January 08, 2006
A Great American Hero Dies
Hugh Thompson, the army helicopter pilot who turned his guns on the American soldiers who were murdering the villagers in My Lai, and thereby stopped the massacre at that point, died yesterday:
On March 16, 1968, Chief Warrant Officer Thompson and his two crewmen were flying on a reconnaissance mission over the South Vietnamese village of My Lai when they spotted the bodies of men, women and children strewn over the landscape.Mr. Thompson landed twice in an effort to determine what was happening, finally
coming to the realization that a massacre was taking place. The second time, he
touched down near a bunker in which a group of about 10 civilians were being
menaced by American troops. Using hand signals, Mr. Thompson persuaded the
Vietnamese to come out while ordering his gunner and his crew chief to shoot
any American soldiers who opened fire on the civilians. None did...
When Mr. Thompson returned home, it seemed to him that he was viewed as the guilty party.
"I'd received death threats over the phone," he told the CBS News program "60 Minutes" in 2004. "Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up. So I was not a good guy."
I believe that everytime we excuse soldiers who misbehave with feeble excuses --they are untrained, they were following orders, they were scared-- we dishonor the true heroes. This is not to say that those reasons are untrue -- many are untrained, scared and following orders. It is just that such reasons may explain why someone bungles up paperwork required, say, for the Red Cross. It does not explain how someone could possibly not know that it is not right to hang a person by their arms and beat him to a pulp and leave him to die.
And, perhaps most important lesson from Mr. Thompson's life was this: there is something a soldier can do when faced with an atrocity, but only if they have integrity and genuine courage -- the real thing, not something that is assumed to have been handed out to every soldier as standard issue.That's what I'm going to remember the next time someone mentions our brave men and women in harm's way.
Posted by zeynep at 08:34 PM | Comments (3)
December 23, 2005
The Good Die Young
Sorry about this but I thought I'd spread some holiday cheer by reminding us all how everyone finally gets their due in this world, and how justice prevails. Here's how it works: you torture and murder children you deem inferior. You get away with it. You publish papers using the data. You live to be 90. Cases against you get thrown out on technicalities, statute of limitations, and false claims of dementia. You die in bed.
VIENNA, Austria - Dr. Heinrich Gross, a psychiatrist who worked at a clinic where the Nazis killed and conducted cruel experiments on thousands of children, died Dec. 15, his family announced Thursday. He was 90.Gross, who was implicated in nine deaths as part of a Nazi plot to eliminate "worthless lives," had escaped trial in March after a court ruled he suffered from severe dementia. No cause of death was given in a brief statement issued by his family.
..
He became a prominent neurologist after the war and was awarded the prestigious Austrian Honorary Cross for Science and Art in 1975. He was stripped of the medal in 2003.
He was put on trial three times, but all the cases were dismissed. In a trial in the 1950s, the case was thrown out because of legal technicalities. A second case in the 1980s was dismissed because the 30-year statute of limitations on manslaughter had expired.
A third trial in 2000, in which Gross was accused of complicity in the murder of nine handicapped children who died as the result of abuse, was suspended after a psychiatrist testified he was unfit for trial because of advanced dementia.
Immediately after the suspension, Gross gave lively interviews in a local coffeehouse.
Isn't it grand?
Posted by zeynep at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2005
A Treat
Last year I wrote an entry about Abe Osheroff, Spanish civil war veteran and so much more. There is now a wonderful new resource, a lengthy interview with him conducted by Robert Jensen.
I highly recommend that you go and read it here. It's delightfully long.
Posted by zeynep at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2005
Longevity Wishes to Many
So, Saddam's trial starts. Leaving aside the obvious problems with the process, it's hard not to be pleased that at least he has to face some sort of court. I know, the lack of proper structure for court may damage the proceedings but I personally don't see the court as totally illegitimate. Depends on how they proceed. After all, just because they are under occupation doesn't mean the Iraqis don't have the right to try their former tormenter -- or that all attempts to do so will be illegitimate.
In the Nuremberg trials, the " tu quoque" defense --you did it too, you hypocrite-- was not allowed. I suppose they will now have to ban the mention of any co-conspirators, co-criminals, supporters, enablers, financiers, and, of course, the largest category --what-do-I-care-as-long-as-my-strategic-goals-are-accomplisheders.
At this point, I extend my best wishes for longevity to all the above mentioned. May they all live long enough to face a docket. And that's another reason to be against the death penalty, even for Saddam. May he live long enough to think about what he did every day, and may he see his friends and supporters join him.
Posted by zeynep at 06:58 AM | Comments (2)
April 19, 2005
"Let's face it. It will make a better story for the families if I'm killed."
