187031 Letter to Noam
Chomsky re 9-11------------- Alterman on Chomsky (long thread at lbo; all
the rest of this file via lbo-talk) ---------------- 186967 Israel's Other
Dirty Secret: The White Slave ---------------- power and sexuality in the
middle east (merip.org article by bruce dunne) ----- ------------- US war
crimes (-------------- ACTIVIST LAWYER MICHAEL TIGAR (ditto including a
monthly review review of Law and the Rise of Capitalism) --------- rangercat67
(new to me) ----- xxx ------------ 187031 Letter to Noam Chomsky re
9-11 (english) keith Lampe, reposted 9:15pm Tue Jun 18 '02 (Modified on
11:39pm Tue Jun 18 '02) article#187031 from GOVERNMENT OF THE USA IN EXILE
" Coping with the Fourth Reich " Occupation of North America . Via uspdm_exile@hotmail.com
June 14, 2002 Dear Noam Chomsky, Hey, mon! I 'm puzzled. During the past
several years you've on balance responded much more promptly and consistently
to my emails than any of my other correspondents. What" happening? Aren't
we Pen Pals any more? Do you consider yourself above reproach? If so, it"
quite understandable: I certainly wouldn't want to have to cope with as
much money/flattery/ adulation as you have to. We should consider you an
innocent victim of such. (I had to go through periods of massive flattery/adulation--especially
between '67 and '72-- and I always found it helpful to change my name or
grow my hair long or become a barefoot person or change my location, etc.-like
a broken-field runner shaking off would-be tacklers. And it has worked
rather well. Almost always, I'm able these days to move about as a Complete
Unknown.) In fact, I've always considered you to be innocent and earnest.
That" why I've always instantly forgiven you for not knowing that this
planet is frequently visited by folks from other solar systems, not knowing
the value of hippies, not knowing that this planet is quite swiftly losing
its ability to grow food outdoors, not knowing the value of psychedelics,
not knowing the evil significance of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations,
not knowing the value of yogas, etc. After all, you've been busy indexing
phonemes, right? I'll defend to the death your right to live in an Ivory
Tower. Somebody has written me to suggest that your life is so cloistered
these days you may not even know who Michel Chossudovsky and John McMurtry
are. If so, please signal and I'll send you a sample of their work. Both
have enormous integrity and insight. They provide much-needed support for
my assertion that being an academic is an inadequate excuse for not understanding
what" happening. I remember a couple years ago you wrote me proudly that
you never watch television. Great!!!! But then why were you so willing
to spread your legs for the S.S./CNN that way? Where" the consistency,
baby? But I hasten to add that television is my medium of choice. It" just
that I'm convinced we should no longer be willing to appear on any of their
TV networks. We've tried it for decades now (in '68 an NYC cop threatened
my life because he'd seen me too many times on the CBS evening "newsâ€)
and we know it doesn't work. As an organizer, I learned a long time ago
that if I want folks to come together in a huge civil-disobedience action,
I've got to give them a substantial reason to trust me. If I relate to
them only with print media, they have little basis for such trust because
they know they can easily be manipulated by trick word-sequences. Radio
gives them a broader basis because it allows them to make an intuitive
judgment of the voice behind the word sequences. Television allows them
to judge not only on the basis of word sequences and voice quality but
in fact on the basis of the entire body language of the organizer urging
them to unite. Remember back in the Sixties we used socalled telephone
trees to get lots of people out on the streets fast? I think these days
we should do Guerrilla Video Trees as a way of circulating antidotes to
all the ABC/CBS/CNN/FOX/NBC/PBS propaganda stuff. Everybody receiving a
guerrilla cassette or disk copies it within forty-eight hours and carries
a copy to at least two neighboring households. So if you're still willing
to go before cameras, why not co-anchor a guerrilla evening-news show?
The other anchor-maybe Maria Gilardin or Helen Caldicott?-can cover the
stuff you're not hip enough to cover. Are you up for it? I hope so. Of
course, we'd want another pair of anchors covering all the news relevant
to other species so nobody can accuse us of being human-chauvinist pigs.
Guerrilla Video (GV) can be part of a larger strategy of returning to the
oral tradition as a way of forcing the Fourth Reich to play us one-on-one
so we can become too expensive for them. We make it too easy for them when
we communicate so much on telephones and computers. Our disks and cassettes
become high-tech adjuncts of the oral tradition when we carry them rather
than posting or uploading them. I hope it" now abundantly clear to folks
in both our circles that becoming too expensive for them is our only hope.
Moral appeals have been rendered quaint. One disadvantage of not watching
commercial TV is you're far less likely to understand the degree to which
the Fourth Reich instigates and manipulates Sports Fetishism in order to
distract from its various illicit activities (e.g., massive trafficking
of cocaine and heroin) and also to encourage competition as a way of getting
away with its ongoing pitiless capitalism. This from Bangkok Post of June
9: "In 1978, when Argentina won the World Cup, the ruling generals fanned
a nationalist euphoria, which distracted the public from the torture and
â€disappearances' of thousands of â€subversives.'.
Since you've put so much energy into writing books and so little energy
into gallant street actions, we can say that so far you've been more expensive
to the North American forest than to our oppressors. But it is never too
late, Noam. Have you ever determined how many trees have been slaughtered
for your books? My friend Peter Warshall can do that for you. As I recall,
you take the total weight in pounds of all the copies of all your books,
then divide by sixty. Spending a fine summer day strolling about in a clear-cut
area approximately the size of what you've removed thus far might be a
good way to decide your next move on the chessboard of resistance. Back
in '70 I refused to allow Herder & Herder to publish my eco-newsservice
Earth Read-Out because they were unable or unwilling to tell me how many
noble sentient trees would be wasted for the first printing. I wanted to
include that figure in my preface. Are you aware that Gandhi once was asked
by an underground activist whether blowing up a freight train was an act
of violence? He said-and published it in his periodical Harijan-that blowing
up a passenger train would be an act of violence. I mention this because
it implies that the most effective act of Gandhianism in recent decades
was last year when the Tamils destroyed half Sri Lanka" airliners and part
of its air force. Though much of the press is fond of seeing this as a
"suicide mission,.my information (probably from BBC) is that nobody was
hurt on either side. It made the Tamils so expensive for Colombo that they've
received major benefits. Most U.S. Sector Gandhians prefer a much more
fashionable definition of Gandhianism than this-so they can keep publishing
in The New Yorker or whatever. But the true definition not the coy one
is our best hope of overcoming the Fourth Reich" occupation of North America.
Yet in judging the rightness of Property Capers we must be strict with
anyone who'd even slightly risk injury to sentient creatures of any species.
Meanwhile, it is extremely naïve of Ralph Nader and
his supporters to believe that if he wins a U.S. presidential election,
he won't suffer the same fate as Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters. (Fortunately,
there are a few signs in Burma that by discouraging tourism and aid and
investment there, Aung San Suu Kyi is becoming so expensive for the junta
that eventually they'll have to make major concessions to her.) The realities
of the most recent U.S. presidential election have made that insight easily
available even to high-school dropouts. In closing, I'd like to suggest
an answer to my earlier question about why you were willing to spread your
legs for the S.S./CNN that way. Is it because you grew up within an Immigrant
Psychology? Grew up as an outsider-looking-in? So that the S.S./CNN would
seem Big Time to you, seem Inside? I wouldn't be surprised. I hope you
understand that I'm not being even slightly judgmental. I love outsiders!
One of my favorite books as a young man was Wilson" THE OUTSIDER-especially
his chapter on Lawrence of Arabia, who was hip enough to kick fame and
adulation. I note with interest that Ralph Nader also grew up within an
Immigrant Psychology-whereas Gore Vidal and I grew up within the polar
opposite of that. Do you suppose it would be interesting for the four of
us to do a socalled conference phone conversation in order to take a look
at some of the more relevant differences between these polarly-opposed
psychologies? I certainly do. Gore and I could pass along a brief summary
of what we learned by being insiders-sons of Big Shots-and getting glimpses
of what goes down behind the scenes. It'd help you understand why it was
so easy for me to believe that the Fourth Reich would sacrifice more than
3000 people in its U.S. Sector last 9/11 in order to help Unocal with its
desire for trans-Afghan pipelines and in order to help the Carlyle Group
with its desire for greater profits from all the "defense.contractors it
owns. (By the way, did you ever receive that IHT piece on the Carlyle Group
which I posted you from India a year ago? I'm curious how reliable their
post is.) How do you feel about this? I suggest we do it by phone because
as your only duly elected U.S. Prez, I'm unwilling to do another fact-finding
tour of the widely loathed U.S. Sector till you folks take concrete steps
towards the establishment of an independent judiciary. Okay? Yours for
an overwhelming resurgence of hippies, Keith Lampe, Ro-Non-So-Te, Ponderosa
Pine Interim President add your own comments Divide the weight of his brain
by 60 (english) Brenda 11:39pm Tue Jun 18 '02 comment#187050 Anyone wonder
how many sentient marijuana plants, peyote, and psychedelic mushrooms were
slaughtered in the process of turning this guys brain to jello? -----------------
As for Noam, well, it is unfair to compare him to Bill Bennett, because
a) he does appear to be decent person with very good manners, and b) he
has a day job as perhaps the most important linguistic philosopher since
Wittgenstein. But politically, I¹m sorry. I defended the guy for years,
even through the Faurrison affair. And I think he did a lot of good work
on East Timor. But look at the man¹s political judgment. He defended
Faurrison. He championed the Khmer Rouge. His condemnations of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict are one hundred percent one-sided, based on the (obviously) false
notion that the Arab nations and the Palestinian people have been trying
to arrange a peace with Israel for decades. He viewed the rescue mission
undertaken in Kosovo as nothing more than the extension of imperial power.
He accuses the United States of perpetrating a holocaust in Afghanistan
and thinks that the mistaken attack on the pharmaceutical factory in Somalia
was as bad if not worse than the attack on the Twin Towers. One could go
on, but it all adds up to, I fear, the mirror image of the ignorant jingoism
of Bennett, Krauthammer, Kelly, Will, etc. And I find it amazing that intelligent
people take it seriously. But anyway, here are just a few of the many letters
I received on these two topics. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily
my friend. Thanks to most of you. ------------------------- Sudan not Somalia.
However, Alterman is correct here except for the "one could go on" bit
and I don't think Chomsky ever said "holocaust." He might have said genocide.
One can see why people think Alterman is the secret mover behind Media
Whores Online. Peter ---------------------- The problem on Chomsky's side
is systematic, in my view. According to his Grand Theory of the supremacy
of US foreign policy analysis over all other elements, the enemy of the
US establishment is by default Chomsky's friend. We can go back to the
wellknown Khmer Rouge and Faurisson examples but that's not necessary.
