EarthCitizen

The other Memorial Day...

2005-05-30T20:35:00.000-07:00

Obviously, everyone knows what Memorial Day's about, but I can't help thinking about something we never hear about...

We honor the fallen soldiers on both Mem. Day and Veterans Day...

But what about the countless CIVILIANS slain in the various wars that have overrun the world? Don't they deserve at least equal time?

The soldiers deserve their honors for courage, for choosing to go into danger. I have no problem with that at all, even though the military life is not for me; I don't think I'd deal well with drill sergeants screaming at me throughout boot camp & can't just follow orders without opportunity to ask questions.

There are other ways to serve our fellow people, and many of the civilians who died did so without any similar recognition of their sacrifices or acknowledgement that they were, to put it bluntly, MURDERED. That's what "collateral damage" is, isn't it?

Why are their deaths ignored on a day that supposed to commemorate people who lost their lives in wars?

Here in America, we've been supremely lucky that comparatively few of our civilians have met such a fate -- a small number at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in WW2; some in the Civil War, WW1, and the various minor wars; some at the Alamo & in various other clashes in the Old West (although we can't forget the MANY Native civilians who were simply butchered in some of those places), etc. Many other countries have seen FAR more blood being shed by their non-military folks in various wars -- millions in Russia, Germany, China, Japan, UK, France, Vietnam, and too many other countries to count.

Of course, this is nothing new. Civilians have been killed, raped, enslaved, and tortured in wars throughout most of "civilized" history. But today's tendency for technology to make war seem "bloodless" and "sanitary" -- virtual, video game killing -- only means it will get worse until civilians and soldiers stand up together and demand an END to war.

How we go about DOING that is the problem.

MidEast confusions...

2005-03-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

Another blog I recently came across here was talking a bit about the belief among some that Israel "calls the shots" in American Mid East politics. I think that's more perception than fact (as did she), but it has for some time made a nuanced debate over policy in that part of the world difficult. Such difiiculty is only fueled by the fact that this administration seems constitutionally incapable of recognizing that there are nuances beyond black and white.

Israel certainly has a strong lobby in the big US Jewish population -- one that's greater than Israel's own and has numerous family bonds to Israeli Jews. Those legitimate connections, unfortunately, feed a long-standing confusion between people, country, and faith.

Judaism, unlike the other major faiths, is essentially the world's largest tribal religion. It discourages conversion & missionizing and encourages solidarity, sense of "homeland," & marriage within the community to a greater degree than many faiths. Combine those features with a lengthy history of being segregated from and often oppressed by others and you've got a situation tailor-made for people to see country = religion = Jewish people, and demagogues both among Jews and outside their community play on that connection, both pro- and con-.

That connection has existed for a long time, but became an especially complicating issue with the birth of independent modern Israel in 1949. The Republic of Israel as a country clearly has its own interests & practices that may not in fact always be shared by American Jews, any more than those of us who claim British descent will always support the United Kingdom's policies. To imagine some kind of monolithic Jewish policy -- especially when taken to the "patriot" movement's delusional extreme -- is to greatly muddy the waters of an already complicated MidEastern situation.

Our policy needs to make it clear that how we react to what the Republic of Israel does has nothing to do with how we treat Jews as fellow people, or with issues that affect Jews here in our country. We need clarity that Jews are only ONE of the world's Semitic peoples, so that supporting Arab countries on some issues & promoting freedom or at least true democratic representation within Israel for the Palestinians is not racially-motivated "anti-Semitism," nor is it "supporting terrorism."

On the flip side, we need to be equally clear that supporting Israel on some issues is not "anti-Muslim," because some of the same confusion exists there. Too many people see Arab = Muslim, when in fact the religion of Islam has 1 billion-plus followers around the world. Only some of them are Arabs. Iran, for example, is definitely NOT Arab -- its people speak Farsi and are actually more closely related to most Europeans than to Arabs -- yet too many Americans do not understand the distinction. For another example, most Americans don't realize that the largest Muslim countries aren't in the MidEast -- they are Indonesia and Nigeria, both with large non-Muslim minorities and formed from numerous non-Arab ethnic groups.

