Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was born in Gori in the country of Georgia December 21, 1879. Edvard Radzhinsky argues convincingly in his biography of Stalin that Stalin was actually born on that date in 1878, though. The bourgeoisie, especially in the West, views Stalin as being as bad, or worse than, Hitler, a totalitarian dictator who killed millions of Soviet and foreign citizens. Allegations of Stalin's "crimes" are usually based on exaggerations and deliberate lies, spread by dishonest Trotskyists, fascists, revisionists like Khrushchev, and Western secret service agents like Conquest, not that Stalin and the USSR were never wrong. From a working class and intenationalist standpoint what the bourgeoisie call crimes (collectivization, purges, trials of saboteurs and spies, the nonaggression pact with Germany, etc) were instead essentially correct and beneficial policies which helped the majority of people - leading the USSR along Leninist lines towards socialism, defeating Nazi Germany and other fascists, and supporting revolutions and national liberation struggles. At the same time, Alliance Marxist-Leninist argues that within the Soviet Union there was a battle going on between Stalin's true, or revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist faction and revisionists who wanted to restore capitalism. Also Stalin does not deserve credit or blame for everything the USSR did, so it takes analysis to judge the usefulness of policies and whether Stalin deserves credit (or criticism) for a given policy.
The unofficial party line of American and Western historians is against Stalin because he was a revolutionary leader who consolidated Soviet socialism and successfully encouraged indigeneous revolutions worldwide. Compare this to subsequent Soviet leaders who presided over the dismantling of socialism, corrupted the struggles of others (such as the Afghans and unsuccessfully with the Albanians), and in the end encouraged the collapse of the USSR and its allies, who had been reduced to what some call Soviet social-imperialist colonies. It is partly because of counterrevolution in the USSR that the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and then fell to an imperialist occupation, perhaps millions of Iraqis died under the UN sanctions and tens of thousands more in the Iraq War, Haiti is under a brutal UN occupation, and conditions and life spans in the former Soviet Union have fallen while a few get rich off state property almost given away for nothing. For this reason it is obvious that the bourgeoisie should hate Stalin and praise Gorbachev, Deng, and other "communist" leaders. For these reasons I would say that Stalin made a great contribution to the social, economic, and even spiritual progress of humanity (as did the USSR for much of its existence) and to Marxist-Leninist theory and practice.
In the future I will add more details or sources to read for a revolutionary view of Stalin so you can judge this for yourself. The introduction to Bruce Franklin's "The Essential Stalin," an anthology of Stalin's writings, is a useful overview, as are articles at www.allianceml.com, www.plp.org, and www.northstarcompass.org.
Merry winter solstice holidays (today is the shortest day of the year and the beginning of astronomical winter, which is probably why so many holidays mark this time of the year)!
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
The Democrats' Wars
Below is another article (posted at www.counterpunch.org) on Edwards' and the Democratic Party's overall support for the Iraq War. I feel that the Democrats didn't vote for war only out of "ambition" (and the if they did they should see now that they made a terrible political miscalculation and I hope they are called to account for it). They are as pro-monopoly, pro-war as Republicans, and welcomed the chance to topple the Iraqi government on any grounds. If they didn't actually think this (although I think many did), their actions still served an imperialist agenda, yet again. The Afghan War at least had some connection to defense of the nation, but I think bin Laden is only a small part of the reason for it (the rest being geopolitics and Unocal's gas pipeline), and even that has been minimized by the White House now. They also let bin Laden escape before 2001 and after the invasion of Afghanistan, at Tora Bora.
http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh12052005.html
What Did the Democrats Know and When Did they Know It?
The Lies of John Edwards
By JOHN WALSH
The apology of John Edwards, former Senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate, for voting for the Iraq war in 2002, has been widely praised. But his apology is based on a lie, one that other Democrats are likely to embrace and one which will serve their ambitions but hide the truth. We should have no illusions about this, for to believe otherwise is to set ourselves up for the continuation of Bush's war by a Democrat.
Edwards declared in an op-ed column in the Washington Post on November 13, 2005: “The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate. The information the American people were hearing from the president—and that I was being given by our intelligence community—wasn’t the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war.” Sounds simple enough. “Had I known then what I know now, etc.” Poor John Edwards was deceived. But was he? How was it that 21 other Democratic Senators and 2 Republicans were not deceived and voted against the war?
Part of the answer arrived in another op-ed the Washington Post one week later, November 20, 2005, by another former Senator, Bob Graham, entitled: “What I knew Before the Invasion.” Like Edwards, Graham was a member, in fact the chair, of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in the period leading up to the war and on October 11, 2002 when the vote on the war on Iraq was taken. In a nutshell, Graham tells us that everyone on that committee knew that Bush was lying about weapons of mass destruction. Graham begins like a good, loyal Democrat, telling us that his colleagues were deceived, at least “most” of them. But he then tells us that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee knew better. Here are some of Graham’s words:
“At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used Senatorial authority, I directed completion of an NIE.”
“Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein’s capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE”.
“There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein’s will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.”
“Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States’ removing Hussein, by force if necessary.” (Note by jw: Who do you suppose those “third countries” were that were fanning the flames of war?)
“The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.’ It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as “If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year,” underscored the White House’s claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.”
“From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth—or even had an interest in knowing the truth.”
“On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.”
John Edwards was a member of that Senate Select Intelligence Committee, and he voted for the war. Who were the other Democratic senators? They were Senators Bayh, Edwards, DURBIN, Feinstein, LEVIN, MIKULSKI, Rockefeller and WYDEN as well as Tom Daschle, then majority leader, an ex officio member. I have capitalized those who voted against the war resolution and who should be hailed as senators of integrity. But Bayh, Daschle, Edwards, Feinstein and Rockefeller, all of whom with the exception of Feinstein, have presidential ambitions, voted for the war despite the fact that they had good reason to know the administration was Bushies were lying. (And let’s not forget the Republicans on the committee: Dewine, Hatch, Inhoffe, Kyle, Lugar, Roberts, Richard Shelby, Fred Thompson and ex officio, Trent Lott.)
There were 19 members of that committee, all of whom had to know that Bush was lying. Only the four in caps above voted against the war. But if 19, out of what is often called a small and intimate club of 100 Senators, knew that the war was based on a lie, can one believe that the rest did not know? And given the bloodletting that was about to be unleashed, why did none of these 19, including Graham, release the “confidential” NIE report? What sort of men and women are these?
Let us carry this one step further. There were 23 Senate votes against the war, only 4 of whom were on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. If we add to that 23, the five Democrats (Bayh, Daschle, Edwards, Feinstein and Rockefeller), we have 28. It would have taken only 5 more to sustain a veto against the war. Let’s see who was available among the pro-war votes. There were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Max Cleland (Yes, he voted for the war!), Christopher Dodd, Tom Harkin (Yes, he voted for the war!), Ernst Hollings, Harry Reid (now minority leader) and Charles Schumer. (That’s 8, bringing the total to 36.) So those Dems cannot say their votes did not matter. They cannot claim we would have gone to war anyway. If they had been willing to filibuster against the war or filibuster to allow the inspectors to complete their work, there would have been no war. These are Dems on whom progressives rely. They betrayed us, and they have blood on their hands since it was in their power to stop the war. But their ambitions came first. (Chuck Hagel who now professes to be anti-war and John McCain who wears his “integrity” on his sleeve would have made two excellent additions among the Republicans.)
Finally it is worth recalling that the Democrats were in the majority in the Senate at the time the war vote was taken on October, 11, 2002. So this is every bit as much a Democratic war as a Republican one.
And that brings us full circle. Why did Graham write his column which, if read carefully, so implicates Edwards and so many others? Actually Graham set out to do the opposite, to excuse his colleagues. He was trying to explain how he could vote against the war while 99 other Dems voted for it. He was trying to excuse them with his insiders knowledge. As he says in the opening to his op-ed:
“In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. ‘More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power,’ he said.”
“The president’s attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace—that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.”
Bush is telling a lie, of course, when he says the Dems had “the same intelligence” as he had. But it contains a kernel of truth, which must be scaring the hell out of the Dems as they feel pressure to abandon the war. (Bush and Cheney finally say something with an element of truth!!!) The kernel is that enough Democrats had enough knowledge to know that we were being lied into war in October, 2002. And except for a courageous 21 Senators, along with 2 Republicans, they went along for the ride - with their careers in mind. So in attempting to excuse his colleagues, Graham’s op-ed leaves his fellow members of the Select Intelligence Committee hanging out to dry. (It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks. And just perhaps, that very thought occurred to Graham as he penned his piece. ) And he raises suspicions about the rest of the Senate, with the exception of the 23. (And of course how is he to explain the votes of the 23; are they to be labeled traitors to save the reputations of Hillary, Kerry et al? That is a tough sell.)
Where does that leave us? The crisis that is the war in Iraq has become a crisis of Democracy. Right now it is crystal clear that there is no true opposition party, although there are minor elements (very minor ones) among the Left in the Democratic party and the Libertarians in the Republican party. These could constitute a genuine antiwar opposition. Until that happens, the war will go on, the neocons may drive us into further wars and our democracy will be further imperiled.
It is worthwhile looking back at the Senate membership of the 107th Congress and comparing the list to those Senators voting against the war on Iraq (http://www.democrats.com/node/6890). Pick your own favorite Judas.
John Walsh can be reached at http://us.f540.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=jvwalshmd@gmail.com.
http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh12052005.html
What Did the Democrats Know and When Did they Know It?
The Lies of John Edwards
By JOHN WALSH
The apology of John Edwards, former Senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate, for voting for the Iraq war in 2002, has been widely praised. But his apology is based on a lie, one that other Democrats are likely to embrace and one which will serve their ambitions but hide the truth. We should have no illusions about this, for to believe otherwise is to set ourselves up for the continuation of Bush's war by a Democrat.
Edwards declared in an op-ed column in the Washington Post on November 13, 2005: “The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate. The information the American people were hearing from the president—and that I was being given by our intelligence community—wasn’t the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war.” Sounds simple enough. “Had I known then what I know now, etc.” Poor John Edwards was deceived. But was he? How was it that 21 other Democratic Senators and 2 Republicans were not deceived and voted against the war?
Part of the answer arrived in another op-ed the Washington Post one week later, November 20, 2005, by another former Senator, Bob Graham, entitled: “What I knew Before the Invasion.” Like Edwards, Graham was a member, in fact the chair, of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in the period leading up to the war and on October 11, 2002 when the vote on the war on Iraq was taken. In a nutshell, Graham tells us that everyone on that committee knew that Bush was lying about weapons of mass destruction. Graham begins like a good, loyal Democrat, telling us that his colleagues were deceived, at least “most” of them. But he then tells us that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee knew better. Here are some of Graham’s words:
“At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used Senatorial authority, I directed completion of an NIE.”
“Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein’s capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE”.
“There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein’s will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.”
“Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States’ removing Hussein, by force if necessary.” (Note by jw: Who do you suppose those “third countries” were that were fanning the flames of war?)
“The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.’ It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as “If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year,” underscored the White House’s claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.”
“From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth—or even had an interest in knowing the truth.”
“On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.”
John Edwards was a member of that Senate Select Intelligence Committee, and he voted for the war. Who were the other Democratic senators? They were Senators Bayh, Edwards, DURBIN, Feinstein, LEVIN, MIKULSKI, Rockefeller and WYDEN as well as Tom Daschle, then majority leader, an ex officio member. I have capitalized those who voted against the war resolution and who should be hailed as senators of integrity. But Bayh, Daschle, Edwards, Feinstein and Rockefeller, all of whom with the exception of Feinstein, have presidential ambitions, voted for the war despite the fact that they had good reason to know the administration was Bushies were lying. (And let’s not forget the Republicans on the committee: Dewine, Hatch, Inhoffe, Kyle, Lugar, Roberts, Richard Shelby, Fred Thompson and ex officio, Trent Lott.)
There were 19 members of that committee, all of whom had to know that Bush was lying. Only the four in caps above voted against the war. But if 19, out of what is often called a small and intimate club of 100 Senators, knew that the war was based on a lie, can one believe that the rest did not know? And given the bloodletting that was about to be unleashed, why did none of these 19, including Graham, release the “confidential” NIE report? What sort of men and women are these?
Let us carry this one step further. There were 23 Senate votes against the war, only 4 of whom were on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. If we add to that 23, the five Democrats (Bayh, Daschle, Edwards, Feinstein and Rockefeller), we have 28. It would have taken only 5 more to sustain a veto against the war. Let’s see who was available among the pro-war votes. There were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Max Cleland (Yes, he voted for the war!), Christopher Dodd, Tom Harkin (Yes, he voted for the war!), Ernst Hollings, Harry Reid (now minority leader) and Charles Schumer. (That’s 8, bringing the total to 36.) So those Dems cannot say their votes did not matter. They cannot claim we would have gone to war anyway. If they had been willing to filibuster against the war or filibuster to allow the inspectors to complete their work, there would have been no war. These are Dems on whom progressives rely. They betrayed us, and they have blood on their hands since it was in their power to stop the war. But their ambitions came first. (Chuck Hagel who now professes to be anti-war and John McCain who wears his “integrity” on his sleeve would have made two excellent additions among the Republicans.)
Finally it is worth recalling that the Democrats were in the majority in the Senate at the time the war vote was taken on October, 11, 2002. So this is every bit as much a Democratic war as a Republican one.
And that brings us full circle. Why did Graham write his column which, if read carefully, so implicates Edwards and so many others? Actually Graham set out to do the opposite, to excuse his colleagues. He was trying to explain how he could vote against the war while 99 other Dems voted for it. He was trying to excuse them with his insiders knowledge. As he says in the opening to his op-ed:
“In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. ‘More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power,’ he said.”
“The president’s attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace—that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.”
Bush is telling a lie, of course, when he says the Dems had “the same intelligence” as he had. But it contains a kernel of truth, which must be scaring the hell out of the Dems as they feel pressure to abandon the war. (Bush and Cheney finally say something with an element of truth!!!) The kernel is that enough Democrats had enough knowledge to know that we were being lied into war in October, 2002. And except for a courageous 21 Senators, along with 2 Republicans, they went along for the ride - with their careers in mind. So in attempting to excuse his colleagues, Graham’s op-ed leaves his fellow members of the Select Intelligence Committee hanging out to dry. (It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks. And just perhaps, that very thought occurred to Graham as he penned his piece. ) And he raises suspicions about the rest of the Senate, with the exception of the 23. (And of course how is he to explain the votes of the 23; are they to be labeled traitors to save the reputations of Hillary, Kerry et al? That is a tough sell.)
Where does that leave us? The crisis that is the war in Iraq has become a crisis of Democracy. Right now it is crystal clear that there is no true opposition party, although there are minor elements (very minor ones) among the Left in the Democratic party and the Libertarians in the Republican party. These could constitute a genuine antiwar opposition. Until that happens, the war will go on, the neocons may drive us into further wars and our democracy will be further imperiled.
It is worthwhile looking back at the Senate membership of the 107th Congress and comparing the list to those Senators voting against the war on Iraq (http://www.democrats.com/node/6890). Pick your own favorite Judas.
John Walsh can be reached at http://us.f540.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=jvwalshmd@gmail.com.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Outrageous Crimes Against Historical Memory in Iraq
Below is one of the more shocking articles I have seen recently about the crimes of the occupiers and their allies in Iraq, posted on UNC's surgelocal listserv. This is like the report that the US military took over Iraqi Olympic facilities and barred Iraqis from using them. This explains why the majority of Iraqis oppose the occupation and 45% support violent resistance (according to a leaked survey commissioned by the UK and conducted by Iraqi researchers). I am surprised that Iraq and the entire Arab world hasn't risen up and overthrown the occupation over this and other atrocities. Do Iraqis not care about this as much as I would expect (or do they not know about it?) or is it harder to fight for national liberation than I realize? It is hard to get a sense of the resistance, with US commercial media downplaying and distorting it, and online sources being hard to follow and verify, and since they make opposite claims. It is also hard to find out about non-violent and quiet, everyday acts of resistance. I have been more supportive of the right of Iraqis to fight back with violence than most activists locally, but it is a difficult position to take, with the support for pacifism in the US left and worry of whether the public is open enough to understand the right to resist.
