The Politics of Mourning

What was lost when state socialism collapsed? It wasn't simply what socialist states did manage to provide. The most devastating loss is, paradoxically, the most intangible: the loss of what we never had. Only by mourning that loss can we mourn the loss of socialism properly, or so says Volker Braun in his poem "Das Eigentum [Property]":

Das Eigentum

Da bin ich noch: mein Land geht in den Westen.
KRIEG DEN HÜTTEN FRIEDE DEN PALÄSTEN.
Ich selber habe ihm den Tritt versetzt.
Es wirft sich weg und seine magre Zierde.
Dem Winter folgt der Sommer der Begierde.
Und ich kann bleiben wo der Pfeffer wächst.
Und unverständlich wird mein ganzer Text
Was ich niemals besaß wird mir entrissen.
Was ich nicht lebte, werd ich ewig missen.
Die Hoffnung lag im Weg wie eine Falle.
Mein Eigentum, jetzt habt ihrs auf der Kralle.
Wann sag ich wieder mein und meine alle.

Property

I'm still here, though my country's gone West.
PEACE TO THE PALACES AND DEVIL TAKE THE REST.
I gave it the elbow and heave-ho once myself.
Now it's giving away its negligible charms itself.
Winter is followed by a summer of guzzling.
But I remain, worrying at the root of all evil.
And my poem becomes increasingly puzzling,
To wit: what I never had is being filched.
I shall always mourn what never happened to me in person.
Hope lay across the path like a trap.
And that's my junk you've got your paws on.
Will it ever again be given me
To say mine and thereby mean the collective me.

The sense of loss expressed by Braun is not his alone -- it is a "mass perception" that has elicited "a memory crisis" because state socialism was never given a proper burial:

"What I never had, is being torn away from me. What I did not live, I will miss forever." With these line from his drama Property (Das Eigentum, 1990), playwright Volker Braun renders his melancholic reaction to the disintegration of the German Democratic Republic. The GDR once prided itself as the tenth strongest world economy, but following the postcommunist turn, or Wende, most of its industries have been brought to a halt, and hundreds of thousands have found themselves jobless. The euphoria at the opening of the Berlin Wall dimmed within a few months, and a pall seemed to set in over the two Germanys, one which prompted many to reconsider the disintegration of state socialism. Whereas most Germans considered the communist project a failure, many others proceeded to mourn its passing, nonetheless. Paradoxically, what Braun's protagonist lost with the collapse of communism was the possible past he never really had.

The mass perception of loss has elicited a memory crisis in contemporary culture. While retrospective literary texts and artworks proliferate, museum exhibitions salvage and curate the wreckage of the GDR as if there were literally no tomorrow. A new German word has surfaced to describe this trend: Ostalgie, derived from Nostalgie, or nostalgia. The first syllable drops the letter n to become ost, the word for east. What remains signifies something like nostalgia for the "eastern times" of state socialism. Yet the nostalgic longing for some home that, perhaps, never really existed distinguishes itself from two other modes of memory that charge postcommunist culture: mourning and melancholia. . . . (Charity Scribner, "Left Melancholy," Loss: The Politics of Mourning, University of California Press, 2003, p. 300)

Is it any wonder that, in 2003, Wolfgang Becker's film Goodbye, Lenin! became one of the highest grossing German films in history?

Goodbye, Lenin! became an international hit as well. The act of mourning socialism perhaps "harbors a latent utopian desire, a refusal to accept the fait accompli of late capitalism as the only imaginable frame of our world" (Scribner, p. 316) -- the desire that is utopian, not because it has no place in the world, but because it knows no geographic border or generational boundary.

Protest the Inauguration by Supporting the National Network of Abortion Funds

Here is a great idea from Katha Pollitt and Jennifer Baumgardner. Put it on your Counter-Inaugural to-do list:

Are you wondering how to protest Inauguration Day (January 20)? Here's a way to make a powerful political point and also help women in need: "honor" George Bush, the most anti-choice President since Roe v Wade, by making a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds. You know how pro-choice groups sometimes counter anti-choice demonstrations by asking people to Pledge a Picketer (give a small sum per demonstrator)? Think of this as Pledge a President!

NNAF, an umbrella for 102 local abortion funds around the country, helps poor girls and women with unwanted pregnancies pay for their abortions. Last year the member funds of NNAF donated $2 million to help nearly 20,000 poor women across the country -- but the need is so much greater. By making a contribution to this important work you not only help women, you send a message to anti-choice Republicans -- and their Democratic friends -- that safe, legal and AFFORDABLE abortion matters to you and that you are not willing to have women's wombs turned into a political football to placate religious extremists.

To donate by credit card, go to http://www.nnaf.org and click the "Donate Now" button. Checks made out to NNAF can be mailed to NNAF, c/o Hampshire College, 893 West Street, Amherst MA 01002-3359. So that we can keep track of special Inaugural donations, please be sure to write "abortions--Inaugural protest" in the designation box or memo line. Bonus for on-line donors: If you dedicate your contribution to George W. Bush, you can send an e-card from the donation page (address it [email protected]) and let the White House know that you celebrated the inauguration by supporting access to safe abortion.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could raise enough money so that no woman in our rich country had to continue a crisis pregnancy for lack of a few hundred dollars? Small donations quickly add up, so whatever you would like to give, NNAF will be thrilled and grateful to receive it.

Please forward this e-mail to your friends and post it in your lists!

Katha Pollitt and Jennifer Baumgardner

From Full Spectrum Dominance to Full Spectrum Disorder

In a much publicized article in The Atlantic Monthly, William Langewiesche wrote:

For the most part, . . . the insurgents' attacks are less nihilistic than they are logical and precisely focused, whether against the American coalition and its camp followers or their Iraqi agents and collaborators. The truth is that however vicious or even sadistic the insurgents may be, they are acutely aware of their popular base, and are responsible for fewer unintentional "collateral" casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces. (emphasis added, "Letter from Baghdad," January/February 2005)

That's an important point worth reiterating, as some Americans favor "an alternative occupation," mistakenly believing that foreign soldiers of an army of occupation are kinder and gentler, less likely to kill civilians, than Iraqi insurgents are.

Langewiesche also makes another significant point: "The Iraqi security forces are riddled with insurgents, not because the vetting is poor, or because agents have been planted, but because hatred of America has grown within the ranks just as it has in Iraqi society at large" (January/February 2005). There goes the American dream of Iraqification.

Langewiesche, however, is still trapped in his own myth: "Tragically, this was not the necessary outcome of the American invasion" (January/February 2005). Liberals like Langewiesche think that it is a mistake, rather than the nature, of Washington that it has not "humbly sought their [Iraqis'] support, respected their views of solutions, of political power, of American motivations, or of the history and future of Iraq" (January/February 2005). Either they have learned nothing from history, or they live in denial of the reality of the American empire. Faith in a possibility of a benevolent empire goes hand in hand with a racist belief, and Langewiesche is no exception in this regard. He is capable of saying that "some of the blame lies with the immaturity and opportunism of the Iraqi people" (emphasis added, January/February 2005). In other words, his racism makes him dare to suggest that it is the responsibility of the Iraqi people to make the occupation work, because the interests of the Iraqi people and the American occupier are identical, which is akin to claiming that it is the responsibility of slaves to make slavery work, because the interests of slaves and masters are one and the same.