In both examples, too many of our countrymen are too easily led to believe the idea that there's some kind of Muslim vs. American vendetta sprawling across the third world. There are problems between the two societies -- nobody rational can deny that, but any vendetta is being brewed by and exists only in the minds of fringe elements on both sides. (In our country, unfortunately, the fringe element sits in the White House.) The vast majority of mainstream people in Muslim countries are like us in the fact that they want to raise their families in peace and prosperity without interference by someone who doesn't understand their way of life.

Edited 3/17/05 to add: I came across this editorial and think he's saying some important things. In brief, he argues, "An American-Muslim alliance for peace is crucial. Most American clergy and Muslim scholars would be happy with such an alliance, though the preachers of Armageddon and terrorism might not." Have to agree with that; everyone loses if the wackjobs on either side win, including the wackjobs.

Also note this link: The Islamic world is not nearly as monolithic as some of us think.

Fantasies of apocalypse

2005-03-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

What do you do when it seems the people running your country are obsessed with engineering the end of civilization as we know it?

To me, that's one of the issues that has gotten very lost in all the Shrub administration's deceptive rhetoric about Social Security, tort reform, and bankruptcy. Behind those issues sits one that could be the single most important thing sane human beings need to fight: This president's desire to essentially restart the Cold War by expanding our nuclear weapons stockpile. It's common sense that doing so will push Russia, China and other powers to do the same and encourage nations without to get them, as might be happening in Iran and North Korea.

But almost nobody talks about it.

"For the past 20 years, we have had the nations of the Earth getting ready for Armageddon, taking the highest capabilities of man and focusing them on waste." Buckminster Fuller wrote that in 1976. It was still true 10 years later, but by 1996, it looked like sanity had really started to take hold -- the Cold War was over and we were helping dismantle not just our nukes but Russia's as well.

Where will we be in 2006?

That depends on whose vision you follow. Bush has already unilaterally stated he believes the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty is junk, wants us to pump billions into "bunker buster" warheads that even the experts find to be of dubious tactical value, and has proposed militarizing space. Although he still talks the talk of nuclear non-proliferation, he refuses to recognize that making it reality requires the US to lead by example. That means continuing to cut warheads, not adding to them, and not threatening countries in ways that make them desperate enough to develop or purchase nukes.

As with many of his policies, he's promoting new nukes as a defensive measure vs. "terrorists" and "rogue states." But think about this a little: no "rogue state" would use a nuke against us unless we've already attacked them b/c they know it would be suicidal. It's remotely possible terrorists would, if they could obtain one, but they aren't likely to be launching it at us. Chances are, they'd plant it personally and die in the resulting fireball, leaving us no target on which to drop our retaliatory strike.

With those in mind, its pretty obvious what Shrub's goal is: Create yet another military R & D "pork" program to enrich his corporate supporters and conveniently siphon millions from necessary social programs. His approach reminds me all too chillingly of the govt's attitude in James Morrow's This is the Way the World Ends -- with Tom Ridge promoting duct tape as a panacea against terrorism, I half-expect some administration nutjob to promote that book's "SCOPAS suits" any time soon now.

Morrow's book, btw, tells the tale of generations of people "unadmitted" to life because of nuclear extinction who get one brief chance to bring their killers to trial. Obviously, that element of it is fantasy, but the horrible scenes of aftermath are disturbingly plausible and clearly drawn from such scientific works as Paul Ehrlich, et al's The Cold and the Dark, the book that first proposed the idea of nuclear winter.

Some of you might be saying something to the effect of, "all of that is way over the top" or "that's all theory being used to promote an agenda." Maybe it is. Maybe nuke war is survivable with minimal social chaos. But given what we DO know about nuclear weapons, can we afford to assume they're wrong? No other technology in human history has ever carried even a hint of extinction, and if that's what rolling "snake eyes" gets us in this game, playing it is insanity.

Bush claims the new generation of nukes will be "battlefield" weapons... which, in practice, means first-use weapons. Any first use, even vs. a non-nuclear nation, will understandably agitate the other nuclear powers, destabilizing things to the point where tension, misunderstanding, hair-trigger alertness, accident, and human error could spark a wider nuclear conflict. It doesn't take much to go wrong, and once it has there's no chance of correcting it.

