Month: November 2009

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the “unique features” of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power “which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country”.

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” – a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”.

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.

The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

John Pilger

Neuroscientists explore the mind’s sexual side and discover that desire is not quite what we thought it was.

by Carl Zimmer

On April 11, 1944, a doctor named T. C. Erickson addressed the Chicago Neurological Society about a patient he called Mrs. C. W. At age 43 she had started to wake up many nights feeling as if she were having sex—or as she put it to Erickson, feeling “hot all over.” As the years passed her hot spells struck more often, even in the daytime, and began to be followed by seizures that left her unable to speak. Erickson examined Mrs. C. W. when she was 54 and diagnosed her with nymphomania. He prescribed a treatment that was shockingly common at the time: He blasted her ovaries with X-rays.

Despite the X-rays, Mrs. C. W.’s seizures became worse, leaving her motionless and feeling as if an egg yolk were running down her throat. Erickson began to suspect that her sexual feelings were emanating not from her ovaries but from her head. Doctors opened up her skull and discovered a slow-growing tumor pressing against her brain. After the tumor was removed and Mrs. C. W. recovered, the seizures faded. “When asked if she still had any ‘passionate spells,’” Erickson recounted, “she said, ‘No, I haven’t had any; they were terrible things.’”

Mrs. C. W.’s experience was rare but not unique. In 1969 two Florida doctors wrote to the journal Neurology about a patient who experienced similar spells of passion. She would beat both hands on her chest and order her husband to satisfy her. Usually the woman would come to with no memory of what had just happened, but sometimes she would fall to the floor in a seizure. Her doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy, probably brought on by the damage done to parts of her brain by a case of syphilis. More recently, in 2004, doctors in Taiwan described a woman who complained of orgasms that swept over her when she brushed her teeth. Shame kept her silent for years, until her episodes also caused her to lose consciousness. When the doctors examined her, they diagnosed her with epilepsy as well, caused by a small patch of damaged brain tissue.

Each of these stories contains a small clue about the enigmatic neuroscience of sex. A hundred years ago Sigmund Freud argued that sexual desire was the primary motivating energy in human life. Psychologists and sociologists have since mapped the vast variations in human sexuality. Today pharmaceutical companies make billions bringing new life to old sex organs. But for all the attention that these fields of research have lavished on sex, neuroscientists have lagged far behind. What little they knew came from rare cases such as Mrs. C. W.’s.

The case studies do make a couple of things clear. For starters, they demonstrate that sexual pleasure is not just a simple set of reflexes in the body. After all, epileptic bursts of electricity in the brain alone can trigger everything from desire to ecstasy. The clinical examples also point to the parts of the brain that may be involved in sexual experiences. In 2007 cognitive neuroscientist Stephanie Ortigue of Syracuse University and psychiatrist Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli of the Geneva University Psychiatric Center reviewed the case of Mrs. C. W. and 19 other instances of spontaneous orgasms. In 80 percent of them, doctors pinpointed epilepsy in the temporal lobe.

Discover

In this diary of mental illness, John Sterns describes a day spent battling schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, chronic depression and chronic anxiety …

Paranoia makes me sweat. I am drenched as I walk up the small campus hill on an unusually clear, warm day. I must reach the safety of my basement office so that the satellite can no longer track my thoughts and transmit them to the central command.

The waves cannot penetrate the concrete of the building’s basement. The controllers know almost all of my movements and thoughts. I need a break to plan my next moves. I keep my head down to avoid making eye contact. Every encounter is an attack, with teeth that are razors ready to rip my flesh. I must please everyone or they will take out a whistle, blow on it and call the attack squad to surround me. They will put a hood over my head, subdue me and then take me to a cabin and kill me.

In my office I sit immobile at my desk, doing no work and trying not to fight my pounding voices. I am helpless against the paranoid delusions and suicidal voices that swirl inside my aching head. My vision blurs. The walls and windows close in and I breathe in rasps. The voices are telling me to die. The air is charged with anxiety. Everything and everyone is overwhelming to me. My body tenses, ready for an ambush at any time. I cower, expecting three men in black snow caps to attack me and beat me to death with wooden clubs. Capture is imminent. Giving in is inevitable.

The afternoon turns to evening and my co-workers leave the building until I am alone. Spies walk the campus ready to report on my movements. I call my wife (though the phones are tapped) and tell her I will be home late. This is a typical evening for us. I will be home in time to play with our son and help put him to bed. Home is separate from work, safe from the satellite. In both places, however, I must have everything in order, everything in its place, neat stacks of papers and no clutter. Nothing can be on the floors. No hiding places for a surprise assault.

