reframe

Pitiless Kings

// September 21st, 2007 // No Comments » // World Issues

Today is the U.N. International Day of Peace. I look at the UN, at our collective governments, and wonder if this is really the best they can achieve? A feel good factor that might make some of us feel that we can take control of this huge, violent monstrosity, even for a moment. When my bile settles, I reflect that anything that raises awareness and brings our focus closer to compassion is a good thing and that cynicism is too often the refuge of a crushed idealist.

While Brave Men Die

// May 31st, 2007 // No Comments » // World Issues

“Eleven years later. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 Americans dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children who will never be born.

Do we scream in the night when it touches our dreams? No. We don’t dream about it because we don’t think about it; we don’t think about it because we don’t care about it. We are much more interested in law and order, so that American streets may be made safe while we transform those of Vietnam into flowing sewers of blood which we replenish each year by forcing our sons to choose between a prison cell here or a coffin there. ‘Every time I look at the flag, my eyes fill with tears.’ Mine too.”

Poster at Berkeley, captured by ivangonecrazy

In August 1939, Dalton Trumbo published the American anti-war book of the century, Johnny Got His Gun. Days later Germany invaded Poland and such pacific perspectives were forgotten. Trumbo writes the narrative of a “deadman-who-is-alive”, a World War I soldier who has lost his arms, legs, ears, eyes and most of his face. This darkest night of the soul speaks a tragic and bitter journey of realisation, despair and attempted suicide that culminates in a rallying cry against the lies, cruelty and foolishness that buries men- and worse- in the name of liberty.

“And all the guys who died all the five million or seven million or ten million who went out and died to make the world safe for democracy to make the world safe for words without meaning how did they feel about it just before they died? How did they feel as they watched their blood pump out into the mud? How did they feel when the gas hit their lungs and began eating them all away? How did they feel as they lay crazed in hospitals and looked death straight in the face and saw him come and take them? If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you’ve given it away you’d ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever?

You’re goddamn right they didn’t.

They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.

He ought to know.

He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth.”

Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, 1939. An online excerpt can be found here.

The Fog of War- Marlene Dumas

// May 25th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry, World Issues

I finally took time to stop and read this poem; part of an art installation by Marlene Dumas. It hangs in a cultureless corridor filled with art, that I’d passed dozens of times on the way to my office. I wonder if I’m the only person whose stopped to read it, and if any others did whether they too shivered at the realisation of the vacuum surrounding them.

Crisis of American Superpower

// March 19th, 2007 // 4 Comments » // World Issues

Jon Stewart interviews Zbigniew Brzezinski- foreign policy Professor, author and National Security Advisor to President Carter.

“I think there is a potential, a residual potential for recovery after 2008, because this is still… a very decent country, but also sad to say, a very ignorant country about the world. We have to survive the next 20 months without the war in Iraq expanding, drawing us into conflict nearby, specifically in Iran. Because if we do that, quite seriously now, if we do that, I think we’ll be bogged down for the next 20 years in a war that spans Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and probably Pakistan and that will be the end of American global supremacy.”

-Zbigniew Brzezinski

A Nuclear Tale in Five Parts

// January 18th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // World Issues

Yesterday’s announcement by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago has inspired me to complete a series on the Nuclear tale, one that I began in April last year spurred by the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. In the coming week I shall post five sides of story; from weapons and warfare to energy and the environment.

Our Only Lesson

// December 13th, 2006 // No Comments » // World Issues

In June 2005, Turkey introduced a new penal code including Article 301, which states: “A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be imposed to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years.“

Soon after, Orhan Pamuk, who recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was retroactively charged with violating this law. In an an interview he had given four months earlier Pamuk had stated that “one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey” (between 1915-1917). This is seen as an insult to Turkishness as the official line in Turkish government, academia and society is that there was no Armenian Genocide and proposes extreme statement such that 56,000 Armenians perished during the period due to war conditions, and less than 10 thousand were actually killed.
Taken from the official statements of Yusuf Halacoglu, The President of the Turkish Historical Society Ref.

Ironically, a bill adopted by the French National Assembly two months ago would make statements such as Halacoglu’s, tantamount to publicly denying the Armenian genocide, illegal in France. Thus we see a blatantly clear contradiction on the factual basis of history enshrined in Turkish and French law- it is impossible to make any consistent and legal reference to the nature of the Armenian genocide in Paris in the morning and Istanbul by night.

Reminiscent of the “study the controversy” campaign to befuddle logical perceptions of evolution with “Intelligent Design” doctrine, in 2005 Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for an international Commission “to establish the events of 1915″. His offer was rejected by Armenia and its foreign minister remarked that “The historians have already said their piece and it is now down to Turkey to determine its attitude.”

Furthermore, the International Association of Genocide Scholars sent an open letter to Erdogan in response stating-

“The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:
1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.
2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.“
International Association of Genocide Scholars, June 13, 2005.

In the terminology of modern debate, Erdogan just got “pwned”.

The number and nature of the deaths, necessary for defining genocide, is as complex as any feature of history however, “There seems to be a consensus among Western scholars with the exception of few dissident and Turkish national historians, as to when covering all the period between 1914 to 1923, over a million Armenian might have perished, and the tendency seem recently to be, either presenting 1.2 million as figure or even 1.5 million, while more moderately, “over a million” is presented, as the Turkish historian Fikret Adanir provides as estimation“. Ref.

This is not merely a case of differing interpretations, it is an active denial of reality, an affront to the dead and evidence of deeper neurotic avoidance of national history; a dangerous discord for any aspiring “open society”. It is evidence of blinding doctrine- one that makes it a crime to study and speak the truth as an objective search will reveal.

The open letter to Erdogan finishes, “We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as a proud and equal participants in international, democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.”

Post Script on Iran

The above piece lay unfinished for the last few months until I was stirred by the abhorrent news on the Iranian Holocaust Conference. Their motives are clear, as Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki declared in a speech that: “If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt.“

Although I find this anti-Israeli hate mongering dangerous and exactly what is not needed right now, it is pretty much more of the same thing that has been in the press across the region for decades. What really sickens me is the official reinterpretation of history- guided by dogma and political agenda. That is what is really terrifying- escalating this dangerous precedent- not only for Israel or Jews, but Iranians and indeed all humanity. History is our only lesson. It is one for which we have paid our highest price and if we fail again the cost of our ignorance is surely the blood of our children. This is my fear.

Conflict History: Pakistan

// October 3rd, 2006 // 4 Comments » // World Issues

Some succinct and neutral background information from the ICG.

“Pakistan joined U.S.-led “war on terror” following 11 September 2001 attacks, promoting Musharraf’s image abroad as secular reformer and U.S. ally. But at home he has given Islamists free-hand, neutering political parties and doing nothing to address Pakistan’s unregulated network of madrasas. Alliance of six major religious parties won majority in two provinces bordering Afghanistan October 2002, promising enforcement of Sharia law and prompting fears of alliance with Afghan jihadists. Musharraf amended constitution 2003 enabling him to dissolve parliament and dismiss prime minister; parliamentary vote 2004 extended his mandate until 2007″.

“Once again the country is ruled by the military and much needed reforms to its economy and government have faltered. Religious extremists play an increasingly important role in providing education and other services to the poor, resulting in the radicalisation of areas of the country. The elections due in 2007 should provide important indications of whether Pakistan will continue on this path, or whether more moderate forces will be able to assert themselves.”

“The International Crisis Group Conflict History: Pakistan.