Langewiesche thinks that "we" should have "explained ourselves honestly" to the Iraqi people (January/February 2005). There is no "we" in America, first of all, but no one can get it in his head and remain a liberal. In any case, Washington has explained its motive plainly enough: it wants Full Spectrum Dominance in all spheres of life, military, politics, and economy. It's been always the same goal at least since World War 2, if not earlier. The world, not just Iraqis, has heard it, and, except Washington's lackeys, no one has liked that, and no one ever will.

Thankfully, Washington no longer has economic supremacy to achieve its goal. A sore loser, it seeks to compensate for its declining economic power by aggressive assertions of military power. In doing so, however, it will only succeed in bringing about Full Spectrum Disorder.

The Politics of Fear: The Power of Nightmares and Hijacking Catastrophe

Robert Scheer, a Los Angels Times columnist, raises an important question: "Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist?" (emphasis added, Robert Scheer, "Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?" Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2005).

Terrorism is deeply threatening, but it appears to be a much more fragmented and complex phenomenon than the octopus-network image of Al Qaeda, with Bin Laden as its head, would suggest.

While the BBC documentary acknowledges that the threat of terrorism is both real and growing, it disagrees that the threat is centralized:

"There are dangerous and fanatical individuals and groups around the world who have been inspired by extreme Islamist ideas and who will use the techniques of mass terror -- the attacks on America and Madrid make this only too clear. But the nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our societies is an illusion. Wherever one looks for this Al Qaeda organization, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the 'sleeper cells' in America, the British and Americans are chasing a phantom enemy." (emphasis added, Scheer, January 11, 2005)

The BBC documentary that Scheer mentions is The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear: Part 1 "Baby It's Cold Outside" (October 20, 2004); Part 2 "The Phantom Victory" (October 27, 2004); and Part 3 "The Shadows in The Cave" (November 3, 2004).

The documentary (as well as its transcript) is made available online by the Information Clearing House: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Like Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire (Dirs. Jeremy Earp and Sut Jhally, 2004), The Power of Nightmares should be a useful tool for activists organizing public forums and house parties.

During the otherwise stupefying presidential election campaigns in 2004, there were a couple of truthful moments: both George W. Bush and John Kerry admitted that the "war on terror" cannot be won.

• "Asked on NBC television whether America could win its 'war on terror', the president had replied: 'I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the -- those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world'" (Julian Borger, "President Admits War on Terror Cannot Be Won," The Guardian, August 31, 2004).


• "When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. 'We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,' Kerry said. 'As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life'" (Matt Bai, "Kerry's Undeclared War," New York Times, October 10, 2004).

The reason we cannot win the "war on terror" is that there is no single organization that we can defeat and make the world free from terrorism. Terrorism, like drug use, can only be managed -- as long as we live in the kind of profit-driven world that gives the ruling class of the richest nations the power to exploit the rest of us. Bush and Kerry, in rare moments of candor, conceded the first point, though they never would recognize the second point.

Conceived at Abu Ghraib

Specialist Charles Graner and Private First Class Lynndie England are back in the news, what with Graner's lawyer Guy Womack comparing one of Graner's Abu Ghraib acts to cheerleaders' routine: "Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?" (qtd. in Adam Tanner /Reuters, "Shocking New Videos Shown at Iraq Abuse Scandal," January 10, 2005).

Among the most bizarre details to emerge from the whole Abu Ghraib torture scandal is that Charles Graner and Lynndie England had a child together!

The child is saddled with videotaped and photographed evidence of his parents happily torturing Iraqi detainees, smiling over the corpse of a tortured detainee, and having sex themselves before or after the torture:

England appeared to suppress a smile as investigators described a videotape that showed her having sex with Corporal Charles Graner, who prosecutors say was a ringleader of the abuse and England says is the father of the child she is carrying. Her mother sat stern-faced in the observation gallery, her eyes darting from the witness stand to her daughter as an investigator described photographs of England topless and engaged in what he called oral sex. (Kate Zernike, "Best-known Abu Ghraib Defendant Faces Military Judge," New York Times/International Herald Tribune, August 04, 2004)

Can this child overcome the most grotesque primal scene in the visual history of mankind, which not even Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey could have dreamt of?

Guía del Migrante Mexicano

Last month, Mexico's Foreign Ministry published Guía del Migrante Mexicano [Guide for the Mexican Migrant], a 31-page illustrated handbook for Mexican workers who cross the Rio Grande in search of trabajo, and distributed "about 1.5 million copies" of it (James C. McKinley, Jr., "A Mexican Manual for Illegal Migrants Upsets Some in U.S.," New York Times, January 6, 2005).

Guía del Migrante Mexicano gives sensible advice to would-be migrant workers, alerting them to dangers of crossing the river and the desert, cautioning them against the wiles of coyotes and drug smugglers who are ready to exploit them, counseling them to stay out of trouble that might lead to arrest and deportation, and teaching them to exercise the rights they do have regardless of their immigration status if they get detained (the New York Times made excerpts from the English translation available: James C. McKinley, Jr., "A Guide for the Illegal Migrant," January 9, 2005).

Mexican officials said that the guide is "not intended to encourage illegal immigration, but to reduce the loss of life. Last year, more than 300 migrants died while crossing rivers and deserts to reach the United States" (emphasis added, McKinley, Jr., January 6, 2005). The handbook even comes with a bright yellow disclaimer on the last page.

The anti-immigrant Right, however, are unappeased: "'If the Mexican government were really very concerned about their citizens dying in the desert, why doesn't it use its army and police to prevent people from crossing in those areas?' said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter borders" (McKinley, Jr., January 6, 2005). It's a pity that Mexico is a capitalist country -- if only Mexico had gone Communist, Mexican migrants could have expected as warm a welcome from the Right as Elián Gonzalez received. The Right wouldn't let you go even if you wanted to go home to your father!

Seriously, where would the U.S. economy be without an estimated $155 billion in output that 3 million undocumented Mexican workers add to it?

Three Kinds of Anti-Semitism in Israel

There are at least three kinds of anti-Semitism in Israel today.

One is the anti-Semitism of the Israeli Right, which represents Israel as a nation of warriors, hard and pitiless, distinct from and superior to the soft and delicate Diaspora Jews. The "C." whom Amos Oz interviewed in 1982, an Israeli military officer who some without evidence claim is Ariel Sharon, is an exemplary voice for it (the link courtesy of Jazzman of Anti-Zionist Notes):

Leibowitz is right, we are Judeo-Nazis, and why not? Listen, a people that gave itself up to be slaughtered, a people that let soap to be made of its children and lamp shades from the skin of its women is a worse criminal than its murderers. Worse than the Nazis. . . . If your nice civilised parents had come here in time instead of writing books about the love for humanity and singing Hear O Israel on the way to the gas chambers, now don't be shocked, if they instead had killed six million Arabs here or even one million, what would have happened? Sure, two or three nasty pages would have been written in the history books, we would have been called all sorts of names, but we could be here today as a people of 25 million! (qtd. in Amos Oz, "About the Soft and the Delicate," Davar, December 17, 1982)

That's an anti-Semitism that depends on the erasure of memories of brave Jewish resistance fighters against fascists.

