Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Category: ENGLISH (Page 6 of 29)

There a few posts written in English

May 17

23.05.2024 /

This year, waking up on 17 May brought to mind a Cat Stevens song:

Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird

I had to look up the text, and saw then, that it is essentially a hymn of gratitude. No matter. The song is beautiful, and the sunlit morning was as pristine as the first morning, no doubt about it. I happened to be in Lillehammer where you can still see snow on distant mountain tops towering over green slopes and the lake down below. May 17 is Norway’s national holiday.

The day is celebrated year after year as earnestly as Christmas. No military parades, but parades of children. Dressed in their finest, waving little flags, they march proudly preceded by their school’s band. In all of Norway, children from all schools march, flanked by their teachers. In the capital, the parade lasts for hours as wave after wave of schools make their way through the centre, up the boulevard to the palace, where the king and his family stand on a palace balcony, smiling and waving (must be quite an ordeal).

Normally, May 17 tends to be cold, often even wet, but this year, the day was spectacularly warm and beautiful. Though I generally go off to the woods on such occasions, I made an exception this year, the last before we cede military control of our country to the USA. I dressed up and watched and listened.

This is the one day of the year when people can wear their beautiful and exorbitantly expensive national costumes. There was a time, not very long ago, when it made sense to own a national costume. Back then, many women did their own embroidery, and some were even able to sew the entire costume. At any rate, the costumes were so durable that they were reused, generation after generation for all major events: Christmas, christenings, weddings, funerals…

Now, they are only used on May 17. And what a sight they are. The town Lillehammer was populated by billowing skirts sprinkled with delicately embroidered flowers, broaches with trembling golden birch leaves, silver belts, richly embroidered linen shirts and intricately shaped tight-fitting brocade bodices. Lillehammer could have been a Rivendell film set (Lord of the Rings).

Norwegians are certainly patriotic, no doubt about it, yet they are surrendering military control of their country to a foreign power. Norwegians are basically peaceable, yet, they have chosen a “protector” that is the most dangerous out-of-control war machine on earth (cf. conversation between Glenn Greenwald and Jeffrey Sachs).

It is terribly sad.

Nineteen eighty-four revisited

10.05.2024 /

It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

The atmosphere in the novel’s first chapters is oppressive. Every one of the protagonist’s moves, every breath, is recorded by “telescreens”. The protagonist knows he will be disappeared sooner or later, guilty as he is of “thoughtcrime”.

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself–anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.

They will come for him, inevitably, and when he is gone, there will be no trace of him, as though he never existed.

Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.

The protagonist, Winston, works in the Ministry of Truth. His job is to cancel inconvenient pieces of the past and throw them down a “memory hole”. He knows too much and doesn’t like what he knows.

Most people, of course, are not targeted. The “proles” almost never are. But Party members, entrusted with defence of the system, are closely monitored. Those who are too perspicacious, whose minds are too independent, risk being eliminated.

Up until this point, I thought George Orwell’s 1949 dystopia was about the USSR. There are, after all, ten-year plans and several daily cups of foul-tasting booze.

Then I started noticing a number of subversive details. First, the events of the novel take place, not in Russia, but in London, one of three megacities in Oceania – a realm encompassing what we know as North America, Australia and UK.

Second (and more importantly) the “proles” – 85 percent of the population – are not adulated, but despised. They are uneducated and therefore not very clever. No attempt is made, either, to educate them, on the contrary; they are treated to constant mind-dulling entertainment.

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section–Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak–engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

Further into the book, Winston finds himself thinking on several occasions that “the proles are our only hope”.

If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious

So Winston longs for a revolution. Did George Orwell share his protagonist’s longing?

Third is the obsession with war, the copiously nurtured hate and fear of the enemy. Hate and fear of the enemy feed war which in turn feed hate and fear of the enemy. Perpetual war is the engine that keeps the system afloat. It keeps the population working, the economy going, and the Party in undisputed power, as war and fear of the enemy, bolsters the population’s loyalty to the Party.

War is not ideological. It has no cause, in fact, other than that of perpetuating the Party’s power. The hope is, of course, to rule the entire world, which – we are told – is divided between three powers, none of them Communist.

… museum used for propaganda displays of various kinds – scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.

….war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.

The other two powers are – guess what? – Eurasia (Russia) and Eastasia (China). [How could Orwell have guessed, in 1949?]

What I, the revisiting reader, found most fascinating, however, were the details of propaganda warfare. The propaganda war is waged against Oceania’s own population by means of tools such as:

Newspeak (reframing), doublethink (cancelling of logic) and the constant rewriting of history.

