or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a memorable 1964 film by Stanley Kubrick.
The mad generals shown in the movie have much in common with the continuing fabric of past and present US warriors as evident from the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, etc. (Ed.)
By James L. Cavallaro
Does the United States need a truth commission to uncover wrongdoing committed by the Bush administration in the war on terror? Yes, says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) of Vermont. Earlier this month, he proposed a process to do just that. “Many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong,” he said. “We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page.”
Many in Washington bristle at the idea. “If every administration started to reexamine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R) of Pennsylvania. “This is not Latin America.”
No, Senator Specter, this is not Latin America. But as someone who has spent the past quarter century researching and working on human rights issues in the Americas, I cannot help noticing instructive parallels and lessons that we might learn from the experience of our southern neighbors.
To be clear: I am not suggesting that the scale of wrongdoing by the US in the past eight years equals the atrocities of Argentina’s dirty war, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, or Guatemala’s long civil war. But the nature of the abuses and the official responses and justifications are, tragically, similar. How so?
Let’s begin with the violations that characterized the authoritarian Latin American regimes of the 1970s. In Argentina and Chile, state agents employed brutal violence in the interrogation and detention process (torture). They kidnapped political dissidents and suspected subversives whom they often tortured to extract information, and ultimately, secretly executed them (forced disappearances). Latin American judicial systems failed to oversee the actions of the executive branch of government to gauge the legality of security and antiterrorism policies (lack of judicial independence). And, all too frequently, state agents killed suspects without legal process (extralegal killings).
Sound familiar? It should. In the past eight years of the war on terror, the US government has compiled quite a record of torture, forced disappearances, extralegal killings, and lack of judicial independence. In light of these similarities, we should ask – despite Mr. Specter’s objections – whether anything can be learned from the Latin American experience. Two lessons spring to mind:
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by Erik Sperling
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping wrapped up his official visit to Venezuela yesterday, signing a dozen new agreements with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in the areas of energy, telecommunications, information, and agriculture.
Xi pledged another US$8 billion towards a joint development fund for projects in the South American country, while Venezuela agreed to contribute an additional $4 billion. Chavez said the fund will be used for development in education, health, and infrastructure in Venezuela.
The new agreements are the newest sign of the increasingly close ties between Caracas and Beijing.
“We’re near to 300 signed documents, advanced projects that are very strategically important,” Chavez said, during a speech at the China-Venezuela Business Forum.
In the field of energy, agreements were signed allowing for preliminary steps towards new drilling projects in Venezuela’s Orinoco basin, the creation of a company to manufacture oil tankers, and multiple refineries on Chinese soil, including one that would process up to 400,000 barrels per day (bpd).
“We know that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world,” Chavez affirmed. “All the oil that China needs for its development in the next 200 years is here in Venezuela.”
In honor of Xi’s visit, Chavez formally inaugurated Venezuela’s first cellular phone factory, the Venezuelan Telecommunications Corporation (VTELCA), which was constructed with Chinese support and technology in the northern state of Falcon.
During a live television and radio broadcast, the Venezuelan president connected to the factory via Venesat-1, Venezuela’s first geostationary satellite launched late last year in another Sino-Venezuelan project.
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A police recruit in Colombia is handcuffed naked and fed manure in a initiation rite carried out by his colleagues.
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The fallen Australian soldiers of the notorious Sandakan death march were remembered at an emotional ceremony at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.
About 90 Australians, mostly relatives of those who perished in the forced march, turned up Friday to hear talks by two former prisoners of war (PoWs) recalling the horror days of World War II.
Also present were Sabah Tourism marketing managers Noredah Othman and Josephine Chai as well as Tourism Malaysia Melbourne director Putra Hilmy Elias and marketing manager Hasanti Perera.
The event was organised by the Shrine of Remembrance chief executive Denis Baguley and Sabah Tourism representative in Australia Gwenda Zappala.
Despite their age, Sandakan PoWs Leslie (Bunny) Glover, 88, and Robert (Bob) Ellice-Flint, 90, who travelled from Queensland to be here, recalled vividly, for over an hour, their horror days in Sandakan, Sabah.
In the incident between January and March 1945, over 1,000 Australian and British PoWs were forced to march across 260km of treacherous terrain and dense jungle from the Sandakan prison camp to Ranau.
Only six Australian PoWs survived.