Even if such a war doesn't result in extinction, even if the nations as we know them basically survive, the numbers of dead and horribly wounded people would be unimaginable. WW2 killed around 40 million worldwide in about 6 years. With nukes, ten times that many could die in less than an hour using only a fraction of the world's arsenal.

The victims of such mass murder would not be "casualties" -- only madmen could see such horror as "casual" -- nor are they "collateral damage" -- whatever that bullshit means. They would be mangled, suffering, maimed human beings -- you, me, our children, our loved ones, our friends.

Conservative or liberal, male or female, rich or poor, religious or secular, we owe it to ourselves and those as yet "unadmitted" to life to oppose Bush's nuclear designs and force the world's leaders to get rid of all nuclear weapons once and for all. This is a real Right to Life movement.

Some will say that if we succeed, the knowledge is still there and someone will eventually build a new nuke. That's indeed a risk. But if the people of Earth know what the technology can do and are committed to watching for and stopping it, such efforts will be caught before they reach fruition.

The alternative is simply unacceptable.

************

May 1, 2005

Global protests against nuclear weapons will be held in conjunction with the UN's conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty in NYC. For info, visit www.abolitionnow.org

Added 5/19/05 (Thanks to Carol Moore for the link): Watch a quick Federation of Amer. Scientists video on why bunker busters are more dangerous to innocent people than to their targets...

"Hobbits"

2005-03-06T13:39:00.000-08:00

Recent studies showing that the "hobbits," Homo floresiensis, found on the Indonesian isle of Flores weren't "diseased" (see the BBC story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4308751.stm)
should really surprise nobody that knows a little mythology. Stories from around the world have spoken of elves, faeries, dwarfs, and other strange little people who were distinct from the modern human residents of the areas in question.

Typically, those tales were brushed off as fantasy, sometimes even hallucination, or, among more scholarly types, maybe given some creedence as symbolic representations of the ancestors. This discovery should call some of those interpretations into question-- maybe some of the stories were true when they started being told. That was usually millennia ago, but there have been reported sightings well into recorded historical times, including among the villagers of Flores.

In most cases, the "little people" were probably local versions of today's Mbuti or San peoples of Africa -- small, but very much Homo sapiens. But it's possible that H. floresiensis hung on in other isolated locations if they survived on Flores for as long as they did. Today's world has numerous species that have lingered in small numbers in very hard to reach places for far longer than that, some of them (like the Coelcanth, a deep ocean fish) discovered alive after being labelled extinct. Human ancestors could be among them.

Of course, the probability of finding any living hobbits is very remote. By now, modern humans have occupied almost every square meter of Earth's surface several times over (but not always at once), and even the Mbuti have been bigger and more advanced technologically than the hobbits for millennia now. Most likely, hobbits simply couldn't compete in the evolutionary game.

Finding evidence of hobbit survival, if it exists, will depend a lot on luck. We wouldn't have found these hobbits if their cave hadn't been buried in volcanic ash, and many places with "little people" legends aren't volcanic. Given when H. sapiens occupied various parts of the globe, the timescale means that the Americas would be most likely to harbor such evidence, if the hobbits ever lived here. (H. sapiens found the Americas maybe as early as 25,000 yrs ago, while hobbits still lived on Flores, but archaeology has so far only found H. floresiensis's probable ancestor H. erectus in the Old World.)

WELCOME!

2005-03-06T01:12:00.000-08:00

Seeing Ward Churchill on Bill Maher's HBO show last night (3/4/05) made me dive into the issues swirling around him after having just let them slide for some time. Yes, I'd heard of him & seen some of the coverage, but, quite frankly, there's more important stuff going on.

But, overnight, it jelled with my recent thoughts of starting this blog and seemed like as good a door to enter the fray as any. So welcome to the first installment of EarthCitizen, a work in progress. I don't know everything and don't know I'd want to, so this is as much an opportunity for me to learn from you as it is to share my views. I welcome your comments, pro or con, and thank you in advance for participating.