Yesteryear’s inconvenient facts are not disputed, not denied; they simply disappear. They are wiped off the slate of our [Google search] screens.

En the end, Winston has learnt to not only say, but actually believe that 2 + 2 equals 5. Just as we in the West have learnt to truly believe that “we defend” freedom, justice and democracy.

In order to train citizens to practice doublethink, the Party lets them sink their teeth into apparently nonsensical slogans, such as:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH:

As translations into the present, I suggest, for example:

PAX AMERICANA
THE FREE MARKET
WIKILEAKS IN CHAINS

I wasn’t around in Stalin’s day, but I have met people who have been dissidents in various totalitarian states, who have lived in constant terror of being denounced by somebody during a torture session , who have suspected the existence of tapping bugs hidden in the most unlikely places. There have been acquaintances who refused to wear seatbelts, who always made sure to stand against a wall. In short I recognise as 2024-fact much of what is considered fiction in the novel 1984.

What surprises me, however, is that the methods detailed with regard to propaganda warfare are so painstakingly reproduced today in the West. Has Orwell inadvertently taught the powers-that-be the art of “doublethink”. Have they learnt about memory holes from him, too?

What about perpetual war? Did he perhaps learn from them?

China

04.05.2024 /

A Global Affairs study conducted in 2023 indicates that 58 % of US Americans view China’s development “as a critical threat to the vital interest of the United States”, and only 19 % “believe that China will deal responsibly with world problems.”

On the other hand a recent Brookings article suggests that most Chinese feel that the USA’s desire to preserve its “global hegemony” is depriving “China it’s right to develop”. The article directs us to a 53-page angry bipartisan report, “A Strategy to Win America’s Competition with the Chinese Communist Party“. Its introduction reads:

For a generation, the United States bet that robust economic engagement would lead the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to open its economy and financial markets and in turn to liberalize its political system and abide by the rule of law. Those reforms did not occur. … the CCP has pursued a multidecade campaign of … decoupling the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the global economy, making the PRC less dependent on the United States in critical sectors, while making the United States more dependent on the PRC.

https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/…

(There is no disputing that China seeks to become less dependent of the US economy.)

On page 8, the report’s list of recommendations ends thus:

Taken together [the recommendations] would level the economic playing field, reduce the PRC’s hold on U.S. and allied critical supply chains, and invest in a future of continued economic and technological leadership for the United States and its likeminded alliesand partners. [My highlight]

ibid

The term “leadership” occurs 25 times in the report, as for example here:
“… thereby undermining American global leadership”.

What the report calls “continued global leadership”, the Chinese refer to as “continued hegemony”. Are the expressions synonymous?

We don’t often encounter the word “hegemony” in the daily news. It sounds foreign and has an unpleasant aftertaste. Nevertheless, a Google search for “USA” AND “hegemony” will return an avalanche of links to sites that either predict an end to US hegemony or, on the contrary, hotly dismiss such a prognosis.

Britannica on hegemony:

… the dominance of one group over another, often supported by legitimating norms and ideas. The term hegemony is today often used as shorthand to describe the relatively dominant position of a particular set of ideas and their associated tendency to become commonsensical and intuitive, thereby inhibiting the dissemination or even the articulation of alternative ideas.

Britannica’s subtle definition would perhaps be reworded by a less highly educated person as: “hegemony” is power exercised by persons who are bossy, domineering – in short bullies.

I’m taking pains to stress this fine distinction between (good) “leadership”, which we admire in a sports team, a military unit or a well-run workplace, and hegemony, which tends to be resented or, at best, tolerated because there is no alternative.

I believe that US Americans are being mislead by their leaders – Democrats and Republicans alike – as to what the rest of the world feels about their country’s economic, military and political control over much of the world. If you read Rogue State by the indefatigable late William Blum (whom I have eulogised in post after post) you will understand that grievances are not without cause.

Back to China. For the USA, the “threat” from China is primarily economic and technological. Do please note the word “threat”. Not even the above-quoted angry report maintains that China seeks to harm the USA with economic sanctions, lethal viruses or AI attacks on banks. According to the report, the only reason China represents a “threat” is that it’s doing well although (or perhaps because) it deliberately fails to follow the US neoliberal playbook. China designs its’s economic policies in such a way that economic growth also improves living conditions for its population. The US hasn’t been doing anything of the kind for several decades.

In 2023 Chinese GNP grew by 5.2 %. Even the IMF expects it to grow by 4.6 % in 2024. China is doing well in spite of Covid, and in spite of a serious real estate crisis. That is certainly not the case for EU states, and the US is so debt-ridden that many people are transferring their savings to expensive cryptocurrencies.