I open a drawer and take out the receipts for dinners that I have had during the past month. Most of the meals were eaten alone at local restaurants. A few are legitimate business meals, which I mix in my expense reports to confuse my would-be captors. The satellite is just one part of a campus-wide plot to kidnap my wife and son, take them to a remote cabin in the Trinity Mountains and brainwash them until they forget about me. I will be kidnapped, too, and taken to an underground bunker in Alabama and killed by lethal injection. This plot has been in place since we arrived here more than two years ago. My predecessor killed himself (something I learned after I started the job) and I am convinced that death looms for me as well.

I try to confuse my enemies by committing crimes. I submit false expense claims so that they believe I am working, are fooled into thinking that I have value for them, thereby delaying their plot. I savagely demean and berate my co-workers to drive them away, so they won’t spy on my activities. Work is the centre of the conspiracy.

Intelligent Life

In Liberia rape survivors are increasingly speaking up and seeking help as awareness of rights increases, but social taboos persist and seeking justice does not always mean that justice is served.

Sexual violence consistently comes first or second (after armed robbery) in monthly police crime listings in the capital Monrovia. The majority of rape victims are children, according to treatment centre statistics. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Monrovia reports their youngest survivor at 21 months old.

“The civil war is over,” said Monrovia resident Tupee Kiadi. “But the new war is rape, especially targeting teenagers and babies. During the war we had peacekeepers to prevent further violence…but women do not have peacekeepers to stop rape.”

During the war women and girls were subjected to rape (commonly gang rape) and sexual slavery, many becoming pregnant from rape. Since peace was sealed in 2003, sex crimes – and impunity – have persisted throughout the country.

Awareness up

MSF launched a campaign on 26 October with the message “Rape is a hospital and clinical business”, to bring rape out into the open and to educate Liberians about the free MSF-run medical and psychological services at Island Hospital in Tweh Farm, western Monrovia.

Clinic visits are up over recent years, said MSF psychologist Elias Abi-aad, who hopes further awareness has been raised by the campaign.

Elizabeth Zro, a social worker and counsellor at the clinic, told IRIN, “Rape is a huge problem here, but people are more open about it now than they used to be a few years ago.”

The MSF clinic takes in on average 70 patients per month, 80 percent of whom are girls under 18; just under half of those aged 12 and under.

In addition to a medical examination, survivors are given protection from sexually transmitted infection, means to block HIV infection and pregnancy if it is within 72 hours of the crime, a medical certificate that can be used in court and several rounds of counselling.

Deweh Gray, president of the Association of Female Lawyers in Liberia (AFELL), told IRIN: “The changing attitude we see is the increased reporting of these cases by people who want to access the system.”

IRIN

Canadian First Nations internationalize their struggle against the most destructive project on earth

Canadian indigenous activist Clayton Thomas-Muller (right) leads the tar sands protest through London’s Trafalgar Square with a traditional song. Lionel Lepine (left) carries the banner. Photo by Mike Russell.

The extraction of oil from tar sands is perhaps the most ecologically insane idea on the planet. As traditional wells begin to run dry, the oil transnationals are turning to sources that are much more expensive to extract and exponentially more polluting.

Canada’s tar sands are by far the biggest of these, containing almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia. Millions of barrels a day are already being extracted in Alberta, creating lakes of toxic waste so huge that they are visible from space.

Outside of Canada, very few people have heard of the tar sands. But in August four First Nations representatives from Canada travelled to Britain to participate in the London climate camp – the country’s biggest annual gathering of climate activists. Organized by the Indigenous Environmental Network and supported by the New Internationalist, the group’s aim was to internationalize the campaign for a complete tar sands moratorium.

Lionel Lepine, a young father from Fort Chipewyan, the indigenous community known as ‘ground zero’ because of its location downstream from this toxic timebomb, left Canada for the first time to make the trip. ‘I’m here because the tar sands are having such devastating effects on our environment and communities,’ he explained. ‘This project is destroying our ancient forests, spreading open-pit mining across our territories, contaminating our food and water, disrupting local wildlife and threatening our entire way of life.’

Another of the visitors was George Poitras, former chief of Mikisew Cree First Nation. ‘We are seeing a terrifyingly high rate of cancer in Fort Chipewyan,’ he revealed. ‘We are convinced that these cancers are linked to the tar sands development on our doorstep. It is shortening our lives. That’s why we no longer call it “dirty oil” but “bloody oil”.’