Another is what may be called the anti-Semitism of the oppressed and marginalized. The following incident reported by Ariel Finguerman and Elana Shap in their article "Aliyah from Former Soviet Union Brings a Surprise -- Anti-Semitism" sheds light on it (the link courtesy of John Sigler of Jewish Friends of Palestine):

In a great majority of cases, the victims are elderly Russian Jewish immigrants.

"They are more unprotected and easily recognized by the anti-Semites," [Zalman] Gilichinsky [of the Israeli Information and Assistance Center for the Victims of Anti-Semitism] says. "Israelis, on the other hand, can defend themselves and know how to go to the police, hence they are hardly attacked."

Dvora Biton, 38, turned to Gilichinsky for help after an unpleasant situation developed about two years ago. She told JTA that her adversary was a neighbor in Yeroham, a city in the Negev Desert.

In the beginning, the relationship with the neighboring family was pleasant, and the Bitons, who are Orthodox Jews, invited them for a Shabbat dinner. When they discovered that the neighbors were not Jewish, however, the Bitons decided to cut down on their social contact.

The neighbor reacted badly and started to call Biton "zhidovka," a pejorative Russian term for a Jew. Every time they met, the neighbor made the cross sign on her chest, shouted, spat on the floor and cursed Biton, she says. (Finguerman and Shap, JTA, July 22, 2003)

That fits into the "cases in which a verbal anti-Semitic reaction is a response to racism encountered here by non-Jewish immigrants, especially the young people whose lives the Israeli establishment embitters, pushing them to alienation from the state" that Lily Galili speaks of ("Anti-Semitism, Right Here at Home," Ha'aretz, May 23, 2003), vulnerable to but not exactly identical with the anti-Semitism of committed neo-Nazi ideologues and activists (which has also burgeoned in Israel).

The fundamental source of the problem, Galili believes, ironically is the Israeli Law of Return, which is "in fact based on the Nuremberg Laws, in which the Germans expanded the definition of who is Jewish in accordance with their own needs":

[D]ealing with the phenomenon must begin with the demographic madness, whereby everyone is welcome to come here as long as he is not an Arab. Even if he hates the state, even if he hates Jews, he is considered a positive contribution to the needs of the demographic head-count. About a year ago, Lutfi Mashour, the editor of the Arabic newspaper Al-Sinara, told Haaretz that while the Jews are obsessing about the Arab demographic threat, a demographic problem is burgeoning for them in quite a different place. (emphasis added, Galili, May 23, 2003)

Both Israel's democratic deficit and demographic madness, however, can be solved in one fell swoop if all leftists in Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Jewish and Palestinian diasporas become committed to struggle together for one democracy, indivisible, with liberty, equality, and solidarity for all.

When Doctors Go to War

Steven H. Miles concluded last year: "Government documents show that the US military medical system failed to protect detainees' human rights, sometimes collaborated with interrogators or abusive guards, and failed to properly report injuries or deaths caused by beatings" ("Abu Ghraib: Its Legacy for Military Medicine," Lancet 364, August 21, 2004).

(It says a lot about class that the whistle blower who exposed torture at Abu Ghraib was not a medical doctor but a soldier whose mother "lives in a cramped trailer steps from a railroad track, at the edge of a line of trim clapboard houses" [Hanna Rosin, "When Joseph Comes Marching Home: In a Western Maryland Town, Ambivalence About the Son Who Blew the Whistle at Abu Ghraib," Washington Post, May 17, 2004, p. C1] -- Spec. Joseph Darby.)

M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks corroborate Miles' findings and argue that U.S. "physicians and other medical professionals breached their professional ethics and the laws of war by participating in abusive interrogation practices," contradicting the Pentagon's denial that they did:

Not only did caregivers pass health information to military intelligence personnel; physicians assisted in the design of interrogation strategies, including sleep deprivation and other coercive methods tailored to detainees' medical conditions. Medical personnel also coached interrogators on questioning technique. ("When Doctors Go to War," New England Journal of Medicine 352.1, January 6, 2005)

The American Civil Liberties Union has made "Records Released in Response to Torture FOIA Request" available online, so you can see some of their evidence for yourself.

What is particularly chilling is that, having interviewed the medical personnel complicit in military interrogations (some of whom spoke on the record while others did so confidentially), Bloche and Marks discovered that "[p]hysicians who did such work tend not to see these practices as unethical":

On the contrary, a common understanding among those who helped to plan interrogations is that physicians serving in these roles do not act as physicians and are therefore not bound by patient-oriented ethics. In an interview, Dr. David Tornberg, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, endorsed this view. Physicians assigned to military intelligence, he contended, have no doctor–patient relationship with detainees and, in the absence of life-threatening emergency, have no obligation to offer medical aid.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In helping to plan and execute interrogation strategies, did doctors breach medical ethics? Military physicians and Pentagon officials make a case to the contrary. Doctors, they argue, act as combatants, not physicians, when they put their knowledge to use for military ends. A medical degree, Tornberg said, is not a "sacramental vow" -- it is a certification of skill. When a doctor participates in interrogation, "he's not functioning as a physician," and the Hippocratic ethic of commitment to patient welfare does not apply. According to this view, as long as the military maintains a separation of roles between clinical caregivers and physicians with intelligence-gathering responsibilities, assisting interrogators is legitimate. (emphasis added, January 6, 2005)

(See, also, M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks, "Doctor's Orders -- Spill Your Guts," Los Angeles Times, January 9, 2005.)

The banality of evil indeed. The U.S. medical personnel interviewed by Bloche and Marks compartmentalize and then subordinate their individual conscience, professional ethics, and international laws to dictates of military service, and in their compartmentalization and subordination echoes the final plea of Adolf Eichmann:

I cannot recognize the verdict of guilty. . . . It was my misfortune to become entangled in these atrocities. But these misdeeds did not happen according to my wishes. It was not my wish to slay people. . . . Once again I would stress that I am guilty of having been obedient, having subordinated myself to my official duties and the obligations of war service and my oath of allegiance and my oath of office, and in addition, once the war started, there was also martial law. . . . I did not persecute Jews with avidity and passion. That is what the government did. . . . At that time obedience was demanded, just as in the future it will also be demanded of the subordinate. (emphasis added, "Eichmann's Final Plea")

That future that Eichmann predicted is here now -- or rather it has been with us always, invisible only to those who thought: "It Can't Happen Here."

Anti-Semites Make "Aliyah" to Israel . . . as the Best and Brightest Jews Return to Russia

Here are a couple of little known facts. Many of the best-educated Russian Jews that Zionists (the majority of whom are End-Time Christians rather than Jews) "saved" for Israel have sought to use it as a stepping stone to "America, Canada or other Western countries" or even gone back to Russia itself because of "high unemployment and a stagnant economy" as well as "the fear of terrorism" in the Holy Land. A more ironic paradox is that only one third of the Russians "saved" for Israel are Jewish and some of the non-Jewish Russians who made "Aliyah" to Israel turned out to be anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and even Holocaust deniers who hate both Jews and Arabs!

One million Russians have arrived in Israel since 1990, making them the country's largest group of immigrants, but poor employment prospects and the fear of terrorism has led to many deciding to return home.

Sitting in her Tel Aviv flat, Irena flicked through photographs of dancers wearing brightly coloured costumes. "I made all these," she said.

"But nobody here cares about your professional skills. Israelis just see Russians as people who have come over to clean their houses, look after old people or sweep the streets."