So China represents no military threat to the USA, yet. But in view of recent US provocations (Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and the gift to Taiwan in April this year of 8 billion USD in military aid) China will surely be preparing itself.

What is Taiwan, by the way? It is not a country recognised by the UN. It was always part of China until after Chiang Kai-Shek lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan which subsequently suffered a murderous 38-year dictatorship. You will not find much about this on the internet, alas. Yet, it was only in 2016 that his Kuomintang party was voted out of power. At best you might get an idea with a search for “Taiwan 228”. History is written, after all, by the victors. USA has been the victor since WWII.

After WWII the USA was one of very few countries in the world that wasn’t destroyed. Russia, China, Germany, England, France, Japan… all in ruins because of the war, and the third world was in ruins because of colonialism. The USA was determined to call the shots, and has done just that ever since.

When US policy makers use the word “hegemon” they prefix it with the epithet “benevolent”. The “benevolent hegemon”. Words have power and US citizens have been deluded into thinking that their country has spawned democracy and justice throughout its sphere of influence.

The benevolent hegemon’s malignant foreign policy choices are now being countered, and the USA is desperately trying to pull its chestnuts out of the fire. Desperate situations call for desperate action. Trying to provoke a war with China may be one of them.

A fitting name

30.04.2024 /

Genocide Joe. I like the sound of it. Craig Murrey firmly believes that the USA and vassal states in Europe actually want to hasten the extermination of Palestinians in Palestine. His argument is sound, I think:

Discontinuing aid to UNRWA would require the following in each country:

Views would have to be coordinated through written submissions and interdepartmental meetings between the departments dealing with the Middle East, with the United Nations, with the United States, with Europe and then of course between the diplomatic and development wings of the ministry. That process would include seeking the views of [the country’s] ambassadors to Tel Aviv, Doha, Cairo, Riyadh, Istanbul and Washington and to the United Nations in Geneva and in New York.

[Yet, several countries] announced all on the same day the destruction of the life support system for Palestinians, then in absolute need.

Craig Murrey, Consortium News April 26 2024

Why on earth would they all simultaneously cut off aid to an organisation that is vital for human survival in that Hell on earth if not to achieve a “final solution” on the Palestine issue.

There’s a lot of money involved, of course, from the Israel Lobby. Everybody knows that, but I doubt that anybody knows just how much, since every attempt will surely be made to conceal the extent of such donations. Here is a site that claims it knows. However I have no doubt that The Intercept has pretty solid documentation about a relatively trifling amount, which nevertheless proved to be significant.

Yes, Genocide Joe! And that is the country that promises to “defend” Finno-Scandinavia with 47 military bases? Defence, my foot!

I’ll be back soon. Yes, by Joe, I’ll be back!

PS: On May 4, I see in Reuters that Sanaa University has issued a statement applauding the “humanitarian” position of the students in the United States and said they could continue their studies in Yemen. “The board of the university condemns what academics and students of U.S. and European universities are being subjected to, suppression of freedom of expression,” the board of the university said in a statement, which included an email address for any students wanting to take up their offer.

Break

17.04.2024 /

I’ll be taking a break now for a while. I have to devote some time elsewhere, in my own language, which is Norwegian.

Besides, as far as I’m concerned, there’s not much more to be said about the Ukraine war and the lies we so relentlessly are being spoon-fed by the mainstream press. There is not much more to be said, either, about the genocide being committed by Israel, the USA and the EU who are, moreover, virtually begging Iran to start world war III …, no, I’d better say no more.

It’s all so psychopathic that if I say anything else, I’ll be guilty of “hate crime”, and I would rather not go to jail.

I will however take the liberty of quoting Australia’s former Prime Minister Paul Keating. He was referring (in 2023) to NATO and to my country’s former Prime Minister:

Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself. With all of Asia’s recent development amid its long and latent poverty, that promise would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States.

Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current Secretary-General of NATO. Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen. In February he was drawing parallels between Russia’s assault on Ukraine and China saying, ‘we should not make the same mistake with China.’ That is, that China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed.

Stoltenberg, in his jaundiced view, overlooks the fact that China represents twenty per cent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world. And has no record of attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do.

http://www.paulkeating.net.au/persistent/catalogue_files/products/20230709nato.pdf

As for the suppression and criminalisation of anti-Zionism in the USA and EU, it is better dealt with in the affected countries. (Norway has fortunately taken a different tack on that score at least.) In the USA, I think the most powerful voice against the suppression of dissident views, including not least anti-zionism, is Glenn Greenwald’s. I very warmly recommend Glenn Greenwald’s channel on Rumble.