Look at Kosovo and the way how he actively supported the corrupt nationalists
around Milosevic. There is plenty of evidence for this. This googled URL
is just a random one: http://www.newsandletters.org/ Issues/1999/Dec/12.99_chomsky.htm
The next casus is already in the making: Chomsky's support for Saddam Houssein.
Geert ------------------- Comments like this are so far from what Chomsky
actually wrote on these topics that it's difficult to ascribe them to simple
ignorance and unwillingness to read, rather than to a settled animus towards
his politics. --CGE ---------------------- They are the most effort-free
ways to garner "legitimacy" by trashing the wacky Noam (who of course isnt
smart enough to realize how foolish such statements would have been). Alterman
even confuses free speech with support for the speaker in his rush to pundit
legitamcy. Perhaps it's a mix of willful whoring and idiocy? Dave -----------------------
Ahem... Chomsky's statement that the U.S. government in the 1990s chose
the Bosnian Muslims as its proxy force for geostrategic reasons was really
stupid. And I ran across a quote from page 291 of _After the Cataclysm_:
"If a serious studyis someday undertaken, it may well be discoveredthat
the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive responsebecause they dealt
with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by
the imperial system. Such a study, however, has yet to be undertaken..."
To claim in 1979 that the character of the Khmer Rouge regime is still
open to debate seems to me to be beyond the stupid, and into the malevolent.
Brad DeLong -------------------- And it's not, ah, stupid to assume that
US interest in the former Yugoslavia was innocent of geostrategic considerations?
And we should insist that it is "malevolent" in 1979 to analyze and debate
what happened in Cambodia? That is of course just what the toadies to the
US regime were doing then, too, as Chomsky mentions in the continuation
of the paragraph you cite: "Such a study [i.e., of the impact of Western
imperialism on Cambodian peasant life], however, has yet to be undertaken.
The West is much more concerned to excise from history the imperial role
and to pretend that the history of contemporary Cambodia begins in April
1975 in a manner that is disconnected from the imperial legacy and must
be explained by the lunacy of 'nine men at the center' who were systematically
massacring and starving the population in a form of 'autogenocide' that
surpasses the horrors of Nazism." ---------------- http://www.msnbc.com/news/752664.asp
Nope, the Noamster and Ed Herman (along with Cambodia scholars on the Left
like David Chandler, Serge Thion [cf. his role in the Faurrison affair]
and Ben Kiernan, were agnostic on the Khmer Rouge.. Kiernan and Chandler
have long ago recanted. Michael Pugliese http://www.jim.com/canon.htm CHAPTER
1: INTRODUCTION How many of those who say they are unreservedly in support
of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth part of the
present sufferings of the Cambodian people? --François Ponchaud,
1977[1] So concludes François Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero, the
first book to detail the "assassination of a people" being perpetrated
in the name of socialist revolution in Cambodia. Hundreds of other books
and articles on Cambodia have been published since 1977. Many have focused
on the period during which the Red Cambodians or "Khmer Rouge" controlled
the country which they renamed "Democratic Kampuchea" between 1975 and
1978. Under the Khmer Rouge, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died from
execution, forced labor, disease and starvation. Since it will never be
possible to ascertain the exact number of deaths, estimates fall on a range.
Michael Vickery estimates 750,000 deaths,[2] while Ben Kiernan adds to
that another 800,000. Karl Jackson puts the figure near 1.3 million,[3]
while the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge (CORKR) claims
at least 1.5 million deaths. The Khmer revolution was perhaps the most
pernicious in history; reversing class order, destroying all markets, banning
private property and money. It is one worth studying for the ages, not
for what it accomplished, but for what it destroyed. The idea for this
thesis grew from research into Cambodia's economic development and history
for a simultaneous economics honors thesis.[4] In particular, a 1979 book
entitled Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy by Malcolm Caldwell, was
my first glimpse into a community of academics, I had no idea existed.
To be sure, this community was not some extreme "fringe" faction of Cambodian
scholars, but virtually all of them.[5] In other words, their view of the
Khmer revolution ergo the Khmer Rouge, became the Standard Total Academic
View on Cambodia or the STAV.[6] These scholars, many of whom worked for
the Berkeley-based antiwar Indochina Resource Center, became the Khmer
Rouge's most effective apologists in the West.[7] While they expressed
unreserved support for the Khmer revolution, fully twenty percent of the
Cambodian population may have perished due to execution, forced labor,
illness, and malnutrition during the period 1975-1979.[8] From periodicals
such as the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars and Current History to
books like Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution and Kampuchea: Rationale
for a Rural Policy, an unequivocal record of complicity existed between
a generation of academics who studied Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. Reading
Karl Jackson's Cambodia: 1975- 1978 (1989), a footnote revealed that debate
among scholars of contemporary Cambodia in the West, during the late 1970s,
included "sympathetic treatment" of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime, namely
the Khmer Rouge. The unassuming footnote, reprinted here, came from Timothy
Carney's essay entitled, "Unexpected Victory." Some representative points
of view on the Pol Pot regime would include, on the critical side, Shawcross
1976a and 1978a and Lacouture 1977a, 1977b, and 1978. Sympathetic treatment
is in Porter and Hildebrand 1976 and Summers 1975 and 1976. Also of interest
is Chomsky and Herman 1977. Works by authors with greater background or
better judgment in Cambodian affairs include Ponchaud 1976 and 1978 and
Chandler 1977. Since 1979, in any case, few have remained sympathetic to
the Democratic Kampuchea regime, as incontrovertible evidence has detailed
its brutality, dwarfing even Stalin's excesses. [Emphasis added.] [9] The
list took on a life of its own, as the pieces to the puzzle of "Who, in
academia, supported the Khmer Rouge?" came together. Here was, in effect,
the origin of the "Khmer Rouge Canon". When Jean Lacouture published a
book review of Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero in 1977, he touched off an
intense debate with American academic cum activist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky,
who is a distinguished linguist, found erratas in both Lacouture's review
and Ponchaud's book. In a series of polemical exchanges that were sometimes
public, other times private, Chomsky referred to these mistakes as examples
of deception and fraud that fueled anti-revolutionary propaganda against
the Khmer Rouge by the media. Together with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky published
an article in mid-1977 in the Nation, entitled "Distortions at Fourth Hand"
that became the centerpiece of his argument against the media's frenzy
over Pol Pot.[10] Two years later, after the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime was
toppled by Vietnam, the Nation article was followed by a book that continued
to express doubt about the truthfulness of "alleged" Khmer Rouge crimes.
Between 1975 and 1979, "the movement of solidarity with the peoples of
Kampuchea and Indochina as a whole"[11] as described by of one of its members,
Gavin McCormick, vociferously defended the Kampuchean revolution and its
perpetrators. To be sure, there have been very few articles or books on
this topic, since it is so unpleasant for those Ponchaud bluntly characterized
as "unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution," to be reminded of
their responsibility in what Jean Lacouture has called "the murder of a
people." The study of this movement is considered by some, especially those
who continue to support Chomsky, to be wholly outside Cambodian studies.
They suggest that it is more in line with American studies since Chomsky
attacked the Western media's propaganda machine as it gravitated around
the "evils of communism." This thesis seeks to dispel this mitigating advance
in favor of a wider Canon for pro-Khmer Rouge literature published between
1975 and 1979. "The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979," unlike other canons,
is not an official list of works in this case, since no one has ever agreed
to one (Carney's list is a small exception). For a work to be listed and
reviewed in the "Khmer Rouge Canon" requires that it have been written
in the period 1975 to 1979 and, of course, have supported, whether explicitly
or implicitly, the policies of the Khmer Rouge (hence the inclusion of
Chomsky's and Herman's work). A second criterion involves the nature of
the publication, namely print; the work must have been published in a reasonably
well-known English-language periodical (Current History, the Nation, etc.),
a monograph (Malcolm Cadwell's South-East Asia by Cook University), or
a book (Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution and After the Cataclysm). Beyond
this requirement is the obvious need for the author of this thesis to have
read that particular work in order to be able to review it. Of course,
there are countless dissertations, newsletter articles (such as those in
News from Kampuchea and News from Democratic Kampuchea), and other journal
articles (from the Journal of Contemporary Asia) that will not be covered
because they were unavailable or would have required extensive treatment
or for lack of time. The Khmer Rouge Canon is by no means exhaustive, far
too many other Indochina scholars deserve to be canonized, yet because
of circumstances will have to wait. This partial Canon offers a glimpse
into the assumptions and logic, evidence and arguments that a generation
of Western scholars used to defend the Khmer Rouge or rationalize their
policies during the mid-to-late 1970s. Together, they created the standard
total academic view. This glimpse, whether representative or not, is in
and of itself a testament to Khmer Rouge's charm over academia. This thesis
seeks to answer the following questions on the STAV: First, in what military-political
context did it develop? Second, what are examples of STAV scholarship,
who made them, what arguments did they make, and why? Third, how does the
Chomsky-Herman thesis fit in, differ from or was similar to the standard
total academic view? Fourth, beyond the STAV, what were the counter- arguments,
and for the members of the STAV scholars, Summers, Caldwell, Hildebrand,
Porter, Chomsky, and Herman, what was the continuity and change in their
political thinking (using Vickery's STV typology)? In sum, this thesis
deconstructs the standard total academic view on Cambodia and constructs
the foundation for the Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979. ----------- http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0206/1386.html
Continuation of chap.1 of Sophal Ear tesis --------------- ---------- So
explain why William Shawcross, who wrote a great book, "Sideshow, " on
Kissinger, Nixon and the savage, "secret, " bombing of cambodia in the
early 70's, in the yrs. previous to the Khmer Rouge seizing power, is so
critical of Noam on the KR??? See the Sophal Ear thesis I posted the first
chapter and URL of. Another chapter (#3, I think) goes into depth on the
excahnged between Noam and Shawcross in the NYRB. Another cite: Michael
Kazin in Socialist Review, late 70's (think it was in the special double
issue on U.S. politics that contained other pieces by such as Barbara Ehrenreich,
David Plotke and some Cineaste editors on Vietnam War films) critiqued
the, "Propaganda Model, " of Noam C. and Ed Herman. Michael Pugliese -----------------------
Noam isn't perfect. Gosh, what a revelation. But the main reason people
dredge up his imperfections is to discredit him (meaning his critique of
U.S. imperialism). There's no other good reason to harp on what he did
or said about Faurisson or the Khmer Rouge. As Christopher Hitchens himself
once argued (and quite well). Doug -------------------- And what he said
in the mid-1990s about the pivotal geostrategic position held by the Bosnian
Muslims? And the claim in the fall of 2001 "'Western Civilization' was
basing its plans on the assumption that they might lead to the death of
several million innocent civilians"? And the claim that the Taliban forces
displayed "astonishing endurance" in their fight against the U.S., its
allies, and the Northern Alliance? Brad DeLong ------------- etc etc. It
seems to me that people who are uncomfortable with talk about U.S. imperialism
like to seize on these things so they don't have to talk about imperialism
- or better still, find comfort in discovering the errors of a leading
critic of imperialism. So I'm wondering, Brad. You're clearly somewhere
between intrigued by and reluctantly sympathetic with a discourse further
left than you. ----- Brad: right than me ------------ Do you think that
the reason U.S. per capita income is four tiems Mexico's, eight times the
Philippines, and 22 times Haiti's has anything to do with imperialism (or
empire or Empire), some political hierarchy of domination? Or is there
no such thing as imperialism? Doug ------------------------- Mexico? No.