Marla Ruzicka, the humanitarian worker killed in Iraq while trying to bring attention to the plight of victims of war, was apparently contemplating drawing up her will last month to try to make sure her work could continue even if she died. Her friend Jennifer Abrahamson recalls Marla's words:
"Let's face it. It will make a better story for the families if I'm killed."
There it is, in a nutshell, a most damning indictment of our society.
Posted by zeynep at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Head of the Office of the Inquisition Elected Pope
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany has just been elected the Pope. Since 1981, Ratzinger had acted as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, modern successor to the Inquisition (formerly known as the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition.)
Yes, Inquisition. How's that for tradition?
Posted by zeynep at 06:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 23, 2004
Savings and Clone
[From Justin again. Sorry about yesterday's absence. I'll spare you the explanation, a banal tale involving inexperienced internet users, pop-up windows software nobody (purposely) asked for, insidious viruses, and destroyed registries.]
The other day I said I can't fill Zeynep's shoes, but today I am going to blog on something that Zeynep would be more likely to blog about than I would on any given day. It's called 'Savings and Clone', a company that prepared a cloned cat for a woman whose cat died a natural death after 17 years. The cat, 'little nicky', was sold to Julie (whose full name won't appear because she fears cloning opponents) for $50000. The story from the CBC ends with the following:
Genetic Savings and Clone, which has cloned five cats since 2001, said it hopes to make the world's first genetically cloned dog by next May.
They expect the market for dogs to be much more lucrative.
Other companies have already created cloned mice, rabbits, goats, pigs, horses and prize cattle, which sell for about $20,000 US each.
Animal-rights activists and others condemned Genetic Savings and Clone, pointing out that thousands of unwanted cats are euthanized each year in the United States.
"It's morally problematic and a little reprehensible," said David Magnus, co-director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University.
"For $50,000, she could have provided homes for a lot of strays."
I have to confess that I don't remember the source - it's either Bertrand Russell or Gandhi - but one of them said that a major problem of our civilization is the idea that because we can do a thing, we should do it. I am not sure why this sort of thing makes me uneasy, to be honest. I would be interested in readers' views on it all. The argument made in the article about the contrast between the treatment of strays and the expensive cloning is certainly appropriate. But there is something more. Maybe it's something about a civilization that is callous to mass death from hunger, preventable disease, aerial bombardment, and firepower, but tries to defeat death by a combination of technology and business, wrapped up in a pithy package called 'Savings and Clone'?
I thought I would bring it up here, since Zeynep has a topic called 'morality'.
Posted by justin at 11:30 AM | Comments (7)
November 30, 2004
Why Do They Hate Us, Continued
This shirt is being sold with the following text:
In addition to helping a worthy cause, it's important to make sure the public does not forget about this brave Marine, who acted swiftly, in defense of his brothers.We're proud of what this Marine did. At MetroSpy we believe terrorists should be hunted down and killed. And we're as happy as a room full of November 3rd Republicans every time that happens. Enjoy!
----
The Marine who killed the wounded insurgent in Fallujah deserves our praise and admiration. In a split second decision, he acted valiantly. CAPTION READS:"The Gods of War Hate those who Hesitate"
I don't need to explain much here, all you have to do is reverse the situation. Imagine a wounded, unarmed marine being left to die in a church in, say, rural Montana by, say, the occupying army. A day later another group of occupier soldiers come back, notice one of the wounded marines is still not dead, and shoots him, point blank, on camera. Then, all they talk about is how the shooter had the right to defend himself from the unarmed, wounded, dying man on the ground. What if he was booby-trapped? What if he was about to lunge?
Then they sell shirt celebrating the shooter. And their columnists keep blabbing about how uncivilized we are, and how we don't value life like they do.
Posted by zeynep at 05:09 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
November 16, 2004
Blue Fairy Redux
A lot of people responded to the picture I posted of U.S. soldiers resting on the "plush red carpets" in a damaged mosque in Fallujah as if I cared more about the carpets. Frankly, I was simply pointing out how inflammatory the image was -- and how revealing it was of the level of competence with which this war was being waged. And a lot of the comments I got were so hateful, so racist --including someone who referred to the kids on picture on top of this page as "turd world children-- that I think I should just compile them and post them on the main page. That kind of virulent racism is integral to the reality of this world although we rarely look at it directly.
And being offended by desecration of places of worship is obviously not limited to Muslims, but it is a trait shared by many faiths. That's just a fact of the way the world -- and personally, I think that's quite unfortunate. I find our obsession with things over life, our culture of death, to be sad, dangerous and, well, very unholy to say the least.