These days Irena mends clothes for a living but she was once chief designer at the Palace of Culture in Sochi, Russia's most famous Black Sea resort.

The town was badly affected by the rouble crash in 1998 so Irena went to Israel with 16 members of her family.

Now, 12 of them, including her husband, have already returned home.

Sochi is enjoying a revival with 6 million tourists each summer, and Irena's husband has already opened his second restaurant there.

Disillusioned

By contrast Israel faces high unemployment and a stagnant economy.

Irena is also nervous about suicide bomb attacks, and worries about her son in the army. When he finishes his military service she plans to go back to Russia.

"I do not know why the government encouraged us to emigrate in the first place," she said.

"They promised us a beautiful future, but life here is pretty tough, and they should have warned us about that."

Vita Martinova, a journalist for the Russian language weekly Novosti Nedeli, said: "Russians want to be more prosperous. They want more money, better cars and good jobs.

"Now they are finding that Russia offers better opportunities for them."

A study released this year says that at least 50,000 Russians returned from Israel from 2001 to 2003.

According to Eliezer Feldman, a sociologist in Tel Aviv, there are three distinct categories of new Israeli citizens returning to Russia and the former Soviet Union.

In the first group there are people like Irena who had great expectations but were disappointed.

If they were lucky enough to find work, their larger earnings in Israel were wiped out by the higher costs of living there.

So they return to the relative security of a low-rent apartment in a provincial town in Russia or one of the ex-Soviet republics.

Global potential

The second group said Feldman is made up of people who saw Israel as a stepping-stone to a third country.

Refused access to America, Canada or other Western countries and unable to adjust to life in Israel, these people often end up back home.

Sasha Danilov, who has been successful in Israel, belongs to the third group of people leaving the country.

He arrived aged 18 from St Petersburg with nothing but a guitar and one small suitcase. At first he worked nights in the airport as a porter and studied during the day.

Seven years later he had his own hi-tech consultancy firm. Now though he has closed his Tel Aviv office because he and his girlfriend are off to Novosibirsk.

Sasha sees Siberia as his exit strategy from Israel's economic crisis. "There is huge potential there and I am hoping to sell Israeli technology to new markets. I want to act as a bridge between the two countries."

Positive discrimination

Sasha is just one of a new breed of Russian speaking Israelis with Western know-how and a globalised outlook who are in high demand across the former Soviet Union.

Anton Nosik is another. He said he simply outgrew the Israeli market and went back to Moscow in 1997 to open several internet news sites.

"In Russia there are more than 14 million internet users compared to just 2.2 million in Israel.

"Israel is a beautiful country but it feels parochial. And if you have not gone to the right school or university it is hard to get promoted beyond a certain level," he said.

Yuri Shtern, one of the 12 Russian members of the Knesset, recognises the problem and said Russians are under represented in Israel's public sector.

He wants to bring in a positive discrimination law to put more Russians in the top jobs.

"I am deeply unhappy with this trend because I think we are losing some of our best and brightest people," he said.

People from the former Soviet Union are still coming to Israel but they tend to be far less educated than the Russians who are leaving.

Moreover only one third of the latest wave of immigrants is Jewish according to religious law. Under the Law of Return anyone with a Jewish grandparent may seek Israeli citizenship.

Anti-Semitism

Some worry that aggressive recruitment drives by the Jewish Agency, responsible for bringing immigrants to Israel, is persuading the wrong kinds of people to emigrate.

Zalman Gilichensky, a teacher from Jerusalem, claimed that people with very distant Jewish roots and even anti-Semites are being encouraged to move to Israel.

He said he has evidence of more than 500 outbreaks of anti-Semitism over the past year and he has set up a website to monitor them.

The incidents include swastika graffiti on the walls of synagogues, and verbal and physical abuse.

"The only way to stop these attacks is to change our immigration policy," Mr Gilichensky said. "It does not bother me that some non Jews come here.

"But I cannot see why we are importing people who hate our guts. Would-be immigrants should have to prove they know something of our history and respect our customs.

"But the government has done its best to sweep all this anti-Semitism under the carpet because these attacks are so damaging to the image of Israel."

Nevertheless the Israeli Attorney General launched a criminal investigation into a neo-Nazi website which called itself the White Israeli Union, after pictures appeared of a man in an Israeli army uniform with his arm raised in a "Heil Hitler" salute.

But since then, other Russian language websites with similar content have appeared, with tasteless jokes about Jewish people and Holocaust denials. (emphasis added, Lucy Ash, "Israel Faces Russian Brain Drain," Crossing Continents, BBC Radio 4, November 25, 2004)

According to Chris McGreal of the Guardian, the White Israeli Union has a long list of enemies, which "include Jews, Arabs, foreign workers and, tellingly, immigrants from Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union," and "encourages readers to join an Israeli army combat unit to kill Arabs" (emphasis added, "Israel Checks Out Website Run by Russian Racists," June 25, 2003).

Robert Frank's America

Robert Frank, whose exhibition Storylines is now being held at Tate Modern, shot the photograph below in Chicago in 1956, in the course of documenting the Democratic National Convention:

"Political Rally, Chicago" (1956), gelatin silver print, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

That's an iconic image of Cold War America, captured at the moment when, having purged most of the real and imaginary Reds from political life, "even McCarthyism was losing its force," as "the Senator, curtailed by the Senate's condemnation motion of December 1954, was to die" in 1957 (Marjorie Perloff, "Poetry 1956: A Step Away From Them"). Joseph McCarthy's political death, however, hardly destroyed the paranoid culture of anticommunism, and, in 1955, the Swiss-born Frank, while documenting America on a Guggenheim fellowship, was arrested and questioned by the police in Little Rock, Arkansas, who were convinced that he was a spy on account of his camera, foreign accent, and papers in foreign languages. What the police didn't realize was Frank was a spy of an altogether different sort, stealing and exposing an open secret -- essential lonesomeness -- of the American way of life.

Below the display of patriotic bunting stands a tuba player, his face completely obscured by the horn. Or rather it is as if the horn grew out of his body, having supplanted a human face. Instead of speaking in his own voice, the man is condemned to play a red, white, and blue tune on demand. The tuba player is up against a bleak wall. The woman on his left and the man on his right, both faceless and fragmented, stand apart from him, looking away in opposite directions. "In Frank's images, people, whether alone, in twos and threes, or in crowds, always seeming curiously detached from one another" (Perloff, "Poetry 1956: A Step Away From Them"), embody alienation and isolation beneath the facade of prosperity in Eisenhower's America. If you look too deeply, blackness at the center of the tuba's mouth might swallow you up.

The same black emptiness exists at the heart of America today, made emptier than in the Eisenhower era by the yawning current-account deficit and the declining dollar, and it is waiting to be photographed by a Robert Frank of the twenty-first century.

An Unlimited Number of Call-ups for Longer Tours of Duty

According to "a senior Army official" who "declined to be named," the National Guard's 15 main combat units are "close to being 'tapped out'" (Bradley Graham, "Reservists May Face Longer Tours of Duty," Washington Post, January 7, 2005, A1). Consequently, the Army is considering a radical policy change:

Under current policy, a reservist is not to serve on active duty for more than 24 months, although those months can be split among multiple deployments that occur over a period of years.