Mexico has made its own history (albeit not under circumstances entirely
of its own choosing). Haiti and the Philippines? I think the U.S. helped
entrench both Marcos and Papa Doc, and that they were worse-than-usual
kleptocrats, and did substantial damage. But I take your question to be,
"Is the U.S. rich because it buys the products of Haiti,the Philippines,
and Mexico for less than their labor values?" And I can't see any way to
get that number up above 2% of the current U.S. standard of living at most...
Brad DeLong ------------------ Let me try a different tack. Does servicing
foreign debt, by draining surplus that could be re-invested at home; or
does the IMF, by enforcing the collection of that debt; or does the world
intellectual property regime, by protecting patent monopolies contribute
anything to maintaining the 5, 10, or 20 to 1 income gap between the U.S.
and the "South"? After all, patent theft and debt default were crucial
strategies for U.S. development in the 19th and early 20th centuries (as
was protectionism, also now largely illegal). Does the repeated willingess
of the U.S. to overthrow any regime that dares attempt a non-orthodox approach
to property and international economic relations contribute anything either?
Three million dead in Indochina is a rather potent example, no? Doug ------------------------
How about, "Don't want people to stuff their heads further up their asses--and
in the process become apologists for Milosevic and Osama bin Laden--by
thinking that the *real* *issue* is the U.S. government acquiring control
of the strategic Sarajevo airfield, or the U.S. government hoping to halve
the population of Afghanistan through famine? Brad DeLong ----------------
Just an aside. The website, AARGH, that reprinted the Hitchens article
from Grand Street on Noam C. is far right Holocaust Revisionist. Along
w/other websites like the Radio Islam of A. Rami, they are well worth perusing
for twisted reasons ;-) Michael Pugliese ------------ Serge Thion, of the
La Vielle Taupe circle, notorious in the Faurrison affair (see, Pierre
Vidal-Naquet's book on Holocaust denial. Might still be available in the
web at the http://www.anti-rev.org webite, also see there the work of Alain
Finkielkraut and Italian Trotskyist, Enzo Traverso) has an article on Chomsky
and the KR. http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/thion/msif1-2.html And, another
aside. E.P. Thompson, in, "The Poverty of Theory, " his brilliant and funny
polemic against Althusserianism mentions that Pol Pot studied marxism in
Paris in the 50's. I've always wondered if he attended lectures by Samir
Amin. I was an avid reader of Amin in the pgs. of Monthly Review in the
70's and 80's. Recently skimmed his MR Press book recounting his intellectual
and political itinery. Michael Pugliese P.S. If Estabrook wants a sympathetic
political economy of the KR, read a book I read in college by Malcolm Caldwell
from Zed Press. Cite is in the biblio in the Sophal Esar thesis. Thought
then that de-linking in the manner in which it was attempted in Democratic
Kampuchea was nuts. P.P.S. Have the long pamphlet elsewhere in storage,
so can't give the ful cite. (But, it is a footnote somewhere in, "Revolution
in the Air, " by Max Elbaum) by Max Elbaum. Published by the small press
that published Frontline and other Line of March pubs. On the reaction
on the new communist movement left of the 70's to the slaughter of the
KR and the Vietnamese invasion that kicked out those real social-fascists.
-------------------------------- Max Sawicky wrote: >Didn't Hitchens put
together a detailed debunking of the >Khmer Rouge rap on Chomsky? Or was
it the Faurisson >affair, or both? Would appreciate links to references.
There's abbc.com. Doug How about supporting Khmer Rouge from 1980? *****
...By January, 1980, the United States had begun secretly funding Pol Pot.
The extent of this support - Dollars 85 million from 1980 to 1986 - was
revealed six years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer
Jonathan Winer, counsel to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
and the Vietnam Veterans of America. When copies of Winer's letter were
circulated the Reagan Administration was furious. Then, without adequately
explaining why, Winer repudiated the statistics, while not disputing that
they had come from the Congressional Research Service. However, in a second
letter to Professor Noam Chomsky, Winer made the same point which, he told
me, was 'absolutely correct.' Here was clear evidence that Pol Pot's secret
backer was Washington. As a cover for its secret war against Cambodia,
Washington set up the Kampuchean Emergency Group, known at KEG, in the
American embassy in Bangkok and on the border. KEG's job was to 'monitor'
the distribution of Western humanitarian supplies sent to the refugee camps
in Thailand and to ensure that they were delivered direct to Khmer Rouge
bases. Two senior American relief workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown,
later wrote, 'The US Government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed ..
the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility
of an internationally known relief operation.' Under US pressure, the World
Food Programme handed over Dollars 12 million worth of food to the Thai
Army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. '20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerrillas
benefited,' according to former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke.
Describing itself as a 'humanitarian organisation,' KEG was run by Colonel
Michael Eiland, the Special Forces operation officer responsible for the
illegal bombing of Cambodia in 1969. Eiland's new 'humanitarian' duties
led directly to his appointment as Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) Chief
in charge of the South-East Asia region, one of the most important jobs
in American espionage. In November, 1980 Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy
director of the CIA and a close adviser of President Reagan, made a secret
visit to a Khmer Rouge base camp inside Cambodia. Within a year, acccording
to reliable Washington sources, 50 CIA agents were running America's Cambodia
operation from Thailand. However, a number of governments were becoming
decidedly uneasy about the charade of the continued United Nation as recognition
of Pol Pot. This was dramatically demonstrated when a colleague of mine,
Nicholas Claxton, entered a bar at the UN in New York with Thaoun Prasith,
Pol Pot's representative and himself complicit in mass murder. Within minutes
the bar had emptied.... ***** Have you concluded that the US government
is malevolent? ------------------------------- Michael Pugliese posts:
Chapter 5: The Intellectual as Commissar ... of trivializing the moral
potency of Chomsky's thesis, of ... In Herman's opinion, the Cambodia and
Faurisson disputes imposed a serious personal cost on Chomsky. ... http://www.mitpress2.mit.edu/
e-books/chomsky/5/6.html - 13k - Cached - Similar pages ...About Noam Chomsky
- Links ... more readable discussion of Cambodia and who supported whom,
from alt.fan.noam- chomsky. Read this first, and then you can plow through
the Sophal Ear thesis ... http://www.talene.net/php/sslinks/links.php?cat=40
- 9k - Cached - Similar pages My Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky ...
trying to alert the outside world to the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia)
... and it seems to me that you have missed the point of Chomsky's main
thesis ..http://. www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/chomsky.html - 24k
- Cached - Similar pages http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache: XevP8KMrnxEC:www.tiac.net/users/hcunn/e-
asia/ch-kh-chron.html+chomsky+cambodia&hl=en&ie=utf-8 Cambodia
and the Media: On Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman ... His response to Chomsky,
quoted in Sophal's thesis: "...it is not only because I once argued for
the victory of this regime, and feel myself partially guilty ... mekong.net/cambodia/media3.htm
- csua.berkeley.edu/~sophal/krcanon.html Khmer Conscience Vol. IX, No.
1, WINTER 1995 THE KHMER ROUGE CANON by Sophal EAR* "How many of those
who say they are un reservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would
consent to endure one hundredth part of the present sufferings of the Cambodian
people?" -- François Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero (1977) Between
1975 and 1979, "the movement of solidarity with the peoples of Kampuchea
and Indochina as a whole" as described by of one of its members, Gavin
McCormick, vociferously defended the Kampuchean revolution and its revolutionaries.
To be sure, ther e have been very few articles or books o n this topic,
since it is so unpleasant for those Fr. Ponchaud characterized as "unreservedly
in support of the Khmer revolution," to be reminded of their responsibility
in what Jean Lacouture has called "the murde r of a people." The study
of this movement is considered by some to be wholly outside "Cambodian
studies"--more in line perhaps with the history of American academia, for
instance. However classified this chapter in American studies surely had
to do with Cambodia and the fate of her people. The Khmer Rouge Canon,
if there were one, would be composed of, among numerous other works, Laura
Summers' "Consolidating the Revolution" (Dec. 1975) and "Defining the Revolutionary
State in Cambodia" (Dec. 1976) in Current History, Georg e C. Hildebrand
and Gareth Porter's biblical Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976),
Torben Retboll's "Kampuchea and the Reader's Digest" in the Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars (Jul.-Sept. 1979) and Malcolm Caldwell's long
essay "Ca mbodia: Rationale for a Rural Policy" in Malcolm Cadwell's South-East
Asia (1979). Perhaps one should add to this list Noam Chomsky and Edward
Herman's masterful "Distortions at Fourth Hand" in The Nation (June 25,
1977) and After the Cat aclysm (1979), but in the latter case, Chomsky
and Herman are mindful to state that they are by no means defending the
Khmer Rouge nor "pretend to know where the truth lies"-- though most of
what they do is to rehash the Hildebrand and Porter line in a more voluminously
footnoted and palatable design. Together, these works and many others ranging
from the Australian homegrown News from Kampuchea (later renamed News of
Democratic Kampuchea) to the British Journal of Contemporary Asia forme
d the Khmer Rouge Canon. Three works come to mind with respect to how that
Canon has been explored previously, William Shawcross' essay "Cambodia:
Some Perceptions of a Disaster," in Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea
(1983), Stephen J. Morris' article "Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Cornell"
in the National Interest (Summer 1989), and Geoffrey C. Gunn and Jefferson
Lee's Cambodia Watching Down Under (1991). Shawcross and Morris, two individuals
one would not expect to find in similar corners essentially agree with
the notio n that a number of individuals on the Left failed, for one reason
or another, to realize even after it became rather obvious, that atrocities
were taking place in post- revolutionary or, alternatively, "liberated"
Cambodia in unprecedented proportions. Sha wcross focuses in on the antiwar
elements, specifically radical academic Noam Chomsky, whereas Morris tackles
Cornell University's pro- Khmer Rouge elements in its South-East Asia Program
(SEAP). Gunn and Lee offer a nearly exhaustive though curiously uncr itical
view of the Australian connection to Democratic Kampuchea. The context
within which Khmer Rouge support incubated was the antiwar movement. To
understand how someone in a wealthy Western democracy could have found
solidarity with the revolution taking place in Kampuchea and elsewhere,
one must first bear in mi nd the political atmosphere and conditioning
from which grew the yoke of radical revolutionary support. It would be
facile to strip the words of these Western academics from the context of
history, a practice not unlike that being undertaken by current hi storical
revisionists. But at the same time, these same activists cum academics
must bear responsibility for what they used to reach their conclusions--namely
the validity and credibility of the evidence they unceremoniously attacked
when at the same time they hypocritically took at face value Ieng Sary
or Khieu Samphan's utterances as words to live by. Notwithstanding the
pro-revolutionary ideological framework from which they were taught to
think, namely the revolutionary conditioning in Cornell's SEAP during the
strife-ridden 1960s and 1970s, one must still wonder how those who studied
Cambodia and ostensibly loved her most in the West, became supporters of
her worst enemy? *Sophal Ear, who left Cambodia in 1976 when he was one
year old, is graduating with double honors from the University of California,
Berkeley in double major Political Science and Economics. He is finishing
up his thesis on the Khmer Rouge Canon . He got a fellowship from the Woodrow
Wilson Foundation to continue his graduate studies at Princeton this fall.