The article starts by condemning Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. I don't know enough about it to say I agree or that this is more anti-communist or reactionary propaganda. Either way, while peaceful means are best, violence is not a good reason to condemn what has been called the Cambodian Revolution. I want to know who was repressed and for what purpose, and in what context before I decide for myself whether I would support or condemn the Khmer Rouge. From what little I know about it (the History Channel didn't help much there) I would guess that it was not proletarian or socialist, but it was a Cambodian (or should I say Kampuchean?) issue. Someday I will get to reading about it in more detail, though there seem to be few books on the Khmer Rouge in local libraries.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARB20051126&articleId=1330
Iraq’s “Year Zero”
by Felicity Arbuthnot
November 26, 2005
The continuing destruction of Iraq’s history - ancient and modern - of homes, lives and civil society under the watch of and at the hands of US and British troops - in defiance of a swathe of international law - is an uncanny and chilling mirror image of Pol Pot’s Year Zero.
In 1975 : ‘Society was to be purified ... throughout Cambodia, deadly purges were conducted to eliminate remnants of the old society: the educated, the wealthy, the (religious elders) police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, former government officials, soldiers .... Education, health care... was halted; cities forcibly evacuated....The country sealed off from the outside world.’ History, monuments, ancient and modern, world heritage sites … were all erased from the earth. Newspapers, radio and television were banned.
Secret prisons were built, Moslems ‘were forced to eat pork.’ ‘Up to twenty thousand people were tortured into giving false confessions in a school in Phnom Penh, converted into a jail ... elsewhere suspects were often shot before being questioned.’(1) Think Abu Ghraib (and don’t forget Guantanamo) and all those other centers where Iraq’s disappeared are incarcerated, now admitted - but not where. Think the shootings at road blocks, the ‘cleansing’ of Iraq’s towns and cities. Add to Pol Pot’s horrific regime only the killing of nearly eighty journalists in thirty months, the bombing of two television stations - Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, whose map grid reference had been trustingly given to the Pentagon - so any light falling on the slaughter and destruction of a nation and it’s heritage, becomes impossible - and the all is Iraq, writ with succinct accuracy.
Iraq’s society too is being ‘purified’, with precisely the same categories of humanity targeted by Pol Pot being killed in their hundreds: academics to doctors, scientists to soldiers. Former US Viceroy Paul Bremer called his purification ‘de-Ba’athification’ and sacked just about every strata of society needed to run a civilized one - in Iraq’s Year Zero, as Cambodia, their real sin was their race and its heritage, ancient and modern.
The destruction, looting of the haunting wonders of the National Museum, Mosul Museum, the two million irreplaceable books, manuscripts reduced to ashes, records of the National Library, the University of Endowment with its unique collection of ancient Qurans, the vandalization of Babylon and Ur by the new Barbarians - US soldiers - and desecration of thousands of archeological sites - the very history of mankind - have been heart wrenchingly recorded. Not recorded is the equally illegal and ongoing, planned destruction of every vestige of Iraq’s more modern history, on the orders of the Supreme Committee for de-Ba’athification - Pol Pot couldn’t have bettered that tag.
In Basra, early casualties were the dead heroes of the US-driven Iran-Iraq war, whose great bronze figures lined part of the corniche, arm out, pointing toward Iran. They were controversial and subject of much debate in a nation invaded repeatedly, throughout its history, its people utterly weary of war. But they were Iraq’s sons and died in defence of their country. They are no more.
The museum up the road, commemorating more of the dead of the eight year conflagration, of whom so many on both sides were lost it has been compared to World War 1, was also destroyed and with it, the only memory for so many: their identity cards, with details and photograph, hundred upon hundred, of the silent dead, living, staring from wall after wall. Real people, mostly so young:; the date they celebrated their birthdays, for all to see, occupation, skills learned over student years, engendered by youthful aspirations, never now to be met. The last vestiges of them have now vanished. Imagine if the Imperial War Museum in London, the Vietnam Memorial Wall, Arlington Cemetery, the Holocaust Museum, the Hiroshima Memorial were raised to the ground. Unthinkable - but Iraq’s grief is, it seems, simply inconsequential. That these are ‘grave breaches’ under Additional Protocol 1 of the expanded Geneva Convention of 1977 and happened under watch of the British Army has not been addressed. That the British Army itself looted a vast statue of Iraq’s President and took it back to their Somerset, south of England, base (2) - at British tax payers’ expense - has also not been addressed and Protocol 1 also applies.
The British though, had been told their first duty was to head for the oil terminal and secure it (3). Statues and museums clearly paled against of the significance of Iraq’s oil.
North in Baghdad early violations by the US army, included the statue toppling and squatting in Palaces, ‘using national historic buildings’ as a ‘command centre’ is also a violation. It is incumbent in the region, for each leader to leave behind him something more magnificent than his predecessor, the Palaces are both national assets - not American ones - and tomorrow’s history. National buildings too are protected, not free board and lodging for illegal invaders. Reports too numerous to cite recorded US soldiers returning home with palace ‘souvenirs’ they thieved and also priceless artifacts, prosecutions have been minimal or missing.
Over fifteen hundred modern paintings and sculptures disappeared from the city’s Museum of Fine Arts, where to visit was to gaze in awe at the wondrous imagination which created unique beauty. In June1993 an American missile killed the Museum’s curator, Leila Al Attar in one of numerous illegal bombings. Now her legacy too, is no more. ‘A cultural disaster’, near unmentioned, was how UNESCO’s Mounir Bouchenak described that cultural vandalism.(4) Thank goodness the troops thought to perfectly preserve the Oil Ministry.
Bit by bit, un-noticed, is the destruction of every statue, every landmark, which was the vibrant beauty, history’s hallmarks, which enchanted Baghdadis and visitors, marked the passing of a personality, commemorated Gilgamesh, the Thousand and One Nights, probably the earliest great epic story; Sinbad the Sailor, Iraq’s triumphs and tears.
Ironically,’ international guidelines protecting cultural property against damage and theft, date back to the American Civil War.’ That carnage ‘led to the 1863 Lieber Code, protecting libraries, scientific collections and works of art’ and was strengthened by the ‘1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property.’ The Nuremburg Trials after World War 11, sentenced Nazi officials to death for destruction of cultural property.(5) This did not deter US soldiers from the first truly breath taking act of desecration.
Michel Aflaq was the Syrian born, French educated, Christian ‘Father of Pan Arabism’. A towering intellect, with Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a Moslem - the two met whilst studying in Paris in the 1920’s and 1930’s - ‘... created the political movement which would come to dominate Syria and Iraq in the modern world.’ Thinker, philosopher, student of Nietzsche, Gide, Tolstoy, French theorist Henri Bergson, with Bitar he had founded France’s Arab Student Union. Finally devoting their energies to politics, culminating in the formation of the Arab Ba’ath Party with Jalil Said, in 1947 with ‘.... a secular focus ‘ with Islam’s significance acknowledged, contributing to world wide emancipation, with a central tenet being that there were Arabs before there were Muslims - thus the ideal of the Arab state. For Aflaq, ‘theorist of integrity ....... incorruptible’; a central tenet of the movement was representing ‘… the Arab spirit ... Arab nation, emphasizing culture rather than politics. (6) He survived imprisonment, high office and the region’s turmoils, dying in Paris in 1989 and buried in Baghdad where his tomb, statue in his honor and dome, occupied a ten km square site. In September 2003 the US army ‘leveled the all to earth’, on orders of ‘Viceroy’ Bremer.(7) Think flattening the Lincoln Memorial and you’ll be getting there.
Vandalising religious and historic monuments are also prohibited and illegal acts under the Hague Convention. Desecrating a grave is a criminal act of the lowest order, in any society.
Driving into central Baghdad from the west, in Nasr Square, Sa’doun Street, a small, resolute figure graced a plinth. He was Abdul Muhsin Al-Sa’doun. Born in Nasiriya in 1889, he became Minister of Justice, then in 1922, Minister of the Interior, then Prime Minister four times, a youthful, political shooting star. In his fourth term as Prime Minister, in 1929, he left the Parliamentary chamber, went into a side room and shot himself, rather than give in to British Colonial demands. He died of integrity, aged just forty years. His statue, made by an Italian sculpture in 1933, stands no more, razed shortly after Michel Aflaq’s, and reportedly melted down. Reports differ as to who was responsible, but not disputed is that it happened under US Army’s watch - even if not at their hands. Symbolism is stark: a man who died of integrity has been razed - along with integrity itself.
In January 2004 the US Army 1st Armored Division did the unthinkable. They made a camp beneath the great turquoise dome of the Shaheed (Martyrs) Memorial to the dead of the Iran-Iraq war, where the names of over half a million dead are inscribed in marble, in memoriam, that their names, at least, live on. Graffiti was sprayed on the names, the Division’s motto obliterated others. The Museum where foreign dignitaries and families had brought items in honor of the fallen was, of course, looted. (Agencies, websites.) The dome is split, allowing the souls of the dead to fly heavenward. A great fountain flowed to the courtyard below - representing endless tears, or eternity as represented by the Euphrates river, depending on who one asked. A place of memory is, anyway, in the interpretation of those who visit and the solace found there.
On November 2nd the landmark statue of Abu Ja’afar Al Mansour (713-775AD) founder of Baghdad, was destroyed by a bomb.(8) No Baghdadi, Iraqi or Arab, would, arguably, blow up this revered historical figure, creator of’ the city named over the centuries: ‘The Paris of the Ninth Century’, ‘Mother of the World’, ‘Abode of Peace’, ‘Round City’, ‘Abode of Beauty’, ‘Triumph of the Gods’ ....(9)
Since journalists are shot and Iraqis lucky to return from a domestic outing in one piece and not in a body bag containing their parts and UNESCO has gone awol, comprehensive records of every day destruction of Iraq’s heritage, numerous, haunting, superb statues, sculptures, monuments is impossible. This surely barely scratches the surface. But an important and chilling plea appeared on a website (10). With the benefit of post invasion destruction, it had horrific clarity. From ‘An Iraqi Tear’ (most ‘liberated’ Iraqis are more fearful of revealing their identities now than they ever were under Saddam) is a plea to our place in history: ‘Please help us protect these monuments.’
‘Tear’ asserts that the Supreme Committee for de-Ba’athification has now ordered the razing of the turquoise Shaheed monument to rivers of tears and the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. The Unknown Soldier was completed in 1959, the year after the revolution which ironically, toppled the British imposed royal rule, which had opened the door to foreign monopolies plundering the country’s oil wealth. It was in homage to all those, who over the centuries: ‘fell in defence of the country’s dignity and pride.’
‘Riverbend’ (11) another blogger and insightful, astute chronicler of the Barbarians returned, notes: ‘The occupation has ceased to be American. It is American in face, militarily, but in essence, it has metamorphosed slowly and surely into an Iranian one.’ An astute Middle East watcher remarked recently: ‘Are you aware that the dominant language among those dominant in the puppet parliament is Farsi?’ ( Iran’s main language.)
Has an unholy alliance been formed between religious fundamentalism in Washington and Whitehall and religious fundamentalism from Iran which bans ‘graven images’? ‘Satan lives in Falluja ..’ a priest who gives God a bad name, told US troops before they used banned weapons and vaporized much of its population.
When the Taliban ordered the destruction of the ancient Banyiman statues in Afghanistan - the world, including Britain and American governments, declared outrage. Now, from Ur to the threat to Unknown Soldier, they are guilty of crimes of historic enormity. Quite apart from those, unquantifiable, against humanity.
In June 2005, the World Monument Society named, for the first time, an entire country, Iraq, an endangered site. ‘Every significant cultural site in Iraq is at risk today ....’ It also emphasized: ‘... preserving 20th century structures ...’
A spokesperson for the Iraqi ‘government’, boasted after the illegal invasion in 2003: ‘We came to power on a CIA train.’ By a different route, so did Pol Pot. Spot the difference.
1. Courtesy The History Place, 1999. ‘Pol Pot in Cambodia 1975-1979’.
2. Author interview with British Army spokesman.
3. ‘Last Round’ by Mark Nicol, pub: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005.
4. ‘Unesco lengthens list of looted art in Iraq’, International Herald Tribune, 24th May 2003.
5. Crimes of War, Ed: Roy Gutman and David Rieff, Pub: W.W. Norton, 1999.
6. ‘From Sumer to Saddam’, Geoff Simons, Pub: Macmillan, 1994.
7. Iraq-USA Politics 10th September 2003.
8. Mohammed Alwusy, Knight Ridder, 2nd November 2005.
9. ‘They came to Baghdad’, Sinan Antoon, Al Ahram Weekly, April 17-23 2003.
10. http://www.uruknet.info/ 2nd November 2005.
11. http:// riverbend.blogspot.com
Felicity Arbuthnot.
Iraq’s Year Zero - possible ‘box’.
Baghdad’s many richly evocative landmarks include:
* The great Liberty Monument in Liberation Square, depicting struggles through the ages; bronze relief figures on marble, by the late Jewad Selim.
* The golden figure of Karamana, Ali Baba’s housekeeper, from the ‘Arabian Nights’, surrounded by the great urns where the forty thieves hid. Water, in place of the boiling oil of the story, flows from a great vessel in her hands.By Mohammed Ghani: ‘the exuberant sculpture’, an object of wonder.
* The Hammurabni Obelisk, in Qhatan Square, honoring the great Babylonian King and lawmaker (1792-1750 BC) by Salen Al-Karaghoulli. The original Obelisk is in the Lovre, Paris.
* Al-Khalil bin Ahmad Al-Faharidi (AD 718-786) statue in Masbah Park, honoring the philologist and grammarian who wrote the first Arab dictionary and works on melody and rhythm.
* Abbas bin Firnas, ninth century philosopher, poet and inventor, is immortalized by Sculpture Badri Al-Sammarra’i, near the Airport. His theories and experiments on the possibility of human flight earned him the name of ‘First Arab Flyer.’
* Hammurabi’s robed statue, by Mohammed Ghani, graces central Haifa Street, utterly evocative, Babylonia’s wonders revisited.
* The Arab horseman in Mansour Square, by Miran Al-Sa’adi celebrates the Arab love of horsemanship and its association with ‘gallantry, courage and generosity’.
* Abu-Nasr Al-Farabi (AD 874-950) created by Ismail Fattah in 1965,one of the Arab world’s greatest ancient philosophers and academics, stands in Zawra Park. He was ‘The Second Teacher’, the First being Aristotle.
* Yahya Al-Wasiti, painter and calligrapher, completed his extraordinary illustrations of Maqamat Al-Hariri,in 1223.An original manuscript is in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. The statue celebrating him is in Zawra Park, by Ismael Fattah.
This random selection of Baghdad’s celebration of Mesopotamia’s lives, ancient and modern, can only fail to convey the extent of its wondrous cultural wealth. Wealth whose preservation is the duty and responsibility of the occupying forces.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
To become a Member of Global ResearchThe Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles in their entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet sites, as long as the text & title are not modified. The source must be acknowledged and an active URL hyperlink address to the original CRG article must be indicated. The author's copyright note must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: http://us.f540.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=crgeditor@yahoo.comhttp://www.globalresearch.ca/www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
To express your opinion on this article, join the discussion at Global Research's News and Discussion Forum
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright Felicity Arbuthnot, uruknet.info, 2005
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARB20051126&articleId=1330
The article starts by condemning Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. I don't know enough about it to say I agree or that this is more anti-communist or reactionary propaganda. Either way, while peaceful means are best, violence is not a good reason to condemn what has been called the Cambodian Revolution. I want to know who was repressed and for what purpose, and in what context before I decide for myself whether I would support or condemn the Khmer Rouge. From what little I know about it (the History Channel didn't help much there) I would guess that it was not proletarian or socialist, but it was a Cambodian (or should I say Kampuchean?) issue. Someday I will get to reading about it in more detail, though there seem to be few books on the Khmer Rouge in local libraries.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARB20051126&articleId=1330
Iraq’s “Year Zero”
by Felicity Arbuthnot
November 26, 2005
The continuing destruction of Iraq’s history - ancient and modern - of homes, lives and civil society under the watch of and at the hands of US and British troops - in defiance of a swathe of international law - is an uncanny and chilling mirror image of Pol Pot’s Year Zero.
In 1975 : ‘Society was to be purified ... throughout Cambodia, deadly purges were conducted to eliminate remnants of the old society: the educated, the wealthy, the (religious elders) police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, former government officials, soldiers .... Education, health care... was halted; cities forcibly evacuated....The country sealed off from the outside world.’ History, monuments, ancient and modern, world heritage sites … were all erased from the earth. Newspapers, radio and television were banned.