The change under consideration, the Army official said, would essentially make a reservist eligible for an unlimited number of call-ups but stipulate that no single mobilization would last more than 24 consecutive months. (emphasis added, Graham, January 7, 2005)

That's almost an incitement to mutiny!

Sexing Susan Sontag

One of the most acclaimed intellectuals of her time, Susan Sontag died on December 28, 2004, and her death immediately inspired controversies about her sexuality. Many writers rightfully questioned major newspapers' studied silence on her relationships with women in her obituaries. For instance, Patrick Moore, the author of Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), wrote: "On Dec. 29, 2004, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times reported Sontag's death on their front pages, with more stories inside. Yet neither paper mentioned Sontag's relationships with [Annie] Leibovitz and other women" ("Susan Sontag and a Case of Curious Silence," Los Angeles Times, January 4, 2005).

So far, so good. Some critics, however, went further, questioning Sontag's own treatment of her own sexuality. "In a 2000 New Yorker profile, Sontag outed herself as bisexual, familiar code for 'gay,'" asserts Moore (January 4, 2005). Sometimes, the declaration of bisexuality is indeed a cover for homosexuality, as the former -- especially for women -- is often seen as less threatening than the latter. Nothing hurts the straight male ego more than the idea that some women are simply not sexually interested in them -- at all! In the case of Sontag, though, she said that she had been in love nine times: "Five women, four men" (qtd. in "Finding Fact from Fiction," The Guardian, May 27, 2000). Since there is no good reason to doubt her honesty (certainly Moore offers none), it seems uncalled for to suggest that she was claiming to be bisexual for the sake of expediency when she really was lesbian.

Then, Chris Crain, executive editor of the Washington Blade, charges Sontag with "silence on gay rights" ("Don’t Settle like Sontag," Washington Blade, January 07, 2005). One may disagree with her on many things -- for instance, I was disappointed with her support for Washington's intervention in Yugoslavia -- but it is simply wrong to say that she had nothing to say about gay rights. Au contraire, she made many intellectual contributions to the politics of sexuality on the left, in a way that is particularly useful for queer activists, though I don't think that she ever personalized them -- e.g., "Speaking as a lesbian, I support etc., etc.," -- as Crain assumes she should have.

To take one example, the longest section in Sontag's essay "What's Happening in America" (1966) is devoted to discussion of youth culture. It's a reply to Leslie Fiedler's essay on the same topic "The New Mutants" (1965), in which he anxiously analyzes the "post-humanist era" of a "radical metamorphosis of the Western male," a "revolt against masculinity," and "a rejection of conventional male potency." In contrast to Fiedler and others who thought like him, lamenting the changes in gender and sexuality that fascinated them at the same time, she boldly argued:

The depolarizing of the sexes . . . is the natural, and desirable, next stage of the sexual revolution (its dissolution, perhaps) which has moved beyond the idea of sex as a damaged but discrete zone of human activity, beyond the discovery that "society" represses the free expression of sexuality (by fomenting guilt), to the discovery that the way we live and the ordinarily available options of character repress almost entirely the deep experience of pleasure, and the possibility of self-knowledge. "Sexual freedom" is a shallow, outmoded slogan. What, who is being liberated? (Styles of Radical Will, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966, p. 200)

The question she raised is still relevant, as gay and lesbian activists of middle strata put the right to marriage and military service at the top of the political agenda, the priority questioned by radical working-class queer activists.

Sontag's dissection of illness as metaphor (Illness as Metaphor, NY: Vintage, 1977) -- some diseases get romanticized, some are regarded as punishments for bad personalities of patients or their mothers, others become metaphors of absolute evil, modern political discourses across the ideological spectrum tend to designate their targets as cancer and incite violence against them, and such metaphoric uses of illness make it difficult to treat illnesses as they are -- was a great intellectual weapon for queer activists even before she authored her own book on AIDS and its metaphors. She was also one of the first major writers who addressed the AIDS crisis in a story published in a mainstream magazine: "The Way We Live Now" (The New Yorker, November 24, 1986).

Less obviously political but no less important, the style of art, literature, and philosophy that Susan Sontag championed was the sort that resists reduction of a text to the personal biography of its author (which is rooted in the same drive to discover the "truth" of a person in the "nature" of the person's sexuality, which must, in turn, be classified into one of the three limited categories invented by bourgeois culture), and in that resistance also lay a mode of queer modernist politics, whether or not she intended it.

Some readers may still wish that Sontag had made the personal political and vice versa in a familiar rhetoric of identity politics, but that was not her style. Gary Indiana, himself one of the finer queer cultural critics, wrote:

She once told Dick Cavett, after the first of her struggles with cancer, that she didn't find her own illness interesting. She stipulated that it was moving to her, but not interesting. To be interesting, experience has to yield a harvest of ideas, which her illness certainly did -- but she communicated them in a form useful to others in ways a conventional memoir couldn't be. (To be useful, one has to reach others on the level of thought, not only feeling —- though the two are inseparable.) ("Susan Sontag [1933-2004]: Remembering the Voice of Moral Responsibility -- and Unembarrassed Hedonism," The Village Voice, January 4, 2005)

Her sort of critical detachment and abstraction isn't the only way to approach the relation between thought and experience, universality and particularity -- for instance, one of the writers Sontag admired the most, Jean Genet, arguably created a new universal through insistence upon his particular experience -- but it's certainly a valid way of living and writing, not at all the same as putting one's life into the closet out of shame. Her reserve may seem old-fashioned to some, but, in an age when reality TV programs and tell-all autobiographies are all the rage, it is refreshing -- and even queer and subversive.

Bush's Big Social Security Cuts

The Wall Street Journal reports that "[t]he White House, in a private memo to conservative allies, strongly argues Social Security benefits paid to future retirees must be significantly reduced" (Dow Jones Newswires, "White House Memo Argues for Social Security Cuts," Morning Star, January 5, 2005).

Well, nothing new there -- the memo simply confirms the George W. Bush administration's proposal to change "the formula that sets initial Social Security benefit levels, cutting promised benefits by nearly a third in the coming decades, according to several Republicans close to the White House" (emphasis added, Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen, "Social Security Formula Weighed: Bush Plan Likely to Cut Initial Benefits," Washington Post, January 4, 2005, p. A1).

What's the Bush formula?

Under the proposal, the first-year benefits for retirees would be calculated using inflation rates rather than the rise in wages over a worker's lifetime. Because wages tend to rise considerably faster than inflation, the new formula would stunt the growth of benefits, slowly at first but more quickly by the middle of the century. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

According to the Social Security Administration's chief actuary, a middle-class worker retiring in 2022 would see guaranteed benefits cut by 9.9 percent. By 2042, average monthly benefits for middle- and high-income workers would fall by more than a quarter. A retiree in 2075 would receive 54 percent of the benefit now promised.



. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . Social Security benefits currently equal 42 percent of the earnings of an average worker retiring at 65. Under the new formula, that benefit would fall to 20 percent of pre-retirement earnings. (emphasis added, Weisman and Allen, January 4, 2005)

If that doesn't sound bad enough, take a look at "Table 2. First-Year Annual Benefits for the Median Retired Worker If Benefits Are Claimed at Age 65, by Birth Cohort and Earnings Level" of the Congressional Budget Office's "Long-Term Analysis of Plan 2 of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security" (September 30, 2004). Compare the figures in the "Current Law -- Trust-Fund-Financed Benefits" column (which represent what retirees will receive if the government does nothing at all to raise funds to pay out scheduled benefits, such as raising the ceiling on taxable wages or giving the trust fund an infusion from general revenues) and those in the "CSSS Plan 2 -- Proposed Benefits + 1A" column (which show what retirees will receive if Bush gets to "reform" Social Security). Notice that retirees in all categories -- from lowest-earning to highest-earning households -- will fare worse under the Bush plan than under the so-called "bankrupt" trust fund?