Let me take this opportunity to reproduce here a piece I had written leading up to the invasion of Iraq, after I had read yet another concerned statement about the archeological treasures of Iraq that would be in danger.
Urgent Request to the Blue Fairy: Please Turn these Children into Stone
November, 8, 2002
Fairy tales often have a universal appeal and draw children of all nations into their magical world. Pinocchio is no exception where the Blue Fairy rewards moral behavior and grants a puppet flesh-and-blood status.
I do doubt, however, that children in Iraq or Afghanistan could understand why an inanimate, man-made object would ever want to be a child of the flesh and blood kind. In their world, the flesh of children is there for the maiming and the blood for flowing --unlike those beautiful, sacrosanct objects of art which must be preserved and doted on.
As the British Independent reports, "an international band of curators and historians anxious not to repeat the damage inflicted on Iraqi treasures during the Gulf War 11 years ago are appealing to the American government to take the historic sites into account."
A similar surge of concern was observed when, about six months before the 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan made a brief appearance in the news. The world was outraged then, but not because hundreds of thousands children's lives were flickering away in refugee camps where lack of education, food, and opportunities stole away their childhood and diseases and lack of medical care made sure many never grow into adults. The world was not outraged because the Taliban regime was denying medical care to women (and children) by not allowing women healthcare workers to work and men to take care of women. The outrage was not that the United States had pushed the U.N. to slap economic sanctions on the country -because of its refusal to turn over Osama bin Laden- that made things worse for the worst off, the poorest, the most vulnerable in the country (according to some estimates, the sanctions increased the price of basic medicines up to 50%) without providing leverage or means to make things better.
It was the 1,400-year-old Buddha statues carved into the mountainside at Bamiyan that triggered the heart-rending cries of concern. The New York Times (03/19/01) reported that Taliban envoy Rahmatullah Hashimi explained that the decision was made after an international NGO offered money to restore the statues but refused to allow the money to be used in refugee camps -- where 300 children had just died. Hashimi recounted that the NGO was asked that “instead of spending money on statues, why didn't they help our children who are dying of malnutrition?” Upon being told that “this money is only for statues”, they decided to destroy them.
Germany, Malaysia and Japan joined Russia, India, United States, Egypt and others to decry the barbarity. Offers poured in: money to restore the statues, money to remove the statues for safekeeping somewhere else, money to change the rulers' minds. Money that had not been pouring in for the refugee camps, for food, for clean water.
Now the world's archeologists and curators are afraid a similar outrage will occur to the historical artifacts in Iraq. The Independent quotes Helen McDonald, of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, based at Cambridge University, who explained that last time the Iraqis had tried to move a great deal of their most important objects out into storage in the countryside and that they have already begun to do so again.
"But some things are immovable, such as huge stones. If a bomb hits a museum or something, that would be it," she said.
Sure enough, she notes, "The British School of Archaeology in Iraq has written [about this]. They wrote to the Foreign Office during the Gulf War to express concern, not just on the humanitarian grounds but the effects that it would have on the culture."
Bombing of stones isn't the only potential cause of horrors, according to Charles Tripp, of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He warns that in the wake of the Gulf War, sanctions had inadvertently caused as much damage to the archaeological sites of Iraq as direct attack. Trip notes: "The conditions of poverty had led to much looting of archaeological sites and site museums, which often contained significant finds even after the best items were removed to Baghdad. Numerous finds have turned up on the art market in the West." Dr Tripp observes that "there is a lot of temptation in a destitute country to rip something out that has a saleable value in the West."
Yes, especially since UNICEF reports that at least half a million children have died due to those sanctions. I can imagine parents looting and prying loose every single stone, rock, tablet, gem or otherwise inanimate object in that country to try to obtain food or simple medicines.
It has been reported that when a journalist asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought about Western Civilization, he replied, "it would be a good idea."
Indeed, it would be a good idea; unfortunately, it's unlikely we'll be able to muster that up in short order so we need a more serious, urgent and miraculous intervention.
We need the Blue Fairy who turned Pinocchio into flesh to perform a reverse miracle.
So here goes.
Please, Blue Fairy, turn the children of Iraq into stone. The older the stone better. Stone with cracks and signs of aging and weather damage would be perfect. Hopefully, that will evoke some protective reflexes and caring in their direction.
And, Blue Fairly, while you are at it, please do the same for the children of Afghanistan which is once again facing famine since the investment required and promised has not been delivered, and the children of Southern Africa which is in the midst of a progressing famine due to the drought which might have been triggered partly by global warming, and the children in Central America which is now threatened by famine thanks to the crisis in the coffee industry which never paid farmers more than a pittance of their enormous profit.