At the start of his enthralling war reminiscences, Glover told a sole Japanese, an antiwar woman, at the ceremony that no one held any grudge or animosity for the “sins of your grandfathers or great grandfathers” during the war when thousands of Australian and Allied troops were massacred.
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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
So maybe I was wrong. I used to consider health care our greatest national shame, considering that we spend twice as much on medical care as many European nations, yet American children are twice as likely to die before the age of 5 as Czech children — and American women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as Irish women.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
On the Ground
Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
Yet I’m coming to think that our No. 1 priority actually must be education. That makes the new fiscal stimulus package a landmark, for it takes a few wobbly steps toward reform and allocates more than $100 billion toward education.
That’s a hefty sum — by comparison, the Education Department’s entire discretionary budget for the year was $59 billion — and it will save America’s schools from the catastrophe that they were facing. A University of Washington study had calculated that the recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a stimulus.
“We dodged a bullet the size of a freight train,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington.
So for those who oppose education spending in the stimulus, a question: Do you really believe that slashing half a million teaching jobs would be fine for the economy, for our children and for our future?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan describes the stimulus as a “staggering opportunity,” the kind that comes once in a lifetime. He argues: “We have to educate our way to a better economy, that’s the only way long term to get there.”
That’s exactly right, and it’s partly why I shifted my views of the relative importance of education and health. One of last year’s smartest books was “The Race Between Education and Technology,” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both Harvard professors. They offer a wealth of evidence to argue that America became the world’s leading nation largely because of its emphasis on mass education at a time when other countries educated only elites (often, only male elites).
They show that America’s educational edge created prosperity and equality alike — but that this edge was eclipsed in about the 1970s, and since then one country after another has surpassed us in education.
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(Submitted by a reader)
By Allan Tacca
Dictionaries define “wisdom” as the ability to think and act using a combination of knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. So we are talking about quite abstract qualities of mind, deployed together.
Especially in our time, it has been possible for one to accumulate a huge stock of information and technical skills, becoming an ‘expert’, without necessarily acquiring wisdom. Man’s capacity for wisdom seems not to have changed much over the last 5,000 years.
If, for example, we look at an advanced country like the United States in its current troubles, we would think that (given the facts and figures available to them) Americans would never again return to their wanton consumption, to the over-valuation of leisure, and to the ugly gas-guzzling road-going monsters that symbolise American freedom and also expose American vulgarity.
We would be mostly wrong. When economic hardships ease, and Americans are able to borrow again, the old habits will very likely return. There will be exceptions of course, but these would not be enough to prevent the next cycle of serious economic mistakes, widespread pain and condemnations.
The greed, selfishness and cynicism that afflict rich countries and are implied in the current economic crisis are in place even in the poorer African countries. But Africa also has its special problems; most notably, that range of undemocratic and marauding tendencies that go under the general name of bad governance.
Bad governance and the slow wisdom of man could conspire to bring back into vogue the phenomenon of military coups. Some months back, the army seized power in Mauritania.
The African Union and the so-called international community went into full voice to condemn the coup; some Western countries cut off aid, but no one drove tanks to the gates of the military junta. From a distance, the Mauritanians seemed a little nervous, but not entirely unhappy with the military action.
A couple of weeks ago, following the death of Guinean President (Gen.) Lansana Conte, an army captain led a bunch of soldiers to take control of the country. The usual condemnations started flowing, and I think the African Union has suspended Guinea’s membership.
Unimpressed by foreign calls for the restoration of the constitutional order, a lot of Guineans seem to have cautiously welcomed the coup. One of the soldiers made two instructive remarks before the media. He said that Conte’s government had spat in the face of the Guinean people.
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Dear Friends,
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a hold over from the Bush Administration, has recommended a sharp increase — 17,000 new troops — in our military presence in Afghanistan.
While President Obama has been a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq, he has approved Gates’ plan to increase our military presence in Afghanistan, which has the potential to become a new quagmire in the Middle East.
On Tuesday, February 17th, President Obama announced that he plans to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan – that’s a 50 percent increase. However, the Department of Defense has not yet completed its research on the situation in Afghanistan, nor its long term strategy for the conflict in Afghanistan, including an eventual exit strategy.
I just took action to tell Defense Secretary Gates not to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan until we have a long-term strategy in place, including an exit strategy. I hope you will, too.
Please have a look and take action.
Thanks!
Soraida Martinez is an artist/activist. Her website is
http://www.soraida.com/
By Charles R. Larson
After all the international controversy about Slumdog Millionaire, if Hollywood crowns the film with an Oscar for the best movie of the year, Indians, I suspect, are going to have much to crow about. How ironic that a half a year ago the movie’s investors feared that they had made a real dog—a film that would interest no one—and were considering dumping it directly on DVD with no release in movie theatres around the world. Can the movie moguls (mughals?) have been so myopic that they had no idea of the film’s importance?
Then the slow release, mostly in art-houses in the United States and England, rather than the big cineplexes, and the increasingly positive word-of-mouth (still in the West), followed by the surprise Golden Globe Award as best film of the year along with several other significant awards for music and acting. And at the time Slumdog Millionaire hadn’t even been released in India.
I was traveling in India when all the brouhaha about the film exploded. Many Indians were ecstatic about all the attention and the subsequent awards the film rapidly acquired: everything about Danny Boyle’s film was happening so quickly. Reviews of the movie (which officially opened in India on Friday, January 23rd) were positive, even glowing. Pirated copies of the film were selling everywhere for as little as 40 rupees, less than a dollar. The Indian press was overflowing with articles about the film, photos of the actors, the director and the composer, and interviews with Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A, the novel that became the basis for the film.
A typical review—for example, Khalid Mohamed’s in The Hindustan Times (Jan. 24)—began by proclaiming, “There’s reason to dance on the streets.” Mohamed gave the film five stars, the highest possible ranking, and ended his glowing evaluation by stating, “Literally every performance rocks. Still, your heart goes out most of all to Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail and Rubiana Ali, the kids who portray the knee-high Jamal, Salim, and Latika. They’re extraordinary just like the rest of Slumdog Millionaire. As one of the songs goes, Jai jo!”
Then the attacks on the film began, generally arguing that the unflattering representation of Mumbai—especially the poverty—lock India into stereotypes that Westerners are already too quick to assume. Arindam Chaudhuri, in The Times of India (Feb 2nd), excoriated that the film “sucks,” describing the movie as “A phony poseur that has been made only to mock India for the viewing pleasure of the First World!!” The film “illogically shows every negative thing about India happening in the protagonist’s life…slums, open-air lavatories, riots, underworld, prostitution, brothels, child labour, begging, blinding and maiming of kids to make them into ‘better beggars,’ petty peddlers, traffic jams, irresponsible call centre executives….”
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Slumdog Millionaire’s Dehumanizing View of India’s Poor
By Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most celebrated films of recent times, tells the rags-to-rajah story of a love-struck boy, Jamal, who, with a little help from “destiny,” triumphs over his wretched beginnings in Mumbai’s squalid slums. Riding on a wave of rave reviews, Slumdog is now poised to win Hollywood’s highest tribute, the Academy Award for Best Picture. This honour could add some US$100 million to Slumdog’s box-office revenues, as Oscar wins usually do. But it will also enhance the film’s already-robust reputation as an authentic representation of the lives of India’s urban poor. So far, most of the awards collected by the film have been accepted in the name of “the children,” suggesting that its own cast is promoting it not as an entertaining, cinematically spectacular work of fiction, which it is, but as a powerful tool of advocacy. Nothing could be more worrying, as Slumdog, despite all hype to the contrary, delivers a disempowering narrative about the poor that renders hollow its apparent message of social justice.
Many Indians are angered by Slumdog because it tarnishes their country’s image as a rising economic power and beacon of democracy. While understandable, this is not defensible. Though at times embarrassingly contrived, most of the film’s heartrending scenarios reflect a sad, but well-documented reality. Torture is not unheard of among the police, though none is surely dim enough to target an articulate man who is also a rising media phenomenon. Beggar-makers do round-up abandoned children and mutilate them to make them more sympathetic, though such a child will unlikely ever chance upon a $100 bill, much less be capable of identifying it by touch alone.
If anything, Boyle’s magical tale, with its unconvincing one-dimensional characters and absurd plot devices, understates the depth of suffering among India’s poor. It is impossible, for example, that Jamal would emerge from his ravaged life with a dewy complexion and upper-class accent. The real problem with Slumdog, however, is not its shallow portrayal of poverty, but its minimizing of the capabilities and even basic humanity of those it claims to speak for.
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