In case you don't, Max Sawicky, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, spells it out for you in CAPITAL LETTERS: "Suffer the Children" (MaxSpeak, January 4, 2005).

By proposing big cuts, not just partial privatization, Bush in effect challenged us: "Bring them on!" By all means, let's bring them on.

I Exist and In the Name of Allah: Documentaries on Gay and Lesbian Arabs and Muslims

I found at Islamicate that Parvez Sharma, an Indian-born director based in New York, is working on a documentary film on gay and lesbian Muslims In the Name of Allah and planning to take it on the festival circuit in 2006 (Matthew Hays, "Act of Faith: A Film on Gays and Islam," New York Times, November 2, 2004). Sharma's producer is a Jewish filmmaker, Sandi Simcha DuBowski, who directed Trembling Before G-d (2001), "a feature-length documentary that two years ago investigated the lives of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews who are also gay or lesbian" (Hays, November 2, 2004). DuBowski says that In the Name of Allah "challenges the idea that there are no Muslim gays or lesbians. It poses much the same question that 'Trembling Before G-d' did: why would gays want to be part of a tradition that rejects them?" (qtd. in Hays, November 2, 2004). Sharma studied film and video at American University in Washington, and it is through "listening to stories told by gay Muslims at the school" that he "conceived the idea of a picture that would 'give voice to a community that really needed to be heard and that until now hadn't been; it was about going where the silence was strongest'" (Hays, November 2, 2004).

Sharma's work in progress has already aroused controversy: "About every two weeks I get an e-mail that berates me, condemns me to hell and, if they are nice, asks me to still seek forgiveness while there is still time" (qtd. in Hays, November 2, 2004). He has had to reassure many of his interview subjects that "they will remain anonymous," though he believes that "filming people in silhouette or with their faces covered tends to reinforce a sense of shame around homosexuality": "'One young Afghan woman I've interviewed, if her family found out about her being lesbian they would undoubtedly kill her,' Mr. Sharma said" (Hays, November 2, 2004). Still, Sharma has faith in the ability of the majority of Muslims to take back Islam from "an extremely small and sometimes loud minority" who he believes hijacked it (qtd. in Hays, November 2, 2004). His film will be an important contribution to the process of recovering Islam's traditional tolerance of diversity.

While we wait for the release of In the Name of Allah, which seeks to give voice to gay and lesbian Muslims "throughout North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Egypt" (Hays, November 2, 2004), a documentary film on gay men and lesbians of Middle Eastern descent (who are Muslims, Christians, and Jews) in the United States is already available: I Exist: Voices from the Lesbian & Gay Middle Eastern Community in the United States (Dirs. Peter Barbosa and Garrett Lenoir, 2003).

"Give them all the love you can. I don't see any difference between a straight or a gay kid," advises Marola Massoud in I Exist.


"My being queer is defined by being Arab and my being Arab is defined by my being queer. They exist together, otherwise they cannot exist at all and I know they do, because I exist," explains Lina Baroudi in I Exist.

Hawking the Empire

Tim Shorrock emailed me that he "figured it was time to join the 21st century" and set up a blog: Hawking the Empire. The blog will focus on the four areas of his expertise: "1) The corporations and entrepreneurs who influence US foreign policy and then make money from its implementation; 2) The politics and economics of the Pacific Rim; 3) The state of the US and global labor movement (or what's left of it); and 4) What's happening in Korea and Japan from the perspective of someone who was raised in Tokyo and Seoul during the height of the Cold War and has been writing about the region ever since." He says that he will be updating it frequently. Check it out.

How Many Troops Would It Take to Defeat the 200,000-strong Guerrilla Insurgency?

James Hider of the Times quotes General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, director of Iraq’s new intelligence services: "I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people" ("Iraqi Insurgents Now Outnumber Coalition Forces," January 4, 2005). Explaining the roots of insurgency, General Shahwani refreshingly eschews propaganda:

"People are fed up after two years without improvement," he [Shahwani] said. "People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something. The army (dissolved by the American occupation authority) was hundreds of thousands. You'd expect some veterans would join with their relatives, each one has sons and brothers" (Hider, January 4, 2005)

General Shahwani, however, overlooks the question of self respect that comes from refusal of slavish submission to an imperial power, which sustains the morale of resistance fighters and motivates even Iraqis who are not involved in armed resistance to identify with them rather than the occupiers. The anecdote that Christian Parenti relates below illustrates the force of identification:

Then it begins: The ammunition in the burning Humvee starts to explode and the troops in the street start firing. Armored personnel carriers arrive and disgorge dozens of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne to join the fight. The target is a three-story office building just across from the engulfed Humvee. Occasionally we hear a few rounds of return fire pass by like hot razors slashing straight lines through the air. The really close rounds just sound like loud cracks.

"That's Kalashnikov. I know the voice," says Ahmed, our friend and translator. There is a distinct note of national pride in his voice -- his countrymen are fighting back -- never mind the fact that we are now mixed in with the most forward US troops and getting shot at. (emphasis added, "Stretched Thin, Lied to & Mistreated," The Nation, October 6, 2003)

Keep in your mind that Iraqi soldiers and policemen hired by Washington are denied the same sense of self respect. And that affects the morale. According to the General Accounting Office's report to Congress, the desertion rates of Iraqi units have been extraordinarily high, exceeding 80% in western Iraq -- see "Table VI.2: Iraqi Civil Defense Corps Desertion from April 2 to April 16" of the GAO's Report to Congressional Committees, "Rebuilding Iraq: Resource, Security, Governance, Essential Services, and Oversight Issues" (GAO-04-902R, June 2004, p. 59). The lack of morale cannot be solved by General George Casey, Jr.'s proposal to "add hundreds of American military advisers to work directly with Iraqi units" (Eric Schmitt, "U.S. Weighs Proposal to Help Iraq's Military," New York Times/International Herald Tribune, January 5, 2004).

James T. Quinlivan, a military analyst and senior mathematician at RAND Corporation, demonstrated that, even in the absence of powerful armed resistance, "successful strategies for population security and control have required force ratios either as large as or larger than 20 security personnel (troops and police combined) per thousand inhabitants" in the context of foreign occupation, "roughly 10 times the ratio required for simple policing of a tranquil population" ("Burden of Victory: The Painful Arithmetic of Stability Operations," RAND Review, Summer 2003):

(Quinlivan, Summer 2003)

And when the colonial occupier meets a powerful guerrilla insurgency?

In 1952 [Major General Robert] York had by chance been assigned for three and a half years as the U.S. Army observer of the British campaign to suppress the guerrilla revolt by the Chinese minority in Malaysia. The lessons he had learned there led him to suspect prior to coming to Vietnam that the task of defeating the Viet Cong was going to be a lot more difficult than his fellow generals thought.