My greater worries now, however, concern recent dramatic developments in my own country (no doubt with pressure from the “supreme fool”, the “accident waiting to happen” mentioned by Paul Keating): what to my mind is the virtual handover of Norway’s sovereignty to the USA. You will find very little information about this online. The press dares hardly whisper. Agreements have been signed according to which Norway gives the US the right to establish military bases in Norway’s 12 main military stations – bases in which the US will have exclusive right of access. There are those who maintain that the US armed forces will be able to carry on in Norway as though they were at home. It is reputed, for instance, that if any US citizen or members of his or her family commits a criminal act in Norway, he or she will not be prosecuted here; If a Norwegian citizen inadvertently trespasses on US security zones (in Norway!), for instance during the transportation of troops, the US forces may open fire on him/her.

Norwegian authorities will not have the right to inspect these bases, and nothing guarantees that nuclear weapons will not be stored there. We have long followed US orders in the matter of foreign policy, we are now finally a US puppet, virtually an occupied state, but nobody is rushing to defend us against the USA.

So I shall have to write elsewhere for a while, and in Norwegian.

Elegy

10.04.2024 /

I started writing here, as Pelshval, very many years ago and mostly for fun. I enjoyed embroidering picaresque scenes of daily life in my country.

Gradually, my voice grew less jolly, more cautious yet at the same time. slightly caustic. There were terrible droughts out there in the world, and sea levels were rising … but our leaders didn’t seem to worry, so maybe I was exaggerating the seriousness of our planet’s predicament.

Then came the Arab Spring. Now I happened to have some – not much, but more than most who follow the press – previous knowledge. So I soon noticed we were definitely getting skewed news reports. But I had a job that meant a lot to me, a job that required absolute loyalty, so I was mostly silent.

Nevertheless, seeds of distrust had been sowed.

During the Trump years I, too, was fascinated by US politics. While most of my friends could not “for the life of me” understand why anybody would vote Trump, I could not for the life of me understand why the Democratic Party was not learning a very important lesson. For a moment, it did seem as though Biden would actually start to notice the 50 % of US Americans who were floundering, but he soon devoted his attention to the needs of the military-industrial complex instead.

With time, I have become strident. I’m sorry. Reading William Blum’s Rogue State, I marvel at how he manages to make a book about catastrophic policy choices so wonderfully ironic and often downright hilarious.

It’s a while since I finally managed to discern, through the haze of propaganda, some of the contours of what is going on. But William Blum saw it all sharply already back in 2002. He foresaw what we are now going through, with such acuity that I suspect his book is available to us at CIA\library because even at CIA, there are those who understand that US foreign policy chickens have come home to roost in a very bad way.

There is so much that needs to be put right! More and more people all over the world and maybe even, to some degree, in the USA are starting to understand that. Alas, here in Europe, Ministry of Truth telescreens are running full throttle, incinerating the inconvenient truths of yesteryear, replacing definitions of sizeable parts of our vocabularies, updating fictions, smoothing innumerable paradoxes, and telling us that the end is near and not to worry. Staffing European psychiatric clinics will soon prove impossible as therapists succumb to the general state of universal befuddlement.

In an extremely depressing book called “Essay on Blindness”, the late Portuguese writer José Saramago has painted a stylised picture of the state of Europe today. He later wrote a cheering sequel, “Essay on Lucidity”, that explains how, one by one, people recovered their eyesight and were able to see clearly. While I certainly recommend many of Saramago’s books – he too is extremely humorous – I think it would prove more beneficial for Europeans’ lucidity (and hence also mental health) to read William Blum’s Rogue State, which can, I repeat be downloaded from the CIA library.

Famous quote from near-forgotten man

07.04.2024 /

If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism.

Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America’s global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but henceforth—oddly enough—a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims.

There would be more than enough money. One year’s military budget of $330 billion is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.

That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.

You will find this passage in “Author’s Foreword: Concerning September 11, 2001” in a book written by William Blum: Rogue State – a Guide to the World’s only Superpower.

The author is not particularly well known, despite his impressive erudition. Whatever fame has befallen him is due largely to praise he received from Osama Bin Laden, who allegedly quoted the above paragraph and recommended the book.

Surprisingly, William Blum (1933-2018) is not vilified in Wikipedia’s brief article about him, in spite of his sharp and detailed criticism of the long line of scandalous US military, economic and media interventions – all of which have had disastrous humanitarian consequences – all over the world. Judging from the article, he grew up in fairly modest circumstances. His education as an accountant will have seemed sensible rather than glamorous. He must have been very bright, because rather than work as an accountant, he became a computer programmer with IBM and was subsequently employed by the foreign service. A patriot, it would seem if we read between the lines, who subsequently was “disillusioned” by the Vietnam war.