If Blue Fairy does not come through, I encourage the Iraqis to start their own make-a-wish foundation, which grants wishes to children with terminal illnesses. Of course, in Iraq, because of the sanctions, easily curable diseases like cholera and treatable childhood problems like leukemia are often terminaland then there are the congenital birth defects in the depleted-uranium-polluted south.
That make-a-wish foundation should take those children, whose childhood we have collectively destroyed, to the precious museums and let them play with all those precious stones and tablets. The children should paint them with indelible ink. They should throw them to the ground from high buildings to see from which floor they pulverize most easily. They should be encouraged to play team games and see which team can hammer a tablet into dust fastest.
Maybe, just maybe, what must surely be the collective wish of all those children and their families will come true. Maybe, amidst the predictable outrage over crushed stone, the world will notice them.
And maybe, just maybe, the biggest miracle of all will happen without the Blue Fairy -- our hearts of stone will turn into flesh and blood.
Posted by zeynep at 10:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 19, 2004
Does Mr. Kerry Deserve a Medal For Killing Your Countryman, Ma'am?
In an exemplary feat of the kind of tough journalism we need today, Nightline went back to the Vietnamese village that Kerry now boasts of having chased down and killed Ba Thanh, a Vietnamese fighter with the NLF, to get to the bottom of things. Empire Notes has a must-read post, including transcripts of Nightline's shameful, shameful conduct:
The unlearning of the lessons of Vietnam is now complete. The presidential campaign was for at least two months dominated by an absurd discussion on the subject, in which the only "moral" issue was, apparently, how many Vietnamese Kerry had killed and how tough the ones he killed were. ABC's Nightline finally put the icing on the cake by going to consult the other witnesses to Kerry's action or nonaction -- the Vietnamese....
It's difficult to communicate how disgusting and macabre this is. It's like questioning the family members of a murder victim in order to figure out whether the killer deserves a medal. Imagine the reaction of the average American being questioned on whether a particular Iraqi resistance member deserves a medal for personally killing some American soldier or whether the soldier was merely killed in an explosion. And the Iraqi resistance is fighting in its own country to expel foreign invaders, not occupying and destroying another country, as the United States did in Vietnam.
It really is the saddest thing. I've seen some of the Swift Boat ads which include snippets of Kerry's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971. And even in those brief, distorted, weirdly-narrated ads, the young Kerry is very moving. I think it may be one of the best testimonials ever given on the subject of colonial war by a member of the aggressive nation.
Just how did that young man die, and who is this opportunist, war-mongering, death-celebrating politician I can't bear to listen to, masquerading around in the remmants of that man's shell? I really recommend reading his testimony in full, and reading it often. Then he spoke a deep truth -- now he talks about "Iraqification" the same way politicians of his day spoke of Vietnamization, which that Kerry understood perfectly well:
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
And the Kerry-then, speaking on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, proclaimed their desire to fight one last battle, a noble one unlike the ignominious one they had been pushed into:
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
Sad to say, that battle has been thoroughly and completely lost. Vietnam did not become the place that America finally turned, that burden remains with us today. On that day, that John Kerry confronted the nation with this unforgettable question: how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? I'd like to ask the current Democratic Party presidential nominee, also named John Kerry, another question. How do you kill your own soul for a shot at power? I would have hoped that it were not possible, that once awakened, a conscience could not be discarded as if it were just another empty campaign promise by just another power-hungry politician.
Posted by zeynep at 10:57 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 08, 2004
The Nuremberg Defense in Iraq
Wall Street Journal has a must-read piece about a year-old report where Bush administration's lawyers argue that torture does not exist (being denied sleep for 96 hours while shackled in a contortion position or being threatened that your family is about to be blown up with a grenade is just unpleasant, not torture); that the "commander-in-chief" is allowed to authorize that unpleasantness; that neither Congress nor international law can interfere in President's unlimited powers to wage war as he sees fit, including torture or other such unpleasant acts; and that underlings cannot be convicted of torture as long as they use the "Nuremberg defense" and claim they were following orders and that "no moral choice was in fact possible."
I can't decide if it is the height of arrogance or stupidity to explicitly invoke the Nuremberg defense since it was rejected by the Allies in 1946 and by U.S. courts in the My Lai trial.
Posted by zeynep at 03:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 31, 2004
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
The New York Times reports on the counseling and advice provided to soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan:
Colonel McClure, now an Army chaplain, is here to warn the hundreds of soldiers before him who had returned five days earlier from Iraq, their uniforms still mildewed from the months away, that whatever they think right now, coming home may not be as easy as it seems. After the first embraces with cameras clicking, the homecoming parties, life may get complicated in unimagined ways....