He plans to return to Cambodia some day. ---------------------------------
--------------- On Mon, 17 Jun 2002, Brad DeLong wrote: > To think of Faurisson
as an "apolitical liberal of some sort" shows an > extraordinary failure
of insight. I don't think Chomsky's writing the > preface for Faurisson's
book reveals that Chomsky wants to see Jews > bbqed on a large scale. I
do think it shows evidence of a high degree > of nut-boyness. ---------------
> > I've concluded that Chomsky goes down on the Khmer Rouge rap, > however...
----------------------- To say that Chomsky wrote a preface for Faurisson's
book shows at best only a scant relationship to the facts. But I am of
course fascinated to know what you've concluded. --CGE ------------ a good
number of posts later Gar Lipow answers Brad too: As far as I know Noam
did not write an introduction. He defended Faurissons's right to publish
and stay in the University system on free speech grounds. Some of Noam's
writing was included in the Faurisson book without Noam's permission, as
an "introduction". And I seriously doubt he ever referred to Faurisson
as an "apolitical liberal" - unless he did it ironically. (Noam does have
a rather heavy-handed sense of irony.) So on this one you will need to
drop the nut-boyness accusation. ------- >I've concluded that Chomsky goes
down on the Khmer Rouge rap, however... --------- Don't think so; but we
probably don't want to spend the time to go round the mulberry bush on
this one again. -------------- Brad: How does one have one's work included
in a book "without permission"? Aren't there people in black robes whose
job it is to make sure that your copyrighted work shows up where and when
you want it to? ----------------- By being a consistent freedom of speech
absolutist who refuses to sue for libel, slander or copyright violation.
Most of us our not that absolute in our commitment to free speech. Noam
is. --------------------- It wasn't copyrighted. ---------- > > > No such
thing, unless it was explicitly placed in the public domain. ------------
OK - badly phrase. Noam does not ENFORCE his copyrights. Which in practice
is the same as not having a copyright. ----------- > > In which case, who
is bitching about it? ------------- A speech or some work of Noam's was
used without his permission by a holocaust denier. We are bitching about
the claim that Noam purposely wrote an introducition for the book. What
happened was that , as I said it was used without permission. Noam had
no way of knowing until afterwords - because it was in France and a fairly
obscure book. He chose not to sue because he is a free speech absoluteist.
I note that he also does not sue for libel or slander , something that
is taken advantage of a great deal. --------------------------- dave dorkin
wrote: Which last paragraph are we talking about? Noam as a anti-Semite?
Please...Brad has consistantly opted for distortions of Noam's statements
in favor of implausible secret motives whereas where Larry Summers was
concerned, he did back flips to reconstrue the "inappropriate" comments.
Why should Noam spend any more time on this BS? Faurisson had a right to
publish. Period. Noam said this and has been on record about anti-Semitism
since before most on the list were able to read and write. The rest is
simple propaganda. Wiesel is a real falsifier as a look at his denial of
the Armenian holocaust will attest with no need for ambiguous mind reading.
---------------------- Noam is wrong when he says that holocaust denial
does not equal anti-semitism. It does. There is no other reason for someone
to deny it AFTER investigating. That is not the same thing (as Noam tries
to argue) as someone denying it, a priori, because it is too preposterous.
Nowhere am I saying that Noam is an anti-semite. I said Noam was too proud
to admit that he should have distanced himelf from Faurisson. I too think
he has the right to publish, but I can assure you that if he ever attached
my comments to his book without my permission, then I would sue is sorry
racist ass and then give the moeny to a charity of my choice. Noam should
spend more time because his answer is insufficient because he knows better.
He is a brilliant man with a command over recent history like no other
person I have ever read. For him to plead ignorance of Faurisson's anti-semitism
is disingenous at best or a lie at worst. ----------------------- I do
change my mind, when the argument and evidence are overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly
against me. Why, in the past six months alone, I have changed my mind on
whether Yasser Arafat is a possible partner for peace, and on whether Harry
Dexter White was a Soviet agent. I really would welcome an opportunity
to change my mind in a leftward direction on *something*. But that ain't
the way things are working. Right now, for example, I feel my mind changing
on Chomsky. I used to take Hitchens's account at face value (yes, often
a mistake): I used to think (mendacious as I find Chomsky's history of
the Cold War, his running interference for Milosevic, et cetera) that on
Faurisson Chomsky had been smeared by Dershowitz and company--that Chomsky
had set out just to defend free speech, had fallen into a trap jointly
laid by American Likudniks like Alan Dershowitz (who wanted to paint Chomsky
as an anti-semitic nutboy to neutralize his critique of Israeli policy)
and French holocaust deniers (who wanted to paint Chomsky as one of them
to add his authority to their cause). But now I don't think Hitchens's
account can be sustained. Chomsky's claims to have been concerned only
with freedom of speech seem to be impeached by his own writings, which
show a desire to defend Faurisson that seems to me quite extraordinary
when coupled with his attacks on historians like, say, Lucy Dawidowitz
as "Stalinist-Fascists". There's something else going on here... Brad DeLong
----- Gar Lipow: You know you are really excercising bad faith. Suppose
some Randite wrote a book arguing the the poor and unemployed should be
enslaved in a revival of bond slavery , as a solution to our social problems.
Suppose you had put some work of yours into the public domain - because
you thought it should be widely circulated; suppose the Randite used this
as introduction to her book. By your logic, I could then say "Brad De Long,
notorious for the introduction he wrote to June Galt's pro-slavery 'Work
makes Free'". It is up to you of course; I have always thought of you as
a reaonable man with whom I have severe disagreements. You have a lot of
other basis's for criticizing Noam - ones I disagree with, but which are
not simply weasely distortion. I suspect you have always thought of yourself
as a reasonable man also; if you insist on maintaining this particular
argument you are not being reasonable. ------------------------- Well,
I certainly wouldn't write--in the last paragraph of that work: "...is
it true that X is an advocate of slavery? As noted earlier, I do not know
his work very well. But from what I have read -- largely as a result of
the nature of the attacks on him -- I find no evidence to support such
a conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have
read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence.
As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some
sort. In support of the charge of slavery advocacy, I have been informed
that X is remembered by some schoolmates as having expressed pro-slavery
sentiments in the 1940s, and as having written a letter that some interpret
as having pro-slavery implications at the time of the Algerian war. I am
a little surprised that serious people should put such charges forth --
even in private -- as a sufficient basis. I am aware of nothing in the
public record to support such charges..." But Chomsky did. --------------------
From the UK fascist friends of Oswald Mosley. http://www.oswaldmosley.com/people/chomsky.html
>... a response to a claim that Faurisson is anti-Semitic by dint of his
questioning of the Holocaust, Chomsky said, "I see no anti-Semitic implications
in denial of the existence of gas chambers or even denial of the Holocaust.
Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that
the Holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited,
viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see
no hint of anti- Semitic implications in Faurisson's work"). Noam Chomsky's
relentless pursuit of the truth in history and politics began from the
standpoint of the Left but that did not deter him from moving closer to
The Journal of Historical Review, based in California. For those who believe
that all Jews work towards common Jewish goals, Chomsky is not alone as
a Jew attacking Israel and defending the revisionists' right to free speech.
--------------- Chomsky said, "I see no hint of anti- Semitic implications
in >Faurisson's work". ----------- Brad: Jesus H. Christ! ------------
much much later: >From a strictly logical point of view, this is correct.
It is something a failing of Chomsky's syle of analysis and pesronal temperment
that he insists on strict logic at the expense of context and nuance. Of
course "There was no Holocaust" doe not imply, "The Jews are wicked," but
only people who believe the latter say the former. jks ------------ we'll
pick the ensuing/remainder of the thread up down here: *** MP: Two books
I read when I was 14 (the Michael Parenti was in my high school library!)
that, besides listening to Pacifica Radio station KPFK in L.A. esp. Dorothy
Healey and being mentored by Blase Bonpane the radical Jesuit) that had
a major effect in moving me from left-liberalism to marxism and socialism
were, "American Power and the New Mandarins, " by the Noamster and, "Democracy
for the Few, " by Michael Parenti, his left gov't./civics textbook. That
over the yrs, both have made some bad judgements in terms of political
alignments and sourcing in their books(Parenti, much, much more, see his
Verso vol, "To Kill A Nation, " that cites Thatcher advisor Sir Alfred
Sherman's Lord Byron Institute and has a chapter (#10) on Blagovesta Doncheva,
a Bulgarian follower of Russian neo-fascist metaphysician, Alexander Dugin
[see, "The Black Hundreds, " by Walter Laqueur] has led to folks like me
being much more skeptical of Chomsky. Not in toto. At least not yet. What
the Chomskyites have yet to do or Noam, is to just cut their losses, admit
he was wrong to call Faurisson a relatively apolitical French liberal and
say that he knee jerked in assuming that since the NYT, TNR and the Reader's
Digest plus the USG was saying that the KR were genocidalists that they
must be engaged, in imperial whiterwash apologetics. Now that centrists
and rightists at TNR and the Reader's Digest had that motive, is UNDENIABLE.
