the jungle again, blowing up bridges and robbing banks. The civil war was on again.
Doña Carlota Ferrera y Rivera tried to tempt the new president with her considerable charms, like Cleopatra with Octavian after the death of Marc Antony, but the new President was cold towards her. Alas, he had a mistress that was only eighteen years old.
There was a brief trial where the former Tsar Igor I was sentenced to death by firing squad by the five magistrates in a unanimous verdict. Before he was shot, however, the Tsar shouted: "Viva la Santa Barbara!"
The soldiers no longer wanted to shoot their beloved tsar, but they had to do it. Now the Tsar's chest was covered with so many medals that the medals stopped all the bullets in their tracks. So what do you do? It was a miracle, right? But they were not ruled by silly superstition even in the tiny Republic of Santa Barbara: the captain of the firing squad merely walked up to the Tsar and administered the coup de grâce. Santa Barbara was a modern and secular republic, you know, not a barbaric kingdom of the Middle Ages.
And they lived happily ever after in Santa Barbara, except for the Chinese, who were deported to Jamaica. Then some communists who were hiding in the jungle overthrew the government and established the People's Republic of Santa Barbara.
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