But the tar sands are also a global problem. The largest industrial project in the world is also the dirtiest. Tar sands produce more than three times as much CO2 per barrel as conventional oil, and the extraction process uses as much natural gas in a day as could heat 3.2 million Canadian homes for a year. And there’s enough of this filthy stuff to push us over the edge into climate disaster. As a result, the delegation argued, it should be everyone’s concern.

The trip highlighted the fact that tar sands exploitation, although happening in Canada, is largely being driven from London’s financial Square Mile. Shell is heavily committed, and BP took a significant stake in 2007. Both are financially backed by British pension funds and investment banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, prompting this new partnership between First Nations and British campaigners.

New Internationalist

Joel Whitney interviews Noam Chomsky, November 2009

Noam Chomsky discusses his forthcoming book, the hypocrisy of neoliberalism, where he feels hopeful about democracy despite U.S. terrorism, and his friendship—okay, passing acquaintance—with Hugo Chavez and other “pink tide” presidents.

If Noam Chomsky’s critics have a common refrain, it is pointing to his habit of being far too hard on America’s motives and too easy on its opponents. The former, of course, is his métier. The latter criticism has limited (though a few important instances). In fact, Chomsky’s central question is how do you punish the crook who owns the jailhouse, pays the police their salaries, and fails consistently to see his crimes as such? Or perhaps, how do you get a self-enamored hypocrite to reckon with his pathology? Certainly not by repeating the praise, or what Chomsky sometimes calls America’s “state religion” of self-worship. And despite this, in a very limited way, Chomsky does give credit where credit is due.

In his forthcoming book Hopes and Prospects, Chomsky admits that a black family in the White House is historic. But he credits not “America,” a “system of power” defined by “market interventions” in the economy that once tolerated, and even fought for, the right to own humans as slaves. Nor does he give much credit to “Brand Obama,” as he calls the phenomenon that elected our new president, insisting that the new president is “likely to ‘have more influence on boardrooms than any president since Ronald Reagan.’” In fact, Chomsky gives credit for the 2008 election, in a way, to himself and his ilk.

In an early manuscript of the book (the text may change), Chomsky writes, “The two candidates in the Democratic primary were a woman and an African-American. That, too, was historic. It would have been unimaginable forty years ago. The fact that the country has become civilized enough to accept this outcome is a considerable tribute to the activism of the nineteen sixties and its aftermath, with lessons for the future.” As such, this small tome is Chomsky’s legacy book.

And high time. His landmark critique of B.F. Skinner that crippled behaviorism’s predominance in psychology and linguistics turns fifty this year. His first book on politics, American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays, turns forty. The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, came out from the New Press last year, in time for Chomsky’s eightieth birthday. And Chomsky’s wife died of cancer last winter (he cites her below anyway as the person he can go to to air his robust anger, rather than admit its effect on his work). Regularly voted into the “top public intellectual” polls various magazines frequently run, the linguist and foreign policy critic, said to be worth two million dollars, remains a polarizing figure.

What’s remarkable is how Chomsky’s criticism of the Vietnam war and America’s many interventions seem even more relevant today, prescient in their understanding of how American greed, dehumanization of others, cultural ignorance, and hypocrisy are rewritten as pragmatic, not moral, mistakes. In “The Remaking of History,” from Toward a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, he writes, “They may concede the stupidity of American policy, and even its savagery, but not the illegitimacy inherent in the entire enterprise.” He continues a page later, “One may criticize the intellectual failure of planners, their moral failures, and even the generalized and abstract ‘will to exercise domination’ to which they have regrettably but understandably succumbed. But the principle that the United States may exercise force to guarantee a certain global order that will be ‘open’ to transnational corporations—that is beyond the bounds of polite discourse.”

Yet Chomsky has been criticized for accuracy and balance, for the petty (citing statements made by an “embassy” rather than “ambassador”) and the heinous (apologist for Pol Pot; a distortion of his views), but most commonly, it seems, for comparing U.S. behavior to Hitler’s. In Prospect Magazine, Oliver Kamm writes of Chomsky’s early political writings as going “beyond the standard left critique of U.S. imperialism to the belief that ‘what is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification.’” (In fact, Chomsky discusses statements like this, insisting, below, that context justifies the comparisons, adding, “I think it’s just the right thing to say.”) “This diagnosis,” Kamm continues, “is central to Chomsky’s political output. While he does not depict the U.S. as an overtly repressive society—instead, it is a place where ‘money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print and marginalize dissent’—he does liken America’s conduct to that of Nazi Germany. In his newly published Imperial Ambitions, he maintains that ‘the pretenses for the invasion [of Iraq] are no more convincing than Hitler’s.’”