Secret prisons were built, Moslems ‘were forced to eat pork.’ ‘Up to twenty thousand people were tortured into giving false confessions in a school in Phnom Penh, converted into a jail ... elsewhere suspects were often shot before being questioned.’(1) Think Abu Ghraib (and don’t forget Guantanamo) and all those other centers where Iraq’s disappeared are incarcerated, now admitted - but not where. Think the shootings at road blocks, the ‘cleansing’ of Iraq’s towns and cities. Add to Pol Pot’s horrific regime only the killing of nearly eighty journalists in thirty months, the bombing of two television stations - Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, whose map grid reference had been trustingly given to the Pentagon - so any light falling on the slaughter and destruction of a nation and it’s heritage, becomes impossible - and the all is Iraq, writ with succinct accuracy.
Iraq’s society too is being ‘purified’, with precisely the same categories of humanity targeted by Pol Pot being killed in their hundreds: academics to doctors, scientists to soldiers. Former US Viceroy Paul Bremer called his purification ‘de-Ba’athification’ and sacked just about every strata of society needed to run a civilized one - in Iraq’s Year Zero, as Cambodia, their real sin was their race and its heritage, ancient and modern.
The destruction, looting of the haunting wonders of the National Museum, Mosul Museum, the two million irreplaceable books, manuscripts reduced to ashes, records of the National Library, the University of Endowment with its unique collection of ancient Qurans, the vandalization of Babylon and Ur by the new Barbarians - US soldiers - and desecration of thousands of archeological sites - the very history of mankind - have been heart wrenchingly recorded. Not recorded is the equally illegal and ongoing, planned destruction of every vestige of Iraq’s more modern history, on the orders of the Supreme Committee for de-Ba’athification - Pol Pot couldn’t have bettered that tag.
In Basra, early casualties were the dead heroes of the US-driven Iran-Iraq war, whose great bronze figures lined part of the corniche, arm out, pointing toward Iran. They were controversial and subject of much debate in a nation invaded repeatedly, throughout its history, its people utterly weary of war. But they were Iraq’s sons and died in defence of their country. They are no more.
The museum up the road, commemorating more of the dead of the eight year conflagration, of whom so many on both sides were lost it has been compared to World War 1, was also destroyed and with it, the only memory for so many: their identity cards, with details and photograph, hundred upon hundred, of the silent dead, living, staring from wall after wall. Real people, mostly so young:; the date they celebrated their birthdays, for all to see, occupation, skills learned over student years, engendered by youthful aspirations, never now to be met. The last vestiges of them have now vanished. Imagine if the Imperial War Museum in London, the Vietnam Memorial Wall, Arlington Cemetery, the Holocaust Museum, the Hiroshima Memorial were raised to the ground. Unthinkable - but Iraq’s grief is, it seems, simply inconsequential. That these are ‘grave breaches’ under Additional Protocol 1 of the expanded Geneva Convention of 1977 and happened under watch of the British Army has not been addressed. That the British Army itself looted a vast statue of Iraq’s President and took it back to their Somerset, south of England, base (2) - at British tax payers’ expense - has also not been addressed and Protocol 1 also applies.
The British though, had been told their first duty was to head for the oil terminal and secure it (3). Statues and museums clearly paled against of the significance of Iraq’s oil.
North in Baghdad early violations by the US army, included the statue toppling and squatting in Palaces, ‘using national historic buildings’ as a ‘command centre’ is also a violation. It is incumbent in the region, for each leader to leave behind him something more magnificent than his predecessor, the Palaces are both national assets - not American ones - and tomorrow’s history. National buildings too are protected, not free board and lodging for illegal invaders. Reports too numerous to cite recorded US soldiers returning home with palace ‘souvenirs’ they thieved and also priceless artifacts, prosecutions have been minimal or missing.
Over fifteen hundred modern paintings and sculptures disappeared from the city’s Museum of Fine Arts, where to visit was to gaze in awe at the wondrous imagination which created unique beauty. In June1993 an American missile killed the Museum’s curator, Leila Al Attar in one of numerous illegal bombings. Now her legacy too, is no more. ‘A cultural disaster’, near unmentioned, was how UNESCO’s Mounir Bouchenak described that cultural vandalism.(4) Thank goodness the troops thought to perfectly preserve the Oil Ministry.
Bit by bit, un-noticed, is the destruction of every statue, every landmark, which was the vibrant beauty, history’s hallmarks, which enchanted Baghdadis and visitors, marked the passing of a personality, commemorated Gilgamesh, the Thousand and One Nights, probably the earliest great epic story; Sinbad the Sailor, Iraq’s triumphs and tears.
Ironically,’ international guidelines protecting cultural property against damage and theft, date back to the American Civil War.’ That carnage ‘led to the 1863 Lieber Code, protecting libraries, scientific collections and works of art’ and was strengthened by the ‘1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property.’ The Nuremburg Trials after World War 11, sentenced Nazi officials to death for destruction of cultural property.(5) This did not deter US soldiers from the first truly breath taking act of desecration.
Michel Aflaq was the Syrian born, French educated, Christian ‘Father of Pan Arabism’. A towering intellect, with Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a Moslem - the two met whilst studying in Paris in the 1920’s and 1930’s - ‘... created the political movement which would come to dominate Syria and Iraq in the modern world.’ Thinker, philosopher, student of Nietzsche, Gide, Tolstoy, French theorist Henri Bergson, with Bitar he had founded France’s Arab Student Union. Finally devoting their energies to politics, culminating in the formation of the Arab Ba’ath Party with Jalil Said, in 1947 with ‘.... a secular focus ‘ with Islam’s significance acknowledged, contributing to world wide emancipation, with a central tenet being that there were Arabs before there were Muslims - thus the ideal of the Arab state. For Aflaq, ‘theorist of integrity ....... incorruptible’; a central tenet of the movement was representing ‘… the Arab spirit ... Arab nation, emphasizing culture rather than politics. (6) He survived imprisonment, high office and the region’s turmoils, dying in Paris in 1989 and buried in Baghdad where his tomb, statue in his honor and dome, occupied a ten km square site. In September 2003 the US army ‘leveled the all to earth’, on orders of ‘Viceroy’ Bremer.(7) Think flattening the Lincoln Memorial and you’ll be getting there.
Vandalising religious and historic monuments are also prohibited and illegal acts under the Hague Convention. Desecrating a grave is a criminal act of the lowest order, in any society.
Driving into central Baghdad from the west, in Nasr Square, Sa’doun Street, a small, resolute figure graced a plinth. He was Abdul Muhsin Al-Sa’doun. Born in Nasiriya in 1889, he became Minister of Justice, then in 1922, Minister of the Interior, then Prime Minister four times, a youthful, political shooting star. In his fourth term as Prime Minister, in 1929, he left the Parliamentary chamber, went into a side room and shot himself, rather than give in to British Colonial demands. He died of integrity, aged just forty years. His statue, made by an Italian sculpture in 1933, stands no more, razed shortly after Michel Aflaq’s, and reportedly melted down. Reports differ as to who was responsible, but not disputed is that it happened under US Army’s watch - even if not at their hands. Symbolism is stark: a man who died of integrity has been razed - along with integrity itself.
In January 2004 the US Army 1st Armored Division did the unthinkable. They made a camp beneath the great turquoise dome of the Shaheed (Martyrs) Memorial to the dead of the Iran-Iraq war, where the names of over half a million dead are inscribed in marble, in memoriam, that their names, at least, live on. Graffiti was sprayed on the names, the Division’s motto obliterated others. The Museum where foreign dignitaries and families had brought items in honor of the fallen was, of course, looted. (Agencies, websites.) The dome is split, allowing the souls of the dead to fly heavenward. A great fountain flowed to the courtyard below - representing endless tears, or eternity as represented by the Euphrates river, depending on who one asked. A place of memory is, anyway, in the interpretation of those who visit and the solace found there.
On November 2nd the landmark statue of Abu Ja’afar Al Mansour (713-775AD) founder of Baghdad, was destroyed by a bomb.(8) No Baghdadi, Iraqi or Arab, would, arguably, blow up this revered historical figure, creator of’ the city named over the centuries: ‘The Paris of the Ninth Century’, ‘Mother of the World’, ‘Abode of Peace’, ‘Round City’, ‘Abode of Beauty’, ‘Triumph of the Gods’ ....(9)
Since journalists are shot and Iraqis lucky to return from a domestic outing in one piece and not in a body bag containing their parts and UNESCO has gone awol, comprehensive records of every day destruction of Iraq’s heritage, numerous, haunting, superb statues, sculptures, monuments is impossible. This surely barely scratches the surface. But an important and chilling plea appeared on a website (10). With the benefit of post invasion destruction, it had horrific clarity. From ‘An Iraqi Tear’ (most ‘liberated’ Iraqis are more fearful of revealing their identities now than they ever were under Saddam) is a plea to our place in history: ‘Please help us protect these monuments.’
‘Tear’ asserts that the Supreme Committee for de-Ba’athification has now ordered the razing of the turquoise Shaheed monument to rivers of tears and the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. The Unknown Soldier was completed in 1959, the year after the revolution which ironically, toppled the British imposed royal rule, which had opened the door to foreign monopolies plundering the country’s oil wealth. It was in homage to all those, who over the centuries: ‘fell in defence of the country’s dignity and pride.’
‘Riverbend’ (11) another blogger and insightful, astute chronicler of the Barbarians returned, notes: ‘The occupation has ceased to be American. It is American in face, militarily, but in essence, it has metamorphosed slowly and surely into an Iranian one.’ An astute Middle East watcher remarked recently: ‘Are you aware that the dominant language among those dominant in the puppet parliament is Farsi?’ ( Iran’s main language.)
Has an unholy alliance been formed between religious fundamentalism in Washington and Whitehall and religious fundamentalism from Iran which bans ‘graven images’? ‘Satan lives in Falluja ..’ a priest who gives God a bad name, told US troops before they used banned weapons and vaporized much of its population.
When the Taliban ordered the destruction of the ancient Banyiman statues in Afghanistan - the world, including Britain and American governments, declared outrage. Now, from Ur to the threat to Unknown Soldier, they are guilty of crimes of historic enormity. Quite apart from those, unquantifiable, against humanity.
In June 2005, the World Monument Society named, for the first time, an entire country, Iraq, an endangered site. ‘Every significant cultural site in Iraq is at risk today ....’ It also emphasized: ‘... preserving 20th century structures ...’
A spokesperson for the Iraqi ‘government’, boasted after the illegal invasion in 2003: ‘We came to power on a CIA train.’ By a different route, so did Pol Pot. Spot the difference.
1. Courtesy The History Place, 1999. ‘Pol Pot in Cambodia 1975-1979’.
2. Author interview with British Army spokesman.
3. ‘Last Round’ by Mark Nicol, pub: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005.
4. ‘Unesco lengthens list of looted art in Iraq’, International Herald Tribune, 24th May 2003.
5. Crimes of War, Ed: Roy Gutman and David Rieff, Pub: W.W. Norton, 1999.
6. ‘From Sumer to Saddam’, Geoff Simons, Pub: Macmillan, 1994.
7. Iraq-USA Politics 10th September 2003.
8. Mohammed Alwusy, Knight Ridder, 2nd November 2005.
9. ‘They came to Baghdad’, Sinan Antoon, Al Ahram Weekly, April 17-23 2003.
10. http://www.uruknet.info/ 2nd November 2005.
11. http:// riverbend.blogspot.com
Felicity Arbuthnot.
Iraq’s Year Zero - possible ‘box’.
Baghdad’s many richly evocative landmarks include:
* The great Liberty Monument in Liberation Square, depicting struggles through the ages; bronze relief figures on marble, by the late Jewad Selim.
* The golden figure of Karamana, Ali Baba’s housekeeper, from the ‘Arabian Nights’, surrounded by the great urns where the forty thieves hid. Water, in place of the boiling oil of the story, flows from a great vessel in her hands.By Mohammed Ghani: ‘the exuberant sculpture’, an object of wonder.
* The Hammurabni Obelisk, in Qhatan Square, honoring the great Babylonian King and lawmaker (1792-1750 BC) by Salen Al-Karaghoulli. The original Obelisk is in the Lovre, Paris.
* Al-Khalil bin Ahmad Al-Faharidi (AD 718-786) statue in Masbah Park, honoring the philologist and grammarian who wrote the first Arab dictionary and works on melody and rhythm.
* Abbas bin Firnas, ninth century philosopher, poet and inventor, is immortalized by Sculpture Badri Al-Sammarra’i, near the Airport. His theories and experiments on the possibility of human flight earned him the name of ‘First Arab Flyer.’
* Hammurabi’s robed statue, by Mohammed Ghani, graces central Haifa Street, utterly evocative, Babylonia’s wonders revisited.
* The Arab horseman in Mansour Square, by Miran Al-Sa’adi celebrates the Arab love of horsemanship and its association with ‘gallantry, courage and generosity’.
* Abu-Nasr Al-Farabi (AD 874-950) created by Ismail Fattah in 1965,one of the Arab world’s greatest ancient philosophers and academics, stands in Zawra Park. He was ‘The Second Teacher’, the First being Aristotle.
* Yahya Al-Wasiti, painter and calligrapher, completed his extraordinary illustrations of Maqamat Al-Hariri,in 1223.An original manuscript is in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. The statue celebrating him is in Zawra Park, by Ismael Fattah.
This random selection of Baghdad’s celebration of Mesopotamia’s lives, ancient and modern, can only fail to convey the extent of its wondrous cultural wealth. Wealth whose preservation is the duty and responsibility of the occupying forces.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
To become a Member of Global ResearchThe Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles in their entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet sites, as long as the text & title are not modified. The source must be acknowledged and an active URL hyperlink address to the original CRG article must be indicated. The author's copyright note must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: http://us.f540.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=crgeditor@yahoo.comhttp://www.globalresearch.ca/www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
To express your opinion on this article, join the discussion at Global Research's News and Discussion Forum
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright Felicity Arbuthnot, uruknet.info, 2005
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARB20051126&articleId=1330
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
John Edwards' Apology for Voting for the War
Our illustrious former Senator, and 2004 Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, now says his vote in Congress to authorize the Iraq War was a mistake. But what is he really apologizing for, and what amends does he propose we make for this mistake?
It is good that Edwards is willing to apologize for what he sees as mistakes, unlike Bush, but this apology is not anti-war or anti-occupation. This is obviously a pro-imperialist, and even pro-regime change apology. Edwards apologizes for supporting a war based on intelligence that was "deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda." I think he could have seen that this was inaccurate information, if he hadn't already supported the idea of overthrowing the Iraqi government. As others have pointed out, he wraps this apology in support for the troops, ignoring the Iraqi cost. And I wonder how much regular soldiers, as opposed to the officers, care about ending "their mission honorably," and honor doesn't mean ending a failed mission by trying to save the imperialist goal. He also makes it sound like all national leaders are at fault, but some people were wise enough to see through the lies and spin before March 2003. I reject the argument that we are all responsible, except that we are all Americans and were not able to stop the War to start with. The idea that we have to fix Iraq is partly a ploy for imperialist objectives, and assumes that we can fix what we destroyed.
Edwards wants to end the occupation by internationalizing the occupation, reducing troop levels, removing unwanted American contractors in favor of local contractors, and "building Iraq's capacity." This is just the Democratic Party version of the occupation. I also wonder if the occupation can survive troop reductions. It would help public relations to reduce the occupation forces, but it would also probably help the Iraqi resistance forces. On the other hand, it might be too unpopular and difficult to add more soldiers in an attempt to detroy the insurgency. This proposal is an attempt to get Iraqi forces to enforce American objectives so the US forces can go home. I'm not sure this would work, and even if it does it is supporting a criminal US policy.
If they really want to end the War, and support Iraqi sovereignty and freedom, it seems to me that the government should negotiate a settlement between the occupiers, the Iraqi government, the resistance (maybe excluding the foreign fundamentalists), and neighboring countries. A national unity government could be created, prior to a new election after the occupation. That way there would be a stable framework so that the occupiers could leave and the Iraqis could peacefully decide their future themselves, and it would isolate the foreign fundamentalists, if they stayed after the occupation ended. There may be flaws with this approach, but I think it is the direction we should pursue. It is probably impossible to restore the Baathist government now, even if it were the most popular political force. I don't think there is yet a unified resistance that could take over and the present Iraqi government seems to have some legitimacy, even though it was created under occupation. We should also not hold the Iraqis to decisions made by Bremer and others, we should not try to control their internal affairs diplomatically, and we should pay reparations for the damage done by the sanctions and war.
It seems more likely that Iraq will be US controlled but seemingly independent or the US and UK will be forced out by the resistance. Maybe I am being too pessimistic (since I think the first option is most likely).