The British had held a twenty-to-one advantage in police and troops against a guerrilla force that never numbered more than 10,000, including its civilian support apparatus, a fraction of the Viet Cong armed strength and its civilian support apparatus, and they had had the racial antagonism of the Malay majority toward the Chinese in their favor as well. The war had still lasted twelve years. (emphasis added, Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, 1989)

Based on the record of British Malaya, it would take 4 million US troops more than a decade to put down the 200,000-strong guerrilla force in Iraq, if (a big if) Washington successfully alienates the Shiite majority from the Sunnis by the lure of an electoral path to power and actually grants them independence ("in Malaya, the center of gravity was targeted not by jungle patrolling, but by the political decision to grant independence" [Gavin Bulloch, "Military Doctrine and Counterinsurgency: A British Perspective," Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly 26.2, Summer 1996]).

Can Washington, already struggling to find enough recruits to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq, come up with 8 million troops (roughly the number necessary to deploy 4 million in Iraq and manage troop rotation at the current pace)? Not without the draft. The longer it stays in Iraq, the worse it will fail.

Outsourcing Intelligence

Tim Shorrock, an outstanding investigative journalist who has probed the expanding empire of crony capitalism, makes a startling observation in his new article in Mother Jones: "Of the estimated $40 billion the United States is expected to spend on intelligence this year, experts say at least 50 percent will go to private contractors" (emphasis added, "The Spy Who Billed Me," January/February 2005).

Shorrock notes that "the outsourcing revolution" in the intelligence community began with the end of the Cold War and exploded "in the mid-1990s under Vice President Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative" (January/February 2005). The initiative was said to "create a government that 'works better, costs less, and gets results Americans care about'" ("Frequently Asked Questions about the National Partnership for Reinventing Government," May 2000). Has it?

Any impression of gains in efficiency is most likely illusory: "[W]here the federal workforce has shrunk, the contractor workforce has grown. Paul Light, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, calls this workforce the 'shadow government,' and estimated its size in 1999 at 5.6 million" (Laura Peterson/The Center for Public Integrity, "Outsourcing Government: Service Contracting Has Risen Dramatically in the Last Decade," January 5, 2005).

Rather, the outsourcing of intelligence, Shorrock suggests, removed the already virtually non-existent Congressional oversight of it while creating a profitable nexus of contractors, lobbyists, and government officials:

The lines separating contractors from agencies are so blurred that at the leading trade association -- the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA) -- 8 of 20 board members are current government officials. The association represents about 125 intelligence contractors, including Boeing, CACI, General Dynamics, and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). Retired Air Force Lt. General Kenneth Minihan, its president and chairman, is yet another former director of the NSA. As a nonprofit, SASA is barred from lobbying, but it frequently sponsors events where government and corporate officials mingle, and it provides information to members of Congress. “We use the term ‘advocacy,’” says Frank Blanco, SASA’s executive vice president. (emphasis added, Shorrock, January/February 2005)

Shorrock is currently working on a book on corporations that are integral part of Washington's foreign policy making. Activists in the anti-war and global justice movements will be sure to find his book an essential reading.

Losing the Hearts and Minds

Counting combat deaths alone may make the Iraq War seem less dangerous to American soldiers than it actually is, because the lethality of war wounds has decreased due in large part to "the imperative to push surgical teams farther forward, closer to battle," a "fundamental departure from previous wars":

Though firepower has increased, lethality has decreased. In World War II, 30 percent of the Americans injured in combat died.3 In Vietnam, the proportion dropped to 24 percent. In the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 10 percent of those injured have died. At least as many U.S. soldiers have been injured in combat in this war as in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, or the first five years of the Vietnam conflict, from 1961 through 1965 (see table). This can no longer be described as a small or contained conflict. But a far larger proportion of soldiers are surviving their injuries.

(Atul Gawande, "Casualties of War: Military Care for the Wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan," New England Journal of Medicine 351.24, December 9, 2004)

Adjusted for improvement in battle care, scale of deployment, and character of war, Phillip Carter and Owen West argue, "infantry duty in Iraq circa 2004 comes out just as intense as infantry duty in Vietnam circa 1966 -- and in some cases more lethal":

In 1966, for example, 5,008 U.S. servicemen were killed in action in Vietnam. Another 1,045 died of "non-hostile" wounds (17 percent of the total fatalities). Since Jan. 1, 2004, 754 U.S. servicemen and -women have been killed in action in Iraq, and 142 more soldiers died in "non-hostile" mishaps (16 percent of the fatalities, similar to Vietnam). Applying Vietnam's lethality rate (25 percent) to the total number of soldiers killed in action in Iraq this year, however, brings the 2004 KIA total to 1,131.

The scale can be further balanced. In 1966, U.S. troops in Vietnam numbered 385,000. In 2004, the figure in Iraq has averaged roughly 142,000. Comparing the burden shouldered by individual soldiers in both conflicts raises the 2004 "constant casualty" figure in Iraq to 3,065 KIA. Further, casualties in Iraq fall more heavily on those performing infantry missions. Riflemen -- as well as tankers and artillerymen who operate in provisional infantry units in Iraq -- bear a much higher proportion of the risk than they did in Vietnam. In Vietnam, helicopter pilots and their crews accounted for nearly 5 percent of those killed in action. In Iraq in 2004, this figure was less than 3 percent. In Vietnam, jet pilots accounted for nearly 4 percent of U.S. KIAs. In 2004, the United States did not lose a single jet to enemy action in Iraq. When pilots and aircrews are removed from the equation, 4,602 ground-based soldiers died during 1966 in Vietnam, compared to 2,975 in Iraq during 2004. ("Iraq 2004 Looks Like Vietnam 1966," Slate, December 27, 2004)

Carter and West find the comparison between Hue and Falluja especially illuminating: in Hue, "three Marine battalions (roughly 3,000 men)" fought 12.000 Vietnamese in 1968, and "147 Marines were killed and 857 wounded"; in Falluja, three Marine battalions attacked several thousand Iraqis in 2004, and "more than 104 soldiers and Marines have been killed and more than 1,100 wounded" (December 27, 2004).

Some would argue that soldiers in today's volunteer military would more stoically bear the same high casualty rate than conscripts during the Vietnam War, but is the difference between them so clear? Carter and West remind us that "[v]olunteers outnumbered conscripts by a 9-1 ratio in the units that saw combat during the war's early days in 1966" (emphasis added, December 27, 2004). Altogether during the Vietnam War, "1,728,344 men were drafted. Of the forces who actually served in Vietnam, 648,500 (25%) were draftees. Draftees (17,725) accounted for 30.4% of combat deaths in Vietnam" (emphasis added, "The Draft and Historical Amnesia," VFW Magazine, March, 2003). In short, conscripts were a minority. In the current war, "[in] recent months, at any given moment, the stop-loss policy has affected about 7,000 soldiers who had been planning to retire, leave the military or move to a different military job" (Monica Davey, "Eight Soldiers Plan to Sue Over Army’s Stop-Loss Policy," New York Times, December 6, 2004), turning a significant minority of regular troops into conscripts in effect. Moreover, National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers, who cannot be expected to perform long and frequent overseas deployments without turning their civilian lives upside down, "now make up nearly 40 percent of the 148,000 troops in Iraq" (Eric Schmitt, "Guard Reports Serious Drop in Enlistment," New York Times, December 18, 2004).