Many others, of course, were also disillusioned by the Vietnam war. Many young US Americans were badly beaten by the police. Most of them recovered and went on to lead so-called “normal” lives.

But William Blum lost his cherished job with the State Department, something that did not deflate his interest in foreign affairs: He devoted the rest of his life to the solitary task of studying and writing about US foreign policy. Apart from the books he wrote, he also kept a blog that is still available to us. (By the way, I suggest you run a search in his blog for NED. William Blum knew very well what sort of sinister apparatus NED was and is.)

Reading Blum’s books, one cannot help being dumbfounded by the callousness, ignorance and recklessness of the entire string of presidential administrations since WWII. All the more reason, Blum must have thought, for him to try to tell his fellow citizens what was going on, and what – by the way – is still going on, though William Blum has been spared having to witness the latest consequences of US policies in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Several of his books, including The Rogue State are available on, for instance, Amazon. I should point out, though, that you can also download that particular book from, of all places, the CIA library.

Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II
was the book Noam Chomsky referred to with the words: “far and away the best book on the topic.” It is rather expensive, but I see that a free pdf version can be found.

More than 20 years have passed since the above-mentioned two books appeared. A long time, you might say. Many people will maintain that the USA has changed over the past two decades and is more observant of human rights, more humane. I’m afraid that such a view will seem doubtful in light of the ongoing genocide in which USA is deeply complicit. Insisting that Ukraine must be a member of NATO (most recently two days ago), at the expense of the vast and growing number of Ukrainian widows, is not very humane. (I mention the widows rather than the men, of whom relatively few remain, since dead soldiers no longer feel pain.)

A systematic US mistake identified by William Blum (e.g. in Vietnam in 1952, according to Graham Green in the novel The Quiet American) – a mistake made again, and again, and again – was to fail to understand the “adversary”. With blissfully arrogant ignorance, the US very recently set about using Ukraine to destroy or at least weaken Russia. The result was of course the decimation of the male Ukrainian population, while Russia has never been stronger.

Chapter 34 of Killing Hope is, I find, particularly illuminating. Here Blum discusses the details of the US-directed propaganda war in the run-up to the coup in Chile – 9/11, by the way, 1973. The population had to be prepared for the coup, had to be convinced that it was a necessary step to save the country from cutthroat Communists and from a Russian and/or Cuban invasion. The details are fascinating because I see some of the same tactics being employed in Norway today.

***

Alas, yes, my country, Norway, is a US vassal. Norway’s propaganda blitzkrieg these past two years has been staggering. Here nobody in his or her right mind dares dispute the official narrative that Russia’s military operation was “unprovoked”. Nobody dares call the war a US proxy war. There is no discussion, no debate, nothing, in a country that used to relish fierce political discussions!

I sent a couple of articles to one of the couple of independent websites that do actually dispute the official narrative, and I was warned not to reveal my name, as I might then lose my job and my friends.

And today, we learn: Norway will henceforward devote 3 % of GNP to “defence”

To “defence”! Not to countering climate change; not even to green-washing, not to reduction of inequality, not to humanitarian aid.

No. To “defence”, i.e. to asist USA in its efforts to maintain global hegemony. To war. To a bellicose march under the US flag. Do we, Norwegians, want this? Do we even know that this is in store for us?

I am shattered. I am desperately ashamed of my country. This is how William Blum must have felt when he discovered what the Vietnam war was all about.

Back to Haiti

01.04.2024 /

I’ve been reading a lot about Haiti lately, largely inspired by what I learnt a year or so ago, about the slaves who fought for and won their freedom from arrogant French landlords supported by French warships. Yes, the slaves were actually able to defeat Napoleon’s forces (20,000 soldiers and as many sailors) and to declare Haiti a sovereign Republic in 1804. That is a remarkable achievement.

[I]n August 1791 the first slave armies were established in northern Haiti under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture. …

Ultimately more than 50,000 French troops died in an attempt to retake the colony, including 18 generals. The French managed to capture Louverture, transporting him to France for trial. He was imprisoned at Fort de Joux, where he died in 1803 of exposure and possibly tuberculosis.

Wikipedia as at 31.01.2024

Napoleon is said to have explained in the midst of the war in Haiti: “My decision to destroy the authority of the Blacks in Saint Domingue (Haiti) is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money…as on the need to block forever the forward march of Blacks in the world.”