Anyway, back to the subject... Better yet, before continuing, please read Ward Churchill's actual essay:

http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html

At a very basic level, I agree with him (as did Maher): US citizens desperately need to wake up to the fact that many things done in our name for decades, even centuries, have been WRONG from almost any sane point of view. Because we claim to be the world's defender of freedom, democracy and human rights and because of the incredible political, economic and military power we can wield, we have a greater responsibility than most countries to nurture and lead by example rather than dominate by guile or force. Sometimes we have indeed done that (one of the best, I think, was our involvement in the creation of the UN), but we've ignobly tried to justify hypocritical actions with patriotic mumbo-jumbo on too many occasions for me to accept.

As citizens of a country that's based on the principle of popular rule, we are ultimately responsible for such actions, at least in a moral sense. While we cannot change the past, we have a duty to ourselves, our children, and the rest of the planet to do whatever we can to ensure that the hypocrisy ends and that we treat other countries as we'd wish to be treated if the roles were reversed.

The fact that our culture has so much emotion invested in seeing itself as the world's shining star, the "one way to live," "a force for good," etc., makes it difficult to focus enough light into the deep, dark holes to see what's there and fix the problems -- or, in many cases, rescue long-stranded, forgotten parts of ourselves. We need to know what's "down there," so to speak, and I suspect when we gather up the courage to look, we'll find a wellspring of cultural creativity as well as less endearing traits.

Unfortunately, Churchill's essay and HBO appearance didn't help that effort at all.

Churchill's linking of the 9/11 terrorists' motives to certain events (the 1st Iraq war, Palestine) is basically accurate but simplistic, but to say some of the other events he mentions (Hiroshima, Native American massacres, for ex.) were more than remotely connected is a big stretch. Those events were certainly examples of the US capacity for irrational violence and hypocrisy, but painting with such a broad stroke only weakens the argument in this case. The fact that the terrorists could do what they did and some people found it acceptable is itself part of that broader problem.

He's right that the terrorists didn't attack WTC carelessly, and he wasn't (by far) the first to say that. It took courage and determination to plan & execute that, and the target WAS one of strong enough symbolic effect to make it militarily viable. Hell, we bombed some of Saddam's palaces even without knowing if anyone was there for the same largely symbolic reasons and routinely targeted financial districts in WW2. As several of the various sites I've read pointed out, many in the Muslim world believe war with the West (especially the US) started long before we invaded Iraq.

The terrorists' courage, however, didn't make the attack any less evil, since it showed a callous disregard for the well-being of others. Recognizing their act as evil doesn't make some of our policies and our years of self-serving mistreatment of the Middle East any less evil, for the same reason. To put it bluntly, those who believe "our" needs and well-being are somehow different from "their" needs and well-being are at best delusional. They can be expressed differently, but LIVING is obviously a prerequisite.

(For lots of MidEast history, politics, etc, see the blog "Informed Comment" at http://www.juancole.com/. I have no connection to him, but he seems to know what he's talking about.)

I have a problem with the WAY Churchill expresses his views more than the facts he uses -- what kind of reaction did he expect if he was comparing WTC victims to Eichmann? The analogy has a grain of truth when applied to the Pentagon victims b/c they WERE in fact coordinating our military, which at the time was entrenched in several Muslim nations, supplying arms to Israel, and sporadically bombing Iraq. (If the roles were reversed, we'd be pretty angry, too.) But a far better analogy for the WTC victims would be to the residents of WW2-firebombed Dresden: Guilty maybe of failure to protest/prevent our govt's hypocrisy & killing, but not of actually making them happen, as Eichmann did.

Saying things like that was almost guaranteed to have Churchill's opinion either ignored completely or attacked in ways that are based more in symbolism, out-of-context quotations, hysteria, and ignorance than in a thoughtful reading of the actual argument. Most people will avoid swimming in water that looks polluted. Less hyperbole and more evidence would've been far more effective intellectually... but garnered him a whole lot less publicity.

Conversely, we need publicity to get the chance to change the systemic problems that cause 9/11s, Indian massacres, Adolf Eichmanns, & even worse horrors, but getting that publicity has proven incredibly difficult without the hyperbole. The mainstream culture (or "Mother Culture," since it intellectually raises us) doesn't want to deal with the core ISSUES and tries to ignore them by focusing instead on the antics used to express them.

We'll definitely talk a lot about those things as this blog progresses...