On balance, Chomsky is a vital, even indispensable voice in the American cultural debate, needed to remind us of the outrage we should feel as the modernization of American life brings us to accept as necessary and understandable the devastation of foreign countries with little actual public debate and no input from the citizens of those countries. How do our presidents’ “terrorist” campaigns (in Chomsky’s terms) become a normal functioning of the state? How does a country that so readily welcomes outsiders, or purports to, so easily bury them by “overthrowing governments around the world and installing malicious dictatorships, assassinating people” or write them off as collateral damage? Perhaps we should, or do, on some level, share his outrage. And yet his voice has been every bit as ruthless, and occasionally selective (like most good rhetoricians), as his opponents suggest. Does that run counter to, or complement, the voice and methodology of the systems of power he criticizes?

—Joel Whitney for Guernica

Guernica: You’ve been savaging U.S. foreign policy for a long time. What’s new in Hopes and Prospects? Or would you say that you’re reworking a single thesis with new examples?

Noam Chomsky: There are new things that are happening. But I don’t think the basic principles of international affairs or social organization or aspirations for the future change very much. In fact, they haven’t for a long time.

Guernica: Does that imply that your approach as a critic isn’t effective?

Noam Chomsky: On the contrary, it has been quite effective in ways I have discussed repeatedly and at length, even though it hasn’t reached as far as changing fundamental principles and their institutional basis.

Guernica: One thing that never changes in your work is the meditation on the devastating effects of U.S. foreign policy. Here in the U.S., we endlessly tell ourselves, and our leaders especially do this, that “we’re good.” No matter the results, our intentions are good.

Noam Chomsky: Systems of power don’t have good intentions. You’ll occasionally in history find a benevolent dictator or a king who has the interests of the people at heart. But fundamentally, structures of power are not moral agents. We don’t look for good intentions. Of course, they all profess good intentions. But of course that’s also true of Hitler.

Guernica: Are “structures of power” amoral or immoral?

Noam Chomsky: Structures of power are amoral. The CEO, say, of the American Petroleum Institute may care a lot about whether his grandchildren will have a decent world to live in. But as CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, he’s going to try to make that impossible by doing what they’re doing right now, in fact. Working out ways to try to duplicate the success of the insurance industry in undermining any kind of health reform. They’ve already announced, “We’re gonna try to learn from [the health insurance industry’s] tactics and block any kind of energy or environmental bill.” Now he knows (he’s not an idiot) that could lead to a serious catastrophe which could undermine the prospects for the life of his grandchildren whom he cares a lot about. But as the director of a petroleum institute, he can’t consider that. If he did, he’d no longer have that position.

http://www.guernicamag.com/spotlight/1409/chomsky_half_full/

via http://www.3quarksdaily.com/

I sadly write from my prison cell. I am sad that you remain unjustly incarcerated on death row for 25 years. I have read that the Court will be addressing further arguments on your case, and I pray that you will finally get the justice you deserve.

I know how frustrating it is for you, as it is for me, to continue to receive negative results in the face of the blatant injustices that have been recognized in our respective cases.

All we have is hope. Hope that finally the right thing will be done and justice will be done. An injustice against any one of us is an injustice against us all, and it is essential that we reach the masses so they will force action before our society is swallowed by the evil forces amongst us.

I applaud those courageous people who have supported us, and, when I feel low and hopeless, I think of them and what they do for us, and refuse to surrender. So, I continue to encourage you to stay strong, and to continue the fight until you are set free.

I want to thank all of you who have dedicated your lives to our freedom. Stay strong and keep Mumia strong. We must not let anyone forget the great injustices that Mumia has suffered.

We must keep strong. We must intensify the fight.

We cannot succumb to the forces in society who seek to keep us quiet and who seek to hide the blatant injustices which keep us penned like animals.

If we are able to unify the masses and stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, we are not only saving the life of the man who speaks for those who are not often heard and whose stories are rarely told, but you are saving all of us who remain unjustly behind bars, saving us from the depths of hopelessness.

Free Mumia Abu Jamal!
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
Leonard Peltier

http://www.uaine.org/

http://www.leonardpeltier.net/

By Robert Jensen

I have stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid of the holiday.

Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States. Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning” (http://www.uaine.org/).

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.

Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline.

Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

ZMAG