I think it was last year that I wrote to Edwards saying he was a warmonger and that I could not vote for him again. If he runs for the Senate again, and it is a choice between him and Elizabeth Dole, I would consider voting for him. He is still an imperialist though, and I don't think he will change. He might become more opposed to the Iraq War and he is better on some domestic issues. On a progressive listserve at UNC he was generally thought to be cravenly following the political winds, so maybe more people see through him now.
The Right Way in Iraq
By John Edwards
Sunday, November 13, 2005; B07
I was wrong.
Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told -- and what many of us believed and argued -- was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.
It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn't make a mistake -- the men and women of our armed forces and their families -- have performed heroically and paid a dear price.
The world desperately needs moral leadership from America, and the foundation for moral leadership is telling the truth.
While we can't change the past, we need to accept responsibility, because a key part of restoring America's moral leadership is acknowledging when we've made mistakes or been proven wrong -- and showing that we have the creativity and guts to make it right.
The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate. The information the American people were hearing from the president -- and that I was being given by our intelligence community -- wasn't the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war.
George Bush won't accept responsibility for his mistakes. Along with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, he has made horrible mistakes at almost every step: failed diplomacy; not going in with enough troops; not giving our forces the equipment they need; not having a plan for peace.
Because of these failures, Iraq is a mess and has become a far greater threat than it ever was. It is now a haven for terrorists, and our presence there is draining the goodwill our country once enjoyed, diminishing our global standing. It has made fighting the global war against terrorist organizations more difficult, not less.
The urgent question isn't how we got here but what we do now. We have to give our troops a way to end their mission honorably. That means leaving behind a success, not a failure.
What is success? I don't think it is Iraq as a Jeffersonian democracy. I think it is an Iraq that is relatively stable, largely self-sufficient, comparatively open and free, and in control of its own destiny.
A plan for success needs to focus on three interlocking objectives: reducing the American presence, building Iraq's capacity and getting other countries to meet their responsibilities to help.
First, we need to remove the image of an imperialist America from the landscape of Iraq. American contractors who have taken unfair advantage of the turmoil in Iraq need to leave Iraq. If that means Halliburton subsidiary KBR, then KBR should go. Such departures, and the return of the work to Iraqi businesses, would be a real statement about our hopes for the new nation.
We also need to show Iraq and the world that we will not stay there forever. We've reached the point where the large number of our troops in Iraq hurts, not helps, our goals. Therefore, early next year, after the Iraqi elections, when a new government has been created, we should begin redeployment of a significant number of troops out of Iraq. This should be the beginning of a gradual process to reduce our presence and change the shape of our military's deployment in Iraq. Most of these troops should come from National Guard or Reserve forces.
That will still leave us with enough military capability, combined with better-trained Iraqis, to fight terrorists and continue to help the Iraqis develop a stable country.
Second, this redeployment should work in concert with a more effective training program for Iraqi forces. We should implement a clear plan for training and hard deadlines for certain benchmarks to be met. To increase incentives, we should implement a schedule showing that, as we certify Iraqi troops as trained and equipped, a proportional number of U.S. troops will be withdrawn.
Third, we must launch a serious diplomatic process that brings the world into this effort. We should bring Iraq's neighbors and our key European allies into a diplomatic process to get Iraq on its feet. The president needs to create a unified international front.
Too many mistakes have already been made for this to be easy. Yet we must take these steps to succeed. The American people, the Iraqi people and -- most important -- our troops who have died or been injured there, and those who are fighting there today, deserve nothing less.
America's leaders -- all of us -- need to accept the responsibility we each carry for how we got to this place. More than 2,000 Americans have lost their lives in this war, and more than 150,000 are fighting there today. They and their families deserve honesty from our country's leaders. And they also deserve a clear plan for a way out.
The writer, a former senator from North Carolina, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2004.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
It is good that Edwards is willing to apologize for what he sees as mistakes, unlike Bush, but this apology is not anti-war or anti-occupation. This is obviously a pro-imperialist, and even pro-regime change apology. Edwards apologizes for supporting a war based on intelligence that was "deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda." I think he could have seen that this was inaccurate information, if he hadn't already supported the idea of overthrowing the Iraqi government. As others have pointed out, he wraps this apology in support for the troops, ignoring the Iraqi cost. And I wonder how much regular soldiers, as opposed to the officers, care about ending "their mission honorably," and honor doesn't mean ending a failed mission by trying to save the imperialist goal. He also makes it sound like all national leaders are at fault, but some people were wise enough to see through the lies and spin before March 2003. I reject the argument that we are all responsible, except that we are all Americans and were not able to stop the War to start with. The idea that we have to fix Iraq is partly a ploy for imperialist objectives, and assumes that we can fix what we destroyed.
Edwards wants to end the occupation by internationalizing the occupation, reducing troop levels, removing unwanted American contractors in favor of local contractors, and "building Iraq's capacity." This is just the Democratic Party version of the occupation. I also wonder if the occupation can survive troop reductions. It would help public relations to reduce the occupation forces, but it would also probably help the Iraqi resistance forces. On the other hand, it might be too unpopular and difficult to add more soldiers in an attempt to detroy the insurgency. This proposal is an attempt to get Iraqi forces to enforce American objectives so the US forces can go home. I'm not sure this would work, and even if it does it is supporting a criminal US policy.
If they really want to end the War, and support Iraqi sovereignty and freedom, it seems to me that the government should negotiate a settlement between the occupiers, the Iraqi government, the resistance (maybe excluding the foreign fundamentalists), and neighboring countries. A national unity government could be created, prior to a new election after the occupation. That way there would be a stable framework so that the occupiers could leave and the Iraqis could peacefully decide their future themselves, and it would isolate the foreign fundamentalists, if they stayed after the occupation ended. There may be flaws with this approach, but I think it is the direction we should pursue. It is probably impossible to restore the Baathist government now, even if it were the most popular political force. I don't think there is yet a unified resistance that could take over and the present Iraqi government seems to have some legitimacy, even though it was created under occupation. We should also not hold the Iraqis to decisions made by Bremer and others, we should not try to control their internal affairs diplomatically, and we should pay reparations for the damage done by the sanctions and war.
It seems more likely that Iraq will be US controlled but seemingly independent or the US and UK will be forced out by the resistance. Maybe I am being too pessimistic (since I think the first option is most likely).
I think it was last year that I wrote to Edwards saying he was a warmonger and that I could not vote for him again. If he runs for the Senate again, and it is a choice between him and Elizabeth Dole, I would consider voting for him. He is still an imperialist though, and I don't think he will change. He might become more opposed to the Iraq War and he is better on some domestic issues. On a progressive listserve at UNC he was generally thought to be cravenly following the political winds, so maybe more people see through him now.
The Right Way in Iraq
By John Edwards
Sunday, November 13, 2005; B07
I was wrong.
Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told -- and what many of us believed and argued -- was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.
It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn't make a mistake -- the men and women of our armed forces and their families -- have performed heroically and paid a dear price.
The world desperately needs moral leadership from America, and the foundation for moral leadership is telling the truth.
While we can't change the past, we need to accept responsibility, because a key part of restoring America's moral leadership is acknowledging when we've made mistakes or been proven wrong -- and showing that we have the creativity and guts to make it right.
The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate. The information the American people were hearing from the president -- and that I was being given by our intelligence community -- wasn't the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war.
George Bush won't accept responsibility for his mistakes. Along with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, he has made horrible mistakes at almost every step: failed diplomacy; not going in with enough troops; not giving our forces the equipment they need; not having a plan for peace.
Because of these failures, Iraq is a mess and has become a far greater threat than it ever was. It is now a haven for terrorists, and our presence there is draining the goodwill our country once enjoyed, diminishing our global standing. It has made fighting the global war against terrorist organizations more difficult, not less.
The urgent question isn't how we got here but what we do now. We have to give our troops a way to end their mission honorably. That means leaving behind a success, not a failure.
What is success? I don't think it is Iraq as a Jeffersonian democracy. I think it is an Iraq that is relatively stable, largely self-sufficient, comparatively open and free, and in control of its own destiny.
A plan for success needs to focus on three interlocking objectives: reducing the American presence, building Iraq's capacity and getting other countries to meet their responsibilities to help.
First, we need to remove the image of an imperialist America from the landscape of Iraq. American contractors who have taken unfair advantage of the turmoil in Iraq need to leave Iraq. If that means Halliburton subsidiary KBR, then KBR should go. Such departures, and the return of the work to Iraqi businesses, would be a real statement about our hopes for the new nation.
We also need to show Iraq and the world that we will not stay there forever. We've reached the point where the large number of our troops in Iraq hurts, not helps, our goals. Therefore, early next year, after the Iraqi elections, when a new government has been created, we should begin redeployment of a significant number of troops out of Iraq. This should be the beginning of a gradual process to reduce our presence and change the shape of our military's deployment in Iraq. Most of these troops should come from National Guard or Reserve forces.
That will still leave us with enough military capability, combined with better-trained Iraqis, to fight terrorists and continue to help the Iraqis develop a stable country.
Second, this redeployment should work in concert with a more effective training program for Iraqi forces. We should implement a clear plan for training and hard deadlines for certain benchmarks to be met. To increase incentives, we should implement a schedule showing that, as we certify Iraqi troops as trained and equipped, a proportional number of U.S. troops will be withdrawn.
Third, we must launch a serious diplomatic process that brings the world into this effort. We should bring Iraq's neighbors and our key European allies into a diplomatic process to get Iraq on its feet. The president needs to create a unified international front.
Too many mistakes have already been made for this to be easy. Yet we must take these steps to succeed. The American people, the Iraqi people and -- most important -- our troops who have died or been injured there, and those who are fighting there today, deserve nothing less.
America's leaders -- all of us -- need to accept the responsibility we each carry for how we got to this place. More than 2,000 Americans have lost their lives in this war, and more than 150,000 are fighting there today. They and their families deserve honesty from our country's leaders. And they also deserve a clear plan for a way out.
The writer, a former senator from North Carolina, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2004.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Korea Peace Day and two anniversaries
Korea Peace Day - November 10th
This is an email I sent to my Congressional representatives for the ASCK's Korea Peace Day, since there was not an event in the Triangle. Since it was written to Congress people, including two very pro-Bush Republican senators, I toned down and didn't say that I would welcome a reunified and socialist Korea, or that I am more worried about the accidental (or intentional) launch of American and Russian ICBMs than about north Korean nuclear weapons.
Perhaps the world would actually be safer if nuclear weapons technology were not limited to the large powers. The DPRK signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its neighbors want a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, so it would be a going against its obligations and international pressure for north Korea to develop a nuclear deterrent. It does have a case for pulling out of the Treaty legally though, by showing that the USA is threatening it with nuclear attack. But this would not have much support in the "world community." I just saw a headline online that the ROK expects to have an economic union of Korea by 2020 and earlier there was a headline that there would be a unified Olympic team. Our foreign policy is going against what is right and it is against the logic of events as well.
It is debatable whether the DPRK actually has a socialist economy (Alliance believes it does not and never did) and its leadership years ago replaced Marxism-Leninism with Juche, or self-reliance, and is pro-capitalist.
"The annual Korea Peace Day, started by the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (www.asck.org) was Thursday, November 10th. I did not hear of any Korea Peace Day events in the Triangle, so I am writing letters to yourself and our two Senators. You should support ending the state of war between north Korea and our country, and normalization. The US could easily solve its disagreements with north Korea by continuing with negotiations, honoring its commitment to supply peaceful nuclear technology to north Korea if they follow their agreements, and ending nuclear (and other) threats against Korea. By threats I mean the past deployment of nuclear weapons in south Korea, plans for their use, and inclusion of these weapons in military exercises, which is a threat against the North and in violation of the Armistice Agreement and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
According to scholar Bruce Cummings (in North Korea: Another Country, which I think is a very useful book), north Korea would give up its missile program, any nuclear weapons program, and even welcome the US presence on the Korean Peninsula in return for normalization. I am surprised the DPRK would trust us so much as to agree to this, but it also makes sense in light of some of its actions. In considering north Korea, you should keep in mind the massive destruction and racist brutality of the Korean War, the North’s isolation during the Cold War, and the nationalist nature of Korea, and especially of the DPRK. Even if this isn’t the case, and north Korean rhetoric notwithstanding, I don’t feel north Korea is a threat to the safety of myself or other American citizens so I would like to see the US work to end this situation. I think it is highly unlikely that north Korea would attack us with nuclear weapons first, and it would risk destruction if it sold the weapons to terrorists. North Korea has committed apparently criminal actions, such as kidnapping Japanese citizens, but dialogue is the way to resolve this situation. The 1994 Agreed Framework sounds like a good model and according to the ASCK it is debatable whether highly enriched uranium processing was a violation. Breach of the agreement then led to the current plutonium and nuclear weapons issue.
The DPRK and ROK are moving towards eventually peaceful reunification on their own terms. There are economic initiatives and I think it was recently it was announced that there would be one Korean Olympic team. We should support these efforts rather than sabotage them, and trade with north Korea would probably benefit us economically as well. Ending the Korean War would save taxpayer money and improve our standing in the world as well.
Korean and American human rights are best served by creating peace, instead of by provocation, such as including north Korea in the supposed “Axis of Evil” and trying to overthrow the DPRK on the pretext of human rights (which I assume is the purpose of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004). According to an article in Covert Action Quaterly last yeat, the 2004 explosion in north Korea might have been a failed US attempt to kill Kim Jong Il, which I would condemn if it is true. I would oppose any attack on north Korea, including supposed precision strikes, and this would probably result in a second Korean War, with massive Korean and American casualties. The DPRK is also seemingly not such a militarily weak country as Iraq."
Anniversaries
November 7th was the 88th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. This was the formal birth of the first truly new economic and political system since the bourgeois gained power in the British, American, and French revolutions and the untold prehistoric revolutions (for example the birth of class society, slave economy, etc., which probably occurred gradually over time). The October Revolution in 1917 was the proletarian or socialist second step of the Russian Revolution, following the bourgeois phase which overthrew the Tsar and the remains of feudalism. Putin tried to divert attention from this working class anniversary by creating a new nationalistic holiday, which Russians apparently did not know the meaning of.
November 8th was the anniversary of the death of Molotov, best known as the USSR's foreign minister (I think that was his title) during World War II. He died November 8, 1986 at 12:55 p.m. if I remember correctly. The conversations recorded by Chuev and published in English in part are very useful. Molotov is a controversial figure for Marxist-Leninists though, because he cooperated with Khrushchev's revisionist group after Stalin's death. Was he a true revolutionary communist, or was he unconsciously or consciously for un-revolutionary and ultimately pro-capitalist policies, a revisionist? He was later expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as part of what I think was called the "Anti-Party Group."
This is an email I sent to my Congressional representatives for the ASCK's Korea Peace Day, since there was not an event in the Triangle. Since it was written to Congress people, including two very pro-Bush Republican senators, I toned down and didn't say that I would welcome a reunified and socialist Korea, or that I am more worried about the accidental (or intentional) launch of American and Russian ICBMs than about north Korean nuclear weapons.
Perhaps the world would actually be safer if nuclear weapons technology were not limited to the large powers. The DPRK signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its neighbors want a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, so it would be a going against its obligations and international pressure for north Korea to develop a nuclear deterrent. It does have a case for pulling out of the Treaty legally though, by showing that the USA is threatening it with nuclear attack. But this would not have much support in the "world community." I just saw a headline online that the ROK expects to have an economic union of Korea by 2020 and earlier there was a headline that there would be a unified Olympic team. Our foreign policy is going against what is right and it is against the logic of events as well.
It is debatable whether the DPRK actually has a socialist economy (Alliance believes it does not and never did) and its leadership years ago replaced Marxism-Leninism with Juche, or self-reliance, and is pro-capitalist.