But, those sectors of the left, that back then (see, "Camodia: The Revolution
Rescued, " by Irwin Silber, Oakland, Ca. 1986) that just like in the period
of the Purge Trials in '36-'38, supported the Stalinist line that the Old
Bolsheviks had morphed into Fascists (in the coffe table book, "The Commissar
Vanishes, " from Penguin there is a Pravda cartoon of Two Dogs, one Trotsky
, the other Hitler) and that only the bourgeois press said they were innocent.(Though,
the notorious, Walter Duranty of the NYT said they must be guilty.) Sad
but true, (the bit abot the Reader's Digest! Communism was NOT fascism,
Sontag isn't a political scientist! |
I've always thought the
the New Class theories of Djilas, Shasctman, Rizzi, made the most sense.See,
"Marxism and the USSR, " by Paul Bellis.) http://www.policyreview.org/
spring89/meyerson.html >...February 6. Sontag Says Conservatives Right
about Communism. Literary critic Susan Sontag berates New York intellectual
world for failure to understand that Communism is "the most successful
variant of Fascism." Argues that subscribers to Reader's Digest learn more
about realities of Communism than readers of The Nation. "Could it be that
our enemies were right?" Michael Pugliese ----------------- http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0206/1597.html
chip berlet on the 'case' Chomsky was scammed, and will not take responsibility
for what happened and how his name is still abused. His argument is that
since he did not initiate the scam, nor has he ever denied the Holocaust
(all true) that he need not directly respond. My argument is that this
represents a type of aloof academic arrogance that does not recognize the
separate reality of how is name is misused. Noe of this should be used
to suggest Chomsky's other work is not worthy of great respect. -----------------
1667.html yoshie's contribution --------- *** Chomsky: "... wouldn't [one]
at least suspect the motives of someone who denies genocide (the Holocaust,
in particular). Of course. Thus, I do suspect the motives of Wiesel, Bernard
Lewis, the anthropological profession, the American Jewish Congress and
ASI, Faurisson, Western intellectuals who systematically and almost universally
downplay the atrocities of their own states, and people who deny genocide
and atrocities generally. But I do not automatically conclude that they
are racists; nor do you. Rather, we ask what leads them to these horrendous
conclusions. There are many different answers, as we all agree. Since the
points are again obvious, a rational person will proceed also to question
the motives of those who pretend to deny them, when it suits their particular
political purposes." I would e.g. be suspicious of the motives of soi-disant
leftists who use a ridiculous "soft on naziism" charge against people like
Chomsky (or Cockburn) to rule them outside the limits of allowable debate
-- as rightists once used "soft of communism"... --CGE ------------ I've
never seen Chomsky display any sympathies for the bestiary Cockburn has
praised - Larry Pratt, Ron Paul. Can't imagine it either. Doug ---------
---- --------------- 186967 Israel's Other Dirty Secret: The White Slave
Trade (english) Khalid Amayreh 3:58pm Tue Jun 18 '02 (Modified on 9:15pm
Tue Jun 18 '02) article#186967 On Sunday, the Israeli Hebrew paper Ma'ariv
reported that Israel's new white-slave traders "import" and "smuggle" thousands
of young girls from the countries of the former Soviet Union, especially
the Baltic republics Moldavia, Estonian and Latvia, to work as prostitutes
in Israel. Report: Israel has the world's largest white-girl slavery market
By Khalid Amayreh Occupied Jerusalem: 17, 2002 (IAP News): The world's
biggest market for trade in white women is located in Israel, according
to Israel press sources. On Sunday, the Israeli Hebrew paper Ma'ariv reported
that Israel's new white-slave traders "import" and "smuggle" thousands
of young girls from the countries of the former Soviet Union, especially
the Baltic republics Moldavia, Estonian and Latvia, to work as prostitutes
in Israel. The paper described how the "imported girls" are treated like
animals in a livestock market. "After the girl is undressed completely,
the prospective buyer examines every bit of her body, including the size
of her breasts and genitals." "Initially some girls hesitate to undress,
but eventually they do as ordered because they have no other choice." "It
is the first order of business that the boss has sex with the would-be
prostitute before she is officially instated in her job, that is in order
to ascertain her ability to work and make the customers feel good." "When
she undresses, she is asked to move around as beauty models do, and then
the prospective buyer would examine her tongue, teeth and genitals to make
sure that she is physically sound. According the paper, the girl-owner
keeps the girl's passport and bars her from leaving the premises where
she "works." He often threatens to report to the police, warning her that
she would be jailed for 20 years if she was caught. The paper said an average
beautiful slave-girl works 16 hours a day, from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 a.m.
during which she "entertains" 20 customers. The average monthly wage of
a young and beautiful girl, say from Latvia, reaches a thousand US dollars,
that is if her boss is a human being. If the girl doesn't behave as "she
should," the boss slashes 200 dollars from her salary. Usually the less-beautiful
girls shut up, but the more beautiful ones, the ones who attract customers,
are quarrelsome. www.iap.org http://www.iap.org/newsjune17.htm ========
========= Great Source (english) Woodward 4:29pm Tue Jun 18 '02 comment#186973
Real unbiased source the ISLAMIC ASSOCIATION FOR PALESTINE. ==========
Yo Woody (english) I dare you to look 7:17pm Tue Jun 18 '02 comment#187005
This story was also covered (surprisingly well, I might add) on one of
the major network infotainment shows like '60 Minutes' or '20/20'. That
was at least 3 years ago. I'm very sad to say that this is a factual, true
story. The jewish mob is huge, and it's connected to the contractors who
develop settlements on land stolen from palestinians. They're also importing
drugs like Exstacy into the USA, and they control that particular market.
They also have connections to the Russian mob. So if we ever experience
a case of nuclear terrorism, Israel should be the first suspect, IMO. ==========
I believe this is a problem in many countries (english) g 7:35pm Tue Jun
18 '02 comment#187011 Not just Isreal. You report it as being done by the
Isreali government when it is a criminal organization behind it being fought
by the Isreali government and anyone caught facing a long jail term. I
do not see what this has to do with Jews or the Isreali-Palistinian conflict
one bit. I personally think their needs to be a lot more to be done internationally
to stop this growing problem. It also needs to be stopped in Muslim nations
like the Sudan which encourages slavery unlike the Isreali government.
=========== Please look at the Saudis (english) US citizen 9:15pm Tue Jun
18 '02 comment#187032 Where the real "white slavery" is going down. But,
as usual, it's easier to blame the Jews than look at your own fucked up
countries. ------------------------------------- Power and Sexuality in
the Middle East Bruce Dunne Sexual relations in Middle Eastern societies
have historically articulated social hierarchies, that is, dominant and
subordinate social positions: adult men on top; women, boys and slaves
below. The distinction made by modern Western "sexuality" between sexual
and gender identity, that is, between kinds of sexual predilections [and]
degrees of masculinity and femininity, has, until recently, had little
resonance in the Middle East. Both dominant/subordinate and heterosexual/homosexual
categorizations are structures of power. They position social actors as
powerful or powerless, "normal" or "deviant." The contemporary concept
of "queerness" resists all such categorizing in favor of recognizing more
complex realities of multiple and shifting positions of sexuality, identity
and power. In early 1993, news of President Clinton's proposal to end the
US military's ban on service by homosexuals prompted a young Egyptian man
in Cairo, eager to practice his English, to ask me why the president wanted
"to ruin the American army" by admitting "those who are not men or women."
When asked if "those" would include a married man who also liked to have
sex with adolescent boys, he unhesitatingly answered "no." For this Egyptian,
a Western "homosexual" was not readily comprehensible as a man or a woman,
while a man who had sex with both women and boys was simply doing what
men do. It is not the existence of same-sex sexual relations that is new
but their association with essentialist sexual identities rather than hierarchies
of age, class or status. A recent study of family and urban politics in
Cairo suggests that social taboos and silences relating to sexual behavior
provide a space of negotiability.1 They accommodate discreet incidents
of otherwise publicly condemned illicit sexual behavior-adultery, homosexuality,
premarital sex-provided that paramount values of family maintenance and
reproduction and supporting social networks are not threatened. Such silences,
however, leave normative constructions of licit and illicit sexual behavior
unchallenged, sustain patriarchal family values, and legitimize patterns
of sexual violence such as honor crimes, female circumcision and gay bashing.2
Also in 1993, an Egyptian physician affiliated with Cairo's Qasr al-'Aini
Hospital informed me that AIDS and venereal diseases were not problems
in Egypt because neither prostitution nor homosexuality exist in an Islamic
country. While this statement may express conventions deemed appropriate
for conversations with foreigners, it is profoundly ahistorical. Over the
centuries, Islamic societies have accorded prostitution much the same levels
of intermittent toleration, regulation and repression as their Christian
counterparts and, until recently, have been more tolerant of same-sex sexual
practices.3 Denying the existence of transgressive sexual practices helps
obscure the ideological nature of "transgression," making it difficult,
for example, to see prostitutes as workers who support themselves or their
families by performing services for which there is a social demand. Such
denials also legitimize failures to respond effectively to public health
concerns such as AIDS.4 Representations of Power and Sexuality Western
notions of sexual identity offer little insight into our contemporary young
Egyptian's apparent understanding that sexual behavior conforms to a particular
concept of gender. His view, informed by a sexual ethos with antecedents
in Greek and late Roman antiquity, is characterized by the "general importance
of male dominance, the centrality of penetration to conceptions of sex
[and] the radical disjunction of active and passive roles in male homosexuality."5
Everett Rowson has found this sexual ethos "broadly representative of Middle
Eastern societies from the 9th century to the present." This is not to
suggest that there has been an unchanging or homogeneous historical experience
for the Arabo-Muslim world but rather to acknowledge both the remarkable
continuity reflected in the sources and the need for research that would
further map historical variations.6 Islam recognizes both men and women
as having sexual drives and rights to sexual fulfillment and affirms heterosexual
relations within marriage and lawful concubinage. All other sexual behavior
is illicit. Whether the 7th century message of the Qur'an undermined or
improved the position of women is much debated. There is more agreement
that in subsequent centuries Muslim male elites, adopting the cultural
practices of conquered Byzantine and Sasanian lands, construed that message
to promote the segregation and seclusion of women and to reserve public
and political life for men. Social segregation was legitimized in part
by constructing "male" and "female" as opposites: men as rational and capable
of self-control; women as emotional and lacking self-control, particularly
of sexual drives. Female sexuality, if unsatisfied or uncontrolled, could
result in social chaos (fitna) and social order thus required male control
of women's bodies.7 The domain of licit sexuality was placed in service
to the patriarchal order. The patriarchal family served as paramount social
institution and the proper locus of sex, thus ensuring legitimate filiation.