We can well imagine US slave owners’ horror at the success of the slave rebellion. So Thomas Jefferson refused to recognise Haiti. Other nations, too, imposed diplomatic and economic sanctions on the newly formed Republic. These embargoes froze Haiti out of the global economic market, and denied the burgeoning nation diplomatic participation in the international political scene. I’ll repeat two words here: “economic sanctions”. What would the goal of those sanctions have been, I wonder, if not the same as that of current sanctions: to punish, to starve and to cause suffering to the population. Back then when they had no internet, an additional aim will have been to reduce access to science and literature and hence to perpetuate ignorance.

What was new to me a year or two ago was not the slave rebellion as such, but that the French demanded that the slaves who had won their freedom in battle, pay compensation for their freedom! I assume the former slaves accepted these terms, partly to avoid being regularly revisited by the French army, and partly because payment for liberation was still the norm at the time. When the Russian serfs were liberated more than 50 years later, in 1861, the landlords had to be compensated, while the former serfs were left without roofs over their heads.

So Haiti was saddled from the start with colossal debts and had to take bank loans at exorbitant interest rates. Not until 1947 were they able to pay off the slave debt. Take a look at that sentence. Former slaves were paying for their freedom until 1947! From 1915 on, they were not even paying France, but the USA that had purchased the debt.

Yes, from the 20th century on, Haiti’s biggest problem (apart from earthquakes) has been its proximity to the USA. The USA has pretended that it is “helping” Haiti get back on its feet. Alas! To quote Kenan Malik’s very brief but wonderfully succinct article “Plundered and corrupted for 200 years, Haiti was doomed to end in anarchy :

“I helped make Haiti… a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” Maj Gen Smedley Butler, a leader of the American forces in Haiti, wrote in 1935.

I need to stop here and stress that I strongly recommend Kenan Malik’s article, because Haiti’s woes have been, throughout, so overwhelming, that most of us, give up trying to get our head around them. Malik’s article summarises things very neatly. But even Wikipedia admits that:

[t]he [US] invasion and subsequent occupation [1915-1934] was promoted by growing American business interests in Haiti, especially the National City Bank of New York, which had withheld funds from Haiti and paid rebels to destabilise the nation through the Bank of the Republic of Haiti with an aim at inducing American intervention.

Wikipedia as at 31/03/24 (my emphasis)

What soon followed was almost 29 years (1959 to 1986) of dynastic Duvalier dictatorship (Papa and Baby Doc) and death squads, which the U.S. unconditionally supported by providing economic and military assistance. Graham Greene explores this ghastly period in his depressing novel “the Comedians.”

Finally, Jean-Bertrand Aristide became the first democratically (and jubilantly) elected president in 1990 (with 92 % of the votes). But the US orchestrated no less than two coups d’etat against him and finally trucked him off to central Africa.

What has happened since is fairly chaotic, it is true. The key, however, is summed up by Kenan Malik in the above cited article:

The suppression of democratic movements became the constant thread of the nation’s history.

Of course, Haiti is not alone in this respect, but the country’s class differences have been exacerbated by the involvement of foreign governments, particularly the USA and more recently Canada. The US still runs Haiti one way or another, nominally through the so-called “core group” of ambassadors, and with the aid of its creation RNDDH, aka Orange DDH, a so-called human rights group (in reality a typical NED scam).

What is also clear is that the mission of Haiti’s police and military is to protect the comprador bourgeoisie and the elite,not the overwhelming majority.

Mainstream media is absolutely useless with regard to Haiti. What they describe, apart from effects of the earthquakes, is “gang violence”. Gang violence sounds bad, of course, but what do the gangs represent?

  • Are the gangs paid? If so by whom/why?
  • Are the gangs politically motivated? If so, how/why?
  • Who are the beneficiaries of the violence?
  • How have the funds disbursed by the USA and other countries been used? Is there any accountability?
  • Why is most of the population so desperately poor and uneducated despite considerable “aid” from the USA and allies?

No, mainstream media is mostly pretty useless. So do please visit Responsible Statecraft’s fresh article US should let Haiti reclaim its democracy which goes a long way in answering the above questions, and more. (Notice, for instance, President Biden’s attempt to persuade Kenyans to do the killing, and Kenya’s reluctance to do so.) Notice, finally, the article’s conclusion that the USA has to finally leave Haiti alone.

I think Haiti has served as a template for the very concept “failed state”. Let’s hope that Biden’s fear of loosing the looming US presidential election will dissuade him from enforcing another reign of terror on the island country.

What happiness

25.03.2024 /

I read in Reuters the other day about the annual World Happiness Report, launched in 2012 to support the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.

How, you may ask, can I even think about commenting “world happiness” when Gaza….? Yes, the mere mention of “happiness” seems a bit obscene, these days, when we – the West – are aiding and abetting unmentionable acts of horror.