"The annual Korea Peace Day, started by the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (www.asck.org) was Thursday, November 10th. I did not hear of any Korea Peace Day events in the Triangle, so I am writing letters to yourself and our two Senators. You should support ending the state of war between north Korea and our country, and normalization. The US could easily solve its disagreements with north Korea by continuing with negotiations, honoring its commitment to supply peaceful nuclear technology to north Korea if they follow their agreements, and ending nuclear (and other) threats against Korea. By threats I mean the past deployment of nuclear weapons in south Korea, plans for their use, and inclusion of these weapons in military exercises, which is a threat against the North and in violation of the Armistice Agreement and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
According to scholar Bruce Cummings (in North Korea: Another Country, which I think is a very useful book), north Korea would give up its missile program, any nuclear weapons program, and even welcome the US presence on the Korean Peninsula in return for normalization. I am surprised the DPRK would trust us so much as to agree to this, but it also makes sense in light of some of its actions. In considering north Korea, you should keep in mind the massive destruction and racist brutality of the Korean War, the North’s isolation during the Cold War, and the nationalist nature of Korea, and especially of the DPRK. Even if this isn’t the case, and north Korean rhetoric notwithstanding, I don’t feel north Korea is a threat to the safety of myself or other American citizens so I would like to see the US work to end this situation. I think it is highly unlikely that north Korea would attack us with nuclear weapons first, and it would risk destruction if it sold the weapons to terrorists. North Korea has committed apparently criminal actions, such as kidnapping Japanese citizens, but dialogue is the way to resolve this situation. The 1994 Agreed Framework sounds like a good model and according to the ASCK it is debatable whether highly enriched uranium processing was a violation. Breach of the agreement then led to the current plutonium and nuclear weapons issue.
The DPRK and ROK are moving towards eventually peaceful reunification on their own terms. There are economic initiatives and I think it was recently it was announced that there would be one Korean Olympic team. We should support these efforts rather than sabotage them, and trade with north Korea would probably benefit us economically as well. Ending the Korean War would save taxpayer money and improve our standing in the world as well.
Korean and American human rights are best served by creating peace, instead of by provocation, such as including north Korea in the supposed “Axis of Evil” and trying to overthrow the DPRK on the pretext of human rights (which I assume is the purpose of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004). According to an article in Covert Action Quaterly last yeat, the 2004 explosion in north Korea might have been a failed US attempt to kill Kim Jong Il, which I would condemn if it is true. I would oppose any attack on north Korea, including supposed precision strikes, and this would probably result in a second Korean War, with massive Korean and American casualties. The DPRK is also seemingly not such a militarily weak country as Iraq."
Anniversaries
November 7th was the 88th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. This was the formal birth of the first truly new economic and political system since the bourgeois gained power in the British, American, and French revolutions and the untold prehistoric revolutions (for example the birth of class society, slave economy, etc., which probably occurred gradually over time). The October Revolution in 1917 was the proletarian or socialist second step of the Russian Revolution, following the bourgeois phase which overthrew the Tsar and the remains of feudalism. Putin tried to divert attention from this working class anniversary by creating a new nationalistic holiday, which Russians apparently did not know the meaning of.
November 8th was the anniversary of the death of Molotov, best known as the USSR's foreign minister (I think that was his title) during World War II. He died November 8, 1986 at 12:55 p.m. if I remember correctly. The conversations recorded by Chuev and published in English in part are very useful. Molotov is a controversial figure for Marxist-Leninists though, because he cooperated with Khrushchev's revisionist group after Stalin's death. Was he a true revolutionary communist, or was he unconsciously or consciously for un-revolutionary and ultimately pro-capitalist policies, a revisionist? He was later expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as part of what I think was called the "Anti-Party Group."
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Durham primary election results
The primary this year didn't seem very well publicized and I didn't know it was this Tuesday until last week. My Dad also voted but my Mom said she didn't have know enough about the candidates to vote this time, and she probably didn't have much time either. My younger brother could vote, but unfortunately he hasn't registered here or where he goes to college. Overall voter turnout was very low. I researched the candidates mainly by reading the questionaires printed in the Herald-Sun. I considered Cora Cole-McFadden (Ward 1), Howard Clement (Ward 2), and Steve Matherly (Ward 3) the most progressive candidates. Cole-McFadden called herself a liberal in the newspaper questionaire and I think she and Clement supported work done by Jobs with Justice and other progressive groups. Counting against Clement are accusations of conflict of interest in a decision involving a relative and his approval of the forced annexation of an area near RTP by the city. I will need to research these more before the November 8th vote. Steve Matherly is involved in progressive politics and is even on some of the same activist listserves as I am on. He ran against candidates I would not vote for. John Best (in Ward 3), along with Jason Maynard, John Holmes, and Victoria Peterson represent conservatism. Whatever class interests they represent are not working class. Best also hasn't had good meeting attendance I have heard. The other candidates I hadn't heard of, so I didn't know what they stood for.
For mayor I voted for Bill Bell, despite his part in creating our current school board disputes. I forgot to look for Jackie Wagstaff's website before voting.
For mayor I voted for Bill Bell, despite his part in creating our current school board disputes. I forgot to look for Jackie Wagstaff's website before voting.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
September 24th protests
I took one of Durham's two chartered buses to the huge anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC September 24th. There were at least 300,000 people in the march I have heard. It looked like it would be large, since there were so many buses from here in the Triangle, including two from Raleigh (one a Green Party bus). There were other events that weekend as well, and a lobbying day and mass civil disobedience action at the White House the following Monday.
Our bus got there later than planned and it was hard to see what was going on in the crowds. I went to find the NC contingent, but I didn't see it and the march hadn't started yet, I thought, so I went looking for the NC Peace and Justice Coalition's table. This would have been in the tabling fair across the street from the opening rally, so I missed the speeches. I ended up spending my entire time there looking at the tables, and I still was able to visit only 2/3rds or fewer and got loaded down with information and ideas for local actions. I had an impeach Bush sign and Alliance pamphlets on impeachment, but I ended up not doing much leafletting. The pamphlet was included in the Durham bus packets. I rode a bus that seemed to be mainly people from the local organization TRACTION, which is a youth group, so many people saw the protest with fresh eyes. It was also a more sociable bus than others I have been to DC on, with discussion before and after the demonstration. It was a good event, but there was so much to do and not enough time and it seemed disorganized at the start of the march. The only other thing marring the day for me personally was that I accidentally killed a copperhead as I went to the bus (at that time of year watch out, because in certain areas copperheads seem to prefer to cross roads).
I circulated the Downing Street memos/impeachment petition on the Durham buses and got many signatures (see the campaign blog, downingstreetactionnc.blogspot.com). Someone was going to circulate it on Chapel Hill's three buses, but in the rush it was forgotten.
The two big anti-war coalitions, UFPJ and ANSWER (or the related TONC) were able to work together in organizing a united demonstration, though I have heard that UFPJ thinks it was a mistake and refuses to do this again. There may have been government sabotage of the march. I heard that trains from several Northern cities were stopped by some kind of an electrical problem. Later it was announced that airborne traces of Tularemia were picked up Saturday at the March. This looks like a possible biological weapon release like the Anthrax Scare. The week after the march I felt sick and was slightly worried, but it seems to have been just a cold and I have basically recovered.
There will probably be more in a report-back in the upcoming issue of Alliance!
This week I read an email by a UFPJ organizer from NC on how he (and UFPJ) view the event. He pointed out a RollingStone magazine article as having a good critique of our movement. I find this article by Tim Dickinson (see www.rollingstone.com, in the politics section; it is the only anti-war article) outrageous and wrong.
Basically the article seems to say that the anti-war movement needs to moderate and focus its demands, so that it can unite with veterans, MoveOn.org, Win Without War, Democrats, and Republicans. It would then have mass support and could present a "responsible" exit plan allowing us to declare "victory" in Iraq. I may overstate the author's views, but he quotes mainly from opponents of ANSWER, and even of UFPJ, and obviously is not very anti-imperialist (opposing the forced and undemocratic military and economic domination of other countries in general, not just the military occupation of Iraq). This has elitist and racist overtones. The article criticizes the diversity of demands at the protest, from freeing Haiti, to anti-Israel speeches, to freeing US political prisoners. It seems racist to say we want the support of what are probably mostly white (and "middle class") groups like MoveOn, and not that of Haitian and Arab Americans, or of the blue-collar working class. And I think Americans should be able to understand violent resistance by patriotic Iraqis, and recognize that they have a right to defend their country, as much as Americans in the 18th century, the French in WWII, and other Europeans.
These concerns are very linked to opposing the War, not diversions hijacking the movement. Israel does not control the United States, but it seems obvious to me that it is our agent in the Middle East and benefitted from this war, since Iraq ws a poweful Arab nationalist opponent, which also aided Palestinian groups fighting Israel. We supported Israel's Zionist colonial policies for our own ends. It is the same arrogant US imperialism in Iraq as the imperialism that supported the Haitian coup, meddles in the Philippines, meddles on the Korean peninsula, and pursues neo-liberal, anti-popular policies in Iraq, New Orleans, and Bolivia. Consider the case of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The UK removed the islanders for a military base, and this military base is also used by the US to attack Middle Eastern countries. Opposing the Iraq War on a narrow basis only throws away our momentum, doing nothing to prevent future wars, such as against Iran or a world war, against China or the EU (which I think is very possible in the coming decades).
There is the argument that we need to moderate so the bourgeois poiticians will join with us. I think it is the purpose of protest movements to make a demand and leave it to the politicians, who are really against us, to produce a solution to save themselves and placate us. If we had influence, and could say we want X exit plan, we wouldn't be protesting. My understanding is that this is how the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles were won (the last movement is critized in the RollingStone piece). The Democrats are not only "spineless" in general on the War, they are also really opposed to us even when they support peace. The leading Democrats fault Bush with not winning in Iraq, isolating us internationally, and distracting from the "War on Terror." They don't oppose the toppling of a foreign government that has done nothing to the American people, for economic and geopolitical gain. They fear we will lost "credibility" as the global bully if a Iraqis can force us out of Iraq. A "victory" in Iraq will hurt the American people - it will be the groundwork for future wars, it will support the Bush Administration, and it will support the neoliberal globalization hurting workers and farmers from Durham to India. And even with our radical demands Democrats and even Republicans are calling for an exit plan.
Finally, I am uneasy with the idea that veterans and their relatives are the people most able to speak on the War. They should be priviledged as experienced, directly involved, and valuable speakers, but all of us supposedly have a voice in government policy and all of us are affected in some way by the War. We are victimized by it here at home when it causes Muslims to support fundamentalists who bomb civilians in this country, when it is used to justify repression of protesters, and when it results in mercenaries patrolling the streets of New Orleans. We don't live in a society where only veterans, or taxpayers, can speak on or supposedly determine government policy.
It would be good if even groups like Win Without War would join us in the streets, but narrowing what we demand to suit more "responsible" groups only serves the warmongers and ensures that we have to do this all over again in 2010. Also don't forget the quiet wars waged in our names, such as the strangling of Iraq after the first war, which may have killed a million Iraqis. It would also be very difficult and undemocratic to impose a uniform message on a protest by 300,000 people, for example I went there protesting for impeaching Bush. It is true that CSPAN coverage wouldn't show much of this, since their idea of covering a protest seems to be just focusing on the official speakers.
There is more to say, but this has taken too long, so I will end it here.
Our bus got there later than planned and it was hard to see what was going on in the crowds. I went to find the NC contingent, but I didn't see it and the march hadn't started yet, I thought, so I went looking for the NC Peace and Justice Coalition's table. This would have been in the tabling fair across the street from the opening rally, so I missed the speeches. I ended up spending my entire time there looking at the tables, and I still was able to visit only 2/3rds or fewer and got loaded down with information and ideas for local actions. I had an impeach Bush sign and Alliance pamphlets on impeachment, but I ended up not doing much leafletting. The pamphlet was included in the Durham bus packets. I rode a bus that seemed to be mainly people from the local organization TRACTION, which is a youth group, so many people saw the protest with fresh eyes. It was also a more sociable bus than others I have been to DC on, with discussion before and after the demonstration. It was a good event, but there was so much to do and not enough time and it seemed disorganized at the start of the march. The only other thing marring the day for me personally was that I accidentally killed a copperhead as I went to the bus (at that time of year watch out, because in certain areas copperheads seem to prefer to cross roads).
I circulated the Downing Street memos/impeachment petition on the Durham buses and got many signatures (see the campaign blog, downingstreetactionnc.blogspot.com). Someone was going to circulate it on Chapel Hill's three buses, but in the rush it was forgotten.
The two big anti-war coalitions, UFPJ and ANSWER (or the related TONC) were able to work together in organizing a united demonstration, though I have heard that UFPJ thinks it was a mistake and refuses to do this again. There may have been government sabotage of the march. I heard that trains from several Northern cities were stopped by some kind of an electrical problem. Later it was announced that airborne traces of Tularemia were picked up Saturday at the March. This looks like a possible biological weapon release like the Anthrax Scare. The week after the march I felt sick and was slightly worried, but it seems to have been just a cold and I have basically recovered.
There will probably be more in a report-back in the upcoming issue of Alliance!
This week I read an email by a UFPJ organizer from NC on how he (and UFPJ) view the event. He pointed out a RollingStone magazine article as having a good critique of our movement. I find this article by Tim Dickinson (see www.rollingstone.com, in the politics section; it is the only anti-war article) outrageous and wrong.
Basically the article seems to say that the anti-war movement needs to moderate and focus its demands, so that it can unite with veterans, MoveOn.org, Win Without War, Democrats, and Republicans. It would then have mass support and could present a "responsible" exit plan allowing us to declare "victory" in Iraq. I may overstate the author's views, but he quotes mainly from opponents of ANSWER, and even of UFPJ, and obviously is not very anti-imperialist (opposing the forced and undemocratic military and economic domination of other countries in general, not just the military occupation of Iraq). This has elitist and racist overtones. The article criticizes the diversity of demands at the protest, from freeing Haiti, to anti-Israel speeches, to freeing US political prisoners. It seems racist to say we want the support of what are probably mostly white (and "middle class") groups like MoveOn, and not that of Haitian and Arab Americans, or of the blue-collar working class. And I think Americans should be able to understand violent resistance by patriotic Iraqis, and recognize that they have a right to defend their country, as much as Americans in the 18th century, the French in WWII, and other Europeans.
These concerns are very linked to opposing the War, not diversions hijacking the movement. Israel does not control the United States, but it seems obvious to me that it is our agent in the Middle East and benefitted from this war, since Iraq ws a poweful Arab nationalist opponent, which also aided Palestinian groups fighting Israel. We supported Israel's Zionist colonial policies for our own ends. It is the same arrogant US imperialism in Iraq as the imperialism that supported the Haitian coup, meddles in the Philippines, meddles on the Korean peninsula, and pursues neo-liberal, anti-popular policies in Iraq, New Orleans, and Bolivia. Consider the case of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The UK removed the islanders for a military base, and this military base is also used by the US to attack Middle Eastern countries. Opposing the Iraq War on a narrow basis only throws away our momentum, doing nothing to prevent future wars, such as against Iran or a world war, against China or the EU (which I think is very possible in the coming decades).
There is the argument that we need to moderate so the bourgeois poiticians will join with us. I think it is the purpose of protest movements to make a demand and leave it to the politicians, who are really against us, to produce a solution to save themselves and placate us. If we had influence, and could say we want X exit plan, we wouldn't be protesting. My understanding is that this is how the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles were won (the last movement is critized in the RollingStone piece). The Democrats are not only "spineless" in general on the War, they are also really opposed to us even when they support peace. The leading Democrats fault Bush with not winning in Iraq, isolating us internationally, and distracting from the "War on Terror." They don't oppose the toppling of a foreign government that has done nothing to the American people, for economic and geopolitical gain. They fear we will lost "credibility" as the global bully if a Iraqis can force us out of Iraq. A "victory" in Iraq will hurt the American people - it will be the groundwork for future wars, it will support the Bush Administration, and it will support the neoliberal globalization hurting workers and farmers from Durham to India. And even with our radical demands Democrats and even Republicans are calling for an exit plan.
Finally, I am uneasy with the idea that veterans and their relatives are the people most able to speak on the War. They should be priviledged as experienced, directly involved, and valuable speakers, but all of us supposedly have a voice in government policy and all of us are affected in some way by the War. We are victimized by it here at home when it causes Muslims to support fundamentalists who bomb civilians in this country, when it is used to justify repression of protesters, and when it results in mercenaries patrolling the streets of New Orleans. We don't live in a society where only veterans, or taxpayers, can speak on or supposedly determine government policy.
It would be good if even groups like Win Without War would join us in the streets, but narrowing what we demand to suit more "responsible" groups only serves the warmongers and ensures that we have to do this all over again in 2010. Also don't forget the quiet wars waged in our names, such as the strangling of Iraq after the first war, which may have killed a million Iraqis. It would also be very difficult and undemocratic to impose a uniform message on a protest by 300,000 people, for example I went there protesting for impeaching Bush. It is true that CSPAN coverage wouldn't show much of this, since their idea of covering a protest seems to be just focusing on the official speakers.
There is more to say, but this has taken too long, so I will end it here.