Its honor required supervision of women by male family members, while marital
alliances among families of equal rank maintained social hierarchies. Where
men rule, sexes are segregated, male and family honor is linked to premarital
female virginity and sex is licit only within marriage or concubinage.
Those denied access to licit sexuality for whatever reasons-youth, poverty,
occupation (e.g. soldiers), demographic sexual imbalances-require other
sexual outlets. Such contradictions between normative morality and social
realities supported both male and female prostitution and same-sex practices
in Middle Eastern societies from the medieval to the modern period. Ruling
authorities saw prostitution as a socially useful alternative to potential
male sexual violence (e.g. against respectable women) and a welcome source
of tax revenues, even as some religious scholars vigorously objected. According
to Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, "institutional prostitution forms part of the secret
equilibrium of Arabo-Muslim societies," necessary to their social reproduction.8
In medieval Islamic societies, understood through their (male-authored)
literature of morals, manners, medicine and dream interpretation, sexual
relations were organized in conformity to principles of social and political
hierarchy. "[S]exuality was defined according to the domination by or reception
of the penis in the sex act; moreover, one's position in the social hierarchy
also localized her or him in a predetermined sexual role."9 Sex, that is,
penetration, took place between dominant, free adult men and subordinate
social inferiors: wives, concubines, boys, prostitutes (male and female)
and slaves (male and female). What was at stake was not mutuality between
partners but the adult male's achievement of pleasure through domination.
Women were viewed as naturally submissive; male prostitutes were understood
to submit to penetration for gain rather than pleasure; and boys, "being
not yet men, could be penetrated without losing their potential manliness."
That an adult male might take pleasure in a subordinate sexual role, in
submitting to penetration, was deemed "inexplicable, and could only be
attributed to pathology."10 Rowson explains the relation between gender
roles and sexual roles in medieval Muslim societies by locating them in,
respectively, distinct public and private realms. Adult men, who dominated
their wives and slaves in private, controlled the public realm. Sex with
boys or male prostitutes made men "sinners," but did not undermine their
public position as men or threaten the important social values of female
virginity or family honor. Women, who could not penetrate and were confined
to the private realm, were largely irrelevant to conceptions of gender;
female homoeroticism received little attention. Effeminate men who voluntarily
and publicly behaved as women (mukhannaths) gave up their claims to membership
in the dominant male order. They "lost their respectability [as men] but
could be tolerated and even valued as entertainers"-poets, musicians, dancers,
singers. Men who maintained a dominant public persona but were privately
submissive threatened presumptions of male dominance and were vulnerable
to challenge.11 The articulation of sexual relations in conformity to social
hierarchies represents an ideological framework within which individuals
negotiated varied lives under changing historical conditions. Adult male
egalitarian homosexual relations may have been publicly unacceptable, but
there is evidence that, in the medieval period, men of equal rank could
negotiate such relations by alternating active and passive sexual roles.12
In Mamluk Egypt, lower-class women could not afford to observe ideals of
seclusion and secluded upper-class women found ways to participate in social
and economic life and even used the threat of withholding sex to negotiate
concessions from their husbands. Women in the Ottoman period went to court
to assert their rights to sexual fulfillment (e.g., to divorce an absent
or impotent husband).13 State efforts to repress illicit sexual conduct
or promote social-sexual norms (e.g., by closing brothels or ordering women
indoors) were sporadic, short-lived and typically occasioned by political
circumstances and the need to bolster regime legitimacy.14 Ideological
Reproduction Reproduction of ideological Islamic sexual roles in the modern
period has accompanied dramatic transformations, including the rise of
modern state systems, Western colonial intervention, and various reform
and nationalist movements. These complex processes have not significantly
challenged the patriarchal values that undergird the sexual order or impaired
the capacity of states, elites and political groups to deploy both secular
and Islamic discourses in their support. Colonial authorities left existing
gender relations largely intact, as did middle-class reform and nationalist
movements. While secular legal codes have been adopted in many countries,
they have generally deferred to religious authority in matters of family
or personal status laws. Both nationalist and Islamist discourses have
invoked ideals of Islamic morality and cultural authenticity to control
and channel change.15 Increased economic and educational opportunities
for women and the rise of nuclear family residential patterns have eroded
patriarchal family structures, with, for example, older forms of arranged
marriages giving way to elements of romantic attachment. Nonetheless, as
Walter Armbrust and Garay Menicucci suggest in their film discussions in
this issue, the popular media constantly reaffirm that family interests
and normative sexual behavior take precedence over individual romantic
aspirations. Moreover, because regimes link their legitimacy to the defense
of morality and the licit sexual order, opposition groups and ordinary
people draw attention to the existence of sexually transgressive behavior
to criticize a range of government policies.16 Thus, premarital and homosexual
relations among Moroccan youth, in the context of AIDS prevention debates
discussed in this issue by Abdessamad Dialmy, are attributed to the government's
failure to provide employment and, hence, access to marriage and licit
sexual relations. Both official and oppositional discourses affirm sexual
norms. Sexual relations, whether heterosexual or homosexual, continue to
be understood as relations of power linked to rigid gender roles. In Turkey,
Egypt and the Maghrib, men who are "active" in sexual relations with other
men are not considered homosexual; the sexual domination of other men may
even confer a status of hyper-masculinity.17 The anthropologist Malek Chebel,
describing the Maghrib as marked by an "exaggerated machismo," claims that
most men who engage in homosexual acts are functional bisexuals; they use
other men as substitutes for women-and have great contempt for them. He
adds that most Maghribis would consider far worse than participation in
homosexual acts the presence of love, affection or equality among participants.18
Equality in sexual relations, whether heterosexual or homosexual, threatens
the "hyper-masculine" order. Gender norms are deeply internalized. A recent
study of sexual attitudes among rural Egyptian women found that they viewed
female circumcision as a form not of violence but of beautification, a
means of enhancing their physical differentiation from men and thus female
identity.19 An informal study of men in Egypt found that aspirations to
"hegemonic notions of masculinity" informed a continuous process of negotiating
the nature of masculinity-the ability to provide for families or exercise
control over women-in response to declining economic conditions.20 The
persistent notion that women lack sexual control affords broad scope and
social sanction to aggressive male sexuality. Women alone bear the blame-and
the often brutal consequences evidenced by honor crimes-for even the suggestion
of their involvement in illicit sexual activities. Suzanne Ruggi notes
in this issue that honor crimes may account for 70 percent of murder cases
involving Palestinian women. Honor crimes are also common in Egypt, Jordan
and Morocco. Violence directed against male homosexuals appears to be on
the rise. Effeminate male dancers known as khawals were popular public
performers in 19th-century Egypt; today that term is an insult, equivalent
to "faggot."21 The 19th-century khawals may not have enjoyed respect as
"men," but there is little evidence that they were subjected to violence.
Hostility to homosexual practices has been part of the political and cultural
legacy of European colonialism. Today, global culture's images of diverse
sexualities and human sexual rights have encouraged the formation of small
"gay" subcultures in large cosmopolitan cities such as Cairo, Beirut and
Istanbul and a degree of political activism, particularly in Turkey. Although
homosexuality is not a crime in Turkey, Turkish gays, lesbians, bisexuals,
transvestites and transsexuals have been harassed and assaulted by police
and sometimes "outed" to families and employers. Turkish gay activists
have specifically been targeted. Effeminate male prostitutes in contemporary
Morocco are described as a marginal group, ostracized and rejected by their
families, living in fear of police and gay-bashers (casseurs de pédés).
For some, as for Turkish transsexuals, prostitution serves as one of the
few ways in which they can live their sexuality.22 Many homosexuals in
Middle Eastern countries have sought asylum in the West as refugees from
official persecution.23 "Queering" the Middle East In noting the threat
posed to the dominant sexual order by egalitarian sexual relationships,
Malek Chebel acknowledges the great silence that surrounds the fact that
widespread active male homosexual relations in Middle Eastern societies
presuppose the widespread availability of passive partners.24 Demet Demir,
a political activist and spokesperson for Turkish transsexuals, touches
upon the same contradiction when she states, with reference to the popularity
as prostitutes of Istanbul's transsexuals: "These people who curse us during
the day give money to lie with us at night."25 Is this the "functional"-and
misogynist-"bisexuality" described by Chebel above the mere substitution
by men of other, available men for unavailable women? That view, which
hardly explains the choice of a male or transsexual over a female prostitute,
is entirely consistent with and sustains the ideology that positions public
or visible or audible men as sexually dominant. Little attention has been
given to the nature of these expressions of male sexual desire which, as
Deniz Kandiyoti has noted, seem to "combine a whole range of masculinities
and femininities."26 There are, she suggests, generational and institutional
dimensions to the production of masculine identities. Thus, men who are
expected to be "dominant" in one context may experience subordination,
powerlessness and humiliation in others, for example in relation to their
fathers and to superiors at school or during military service. How does
"masculinity" change meaning in these different domains? The complexity
of questions of sexuality, identity and power are explored in this issue
by Yael Ben-zvi who finds herself, in Israel, simultaneously privileged
as an Ashkenazi Jew and marginalized as a lesbian. The aim of "queerness,"
therefore, is to recognize identity as "permanently open as to its meaning
and political use [and to] encourage the public surfacing of differences
or a culture where multiple voices and interests are heard."27 Bruce Dunne,
an editor of Middle East Report teaches Middle East history at Georgetown
University. -------------------- This one's going to hit the Shrub club
like Lennox Lewis. The US put those Taliban prisoners in the containers
and it's all on news video. That's another thing that Bush knew - when
he unsigned the ICC treaty. I posted on this in December. Thousands of
prisoners in sealed containers right there on the TV screen - anyone could
see they were going to die horribly. --------------------------------------------
New film accuses US of war crimes Kate Connolly in Berlin and Rory McCarthy
in Islamabad Thursday June 13, 2002 The Guardian A former chairman of Amnesty
International yesterday called for an independent investigation into claims
that US troops tortured Taliban prisoners and assisted in the disappearance
of thousands of others in the war in Afghanistan. Andrew McEntee said that
"very credible evidence" in a British documentary film needed to be investigated.