Anger and discontent in the Army and Reserve rank and file today may very well be more widely spread than they were among rank-and-file soldiers in 1966. Pluralities of "commissioned officers and their families" (43%), "non-commissioned officers and their families" (41%), and "junior enlisted personnel [ranks E-4 and below]" (44%) think that the National Guard and Reserve forces sent to Iraq were not "properly trained and equipped for service there" (Adam Clymer/Annenberg Public Policy Center, "Service Members, Families Say Pentagon Sent Too Few Troops to Iraq, Stressed National Guard and Reserves, Should Allow Photos of Coffins at Dover, Annenberg Data Show," October 16, 2004, Table B, p. 7). Asked whether they think "the U.S. should keep military troops in Iraq until a stable government is established there" or "the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible," 31% of junior enlisted personnel said, "Bring Troops Home," and a whopping 47% of them believe that it is not the proper thing for the Pentagon to order "some people in the military to stay on active duty beyond the time their enlistment expired" (Clymer/Annenberg Public Policy Center, October 16, 2004, Table B, p. 7).

Washington has not only not won the hearts and minds of Iraqis; it has lost the hearts and minds of a sizable number of US soldiers, and the losses have begun to show. On October 13, 2004, soldiers from the 343rd Quartermaster Company refused to go on a convoy mission to "drive fuel and water trucks from Tallil Air Base, their home in southern Iraq, to Taji, a base north of Baghdad" because their trucks were not sufficiently armored -- an act that could be considered a mutiny punishable by death or prison -- but none of them will face a court-martial (Ron Jensen, "Soldiers Who Refused Convoy Mission Won't be Required to Face Court-Martial," Stars and Stripes, December 7, 2004). If court-martialed and found guilty of refusing to obey an order, they could have been "sentenced to up to two years in jail," but the brass decided that all they could do to them was to mete out "'non-judicial' punishment under Article 15 of the U.S. military justice code," which gives commanders "discretion to order brief detention of up to a month, loss of up to a month's pay, extra duties and loss of rank" (Reuters, "Minor Sanctions for U.S. Troops Who Balked in Iraq," December 6, 2004). Why? The Army admits that the refusers "raised a valid concern," and it also knows that other soldiers and their families are behind them:

The group received an outpouring of support from family in the States and from some stationed in Iraq and Kuwait.

"There are troops who support you and believe you did the right thing," one soldier in Kuwait in had said in Stars and Stripes. "You took a stand, not just for yourselves, but for every member of the military." (Jensen, December 7, 2004)

Then, "[o]n December 6, 2004, eight U.S. soldiers -- five stationed in Iraq, two in Kuwait on their way to Iraq, and one home on leave from Iraq about to be shipped back -- filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Armed Services’ so-called "stop loss" policy," supported by the Center for Constitutional Rights ("Eight Soldiers Sue U.S. over "Stop-Loss" Policy"). Given the aforementioned survey results, I am certain that the eight soldiers' lawsuit is one that nearly half of the rank and file support and that all in the military are carefully watching.

Last not the least, the Army National Guard fell "30 percent below its recruiting goals" (Schmitt, December 18, 2004).

The Pentagon has learned a lesson from the Vietnam War and wishes to avoid the draft. The Pentagon's draft evasion, however, may turn out to be as destructive of morale and discipline as the draft itself.

Après moi le déluge!

"Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society," wrote Karl Marx in Capital (Vol. 1, Part III, Chapter Ten, Section 5). What Marx said in the late nineteenth century still holds true today.

As capitalism destroys subsistence agriculture and makes terms of trade unfavorable to rural life, more people become proletarianized and migrate to cities in search of elusive jobs. Unplanned urbanization therefore proceeds apace. "By 2007, for the first time in human history, more than half the people in the world will be living in cities," the number of urban dwellers rising "from 3 billion in 2003 (48 per cent of the total population) to 5 billion in 2030 (60 per cent)" (United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 2004, Chapter 4). 15 of the 20 mega-cities of more than 10 million people are in developing countries, in whose urban areas "[a]lmost all of the world’s total population growth" will take place in this period (State of World Population 2004, Chapter 4). The earth is becoming a "planet of slums," as urbanization has been "radically decoupled from industrialization" (Mike Davis, "Planet of Slums," New Left Review 26, March-April 2004) due to the "Washington Consensus" (William Finnegan, "The Economics of Empire: Notes on the Washington Consensus," Harper's Magazine, May 2003) as well as labor-saving technological innovation compelled by competition that constantly creates a surplus population.

The poor, "everywhere forced to settle on hazardous and otherwise unbuildable terrains" (Davis, March-April 2004), are vulnerable to disasters. At the same time, they are denied the benefits of improved building techniques:

[I]n response to the threat of earthquakes, buildings on the West Coast now are designed to sway over shifting foundations, and new highway overpasses are no longer stacked like the jaws of a huge horizontal vise.

Istanbul, Tehran, New Delhi and other increasingly dense and shabbily constructed cities, on the other hand, are rubble in waiting. When an earthquake leveled the ancient Iranian city of Bam in 2003, for instance, more than 26,000 people were essentially crushed by their own homes. . . .

"Tehran is a city the size of Los Angeles, with thrust faults like Los Angeles," Dr. [Kerry] Sieh [a veteran seismologist at the California Institute of Technology] said. "In Los Angeles the next 7.5 quake might kill 50,000 people. In Tehran, that would kill more than a million people." (Andrew C. Revkin, "The Future of Calamity," New York Times, January 2, 2005)

The ruling class obsession with short-term cost-and-benefit calculations and disregard for long-term human, ecological, and even economic consequences compounds nature's upheavals.

[E]lected officials and disaster agencies, both public and private, remain focused on responding to catastrophes instead of trying to make societies more resilient in the first place, said Dr. Brian E. Tucker, a geophysicist and the head of GeoHazards International, a private research group trying to reduce poor countries' vulnerability to earthquakes. For instance, while the United Nations in 1989 declared the 1990's the "International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction," and created a secretariat to run it, it set no concrete goals or timetable for accomplishing them, Dr. Tucker said.

He described a recent study by Tearfund, a Christian relief agency, that found that less than 10 percent of the money spent on disaster relief by government agencies and institutions like the World Bank goes to preventive measures. According to the study, Mozambique, anticipating major flooding in 2002, asked for $2.7 million to make basic emergency preparations. It received only half that amount from international donor organizations. After the flood, those same organizations ended up committing $550 million in emergency assistance, rehabilitation and reconstruction financing.

Dr. Sieh said he was not confident that wealthy countries would ever recognize the value of prevention. Even as they grow more scientifically prescient, people have a blind spot for certain inevitable disasters, either because they play out over long time frames, like global warming, or because they are rare, like tsunamis.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"There is a technological and scientific basis for proactive strategies," Dr. Sachs said. "But they are not being applied, and there is no reason for that. It's not even a question of money. It's much cheaper to anticipate rather than respond." That is true, he said, whether the goal is restoring fertility to African soil or building a system to warn of tsunamis. (emphasis added, Revkin, January 2, 2005)

What it takes to force the power elite to think in a long term perspective is "compulsion from society" alone (Marx, Section 5).

New Colors for a New Year!

I finally got around to tinkering with the blog template and managed to get rid of the ghastly shades of orange with which the original template tinted the blog description, byline, and links. Yea!