Friday, September 16, 2005
More on New Orleans
Our handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster compares poorly to that of Cuba, according to an article I read. According to that article, Cuba has plans to respond to hurricanes, including evacuation of residents, their animals (I hope this includes pets and not just livestock), and appliances like TVs and refrigerators (to prevent looting)! On this it may be the local and state officials' faultdts, since they must have had vehicles they could have used for evacuation. It must have been very bad for New Orleans residents to have to leave their pets behind, and to just leave them alone to fend for themselves is inhumane.
Thursday night Bush said there would be an investigation or review of the disaster response - but why was the idea of an independent (or at least Congressional) investigation of the response dropped in Congress recently? We need an independent, reasonably objective investigation to find out what went wrong (just like there should have been a better investigation of 9/11).
The Internet encourages rumors and conspiracy theorizing, but with this Administration it is hard to tell what is reasonable to believe (after all, it compulsively withholds facts, even from Congress, and has lied to the public so many times). Thursday I saw an article saying that the levee in New Orleans could have been broken by military forces who were there, about 5 of whom were shot by New Orleans police. The purpose of the flooding would then be to force out the black residents to allow corporate redevelopment. Whether this is true or not, it looks like a corporate, neoliberal-style reconstruction of the Gulf region is being planned. Unions are already under attack and a free trade-based economy is planned. This is like the situation in occupied Iraq, where the US has liberalized laws on foreign ownership of Iraqi companies and resources, given reconstruction money to foreign companies like Halliburton, instead of native (and cheaper) contractors, and even attacked Iraqi agriculture with new rules on seed saving (or maybe it was something else). Some or all of these changes are also illegal under international law, which prevents occupiers from re-writing the laws of a conquered country.
Earlier there was a controversy about what to call the people displaced by the disaster. By definition refugee fits, but at least some people are against the term. Why is that? I don't think it compares the suffering of survivors to the suffering of people in Africa (which is what one Herald-Sun letter writer said). Evacuees seems to be the preferred term now, so I'll use that.
The other big national story right now is the Roberts confirmation hearings. I've heard the hearings on NPR and not a lot sticks out as dangerous about Roberts there. But we have little information on what he thinks, since he won't comment on many issues and he says as a lawyer he would have taken whichever side he was hired to defend. I distrust Bush's motives in nominating Roberts and Bush will be able to fill two Supreme Court seats - is there a hidden plan at work to turn the Court further right or towards the Executive branch, starting with nominating Roberts? According to the radio program Democracy Now, Roberts may stand for increasing Presidential power, rather than a conservative agenda. This idea fits with the Bush Administration's secrecy and concentration of power in the Executive branch. I worry though that if Roberts is rejected Bush will not nominate a better candidate (one who won't turn the Court further right or serve the Executive branch), and maybe a worse one.
Thursday night Bush said there would be an investigation or review of the disaster response - but why was the idea of an independent (or at least Congressional) investigation of the response dropped in Congress recently? We need an independent, reasonably objective investigation to find out what went wrong (just like there should have been a better investigation of 9/11).
The Internet encourages rumors and conspiracy theorizing, but with this Administration it is hard to tell what is reasonable to believe (after all, it compulsively withholds facts, even from Congress, and has lied to the public so many times). Thursday I saw an article saying that the levee in New Orleans could have been broken by military forces who were there, about 5 of whom were shot by New Orleans police. The purpose of the flooding would then be to force out the black residents to allow corporate redevelopment. Whether this is true or not, it looks like a corporate, neoliberal-style reconstruction of the Gulf region is being planned. Unions are already under attack and a free trade-based economy is planned. This is like the situation in occupied Iraq, where the US has liberalized laws on foreign ownership of Iraqi companies and resources, given reconstruction money to foreign companies like Halliburton, instead of native (and cheaper) contractors, and even attacked Iraqi agriculture with new rules on seed saving (or maybe it was something else). Some or all of these changes are also illegal under international law, which prevents occupiers from re-writing the laws of a conquered country.
Earlier there was a controversy about what to call the people displaced by the disaster. By definition refugee fits, but at least some people are against the term. Why is that? I don't think it compares the suffering of survivors to the suffering of people in Africa (which is what one Herald-Sun letter writer said). Evacuees seems to be the preferred term now, so I'll use that.
The other big national story right now is the Roberts confirmation hearings. I've heard the hearings on NPR and not a lot sticks out as dangerous about Roberts there. But we have little information on what he thinks, since he won't comment on many issues and he says as a lawyer he would have taken whichever side he was hired to defend. I distrust Bush's motives in nominating Roberts and Bush will be able to fill two Supreme Court seats - is there a hidden plan at work to turn the Court further right or towards the Executive branch, starting with nominating Roberts? According to the radio program Democracy Now, Roberts may stand for increasing Presidential power, rather than a conservative agenda. This idea fits with the Bush Administration's secrecy and concentration of power in the Executive branch. I worry though that if Roberts is rejected Bush will not nominate a better candidate (one who won't turn the Court further right or serve the Executive branch), and maybe a worse one.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
The Disaster in New Orleans and other delayed posts
I haven't posted in awhile so I have several stories to mention.
I was hoping to do more reading into what has happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina went through, but I haven't had time. From what I've heard it sounds like the government at all levels failed the people of the Gulf coast. It seems like if you're in a major disaster, expecially if you are considered political unimportant by the elite, watch out, because you may be on your own for awhile. I plan to look into how the results and response to Katrina and Hurricane Floyd in eastern North Carolina compare - has disaster relief gotten worse, or did the Clinton Administration and the State government allow poor and working class people to die needlessly here too?
Now there are Blackwater mercenaries in New Orleans and civil rights are or were suspended (I doubt a shoot to kill policy encourages respect for the lives and rights of any citizens caught in the open). I was surprised that national political figures would talk of abondoning a great and historic city like New Orleans. New Orleans has problems, since it is below sea level and on the coast, but we have always rebuilt our large cities after disasters and New Orleans could be made safer. If New Orleans residents want to rebuild, they should be allowed to and helped. Also, I have seen news articles about the affects of pathogens in the floodwaters and air pollution, but what about all of the poisons released by the flood? After all, the lower Mississippi and other affected areas are already dangerously contaminated in places by carcinogens from the chemical and oil industries. What will this do to the natural ecosystem? I have given to the Red Cross for disaster relief, but there is also an issue here (and with Pat Robertson's charity even more so).
Hopefully I will have time to write something more substantive later on.
I think an article in the Durham section of the Herald-Sun today said that ARAMARK was among the companies possibly violating Durham County's living wage law (by not releasing their payroll records to allow verification of compliance). This reminds me of the many payroll problems reported by ARAMARK workers at UNC-CH (see article in the July 2005 edition of Alliance!).
I was hoping to do more reading into what has happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina went through, but I haven't had time. From what I've heard it sounds like the government at all levels failed the people of the Gulf coast. It seems like if you're in a major disaster, expecially if you are considered political unimportant by the elite, watch out, because you may be on your own for awhile. I plan to look into how the results and response to Katrina and Hurricane Floyd in eastern North Carolina compare - has disaster relief gotten worse, or did the Clinton Administration and the State government allow poor and working class people to die needlessly here too?
Now there are Blackwater mercenaries in New Orleans and civil rights are or were suspended (I doubt a shoot to kill policy encourages respect for the lives and rights of any citizens caught in the open). I was surprised that national political figures would talk of abondoning a great and historic city like New Orleans. New Orleans has problems, since it is below sea level and on the coast, but we have always rebuilt our large cities after disasters and New Orleans could be made safer. If New Orleans residents want to rebuild, they should be allowed to and helped. Also, I have seen news articles about the affects of pathogens in the floodwaters and air pollution, but what about all of the poisons released by the flood? After all, the lower Mississippi and other affected areas are already dangerously contaminated in places by carcinogens from the chemical and oil industries. What will this do to the natural ecosystem? I have given to the Red Cross for disaster relief, but there is also an issue here (and with Pat Robertson's charity even more so).
Hopefully I will have time to write something more substantive later on.
I think an article in the Durham section of the Herald-Sun today said that ARAMARK was among the companies possibly violating Durham County's living wage law (by not releasing their payroll records to allow verification of compliance). This reminds me of the many payroll problems reported by ARAMARK workers at UNC-CH (see article in the July 2005 edition of Alliance!).
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Duke and UNC progressives are being too quiet
Social justice activists at Duke and UNC are still active, but over the last few months I think they've been too silent on some issues, allowing the right to appeal to the public without any counterarguments.
At Duke last fall anti-Palestine Solidarity Movement letters and op-eds in the Herald-Sun were not answered or were answered late in the lead up to the PSM Conference. Organizers might have felt that it is pointless to debate ideological Zionists and conservatives, which might be true. But what about people who would read the articles and not have time or motivation to look for the truth? For example, one letter or article made it sound like participants at a past PSM Conference chanted "Kill the Jews." I was told that it did not happen but it was never denied in the Paper and it is hard to find information online.
Now with Israel's false withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip there are pro-Israel letters to the editor in the Herald-Sun and two more anti-PSM op-eds. The letters were sparked by a letter on Israel divestment by churches in NC. Of course the editors and the media in general are hyping the Gaza withdrawal (although the previous editors were not openly against the PSM Conference at Duke I think). The op-eds portray the PSM as supporting terrorists and the International Solidarity Movement (Rachel Corrie and Brian Avery belonged to this group) as being itself terrorist. The movement doesn't need this libel, since Americans are probably generally pro-Zionist and anti-Arab to begin with, because of ignorance. I know it was summer vacation, but I know some participants are around, and I did my part in writing a letter on the Gaza ruse. If Duke activists have been writing to the editors they should say so, so we can know that the editors go that far to support Zionism and Israel.
UNC-Chapel Hill had its annual Fallfest street fair welcoming students to the University Sunday night, 9pm-2am. During Fallfest part of South Road (Highway 54) is closed on Campus near the Student Union. Student groups table, local restaurants have vending stands, there is music, and a climbing wall, break dancing, etc. at Fallfest. This time there were so many small George Bush signs, at at least three tables - signs such as "W is for Women" and something about farmers. I don't remember so many signs being there last August before the national election and there weren't any Democratic Party signs this time (the Young Democrats were tabling though).
I was diappointed that Student Action with Workers didn't table - it will hurt recruiting. I can't believe such a larger group could evaporate over the summer and I think it still exists. Boiling Point magazine tabled - except it did so under a big sign for the conservative Campus Crusade for Christ. A relatively new fair trade group (started last fall) was tabling - and using sex appeal in some shoutouts I think. The GLBTSA was there I heard. Did I miss Campaign to End the Cycle of Violence, UNC's anti-war group?! I know they have plans for the fall, yet I did not see them tbling. I could easily have missed them though. It seemed more conservative than before and I saw at least one new conservative group tabling. Like last year I was alienated by how the University is changing from how it was when I was a student in 2004. I also saw a guy wearing a bright red t-shirt emblazoned with a big hammer-and-sickle, but I'm sure it was like a Che Guevara shirt rather than being supportive of socialism. It's nice to see the emblem, but it was politically pointless for us. We'll see what happens at UNC this fall.
The Alliance ML interest meetings will be Thursday, September 8th from 7-9pm at Internationalist Books (405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill) and Monday, September 12th at the same time at the Southwest Library (I think its address is 3605 Shannon Road - it is near the old South Square; see www.durhamcountylibrary.org to check the address). The meetings will be about the group and our part in the DSM investigation/impeachment campaign. Members of other Marxist groups are welcome and I'm thinking of organizing an event this fall to encourage inter-group communication.
A blog, downingstreetactionnc.blogspot.com, has been created for DSM discussion and campaign planning. It is provisional since there haven't been any comments there yet to make it grassroots.
In a way I'm overly optimistic and advantaged, but things seem to be looking up in a way. For example, unions are growing in the state, Cindy Sheehan is pressuring Bush, and the public is turning more and more against Bush and the Iraq War. This is at the cost of thousands of American soldiers and others though, who were sent into an war of aggression and are now being hurt by Iraqis rightfully resisting foreign occupation.
At Duke last fall anti-Palestine Solidarity Movement letters and op-eds in the Herald-Sun were not answered or were answered late in the lead up to the PSM Conference. Organizers might have felt that it is pointless to debate ideological Zionists and conservatives, which might be true. But what about people who would read the articles and not have time or motivation to look for the truth? For example, one letter or article made it sound like participants at a past PSM Conference chanted "Kill the Jews." I was told that it did not happen but it was never denied in the Paper and it is hard to find information online.
Now with Israel's false withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip there are pro-Israel letters to the editor in the Herald-Sun and two more anti-PSM op-eds. The letters were sparked by a letter on Israel divestment by churches in NC. Of course the editors and the media in general are hyping the Gaza withdrawal (although the previous editors were not openly against the PSM Conference at Duke I think). The op-eds portray the PSM as supporting terrorists and the International Solidarity Movement (Rachel Corrie and Brian Avery belonged to this group) as being itself terrorist. The movement doesn't need this libel, since Americans are probably generally pro-Zionist and anti-Arab to begin with, because of ignorance. I know it was summer vacation, but I know some participants are around, and I did my part in writing a letter on the Gaza ruse. If Duke activists have been writing to the editors they should say so, so we can know that the editors go that far to support Zionism and Israel.
UNC-Chapel Hill had its annual Fallfest street fair welcoming students to the University Sunday night, 9pm-2am. During Fallfest part of South Road (Highway 54) is closed on Campus near the Student Union. Student groups table, local restaurants have vending stands, there is music, and a climbing wall, break dancing, etc. at Fallfest. This time there were so many small George Bush signs, at at least three tables - signs such as "W is for Women" and something about farmers. I don't remember so many signs being there last August before the national election and there weren't any Democratic Party signs this time (the Young Democrats were tabling though).
I was diappointed that Student Action with Workers didn't table - it will hurt recruiting. I can't believe such a larger group could evaporate over the summer and I think it still exists. Boiling Point magazine tabled - except it did so under a big sign for the conservative Campus Crusade for Christ. A relatively new fair trade group (started last fall) was tabling - and using sex appeal in some shoutouts I think. The GLBTSA was there I heard. Did I miss Campaign to End the Cycle of Violence, UNC's anti-war group?! I know they have plans for the fall, yet I did not see them tbling. I could easily have missed them though. It seemed more conservative than before and I saw at least one new conservative group tabling. Like last year I was alienated by how the University is changing from how it was when I was a student in 2004. I also saw a guy wearing a bright red t-shirt emblazoned with a big hammer-and-sickle, but I'm sure it was like a Che Guevara shirt rather than being supportive of socialism. It's nice to see the emblem, but it was politically pointless for us. We'll see what happens at UNC this fall.
The Alliance ML interest meetings will be Thursday, September 8th from 7-9pm at Internationalist Books (405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill) and Monday, September 12th at the same time at the Southwest Library (I think its address is 3605 Shannon Road - it is near the old South Square; see www.durhamcountylibrary.org to check the address). The meetings will be about the group and our part in the DSM investigation/impeachment campaign. Members of other Marxist groups are welcome and I'm thinking of organizing an event this fall to encourage inter-group communication.
A blog, downingstreetactionnc.blogspot.com, has been created for DSM discussion and campaign planning. It is provisional since there haven't been any comments there yet to make it grassroots.
In a way I'm overly optimistic and advantaged, but things seem to be looking up in a way. For example, unions are growing in the state, Cindy Sheehan is pressuring Bush, and the public is turning more and more against Bush and the Iraq War. This is at the cost of thousands of American soldiers and others though, who were sent into an war of aggression and are now being hurt by Iraqis rightfully resisting foreign occupation.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
DSM Day in the Triangle
Several of us in the Triangle organized a town meeting about the Downing Street memos on July 23rd, the third anniversary of an incriminating meeting recorded in one of those documents. It was a day of action called for by Rep John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and the After Downing Street Coalition. The meeting was at the Community Church of Chapel Hill, 7-9:30pm and about 42 people came. The general tone was that we should lobby Price on this continuously wherever we can. I circulated the petition I mentioned earlier and got almost two pages of signatures and gave a petition to someone to circulate. Right now we need to support Rep. Barbara Lee's (D-CA) Resolution of Inquiry requiring the Administration to hand over British-American communications from most of 2002. It will be voted on sometime within 16 days from Thursday, the 21st, when it was introduced. This is Bush's chance to come clean, or it could provide new revelations about how the Iraq War was launched.
A blog will probably be set up to keep in touch and maybe a listserve. There will be a story on this in the August issue of Triangle Free Press. I think the lack of a definte plan and follow up meeting could be a problem. There was also a house party in Raleigh for DSM Day.