He was speaking after the first showing in Berlin of the film, Massacre
at Mazar. "This film raises questions that will not go away," said Mr McEntee,
who led Amnesty International UK in the 1990s and is now an international
human rights lawyer. The documentary describes how thousands of Taliban
troops were rounded up after the battle of Kunduz in late November and
transported in sealed shipping containers to Sheberghan prison, a jail
then under US control in northwestern Afghanistan. The film alleges that
large numbers of the prisoners died during the journey. US troops suggested
the drivers take the bodies out into the desert at Dasht-i-Leili for burial.
Two men said they were forced to drive hundreds of Taliban, many of whom
were still alive, into the desert, and said that the living were shot.
Footage showed large areas of compact red sand dotted with the traces of
bones, including jaw bones, and pieces of clothing. (...) My post: I saw
a news report right after the Kala-I Janghi massacre that showed a line
of trucks hauling containers that the reporter said were filled with prisoners.
She left it at that, not seeing anything odd about transporting people
in almost airtight containers. This was the same birdbrain Turkish reporter
who covered the fort massacre while Mujahedeen were getting shot practically
right next to her. All the papers are carrying the same story, from apparently
a single source, about "dozens" of Taliban killed. The prisoners themselves
say more than 140 died, when you add it up. I heard there was another TV
news report saying the containers had travelled for 4 days, which suggests
a much higher death toll, especially if there were no air holes. Hakki
-------------------------------- Captured Taliban suffocated on trip to
jail http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4317992,00.html Prison visit
uncovers tragic events in wake of revolt at fort Carlotta Gall in Shibarghan
Wednesday December 12, 2001 The Guardian Dozens of Taliban prisoners died
after surrendering to Northern Alliance forces, asphyxiated in the shipping
containers used to transport them to prison, witnesses say. (...) ---------------------
If possible, this is even worse than it appears. Kunduz is where (according
to a Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker some months ago), ISI was
given 24 hours to get its officers out before the final assault. ISI took
advantage of the window to airlift out the main Taliban and al-Qaeda cadre
in Kunduz as well. So the poor fucks who suffocated in our sealed containers
were the ones who were not important enought for ISI to rescue. Another
glorious victory.... MM ---------------- Whie all this was going on I happened
to catch an interview O'Really did with some Brit journalist who had been
there. He said the Northern Alliance people were basically shooting anyone
they captured who was not Afghani. There was also the report, about which
little has been said since, that in the run-up to the prison rebellion
where CIA guy Mike Span was killed, prisoners were being taken out and
shot, thereby providing an obvious explanation for an otherwise suicidal
act -- the same one for which 'Jihad Johnny' is on trial. Speaking of the
late and lamented Hakki, I'd like to remind people he ripped me for predicting
a U.S. invasion of Iraq this year. The way things are going, I might have
been off by only a month or so. mbs -------------- Now, now Maxie, can't
we all get along. I realize that Hakki somehow, mistakenly, got you in
his mind as Berletish and went reactionary on you. I haven't talked to
him about it or anything but I noticed around when it happened. Silly mistake.
And then they flourish. Total bummer. You both bring so much to my screen.
----- http://writ.news.findlaw.com/ books/reviews/ 20020524_cassel.html
ACTIVIST LAWYER MICHAEL TIGAR LOOKS BACK ON HIS CONTROVERSIAL LIFE IN THE
LAW: A Review of His New Memoir, Fighting Injustice By ELAINE CASSEL ----
Friday, May 24, 2002 Michael E. Tigar, Fighting Injustice (American Bar
Association 2002) Ask America's top litigators to name their best and brightest,
and attorney Michael Tigar will be at the top of the list. Known for his
mesmerizing courtroom presence and peerless trial preparation, Tigar has
represented many controversial clients, among them Terry Nichols, whose
life he convinced a jury to spare in the Oklahoma City bombing trial, John
Demjanjuk, Angela Davis, John Connally, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and members
of The Chicago Seven. Yet in the course of his career, Tigar also has stood
beside scores of other lesser-known individuals who, according to Tigar,
were victims of various types of governmental overreaching or illegality.
Tigar's new book, Fighting Injustice, is part memoir, part legal treatise,
part litigation how-to, and part social manifesto. It recounts the highlights
of a brilliant career in the law and the personal and political forces
that shaped it. A Sense of Injustice Rooted in Childhood and Developed
At Berkeley Afraid of becoming a "well-to-do and skilled, but irrelevant,
lawyer," Tigar has taken on issues he could embrace with "passion"--among
them civil rights, the draft, free speech, government surveillance, the
death penalty, and international human rights. His career has been marked
by a sense of the injustice perpetrated by governments against citizens,
a desire to "look at what needs correcting," and a mission to change the
law and the administration of justice. Tigar grew up in Glendale, California,
where his father was active in the machinists' union and his mother, at
her young son's request, volunteered as a community political canvasser.
When he announced at the age of 11 or 12 that he wanted to be a lawyer,
his father gave him Irving Stone's biography of Clarence Darrow, Clarence
Darrow for the Defense, and encouraged him to be "that kind of lawyer."
There can be little question that Tigar met that challenge. In 1958, Tigar
entered the University of California at Berkeley. There, his world view
began to take shape; it was defined by the civil rights movement, and by
opposition to McCarthyism, capital punishment, and American military policy
in Vietnam. Tigar was active in free speech and anti-war movements. During
a two-year stint as a radio reporter, Tigar recalls, he was "radicalized"
by what he learned about domestic and foreign politics. As a result, he
set his sights on the law, compelled by a single-minded purpose: to influence
events. He entered Boalt Hall, Berkeley's law school, in 1963. At the time,
first year law students were asked to sign a state bar form which, among
other things, questioned whether the applicant had been affiliated with
any organization that advocated the overthrow of the government. Tigar
was offended by this thinly veiled attempt to extract a loyalty oath. After
he obtained signatures from a third of the first year students that they
would not sign the form, Tigar asked civil procedure professor Geoffrey
Hazard whether he agreed that the question was unconstitutional under a
1961 Supreme Court decision. Hazard not only agreed, but called the general
counsel of the California Bar. The question was deleted. Meanwhile, a friend
challenged Tigar by noting that, given his penchant for radicalism, the
only way he would be taken seriously as a law student was to be first in
his class. Tigar did just that--all three years of law school - and became
editor-in-chief of the law review besides. Tigar too modestly credits these
accomplishments not to intellectual brilliance, but to extremely hard work.
Too Much for the Supreme Court, But Not For Edward Bennett Williams Tigar's
law school reputation landed him an offer to clerk for then-Supreme Court
Justice William Brennan. But literally while en route from California to
Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children in tow, Tigar got word
that the offer had been retracted - as a result of pressure from Chief
Justice Earl Warren and others, who had gotten wind of Tigar's anti-government
activism. Tigar's response tells much about his character. Rather than
blasting Brennan, he understood the pressures Brennan was under, refused
to take it personally, and maintained a cordial relationship with Brennan
until Brennan's death. Rebuffed by the Supreme Court, Tigar was hired by
Edward Bennett Williams, a partner in DC's highly regarded firm of Williams
& Connolly. There Tigar got a glimpse of the glamorous side of practicing
law while on the defense team for Bobby Baker. Though appreciating the
"best possible practical legal education" he was getting, the high life
of Williams and his coterie left Tigar cold. His first case on his own,
outside the Williams firm but with Williams's approval, was the pro bono
defense of a young black man charged with carrying a dangerous weapon.
The prosecutor was Robert Bennett - who later became President Clinton's
counsel in the Paula Jones matter and, of late, counsel to Enron. Tigar
won the case, and thereafter developed a practice focusing on civil rights,
the Fourth Amendment, and selective service law. The radical law student
had morphed into a radical lawyer - and Tigar's memoir of his radical youth
similarly segues into a fascinating melange of stories and guidance for
current and would-be trial lawyers. Not Just War Stories, But Practical
Tips For Trying Cases Tigar's legendary courtroom narrative skills are
in evidence here, and readers who enjoy war stories from the front lines
of litigation won't be disappointed. But there is more here than tales
and anecdotes. While the first three chapters of the book provide a chronological
framework for Tigar's life and work, the remaining text is organized thematically,
according to broadly defined issues like free speech, the death penalty,
and government surveillance. Tigar offers valuable mini-treatises on topics
such as the constitutional separation of powers as it relates to waging
war (the subject of his law school valedictory address), selective service
law, wiretapping legislation, and habeas corpus. The book is also generous
with tips for trying cases: Given a choice, advance a theory of your case
that is the least contradictory to that of your opponent, Tigar advises.
Make objections in a way that minimizes disruption to the trial process.
Be judicious in the use of rhetorical and argumentative techniques. Tigar
also offers tips for dealing with the media - don't try your case to them
- and dealing with clients - maintain a healthy skepticism about their
versions of events. This advice from an attorney whose litigation skills
and power of persuasion are praised even by his adversaries is, by itself,
reason enough to read the book. Tigar's advice on trial preparation is
also extremely useful. Tigar explains that he reads every relevant case
and its annotations in search of analogies that might be useful in creating
a theory of a case or crafting a persuasive argument. The Tigar method
includes placing cases in their historical and political frameworks, and
enlivening the legal analogies drawn from close case study with examples
from his encyclopedic knowledge of history, literature, music, and religion.
The Terry Nichols Trial and Beyond Especially interesting is Tigar's insight
into his representation of Terry Nichols for his role in the Oklahoma City
bombing. At least one of the reasons for Tigar's welcoming Judge Richard
Matsch's appointment to defend Nichols is his personal opposition to the
death penalty. "I have thought that in a well-tried capital case jurors
might turn towards life when they saw the human side of capital punishment
up close," he remarks in the book. "And if we can begin convincing jurors
to vote for life, may be we can influence prosecutors not to seek death.
At least, I thought, this would be so in a publicized case." Indeed, there
was substantial publicity - and, in some quarters, outrage - over the jury's
deadlock on whether Nichols had the intent to cause death, which under
the law was a prerequisite to recommending a death sentence. The result
of the impasse was that Judge Matsch had no option but to sentence Nichols
to life in prison - a significant victory for Tigar and his client. Fighting
Injustice includes portions of Tigar's summation to the jury, in which
he reminded jurors that every world religion teaches forgiveness and redemption.
He urged them to transcend vengeance and look toward the future - not to
denigrate the suffering of the victims' families, but to get beyond it.