But I actually believe that it is all, somehow, interconnected. What the West has been doing to the Palestinians for decades will forever be a hideous stain on the record of an era that is coming to an end. In the West, mood is affected both by an emerging awareness of the harm we have done to the rest of the world and to the growing signs that our welfare is being eroded.

People in 143 countries and territories have been asked to evaluate their life on a scale from zero to 10. Finland scored 7.7 followed closely by the Scandinavian countries (including Iceland), and Israel, while Afghanistan and Lebanon, at the bottom, scored next to nothing. Palestine, of course, wasn’t asked.

So that’s the main findings – not very heady, but the Reuters journalist David Milliken has done a good job, I think, because he took a good long look at the 52-page report, and because he pointed out a few very interesting findings, I downloaded the report too.

Findings: The United States dropped  to 23rd place from 15th last year, mainly because people younger than 30 would have placed the United States in 62nd place! (See figure 2.2) Biden and Trump, beware!

And that is the very interesting part of the report. In several of the wealthiest countries there appears to be growing dissatisfaction among the young (defined as under 30). The young in Norway put the country in 20th place, those in the UK in 32nd. Rankings for Germany and France were 47 and 48, for Canada 58 (whereas for all ages the Canadian ranking was 15) Spain 55… etc.

Russia’s young at 68th, however, are slightly more positive than the average, 72, whereas Israel’s young put their country in 2nd place! Young Israelis must have been very blind, indeed.

Yes, the times they are a’changin. For the worse in the West, mostly, though Lithuania’s young put their country in first place.

The report reads: “In Western Europe, life evaluations among the young are significantly lower in 2021-2023 than they were in 2006-2010…For the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, happiness has decreased in all age groups, but especially for the young.”

“Interconnected” was the word I used above. The so-called Pax Americana, that never was a Pax at all, is in the process of being exposed. The colossal hoax to which we in the West have been blind, is unravelling. The West’s irresponsible militarisation, the preposterous US debt (and remember, the dollar is the reserve currency, so when the dollar falls, we all fall), the deepening poverty of the bottom 50 % coupled with the spiralling wealth of the top 10 %, the brazen disregard for the accelerating ecological breakdown… all of this crowned now by the shame felt by those of us who are not psychopaths (and we are, fortunately, the vast majority) about our countries’ participation in acts so horrible that I am lost for words… will continue to undermine “happiness” in the West in years to come until the USA stops being such a bloody bully.

Sanctions

14.03.2024 /

I definitely don’t like the way women are treated in Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. And I most emphatically do not approve of putting dissidents in prison, either. And as for torture… no! no! no! (If you tortured me to force me to endorse torture, I would probably give in, but those who love me, and their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren – and there may be many of them – would make sure that you and your lot (and offspring) never sleep easy.)

Nevertheless, the idea that a pompous king or emperor and his court should stride through the corridors of the world, passing judgements and rigorous sentences on “misbehaving” members of the global community is repugnant. All the more so, if said king or emperor is himself decadent and given to all sorts of vices (including torture!)

Vice President Harris is reputed to have been “tough on crime” in her past. (I gather she is not popular in her current position either.) Anybody who has had anything to do with miscreants will know that harsh punishments stimulate, rather than diminish, destructive urges. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are not the rule. Rather than tell you what you know – about US criminal justice, that is – I shall simply refer you to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report:

In the United Kingdom, reoffending rates also topped 70 per cent in some prisons, according to statistics from the Ministry of Justice. Many offenders, even after severe sentences of imprisonment, repeatedly fail to desist from crime and reintegrate into the community as law-abiding citizens. Imprisonment, in itself, is incapable of addressing the offenders’ social integration issues. [highlighted by me]

…

… In addition to the costs of law enforcement and investigating and prosecuting crimes, there are the costs of imprisonment, as well as the costs to the victims and the community.

Consider also the effects of prison overcrowding and smouldering community anger. Look at Haiti now!

So it is, not only with individual delinquents, but also with nations.

The US should know that patriotic sentiment – nationalism, if you will – is something to be reckoned with. In spite of the near civil-war-situation in the USA, US Americans love their country passionately. Iranians do too. Iran was, after all, practically the cradle of civilisation. Iranians have a history and cultural heritage compared to which US history and cultural heritage is still in kindergarten. The same applies to China and even to Russia, where historical awareness and pride is a force that ignorant US politicians have disregarded. (That the US establishment is so unbelievably ignorant should terrify US voters.)

As for Cuba and Venezuela, relatively new countries, they have been heroic in the extreme: Like the USA they stood up to the colonial power, but they have since also stood up to the North American bully! And they are proud of their heroism. (Note, by the way, how many US Americans and Europeans have loved Cuba.)