Organizations aren't as interested in the petition as I was hoping but I will go forward with it. There are copies at Internationalist Books in Chapel Hill and at the Durham Food Co-op. I plan to leave copies at The Know Bookshop Friday also. Three other people might be circulating the petition as well. Maybe there will be enough signatures in late August or in September to call a meeting on how to present this to Rep. Price.
The July issue of Alliance! (www.allianceml.com) is out and has an article calling for impeachment that refers to the DSM and a call for Alliance ML comrades to work on this issue.
A blog will probably be set up to keep in touch and maybe a listserve. There will be a story on this in the August issue of Triangle Free Press. I think the lack of a definte plan and follow up meeting could be a problem. There was also a house party in Raleigh for DSM Day.
Organizations aren't as interested in the petition as I was hoping but I will go forward with it. There are copies at Internationalist Books in Chapel Hill and at the Durham Food Co-op. I plan to leave copies at The Know Bookshop Friday also. Three other people might be circulating the petition as well. Maybe there will be enough signatures in late August or in September to call a meeting on how to present this to Rep. Price.
The July issue of Alliance! (www.allianceml.com) is out and has an article calling for impeachment that refers to the DSM and a call for Alliance ML comrades to work on this issue.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
local Downing Street memos and impeachment campaign launched
Alliance Marxist-Leninist (a member of the After Downing Street Coalition) and the Durham Bill of Rights Defense Committee are circulating a petition to Rep. Price to ask that he support investigation of the Downing Street memos as evidence of impeachable crimes by Bush & Co. Price has supported Rep. Conyers' efforts on this, so he may be willing to go further, especially if we push. The petition is based on the After Downing Street Coalition's demands. Email me at alliance_trianglenc@hotmail.com if you want to circulate the petition (or use it in your own Congressional district). I encourage other groups to join the effort - just email me to be included. This is also an opportunity for practical cooperation of communist parties in the area. Currently this is just a petition effort, but there are further steps to take. I suggested that Alliance work on this campaign in all of its US branches, and I think there is interest in doing this.
The petition will be circulated here at the peace vigil every Friday at the corner of E. Franklin St. and Ellit Road (and maybe at other vigils) and at the BORDC's table July 4th at the Carrboro Town Hall. We will probably present the petition in late July or August. July 23rd is an anniversary of one of the memos and the Coalition is calling for a national day of action then.
The petition says:
"We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, want to thank Rep. Price for signing Rep. Conyers’ letter to President Bush asking for an explanation ofthe Downing Street memos (seewww.afterdowningstreet.org), but more needs to be done. We ask that you co-sponsor Rep. Barbara Lee’s Resolution of Inquiry (which is not about impeachment) and that you introduce or support a Resolution ofInquiry into whether the leaked memos contain groundsfor impeachment. These memos suggest that the Administration deliberately misled Congress to justifyaggression against Iraq, a felony and a violation of international law. If there are grounds for impeachment, with or without involving this newinformation, we ask that you support impeachment ofthe President and anyone else who has committed impeachable offenses."
After the 2004 election this is the next way we can politically fight the entire Bush agenda, rather than only fighting particular battles. This campaign should be supported by social justice groups because removing or weakening Bush will aid many of our campaigns, it is a good organizing tool and cause for unity for our groups, it is a framework that allows us to show how the Administration is criminal, and because Bush should not continue to get away with all of these crimes.
The Administration is losing support, the Republicans are less unified, the Congressional situation couldchange next year, and these memos have been revealed, so impeachment is now more likely. Ramsey Clark (www.votetoimpeach.org) shows that impeachment is a justified and reasonable step to take and it could remove more than just Bush. The Administration could have been impeached before, over Bush's wars of aggression, violation of civil rights, torture, etc. (see the articles of impeachment drafted by Clark and the National Lawyers' Guild), but the Democratic Party as a whole would not support it. Now with these memos there are Democrats willing to speak of impeachment. Congress members pledged to uphold the Constitution, so they should vote for impeachment if there is a clear case, but I realize that the oath isn't taken seriously. If they don't impeach Bush then they will be exposed as acting unconstitutionally, again weakening the opponents of democracy.
I think any neo-conservatives left in the Administration would be lame ducks after impeachment of the others. If it fails, the Administration would still be weakened by the effort.
We have not planned steps to take with our Senators, but a petition to them could say:
"We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, ask that you urge the House to introduce and pass a Resolution of Inquiry into impeachment of the President and others over the evidence revealed by the Downing Street memos (www.afterdowningstreet.org). These memos suggest that the Administration deliberately misled Congress to justify premeditated aggression against Iraq. This would be a felony and a violation of international law. We also ask that you support Senators Kennedy and Kerry in their efforts on this issue. If there are grounds for impeachment, with or without involving this new information, we askthat you support impeachment of the President and anyone else who has committed impeachable offenses."
Let me know if you want to circulate this and we could coordinate a Senate campaign also.
The petition will be circulated here at the peace vigil every Friday at the corner of E. Franklin St. and Ellit Road (and maybe at other vigils) and at the BORDC's table July 4th at the Carrboro Town Hall. We will probably present the petition in late July or August. July 23rd is an anniversary of one of the memos and the Coalition is calling for a national day of action then.
The petition says:
"We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, want to thank Rep. Price for signing Rep. Conyers’ letter to President Bush asking for an explanation ofthe Downing Street memos (seewww.afterdowningstreet.org), but more needs to be done. We ask that you co-sponsor Rep. Barbara Lee’s Resolution of Inquiry (which is not about impeachment) and that you introduce or support a Resolution ofInquiry into whether the leaked memos contain groundsfor impeachment. These memos suggest that the Administration deliberately misled Congress to justifyaggression against Iraq, a felony and a violation of international law. If there are grounds for impeachment, with or without involving this newinformation, we ask that you support impeachment ofthe President and anyone else who has committed impeachable offenses."
After the 2004 election this is the next way we can politically fight the entire Bush agenda, rather than only fighting particular battles. This campaign should be supported by social justice groups because removing or weakening Bush will aid many of our campaigns, it is a good organizing tool and cause for unity for our groups, it is a framework that allows us to show how the Administration is criminal, and because Bush should not continue to get away with all of these crimes.
The Administration is losing support, the Republicans are less unified, the Congressional situation couldchange next year, and these memos have been revealed, so impeachment is now more likely. Ramsey Clark (www.votetoimpeach.org) shows that impeachment is a justified and reasonable step to take and it could remove more than just Bush. The Administration could have been impeached before, over Bush's wars of aggression, violation of civil rights, torture, etc. (see the articles of impeachment drafted by Clark and the National Lawyers' Guild), but the Democratic Party as a whole would not support it. Now with these memos there are Democrats willing to speak of impeachment. Congress members pledged to uphold the Constitution, so they should vote for impeachment if there is a clear case, but I realize that the oath isn't taken seriously. If they don't impeach Bush then they will be exposed as acting unconstitutionally, again weakening the opponents of democracy.
I think any neo-conservatives left in the Administration would be lame ducks after impeachment of the others. If it fails, the Administration would still be weakened by the effort.
We have not planned steps to take with our Senators, but a petition to them could say:
"We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, ask that you urge the House to introduce and pass a Resolution of Inquiry into impeachment of the President and others over the evidence revealed by the Downing Street memos (www.afterdowningstreet.org). These memos suggest that the Administration deliberately misled Congress to justify premeditated aggression against Iraq. This would be a felony and a violation of international law. We also ask that you support Senators Kennedy and Kerry in their efforts on this issue. If there are grounds for impeachment, with or without involving this new information, we askthat you support impeachment of the President and anyone else who has committed impeachable offenses."
Let me know if you want to circulate this and we could coordinate a Senate campaign also.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Water pollution by local wastewater treatment plants
A few weeks ago there was an article (and a letter) in the Herald-Sun newspaper (www.herald-sun.com) on upgrades to the Triangle Wastewater Treatment Plant to produce cleaner effluent to improve Jordan Lake's waster quality. The Triangle WTP is at the intersection of TW Alexander Drive and Highway 55 in Durham County and dumps into Northeast Creek.
The improvements are good, for example the Creek no longer smells like chlorine for miles. More should be done. This treated water might still degrade the Creek's ecosystem and this dumping therefore violates the spirit of the Clean Water Act (see the article below). Also, these improvements are being made to improve Jordan Lake, not for the sake of cleaner water in general, which I think should be the goal.
Jordan Lake has its good points but it destroyed a huge area of bottomlands that were probably rich in wildlife, as well as destroying a small town. I am irritated that the concern is for its water quality, not for the quality of the natural waterways running into it. Jordan Lake provides recreation and drinking water, but the creeks also provide recreation and food for people, as well as being diverse habitats for wildlife.
I am planning to start a Stream Watch group (part of a State program) for Northeast Creek to help improve and safeguard its quality and diversity.
I wrote the article below in October 2003 for UNC-Chapel Hill's left student magazine, Boiling Point.
Are wastewater treatment plants harming the quality of local waterways?
Where the entrance ford into UNC’s Mason Farm Biological Preserve crosses Morgan Creek there is a ‘chlorine’ smell to the air, but, other than perhaps its constant flow, the Creek seems ordinary. If you walk upstream to the area behind Finley Golf Course’s parking lot you will find the Orange Water and Sewer Authority’s Mason Farm Wastewater Treatment Plant discharging processed wastewater into Morgan Creek.
In this age of environmental concern, sewage treatment plants are often the only point-source (pollution sources at a particular point, such as a pipe) polluters of local waterways. Treating wastewater before releasing it into the wild was a great improvement and has resurrected many waterways but today they are a main source of pollution. Their design and location in flood-prone bottomlands shows a disregard for improving water quality. Wastewater treatment plants (WTPs) only have to treat water to match the use of the waterway they drain into, preventing improvements. They release man-made and possibly harmful chemicals from the process of water treatment and chemical that were not removed, depending on the design of the plant they can release biocidal amounts of chlorine compounds into natural waterways, they release disease-causing pathogens, especially during floods, and they release biologically significant quantities of medical and possibly illegal drugs into the water. These problems are worsened by their often being located in flood-prone bottomlands, out of sight and without levees. Local creeks should not be mere ways to carry polluted water out of sight and out of mind. The Clean Water Act of 1972, a landmark law regulating pollution and water treatment, broadly defines the pollution it is intended to prevent as “the man-made or man-induced alteration of the chemical, physical, biologically, and radiologically integrity of water” (Adler, 1993) and if the effluent of local WTP’s is reducing water quality, then it has not met these expectations. Neither have they met the goal of zero-discharge in 1980s.
Heavy metals are toxic because above a certain quantity they hinder vital enzymes, disrupting bodily processes. Copper, lead, and zinc are leached from water system pipes and may be released with treated water in waterways, although heavy metals tend to accumulate in sludge rather than in the released water. These three metals are more toxic than many other heavy metals and they are not strongly stored in bottom sediment in waterways (Kennish, 1992). The concentration of heavy metals is of less concern than how they are complexed into molecules in a specific environment. Under the Clean Water Act, WTPs receiving water from residential and industrial sources are classified as receiving only residential wastes and they might not be designed to treat industrial wastes they receive, not to say that residential waste always lacks heavy metals, etc (Adler, 1993). Hopefully OWASA’s plants are designed to fully treat UNC’s wastes.
WTPs do not produce completely clean water and nature is used to purify the discharged water, which obviously must contain chlorine compounds poisonous to aquatic organisms, and other substances. In fish chlorine enters their gills, and often damages the gill surfaces, but in the bloodstream it binds to hemoglobin, causing suffocation (methemoglobinemia) (Kennish, 1992). Because chlorinated water is deadly to wildlife in waterways, the EPA issued guidelines on when it should be used in disinfection (and this probably applies to chloramines): it should be used only where its benefits are proven and specifically to protect public health, it should be used where protecting aquatic wildlife is not a concern, and where public health and conservation conflict, an alternative method should be used. Chlorine is toxic to fish at very low concentrations, and at these low concentrations control is difficult (Spellman, 1999). In waterways continuously exposed to chlorinated water, the total chlorine concentration should not be more than 0.01 milligrams/liter for tolerant organisms or 0.002 mg/L for most wildlife, and this is interpreted as making all chlorine release impermissible (Spellman, 1999). Combined chlorine compound concentrations in tapwater are usually 1-4 mg/L.
Recently Chapel Hill, Durham, and Hillsborough joined Raleigh and Cary in disinfecting drinking water with chloramines instead of using only chlorine. Chloramines are compounds of chlorine attached to a molecule made of nitrogen and hydrogen (NH2Cl is an example of a chloramine) and are created by the mixing of chlorine and ammonia at some point in water treatment. Because ammonia is abundant in wastewater, even if local WTPs use only chlorine in wastewater treatment, chloramines are created, as well as entering the system through tapwater. Chloramines are replacing chlorine because they don’t produce as much of the potentially carcinogenic disinfection byproducts trihalomethanes (THMs), they might improve tapwater’s odor and taste, because of liability worries regarding chlorine, and because chlorine may be prohibitively regulated. The problem is that chloramines can exist much longer than other chlorine molecules because they are less reactive with other molecules and they are poisonous to fish, reptiles, amphibians, corals and other wildlife. Unless natural processes react with chloramines to render them harmless they could exist in treated water for days, continuously dosing miles of a waterway with a biocidal compound. Where I grew up in southern Durham Northeast Creek smelled like chlorine for many miles downstream of the Triangle Wastewater Treatment Plant until a change was made at the plant. Unlike Morgan Creek, NE Creek has a silt problem and this allows one to see that during the summer clear WTP discharge makes up much of the Creek’s flow for a long distance.
Treated water can be dechlorinated but this has potential problems as well. Dechlorinating chlorine compounds releases the molecules associated with them allowing new, toxic or carcinogenic compounds to arise (White, 1999). Dechlorinating chloramines releases ammonia and nitrogen containing compounds also poisonous to fish.
Chlorine can form THM compounds with organic matter in water and these compounds are regulated in drinking water to be at no more than 0.10 mg/L. In treated wastewater chlorine is more likely to form chloramines because of the abundance of ammonia, but THMs are still possible (Bryant et. al, 1992). THMs, other disinfection byproducts, and even the water disinfectants themselves may cause cancer and other illnesses. Chlorine affects the thyroid and possibly the kidneys and can form other byproducts after it enters the body and “liver toxicity” is caused in lab animals by chloramines (Bryant, 2000). The use of water treatment chemicals has inherent dangers, for example if one ton of chlorine gas kept at a WTP escaped, it could endanger an area within a six mile radius of the release, but accidents are rare (Spellman, 1999).
An obvious danger from WTPs is pathogens in wastewater and spills of raw sewage is a problem for this reason. Diseases ranging from fungal ear or skin infection and relatively minor viral gastrointestinal illnesses to lethal illnesses like typhoid and cholera are caused by the 300 viral types, 100 bacteria species, fungi, a few protozoa, and nematode and annelid worms transmitted through wastewaters. Some, such as the virus causing polio and Giardida protozoans, can survive away from a host for a long period (years for polio viruses), so contamination would occur without very many sewage spills (Buzzi, 1992). Many disease causing organisms infect wildlife or are opportunistic pathogens and cause disease only because nutrient-rich wastewater encourages their growth and increases chances of infection. Amoeba that cause rare (and lethal) brain infections and exist in this area are an example. This excess nitrogen in treated water should also change waterway ecosystems, maybe encouraging non-native and destructive carp populations, since excess nutrients tend to encourage generalist species like carp over ecological specialist species. Nitrites can be produced with chloramines by nitrogen-metabolizing bacteria, which are harmful to humans and wildlife (Environmental Health Program, 1995). The release of pathogens is also a danger to wildlife since they may be susceptible to infection by these organisms.
Biologically significant and active concentrations of medical and possibly illegal drugs (and the chemicals used to create them) (Daughton) and other household chemicals survive passage through WTPs and are continuously released into nature. Pharmaceuticals and personal care products, such as drugs and fragrances, have been found in small concentrations in natural waters. Medical drugs especially are often designed to be active in very small doses so a low concentration is not necessarily a good sign. As an example, one used NuvaRing contraceptive could pollute 24 million liters of water with estrogen at a level active in fish (see Science News magazine of Jan. 25, volume 163, number 4). Many substances still have not been looked for in natural waterways and the possibility of dangers to humans is even murkier than environmental effects. The chemicals mentioned in this article could also interact in unknown ways to be more dangerous to wildlife. Chemicals could be released at small rates, but become a problem if they accumulate in sediment or bioaccumulate through storage in certain species (Beuhler, 1993).