After the Nichols case, Tigar is said to have wondered if there was another
major trial left in him. Yet one can't imagine that Michael Tigar will
be leaving the courtroom anytime soon. Currently, Tigar is a professor
at American University's Washington College of Law, where he leads seminars
in human rights impact litigation, and mentors students to aspire to a
life in the law that consists of more than six figure incomes and the obligation
to generate thousands of billable hours yearly. He also travels across
the country teaching capital defense and other litigation skills, and tries
cases here and abroad. Fighting Injustice tells stories and teaches. But
it also preaches. "There is a world to be understood, and more important,
to be changed," Tigar admonishes. He challenges lawyers to move beyond
the "search for precedent and rules" and to commit themselves to bringing
justice to a world where injustice abounds. --------------------------
http://www.monthlyreview.org/lawrise.htm A thought-provoking interpretation
of the role of legal ideology in the bourgeoisies ascendance to state
power. HARVARD LAW REVIEW Provides a realistic basis for understanding
our history and the role of the law in the United States. UNIVERSITY
OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW This pioneering book asks brave questions.
. . . Tigar has performed a valuable service in opening up for discussion
this area of social and intellectual history. CHRISTOPHER HILL, THE
NEW STATESMAN Against a backdrop of seven hundred years of bourgeois struggle,
eminent lawyer and educator, Michael E. Tigar, develops a Marxist theory
of law and jurisprudence based upon the Western experience. This well-researched
and documented study traces the role of law and lawyers in the European
bourgeoisie's conquest of power-the first such history in the English language-and
in the process, contradicts the analyses of such major figures as R.H.
Tawney and Max Weber. Using a wide range of primary sources, Tigar demonstrates
that the legal theory of the insurgent bourgeoisie predated the Protestant
Reformation and was a major ideological ingredient of the bourgeois revolution.
Originally published in 1977, Law and the Rise of Capitalism has been translated
into several languages to international acclaim. Tigarµs new introduction
and extended Afterword discuss the struggle for human rights over the past
two decades and shed light on the challenges facing today's social movements.
Tigar draws on his own experiences as a fighter for democratic rights in
the United States, Europe and South Africa, while adding new historical
insights to human rights issues in the United States including the plight
of political prisoners and the death penalty. ----------------------------
He was already a legend before he got to Berkeley. Tigar was either student
body president or some thing like that in first my high school the year
or so before I got there. My best friend's older brother Ken C. ran for
student office attempting to carry on a just dawning tradition of vaguely
defined progressivism in a younger generation in the late fifties. Among
other issues (like civil rights, and HUAC), the Carol Chessman execution
took place about this time and had been a focal point of high school discussions
and UCB campus activism against the death penalty. Any way my friend's
older brother went to UCB and linked up with Tigar and others in Slate,
a progressive student political party on campus in (`59-63?) to push left
or progressive student politics at Cal. After rankling for two or three
years over every minor dip-shit rule put in place specifically to stop
student activism, the Slate crew and others on campus got fed up and planned
a direct assault, the famous Sept `64 fall campaign against the administration's
policies on free speech---that ended up with the Sproul Hall sit-in, known
as FSM. Ken followed Tigar into Boalt as Tigar was graduating. I can't
remember now if Tigar had tried to apply to Douglas for a clerkship or
that was just part of a dinner table discussion with Ken and Bill and their
folks. Perhaps Douglas didn't have a position open at the time. But at
any rate Tigar ended up applying to Brennan, was accepted, and then was
rejected by Warren or some committee of other justices. In a way I hate
thinking about and remembering those times, because they are so far away,
and increasingly unbelievable, unimaginable. Nobody wants to hear it. The
entire sweep of those events and people have been erased from the public
mind, if not the public record, and there is some strange form of mass
denial intimately linked with the whole era--to the effect that all that
happened on another planet to another people. The established political
institutions and their technocrats have systematically defended their own
mediocrity against that whole progressive generation. Hence they (we?)
have had no impact on the basic foundations of the society and the traditional
conceptualization of public thought, conduct, and action. People like Tigar
and others should be sitting on the Supreme Court, or working their way
through senior positions in the federal and state systems, or part of the
elected political establishment. Instead we have an ocean of utterly despicable
mediocrities---obvious ideological beneficiaries of the much touted merit
system of an open, free, and competitive society, blah, blah, blah.. Chuck
Grimes ------------------ Even the smartest people make dumb calls. Judge
Posner wrote a book about Bush v. Gore, offering the best possible defense
of it, you could read it. ANd you don't have to take my word that he's
smarter than both of us put together. Everyone of every political persuasion
agrees. Hell, if you thought you had an interesting take on the case, he'd
talk to you about it for as long as you could keep his attention. Justice
Scalia's brilliant too. A total creep, but brilliant.... jks ----------
I am not sure that being smarter than a wheelchair mechanic with an art
degree adds much to a claim of brilliance. But, here is a question. It
seems to meander along an interesting boundary between the rational and
the ethical. How smart can you be, if in decisions and actions you take
that effect other people's lives, you knowingly do them a greater rather
than a lesser harm? I think much misery follows exactly this proposition---the
belief that a few lives can always be tossed for the greater good, thus
the corpses of the world follow like water flowing over falls. Judging
from the number of such corpses, there seems to be a unlimited supply of
greater goods. Descending to Bush v Gore. Since the outcome was in effect
a choice between two meritless mediocrities, then why choose the one the
people did not choose? If there is any single maxim of democratic government,
it is trust the people. Not because they are right or smart, but because
it is their decision to make---and theirs to suffer. What has flowed from
that decision has been terrible. If Bush had the majority popular vote,
the court could rest its conscience that for better or worse, it only affirmed
the people. But they didn't. They can not rest, because they have done
a profound harm and the consequences have continued to follow breathlessly
from one disaster to another, reeling us into a nightmare. In any event,
the written decision might be rational, it might be interesting, it might
be a lot of other things, but it certainly isn't inspired by ideals of
democratic governance. In fact it is much worse, because it mocks all of
those principles through its transparently fallacious mask. Take your choice.
They were foolish and petty and unwittingly damaged a core belief of democratic
governance or they were smart and therefore did evil. At least I gave them
the benefit of the doubt. ``...We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar,
and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth, through hitherto we
have not been able to complete our work. But whose fault is that? Oh, the
work is only beginning, but it has begun. It has long to await completion
and the earth has yet much to suffer, but we shall triumph and shall be
Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man...'' (Ivan
Karamazov, from the Grand Inquisitor, BK 305p.) The `him' in the above
refers to Satan and `we' refers to the Church, were the Grand Inquisitor
is the chief local official. The Grand Inquisitor has arrested Jesus Christ
and jailed him for performing a miracle on the first day of his second
coming. The quote is from a conversation between the Inquisitor and Jesus
in the dungeon. In the novel's narrative context it is Ivan Karamazov telling
his little brother Alyosha an allegory, in an attempt to destroy his innocence.
Chuck Grimes -------------------- >>My own feeling, not developed in any
detail, is that all judgements in >>terms of intellectual capacity (low
or high as the case might be) belong >>in the same order if not the same
genus as conspiracy theories. They >>turn the focus away from social relations
and history to focus on an "x" >>that is neither measurable nor even very
definable. > -------------->I've got to say I agree with you on this. Justin,
you admire this abstract >quality of intelligence outside of what it does
too much for me. So what if >these fucks are smart? That makes them worse.
> >Doug ----------- Marx said that class rule becomes more stable and dangerous
as the class that is ruling is able to assimilate the best minds from the
opposing class. Isn't this what universities and academics do? I saw some
figures that showed that 4/5 of college graduates go into professional
or managerial positions in large corporations. The cream of high school
graduates from working class backgrounds tend to be shunted into managing
the corporations owned in part by their class opponents. In the same vein,
the working class needs to assimilate critical/utopian opponents of capitalism
(such as Chomsky) to strengthen its opposition and make it more dangerous.
The problem is that just as managers from working class backgrounds may
turn against the owners of the means of production, the critical/utopians
may turn against the working-class at crucial junctures. For example, refusing
to accept Marx and Lenin's arguments for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
grs ---------------------------- This isn't another mealy-mouthed request
for answers to right-wing arguments, but the following passages are interesting
(and maybe the next big thing in Sullivania). Along with pleas that our
big-hearted immigration policy is the main contributor to inequality in
America, we now have the insistence that, since Bill Gates is no more powerful
today than Andrew Carnegie was during the Gilded Age, Paul Krugman is mostly
wrong to fret over the growing con centration of wealth in the hands of
a lucky few. This comes from http://janegalt.net, one of the homes of KrugmanWatch
on the web. Actually, I do have one question: How is this "negative income
tax" thing supposed to work? Wouldn't it simply depress wages, just like
the repeal of the minimum wage that's supposed to go along with it? [Krugman]
" But the Gilded Age looked positively egalitarian compared with the concentration
of wealth now emerging in America. Pretty soon denial will no longer be
possible. What will the apologists say next? " [Galt] On the contrary,
we live in the most egalitarian age in history. Think about it: how much
better is Bill Gates' life than Andrew Carnegie's? He's healthier and will
probably live longer. But is his house more comfy? His art better? His
life more convenient? His clothing better quality? His food tastier and
better prepared? Nope. Healthcare and Gadgets aside, Bill Gates and Andrew
Carnegie have little between them. Now compare the worst paid guy in Carnegie's
empire to the worst paid guy in Bill's. The worst paid guy in Carnegie's
empire lives in a couple of rooms with his wife, several children, and
extended family. He eats meat once or twice a week. He owns one or two
sets of work clothing and a good suit, probably the one he was married
in. He has an ordinary hat, a good hat, and some seasonal apparel. He works
twelve hours a day. He has no personal transportation; he walks or takes
a horsecar. He does not vacation. He cannot afford books, plays, or other
entertainment. His entertainment is church, conversation, and possibly
music. He probably cannot read. In human terms, it may be a rich life.
In material terms, it wouldn't do a modern welfare mother for a camping
weekend. I don't think I need to itemize the fate of Bill Gates' mail boy
for you to see the difference. The rich were comfortable then and are comfortable
now; the improvements are strictly marginal. The poor, on the other hand,
have improved their lot immensely. Plutocracy, my Aunt Fanny. Now, in fact,
I am under the impression that inequality is increasing broadly. The problem
is that Krugman knows as well as I do why that is: technology puts a higher
premium on skilled than unskilled labor. If all you're good for is your
muscle power, a machine will work cheaper and quicker and won't unionize.
Bye bye human draft horses. Neither the estate tax nor any other law man
can make will remedy this. Only three things might: a subsidy to employers
to hired unskilled labor, which is massively unproductive and distortionary,
and would involve rolling back productivity increases in some industries;
training, which has a dismal record last time I looked; or a negative income
tax combined with a repeal of the minimum wage, enabling workers to labor
with dignity at a price they are worth. As you can see from the spin, that
last is my prescription. |