By the time it was Venezuela’s turn to suffer the tightening of the sanction screws, the Western press was better prepared than they had been after the Cuban revolution to unleash defamation campaigns against Hugo Chavez. Even John Pilger could not save Chavez’ reputation in the West. But Venezuelans, and a very large (probably growing) proportion of Latin Americans warmly revere the late Hugo Chavez, which is one reason why Maduro is still comfortably seated.

Unfortunately, the USA has no respect for Democracy in Venezuela, or for that matter in any other country that resists US political and economic control, which is why they have applied sanctions that more or less kill off Venezuelans.

Quoting a CEPR (Center for Economic and Policy Research) report:

According to the National Survey on Living Conditions (ENCOVI by its acronym in Spanish), an annual survey of living conditions administered by three Venezuelan universities, there was a 31 percent increase in general mortality from 2017 to 2018. This would imply an increase of more than 40,000 deaths. This would be a large loss of civilian life even in an armed conflict, and it is virtually certain that the US economic sanctions made a substantial contribution to these deaths. … As noted above, the impact of the August 2017 sanctions on the collapse of oil production and therefore access to imports was quite immediate…[highlighted by me]

The United States first imposed sanctions targeting the Venezuelan government in 2015.

Since then, sanctions have multiplied to the point that millions of ragged Venezuelans have turned into unwelcome itinerant paupers roaming the rest of the South American continent where they constitute as seriously a destabilising demographic force as the Central American immigrants to the USA. Decades of US regime change operations and support for vicious dictatorships in all of Latin America are the root cause of all of this displacement.

Sanctions particularly affect health care (medicines and gear), cf. The Lancet

Soon after imposing economic sanctions on a country, many essential life-saving drugs become unavailable. Even production of some drugs being manufactured in a country is decreased, or even stopped, because of a shortage in basic ingredients or spare machine parts that are necessary for drug production. The price of drugs increases to a level that people with low income can barely afford. …Lack of spare parts affects not only medical devices but also other necessary infrastructures such as electric generators; frequent power cuts cause serious problems (loss of vaccines, drugs, ventilators, monitors, etc). Hundreds of thousands of people die in silence from diseases.

Have those who approve of sanctioning a country considered the surviving victims’ hatred, accumulated incrementally year by year? Have those who design US foreign policy any idea of the growing global contempt for the US “rules-based order”?

  • What rules?
  • Who made the rules?
  • And why do the so-called “rules” – whatever they are – not apply to the USA?
  • Why do NO rules apply to the USA?

Listen to this angry but extraordinarily knowledgeable young man, Ben Norton, explain Latin American anger.

Remarkably, the Maduro government has survived. According to MintPress as at March 2022:

The government in Caracas, however, somehow survived for reasons that differ, depending on the political position of the analysts. In Venezuela, much credence is being given to the country’s socialist values, the resilience of the people and to the Bolivarian movement. The anti-Maduro forces in the US, centred mostly in Florida, blame Maduro’s survival on Washington’s lack of resolve. A third factor, which is often overlooked, is Russia.

I would like to add, though, a detail that does not seem to interest the mainstream media or even Mintpress: The Venezuelan authorities prioritised food imports and food subsidies according to another CEPR report.

Food imports in 2020 are similar to those in 2017 ($2.0 billion in 2017, $1.8 billion in 2020) despite total imports and GDP falling by around 50 percent during that period. The decline in import capacity that occurred after 2016 did not lead to lower food import levels because the government found a way to prioritize food imports. An overhaul of public sector food assistance policies, and in particular the launch of a system of nationwide distribution of food packages (known by the acronym CLAP, for Local Committees of Supply and Production) to families in need in 2016, appears to have played an important role in addressing food insecurity. In 2020, the subsidy received by families through the CLAP system was $855 million, or almost 50 percent of the country’s total food imports. [highlighted by me]

Venezuela is not the only country whose population is being castigated by the USA. The above CEPR report which examines the effect of “sanctions”, includes three detailed “case studies”: Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela.

The so-called “Democratic” USA arrogantly disregards the global majority of countries that condemn the imposition of sanctions all over the place.

Yes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was in contravention of International Law. Yes, yes and yes.

But US unilateral sanctions are also in contravention of International Law!

Articles 39 and 41 of the United Nations Charter empower the UN Security Council to adopt “measures not involving the use of armed force” in response to the existence of “any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression”:

Article 39: The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Venezuela represented no “threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression”. Ever. The USA just didn’t like the Venezuelan administration.

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