WTPs are often located without very adequate protection in floodplains, along with their inflowing sewer pipes. The Triangle WTP and its sewer easements are located on the banks of Northeast Creek, and it is only a few feet above the Creek banks without levees and it has sewer spills during every major storm. The Mason Farm WTP is much better protected, which is a good thing given that it is located on a low island. WTPs are usually relatively isolated, for good reasons, but this makes public oversight more difficult.
Pollutants and pathogens released by WTPs intentionally or unintentionally damage the quality and health of waterway ecosystems and potentially human health. It is possible that illegal activity makes contamination worse than we know from official information. The Public Interest Research Group reports that most municipal and industrial WTPs in several Northern states have violated their pollution permit (Environmental Water Analysis, 2002). Those in charge of our WTPs should be as concerned about dialoguing with the public about environmental problems as they are regarding human health. When Durham switched to chloraminating drinking water it alerted water customers about the health aspect of chloramines but glossed over any environmental issues. Natural waterways should not be used to transport wastes away from sight and concern and WTPs should not be dumping into waterways at all. Contamination and alteration of natural waterways by WTPs ought to be studied and here UNC could work to fix these problems. Biology, chemistry, environmental studies, and other classes could study how the Mason Farm WTP effects Morgan Creek, for example. Better means to treat wastewater exist and ought to be more widely used. American infrastructure such as WTPs needs upgrading and repair but instead money is squandered blowing up foreign infrastructure. Just because wastewater is treated before being dumped does not mean that it is free of pollutants and poisons, especially those unlikely to cause a scene (like a burning or fishless river) and publicly embarrass the utility.
Cited:
Adler, Robert W., Landman, Jessica C., Cameron, Diana M. The Clean Water Act: 20 Years Later. Island Press: Washington, D.C., 1993.
Beuhler, Mark D. Proceedings: 1992 Water Quality Technology Conference: Part I – Sunday Seminars Through Session 3D: November 15-19, 1992: Toronto, Canada. Ed. American Water Works Association. 1993.
Bryant, Edward A., Fulton, George P., Budd, George C. Budd. Disinfection Alternatives for Safe Drinking Water. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992.
Buzzi, Ruth Ann. Chemical Hazards at Water and Wastewater Treatment Plants. Chelsea, Mich.: Lewis Publishers, 1992.
Environmental Health Program. Chloramines, modified May 1996, [web site]. Accessed February 8, 2003. Available at http://216.239.39.100/Search?q=caule:mqmAAmuJJMiC;www.hc.-sc.gc.ca/ehp/ehd/catalogue/bch_pubs/dwgsup_doc/chlora.pdf+chloramines&hl=en@ie=UTF-8 or from http://www.hc.-sc..ca/ehp/ehd/catalogue/bch_pubs/dwgsup_doc/chlora.pdf. Created October 1995.
Kennish, Michael J. Ecology of Estuaries: Anthropogenic Effects. Boca Raton, Flor.: CRC Press, 1992.
Spellman, Frank R. Choosing Disinfection Alternatives for Water/Wastewater Treatment. Lancaster, Penn.: Technomic Publishing Co., Inc., 1999.
White, Geo. C. Handbook of Chlorination and Alternative Disinfectants., 4th ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1999.
Daughton, Christian G. Various webpages about ppcps and illicit drugs in wastewater, created from about 2001-2003, [web sites]. Accessed September 29, 2003. Available linked to www.epa.gov/nerlesd1/chemistry/pharma/index.htm
The improvements are good, for example the Creek no longer smells like chlorine for miles. More should be done. This treated water might still degrade the Creek's ecosystem and this dumping therefore violates the spirit of the Clean Water Act (see the article below). Also, these improvements are being made to improve Jordan Lake, not for the sake of cleaner water in general, which I think should be the goal.
Jordan Lake has its good points but it destroyed a huge area of bottomlands that were probably rich in wildlife, as well as destroying a small town. I am irritated that the concern is for its water quality, not for the quality of the natural waterways running into it. Jordan Lake provides recreation and drinking water, but the creeks also provide recreation and food for people, as well as being diverse habitats for wildlife.
I am planning to start a Stream Watch group (part of a State program) for Northeast Creek to help improve and safeguard its quality and diversity.
I wrote the article below in October 2003 for UNC-Chapel Hill's left student magazine, Boiling Point.
Are wastewater treatment plants harming the quality of local waterways?
Where the entrance ford into UNC’s Mason Farm Biological Preserve crosses Morgan Creek there is a ‘chlorine’ smell to the air, but, other than perhaps its constant flow, the Creek seems ordinary. If you walk upstream to the area behind Finley Golf Course’s parking lot you will find the Orange Water and Sewer Authority’s Mason Farm Wastewater Treatment Plant discharging processed wastewater into Morgan Creek.
In this age of environmental concern, sewage treatment plants are often the only point-source (pollution sources at a particular point, such as a pipe) polluters of local waterways. Treating wastewater before releasing it into the wild was a great improvement and has resurrected many waterways but today they are a main source of pollution. Their design and location in flood-prone bottomlands shows a disregard for improving water quality. Wastewater treatment plants (WTPs) only have to treat water to match the use of the waterway they drain into, preventing improvements. They release man-made and possibly harmful chemicals from the process of water treatment and chemical that were not removed, depending on the design of the plant they can release biocidal amounts of chlorine compounds into natural waterways, they release disease-causing pathogens, especially during floods, and they release biologically significant quantities of medical and possibly illegal drugs into the water. These problems are worsened by their often being located in flood-prone bottomlands, out of sight and without levees. Local creeks should not be mere ways to carry polluted water out of sight and out of mind. The Clean Water Act of 1972, a landmark law regulating pollution and water treatment, broadly defines the pollution it is intended to prevent as “the man-made or man-induced alteration of the chemical, physical, biologically, and radiologically integrity of water” (Adler, 1993) and if the effluent of local WTP’s is reducing water quality, then it has not met these expectations. Neither have they met the goal of zero-discharge in 1980s.
Heavy metals are toxic because above a certain quantity they hinder vital enzymes, disrupting bodily processes. Copper, lead, and zinc are leached from water system pipes and may be released with treated water in waterways, although heavy metals tend to accumulate in sludge rather than in the released water. These three metals are more toxic than many other heavy metals and they are not strongly stored in bottom sediment in waterways (Kennish, 1992). The concentration of heavy metals is of less concern than how they are complexed into molecules in a specific environment. Under the Clean Water Act, WTPs receiving water from residential and industrial sources are classified as receiving only residential wastes and they might not be designed to treat industrial wastes they receive, not to say that residential waste always lacks heavy metals, etc (Adler, 1993). Hopefully OWASA’s plants are designed to fully treat UNC’s wastes.
WTPs do not produce completely clean water and nature is used to purify the discharged water, which obviously must contain chlorine compounds poisonous to aquatic organisms, and other substances. In fish chlorine enters their gills, and often damages the gill surfaces, but in the bloodstream it binds to hemoglobin, causing suffocation (methemoglobinemia) (Kennish, 1992). Because chlorinated water is deadly to wildlife in waterways, the EPA issued guidelines on when it should be used in disinfection (and this probably applies to chloramines): it should be used only where its benefits are proven and specifically to protect public health, it should be used where protecting aquatic wildlife is not a concern, and where public health and conservation conflict, an alternative method should be used. Chlorine is toxic to fish at very low concentrations, and at these low concentrations control is difficult (Spellman, 1999). In waterways continuously exposed to chlorinated water, the total chlorine concentration should not be more than 0.01 milligrams/liter for tolerant organisms or 0.002 mg/L for most wildlife, and this is interpreted as making all chlorine release impermissible (Spellman, 1999). Combined chlorine compound concentrations in tapwater are usually 1-4 mg/L.
Recently Chapel Hill, Durham, and Hillsborough joined Raleigh and Cary in disinfecting drinking water with chloramines instead of using only chlorine. Chloramines are compounds of chlorine attached to a molecule made of nitrogen and hydrogen (NH2Cl is an example of a chloramine) and are created by the mixing of chlorine and ammonia at some point in water treatment. Because ammonia is abundant in wastewater, even if local WTPs use only chlorine in wastewater treatment, chloramines are created, as well as entering the system through tapwater. Chloramines are replacing chlorine because they don’t produce as much of the potentially carcinogenic disinfection byproducts trihalomethanes (THMs), they might improve tapwater’s odor and taste, because of liability worries regarding chlorine, and because chlorine may be prohibitively regulated. The problem is that chloramines can exist much longer than other chlorine molecules because they are less reactive with other molecules and they are poisonous to fish, reptiles, amphibians, corals and other wildlife. Unless natural processes react with chloramines to render them harmless they could exist in treated water for days, continuously dosing miles of a waterway with a biocidal compound. Where I grew up in southern Durham Northeast Creek smelled like chlorine for many miles downstream of the Triangle Wastewater Treatment Plant until a change was made at the plant. Unlike Morgan Creek, NE Creek has a silt problem and this allows one to see that during the summer clear WTP discharge makes up much of the Creek’s flow for a long distance.
Treated water can be dechlorinated but this has potential problems as well. Dechlorinating chlorine compounds releases the molecules associated with them allowing new, toxic or carcinogenic compounds to arise (White, 1999). Dechlorinating chloramines releases ammonia and nitrogen containing compounds also poisonous to fish.
Chlorine can form THM compounds with organic matter in water and these compounds are regulated in drinking water to be at no more than 0.10 mg/L. In treated wastewater chlorine is more likely to form chloramines because of the abundance of ammonia, but THMs are still possible (Bryant et. al, 1992). THMs, other disinfection byproducts, and even the water disinfectants themselves may cause cancer and other illnesses. Chlorine affects the thyroid and possibly the kidneys and can form other byproducts after it enters the body and “liver toxicity” is caused in lab animals by chloramines (Bryant, 2000). The use of water treatment chemicals has inherent dangers, for example if one ton of chlorine gas kept at a WTP escaped, it could endanger an area within a six mile radius of the release, but accidents are rare (Spellman, 1999).
An obvious danger from WTPs is pathogens in wastewater and spills of raw sewage is a problem for this reason. Diseases ranging from fungal ear or skin infection and relatively minor viral gastrointestinal illnesses to lethal illnesses like typhoid and cholera are caused by the 300 viral types, 100 bacteria species, fungi, a few protozoa, and nematode and annelid worms transmitted through wastewaters. Some, such as the virus causing polio and Giardida protozoans, can survive away from a host for a long period (years for polio viruses), so contamination would occur without very many sewage spills (Buzzi, 1992). Many disease causing organisms infect wildlife or are opportunistic pathogens and cause disease only because nutrient-rich wastewater encourages their growth and increases chances of infection. Amoeba that cause rare (and lethal) brain infections and exist in this area are an example. This excess nitrogen in treated water should also change waterway ecosystems, maybe encouraging non-native and destructive carp populations, since excess nutrients tend to encourage generalist species like carp over ecological specialist species. Nitrites can be produced with chloramines by nitrogen-metabolizing bacteria, which are harmful to humans and wildlife (Environmental Health Program, 1995). The release of pathogens is also a danger to wildlife since they may be susceptible to infection by these organisms.
Biologically significant and active concentrations of medical and possibly illegal drugs (and the chemicals used to create them) (Daughton) and other household chemicals survive passage through WTPs and are continuously released into nature. Pharmaceuticals and personal care products, such as drugs and fragrances, have been found in small concentrations in natural waters. Medical drugs especially are often designed to be active in very small doses so a low concentration is not necessarily a good sign. As an example, one used NuvaRing contraceptive could pollute 24 million liters of water with estrogen at a level active in fish (see Science News magazine of Jan. 25, volume 163, number 4). Many substances still have not been looked for in natural waterways and the possibility of dangers to humans is even murkier than environmental effects. The chemicals mentioned in this article could also interact in unknown ways to be more dangerous to wildlife. Chemicals could be released at small rates, but become a problem if they accumulate in sediment or bioaccumulate through storage in certain species (Beuhler, 1993).
WTPs are often located without very adequate protection in floodplains, along with their inflowing sewer pipes. The Triangle WTP and its sewer easements are located on the banks of Northeast Creek, and it is only a few feet above the Creek banks without levees and it has sewer spills during every major storm. The Mason Farm WTP is much better protected, which is a good thing given that it is located on a low island. WTPs are usually relatively isolated, for good reasons, but this makes public oversight more difficult.
Pollutants and pathogens released by WTPs intentionally or unintentionally damage the quality and health of waterway ecosystems and potentially human health. It is possible that illegal activity makes contamination worse than we know from official information. The Public Interest Research Group reports that most municipal and industrial WTPs in several Northern states have violated their pollution permit (Environmental Water Analysis, 2002). Those in charge of our WTPs should be as concerned about dialoguing with the public about environmental problems as they are regarding human health. When Durham switched to chloraminating drinking water it alerted water customers about the health aspect of chloramines but glossed over any environmental issues. Natural waterways should not be used to transport wastes away from sight and concern and WTPs should not be dumping into waterways at all. Contamination and alteration of natural waterways by WTPs ought to be studied and here UNC could work to fix these problems. Biology, chemistry, environmental studies, and other classes could study how the Mason Farm WTP effects Morgan Creek, for example. Better means to treat wastewater exist and ought to be more widely used. American infrastructure such as WTPs needs upgrading and repair but instead money is squandered blowing up foreign infrastructure. Just because wastewater is treated before being dumped does not mean that it is free of pollutants and poisons, especially those unlikely to cause a scene (like a burning or fishless river) and publicly embarrass the utility.
Cited:
Adler, Robert W., Landman, Jessica C., Cameron, Diana M. The Clean Water Act: 20 Years Later. Island Press: Washington, D.C., 1993.
Beuhler, Mark D. Proceedings: 1992 Water Quality Technology Conference: Part I – Sunday Seminars Through Session 3D: November 15-19, 1992: Toronto, Canada. Ed. American Water Works Association. 1993.
Bryant, Edward A., Fulton, George P., Budd, George C. Budd. Disinfection Alternatives for Safe Drinking Water. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992.
Buzzi, Ruth Ann. Chemical Hazards at Water and Wastewater Treatment Plants. Chelsea, Mich.: Lewis Publishers, 1992.
Environmental Health Program. Chloramines, modified May 1996, [web site]. Accessed February 8, 2003. Available at http://216.239.39.100/Search?q=caule:mqmAAmuJJMiC;www.hc.-sc.gc.ca/ehp/ehd/catalogue/bch_pubs/dwgsup_doc/chlora.pdf+chloramines&hl=en@ie=UTF-8 or from http://www.hc.-sc..ca/ehp/ehd/catalogue/bch_pubs/dwgsup_doc/chlora.pdf. Created October 1995.
Kennish, Michael J. Ecology of Estuaries: Anthropogenic Effects. Boca Raton, Flor.: CRC Press, 1992.
Spellman, Frank R. Choosing Disinfection Alternatives for Water/Wastewater Treatment. Lancaster, Penn.: Technomic Publishing Co., Inc., 1999.
White, Geo. C. Handbook of Chlorination and Alternative Disinfectants., 4th ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1999.
Daughton, Christian G. Various webpages about ppcps and illicit drugs in wastewater, created from about 2001-2003, [web sites]. Accessed September 29, 2003. Available linked to www.epa.gov/nerlesd1/chemistry/pharma/index.htm
Monday, June 06, 2005
About this blog, or my first post
I'm new to reading blogs and blogging, so I don't have a definite plan for this blog yet and I'm still learning how to use Blogger. As the description says (or should say), I want to provide news and commentary, mainly on local issues, but also on national and international concerns, from a progressive, communist viewpoint in the Triangle area of North Carolina. I am blogging because I want to speak about these issues and I want to reaffirm the need for Marxist-Leninism in solving these problems. Right now I am most involved in workers' rights (such as campaigns by state, Aramark, Angelica, and farm workers, through Student Action with Workers and Triangle Jobs with Justice), environmental issues (water quality, non-native organisms, and light pollution), and electoral issues (through a Bill of Rights Defense Committee) at the local level, so I will probably concentrate in those areas for now. Anti-imperialism and climate change are my big international issues. Of course, I want to tie all of this together in arguing for overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist society. I am a member of Alliance Marxist-Leninist (www.allianceml.com) and I hope to build a branch here, but this is a personal blog and I hope it will interest people of different progressive inclinations. I'll see how regularly I can post. Thanks for visiting and I hope to have more up soon.
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