And you will surely get "dumb question No. 3" from those who never set a boot in Iraq: Did you shoot anyone over there?
Colonel McClure, who did two combat tours in Vietnam, shares his own crass retort: "I don't know. I never went to look." But as laughter seeps through the rows, he turns sensitive again. Never answer the shooting question, he advises, because it will only prompt another: How did it feel?
"Don't let them get to that follow-up question," he warns the soldiers, now silent. "That one hurts."
Of course not. Hurt is to be avoided at all costs. In fact, one should take pre-emptive measures to try to avoid any real conversation:
Instead, they are counseled to take their spouses on dates, to buy ice cream and go on outings to Chuck E. Cheese's with their children, to come home with unexpected bouquets (corsages work, too), and to talk with their mates, but without telling "all of what you saw over there."
Posted by zeynep at 01:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 28, 2004
Reclaiming Our Sanity
After I wrote phrase "the better [the site] will become" in the previous post, I started wondering what I meant by "better." Better written, better known, more widely read? Well, sure, but something else.
It's a world where an insidious form of immorality is pretty much the reigning norm, it’s hard not to feel insane of sorts. To effect change in such a world thus requires a double-bootstrapping: one has to regain one’s sense of self and one has to find ways to come together with others.
On the one hand, I think we have to start with individual moral agency -- if for nothing else, as humans, we are individuals in separate minds and bodies. I'm not a transnational entity, neither are you. On the other hand, no matter what one does, as long as the "I" in the "what can I do" isn't pooled into something larger than each of us, there is no good answer -- if for no reason other than the simple fact that forces arrayed against us are so large. Not that there is a nice, easy answer in collectivity but there is a distinction between choosing the most moral path open to an individual and achieving effectiveness. And effectiveness does require some form of collectivity. And morality without effectiveness can, and often does, induce despair, hopelessness and inaction.
So, where do we go from there? Faced with massive forces, seemingly impossible odds and made to doubt our sanity, our basic moral truths?
First and foremost, I think that we have to believe in our understanding of the world. In spite of all this massive ideological onslaught, we have to accept that, in this world, under these conditions, these are the sane positions, these are the moral considerations. It is sane and moral to be centered in this way. The greatest success of the ideology disseminated by the current power structures is in the way they make us feel uncentered, weird, a little loony, corny, pretentious or well-meaning but stupid for feeling this way.
I’m not saying we have a monopoly on immutable and transcendent truths. But not all moral beliefs are equally thorny and complicated. One can start somewhere while conceding a lack of full and comprehensive answers to everything.
Here's a few. It is simply wrong, wrong, wrong to have almost a billion malnourished people while a part of the world is drowning in almost obscene levels of cornucopia. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong to have millions die of easily curable or controllable diseases when the global luxury retail market alone is upwards of $100 billion. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong to be the five percent of the planet’s population while consuming from 25 to 40 percent of its resources -- and going to war under these set of circumstances in the heart of the region producing the most strategic resource in the world.
That's all wrong and I think we all know it. And most everything in the modern, affluent lifestyle and cultural climate that surrounds us is designed anesthetize us to that knowledge. We have to take back our own hearts and minds before worrying about who else’s we’re losing or winning.
What to do about it all may not be simple but it has to start with reclaiming what we do know as that which what we do know. (And, no, I don’t mean that as a tautological statement. It might be one for a machine but it’s not one for us humans who often hold multiple levels of beliefs filtered through inconsistent ideologies.)
As a friend of mine once put it, it's like there is this evil person/machine throwing kids to a raging river. Do you go try to save one? What about all the others? If you decide it's more important to stop him for once and for all, what about all those kids who drown while we gnaw at his ankle, relatively unnoticed? And why not just give up rather than take responsibility, confront difficult choices -- and pretend not to have noticed?
And, yes, there are many thorny issues beyond that. But how does one even start thinking, start doing something about it all before being able to stand on some ground that feels like it’s there -- rather than in our loony heads?
I think the way out is the way we know anything else in this world: we reference our minds with other people’s minds. That’s almost how one can define insanity: it’s that state when your reality is so distinct, so incommunicable to others that you become trapped in your own mind. In the same way, being able to share the reality reflected in your mind with kindred souls is how people achieve that state of mind called sanity.
So, in many ways, that what the effort in this site is about; it’s not just about writing and it’s not just about being read. It’s about reclaiming both a sense sanity and a knowledge of that moral center -- mine, yours and ours. The more we get there, the better it is.
Posted by zeynep at 01:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack